Starting out AAA games, Jodon Karlik decided he wanted to go indie. With his skills in C++ and Unreal Engine, he created Coding Jar Studios and set out to create unique games. Fling Theory was the first product of this mission, and he describes the road he took to get there.
While working on console games at Propaganda Games (Disney Interactive), the studio decided to spark creativity by holding a game jam. The speed at which decisions were made and functionality came together during the game jam had sparked an interest in me. I made up my mind to leave the console games industry to try my hand at small mobile games. I enlisted the help of my friend, Doug Insley, who jumped at the opportunity to quit his sales job and join me in our adventure to create our first game, Fling Theory.
Enough With the Violence!
After working on many violent games, I knew that I wanted to do something different. I always had a fascination with physics, so writing a simple physics simulator with educational aspects would be something that I’d find fun, and I could feel good about putting it on the market. After a few hours of brainstorming and prototyping, I came up with the idea that you could manipulate atoms to solve puzzles. The initial idea was that you could use electrons, protons, and neutrons to craft specific atoms to solve puzzles. With that, the development of Fling Theory had begun.
Simple Physics
The initial version of the game was extremely difficult. The fact that we were trying to teach the concepts of atomic physics while crafting difficult puzzles overwhelmed and frustrated many users. We spent weeks trying to tune difficulty curves and context-specific tutorials which would detect if you were having troubles and give you hints. Ultimately, we found that the knowledge range of the users was too wide to tune as a one-size-fits-all game. We ended up cutting many of the educational aspects in favor of casual game play.
The final version of the game simplifies the concepts to two rules: Opposites attract and like-charges repel. This allows users as young as five years old to enjoy the game and will hopefully encourage users to explore the science on their own rather than trying to hammer it into their head.
Would They Want it?
We were always worried about how the mobile market would receive the game. When we released an early version of the game on the web and received a 3.5 star rating, I decided that a failure in the mobile markets would mean very little to us. Was it the quality of the game, our marketing, or a lack of interest in the subject matter? With a low-rated game, these questions would be hard to answer. For this reason, we decided to redesign a significant portion of the game to achieve a higher quality bar.
Facing a redesign instead of crossing the finish line is always an enthusiasm killer, and our love for the product was soon diminishing. Furthermore, since we were self-funded, our bank accounts soon ran low and we ended up taking contract work to fund further development. After taking a long hiatus, we returned with a strong desire to polish the product to a higher quality bar.
Since this was our first independent game, we had a lot of questions surrounding our release strategy that went unanswered for a long time. We heard of people making money on all sorts of platforms, and since we were using the cross-platform Unity engine, we tried to port to all of them. This turned out to be a big mistake. The effort required to get the game running at a high-quality bar on many platforms did not make sense financially. For instance, we braved the Unity-Flash alpha and ported the game to Flash in the hopes of getting a sponsorship from a portal site. The effort required to do this far outweighed the highest bid we received, so we decided to hold off releasing on any platforms until we explored the best release strategy. It is best to focus on a single platform first, then expand to further platforms when you’re ready. This gives you time to do the important things like marketing and platform-specific features that make the difference in quality.
Time to Publish
We had many offers from publishers during our downtime, all with dubious terms, including one publisher that made an offer to keep 90 percent of the revenue. Eventually, we resolved to self-publish and were days away from releasing on the Apple iTunes Store, when we finally heard back from a publishing fund we had applied for called App Campus.
App Campus is a joint venture funded by Microsoft, Nokia, and Aalto University in Finland. The program terms for them were quite simple: create a high-quality mobile app and receive funding in exchange for a three month exclusivity period on the Windows Phone platform. We pulled the plug on the iOS release in order to comply with App Campus rules. It turned out to be one of the best decisions we made.
Successful Launch on Win8 & Win Phone 8 Platforms
We met Microsoft and Nokia evangelists at the Vancouver Global Game Jam, who turned out to be amazingly great contacts to have. App Campus flew us to Finland, trained us in how to market our game, and gave us even more contacts. Eventually, we were in contact with the director of product marketing for Windows Phones, who helped create buzz for our launch by showing it off at the Microsoft Booth at GDC. The amount of support Microsoft and Nokia provided is unparalleled to anything I’ve seen. Their evangelist programs are very friendly to indie developers looking to make a big splash on their platforms.
We launched the game, and the extra time we took to polish the game appears to have paid off. We are averaging a 4.5 star rating on the Windows Phone 8 platforms and saw over 100,000 downloads in the first month alone. It feels really great to finally release a product and be generally praised by the public.
Fling Theory will launch on iOS and Android in mid-September. They would love to hear from you! Contact them on Twitter, Facebook or their website, where they’ve been posting some of their other educational projects, such as game development tutorials.
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