The Stockholm-based game studio Fula Fisken (which literally means “The Ugly Fish” in Swedish) was founded in 2010 by Magnus Lind, Stefan Svebeck, and Toomas Hommik. Fula Fisken has four games on their list: Astroflux, Världskoll (for client UN on iOS/Android), Kolleagues (for client TCO on iOS/Android), and Sudoku and Friends (a multiplayer sudoku, playable on the web and Android). Magnus Lind shares the difficulties and the rewards of creating Astroflux, a real-time 2D space shooter MMORPG browser game.
Creating the Game We Want to Play
Everybody on the Fula Fisken team are game nerds; Toomas used to be late for work after long Xbox gaming sessions, Stefan’s a hardcore Starcraft player and plays through Diablo 2 on Hell Mode at least once a year, and Magnus plays everything from Starcraft to Clash of Clans and has a passion for retro games.
When we founded Fula Fisken, all we knew was that we wanted to create awesome games. We all had years of experience with running huge web-based games with twenty-ish database/web servers, and we also knew how a strong community could make a game flourish.
We started out in a super small office, which we shared with a T-shirt designer that collected toy robots. It was kind of surreal to have our own game studio, an office, and the possibility to create whatever we wanted to. One problem though: we did not have an income. We really needed to find contract work to pay the rent and get a minimum salary. Luckily, we got an offer to create a game for the Swedish Trade Union TCO. We were to come up with a concept that “showed the upsides of collaboration in a work place”. This was a dream come true: we got to make our first game and we would get paid for it! The result was Kolleagues, made together with artist Sandra Löv.
We still needed to decide what our first company game would be. The ideas were many, but we all liked the idea of a 2D space shooter, possibly with multiplayer elements, so alongside Kolleagues, we started working on what would become Astroflux.
Getting Players into the Game
In May 2012, we were ready for our initial release of Astroflux. It was a rather quiet release, since we only shared the link with a few friends. Bugs were found and fixed. Eventually, Chris Benjaminsen at PlayerScale (now Yahoo), our backend service provider, tried the game and, if I dare to say, fell in love with it.
Chris played Astroflux more aggressively than any other player during beta and offered us advice. Having Chris helping us was awesome, and he pushed us into new territories, like finding publishers and monetizing strategies. Before Chris came along, we were mainly focusing on our game — but suddenly, we were also thinking of how to make it popular and profitable.
Too Many Players!
In October 2012, we released Astroflux on Kongregate. They put us in the “Hot New Games,” and we also ended up in the “Top Games This Month”. The influx of new players overwhelmed us. Within an hour, we had 300 players online and our server crashed.
The next few hours were horrible; it was the game’s best moment to date and the worst at same time. We simply couldn’t get the game going except for a few minutes at a time before it crashed again, and again, and again…Players rated the game one star, and we had to ask Kongregate to remove us from the “Hot new games” section. We realized that we needed to rewrite a huge part of our server code, because more than ~20 players online caused all kinds of bugs.
Getting Back on Track
The months following the release on Kongregate were spent fixing — everything. Astroflux needed the ability to handle more players, and we knew that just adding more servers wouldn’t help in the long run. Aron Pettersson, a robot engineer student with sick mathematical skills, was a great help in this process and with programming enemy AI.
We also received excellent feedback and ideas from Peter Eykemans at Kongregate, and we decided to make some changes. For example, rather than just having one spaceship, we added the ability to have a fleet, with different ships getting different stats. The thought behind this was to have more stuff for the players to upgrade, and to experience something else by playing with a different ship. The result was a success! The players loved it, and the incentive to play beyond a certain point grew significantly. This was a success for monetization.
In late May 2013, we were put on the front page of Kongregate again. This time, we were ready and we could handle the traffic. Our rating went up to 4.2 and it was great. We started to get decent payments and for the first time, it actually felt that we had something going for real. We got over 25,000 new players from Kongregate and peaked at 842 players online.
Battling Free2Play and Pay2Win
People in the business have told us that to make the game as profitable as possible, we should basically allow everyone to upgrade everything with our paid currency. They might be correct about that, but we’ve chosen a model that we’re more comfortable with.
First of all, the game is free-to-play. We have deliberately not added the super-mega-weapon for sale. Instead, we reward active players with quite a lot of our purchasable in-game currency. This way, the players get used to spending the in-game currency, and they also know that if they’re active, they will sooner or later be able to buy some of the cooler items. If a player gets curious about an upgrade or a ship, it’s possible to spend money to get it earlier. For us, the monetization process is very much about finding a balance between “free-to-play” and “pay-to-win”. These two often go hand in hand in games today. I don’t really mind it, but for a game like Astroflux, the balance is important for keeping the players happy.
By limiting a single part of the game (the player level), we’ve made sure that a player can’t pay their way to victory. A level 50 player that invests $100 in the game won’t be able to beat a level 80 player. Reaching level 80 is time consuming, but anyone can get there even without paying. Buying upgrades and a XP-boost will get you there faster, but you still need to invest quite a lot of game time. My experience is that players usually accept that you can get items faster by paying, as long as you still CAN get them for free.
What’s Next?
We’ve got the game running smoothly and it monetizes decently, but we have some important steps to take:
1. Player retention
We lose too many players early on in the game — and we lose too many players because we don’t have enough incentives to play beyond a certain level.
2. Better PvP
Our current PvP system is inherited from an earlier Police vs Pirate-feature and does not work very well. We’ve made some quick fixes, but we need to re-think and re-make.
3. Improve Clans
We’ve got clans in the game, but they’re not really used for anything at the moment except showing that you are in a clan.
4. More content
Creating new star systems and enemies takes time. What we need is a way to allow players to create content or possibly dynamic content creation based on player level.
As you can see, we’ve got a lot of fun ahead of us!
A Bumpy Road
Even though we were experienced programmers when starting this project, we didn’t have experience in making real-time MMORPG:s. We certainly were in over our heads with Astroflux as one of our first projects. We probably would have been better off by making a couple of much smaller games to start with. We’ve literally spent months correcting our own newbie mistakes.
Real-time multiplayer also probably complicates things by a factor 10. It adds synchronization problems, lag problems, the need for servers, and much more. Simply don’t go there for your first game!
Hands-On Tips
1. Don’t be cheap
Don’t be afraid of awarding active play with your purchasable in-game currency. Instead, make sure there is always something to spend it on.
2. Clans should not be expensive to create
We thought it was a good idea to make clans expensive to create and free to join, but after lowering the price to get your own clan, the engagement skyrocketed.
3. Last but not least: Think at least twice about real-time multiplayer
Even though I think having a running real-time MMO is super awesome, the extra complexity can really be a show stopper. In all honesty, there were many times during the creation of this game that we wished we’d started with something simpler.
Astroflux is available to play at astroflux.net. The Fula Fisken crew is currently planning their trip to Casual Connect in San Francisco where they will be showcasing the game. You can follow Magnus @magnuslind and Fula Fisken can be found @fulafisken, on Facebook and on fulafisken.se.
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