Total Monkery started in the back bedroom of a terraced house towards the end of 2012 by industry veteran coder, Richard Weeks. Richard had worked on every console from the CD32 and Playstation, to the Xbox 360 and Kinect, but had never made a game for himself.
So he roped in his girlfriend, her daughter, and her daughter’s boyfriend, and together they started a company. It was a good thing that the initial team were related or in relationships as the ‘office’ really was a small room. As Richard was the only one with industry experience, they spent the first year developing systems and training everyone up. At the end of 2013, and with the support of a Creative England grant, they were ready to embark on their first project: MagNets. Total Monkery’s managing director Andrea Chandler shares the story.
Richard had been giving talks at the local university and games community meetups. There, he happened to mention a game he had worked on in the late 90’s. The original development team had loved it, but it didn’t turn into a commercial success. He was surprised to find that several people remembered the game fondly. Further investigation revealed a bit of a cult following. And so Richard created MagNets, taking the original game mechanic and blending it with modern tech and a completely different style.
Organizing work in a family team
So the months of hair pulling, battles with Unity and a steep learning curve began.
The project was originally planned to take nine months. It took about a year. We knew over-running was a common problem, so we believed we’d over-estimated the time it would take.
But we found that accurate estimates are difficult to make when you’re a new studio - and a newbie team. No-one but Richard had ever delivered a game like this.
So what exactly slowed us down? Partly, some practical issues. Working in a bedroom office has some challenges. Halfway through development, the team moved into an incubation space at the local university and took on a new member of staff. This also has some challenges, and takes more time than you think.
But there were technical issues too. For example: 90% of the bugs came down to collision, and our workflow was awkward and involved a lot of bespoke colliders. Settling into the level-building workflow itself proved a challenge, with many iterations. We tried modular kits but ended up with bespoke designs. We were figuring out the best way to handle things like textures as we went along. And the team had no senior artist to crack the whip, give advice and enforce process.
At the start, with little art experience, we were going on faith that we could make the game look good. That’s a scary place to be for a first-timer.
We also chose the less-trodden path. Unity has an awful lot of resources available for certain game genres - even when we started, you could put together an FPS from a kit in days. We chose an unusual genre and an incredibly rare mechanic, so we were on our own. We chose to use vertex colouring, making our texture and material workflow slightly non-traditional. We had lots to learn and a lot of googling to do.
So what did we learn? Well, the good thing about learning workflows the hard way is that they really, really go in. Our next game was in a workable state much, much quicker and the project was less of a mess at the end. Much mocking, scolding or shouting is done if anyone does anything against process, because we KNOW what happens if you break that sort of rule.
We also learned how to work together when more than half the team have personal relationships outside the office. This is an ongoing journey. Working with family brings strong emotions into the office whether you want it to or not - but this can be an asset as well as a challenge.
We also now have TMSystem. These are libraries of common code that can be shared with future games. We won’t have to repeat code we already wrote for MagNets. We have also, after much experimenting with techniques, finally adopted a project management/tracking system called Pivotal Tracker, which works great for us.
Exposure for indies: the experience
And the time budget might have been blown, but the final quality is also beyond the original scope of the project. Getting the game in front of consumers early in development was a major help in this regard. Only a few months into development, the game was played by thousands of people at the Gadget Show Live and subsequent events. The consumer testing hugely influenced the direction of the game and gave them great bug testing throughout development.
But the biggest challenge we have faced has nothing to do with development. As an unknown developer, getting press attention has been tough. Making a game that doesn’t necessarily fit with current trends makes viral success unlikely. And Steam Greenlight, whilst exciting, didn’t necessarily offer the sort of community-building resources you might expect - response was positive, but organic exposure was tiny. Balancing the required advertising legwork with delivering on-time is very difficult for a small team without a dedicated PR member. And once you arrive on Steam you’re competing with thousands of other games for attention, from indies to big-budget hits.
This is the area that we would advise budding developers to think long and hard about. Having a strategy and allocating the time or the money to enact it is essential.
Since the release of MagNets, Total Monkery have released another game, ElemenTales, a puzzle game for Windows tablets. ElemenTales will also be available this year for Xbox One with all-new content. A new and improved MagNets is ready for release on Xbox One as MagNets:Fully Charged, currently in the certification stage. “And we are now very excited to be working on Late Night Shop, a first-person stealth-puzzle horror for PC. The family members in the team are all still talking, and we’ve got some new faces too. So was it all worth it? No question.
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