Founded in 2004, Plastic Dreams is an indie game studio from the small city of San Carlos, Uruguay. The team currently has three people (programmer, artist and QA/creative) working onsite. Outside the office, a community manager takes care of all social media; she also composes the music and sound used in the studio’s games.
Plastic Dreams has been making games for more than five years and has participated in the annual National Videogame Contest, which they’ve won five times - including first prize for best game in 2010 and 2015. Three years ago, they started working on their first commercial game for iOS, Bebop Puzzle Beat - and this is where the journey begins.
Bebop Puzzle Beat is a puzzle-action game based on a minigame from a previous Plastic Dreams’ title called Life Through a Spoon. We didn’t want to make another puzzle game clone, so we decided to create a different take on the genre. After determining which tweaks and additions should be made to create a competitive title, we went head first into development. We assumed it would be a short game we could make in very little time so we could test the market as soon as possible . . . but things didn’t go quite as we thought they would!
iPhone 5 and iPad with Retina: the troublemakers
Initially an iPhone 4/iPad 2 title developed with GameMaker Studio, everything was going well until the iPhone 5 and its new aspect ratio showed up. We had to change a lot to make our game fit on all devices. After getting that sorted out, the iPad with retina display appeared - and that’s when our real trouble began…
Bebop Puzzle Beat features raster graphics. Back then it wasn’t a crazy idea to have fully illustrated backgrounds and big sprites because the devices could handle them. However, once Retina kicked in, we had to redo all graphics in 1080p and recreate a lot of the game’s architecture so that the memory could handle these graphics. This was a lot of work - considering the game was in an advanced state. By this time, we had managed to acquire an investor to finance the studio and purchase the necessary tools so that we could continue with development. We were working on our own computers. Compiling was done through a Windows XP computer with a Mac OS virtual machine. Illustrations were created on paper and digitized and painted via mouse in Photoshop. Any further delays would wreak havoc with the project…
Fortunately, we got through all this - and with a lot of work and some miracles, our programmer managed to pull it off. The game was back and running again on all available devices!
That is, until Apple demanded 64-bit support for all apps…
Once more, we had to rush into fixing everything all over again. The game was consuming way too much memory like this. The programmer had to redo pretty much everything again, and our QA guy did insane things to optimize all graphics. By this time, we had also decided to include advertisements in the game for monetization purposes - since we were unsure about how much unique IAPs the game could sell. This resulted in lots more work!
An award and experience
Finally, in the end of 2015, the game was finished and ready to be released! We presented it at the National Videogame Contest as well, and it won first prize for best national game of the year!
We released Bebop Puzzle Beat on December 10th and prepared a giveaway of a set of plushies of the game’s characters to boost the marketing campaign. Reviews on the game have been rather positive, and we were even included in AppAdvice’s “Top 50 Apps” of the year. However, partly due to the time of release, downloads have been pretty low and have now plateaued.
The development of Bebop Puzzle Beat has been a long road; and even though it didn’t have quite the reception we aimed for, we learned a lot that should help us in future releases. The fact that the game plays, looks and sounds the way it does now is the product of a ton of work from everyone at the studio. We’re really happy that it’s out now and that people can enjoy it. In fact, we are now working on the Android port. Stay tuned!
Anyone reading this is invited to try the game out from the App Store. It’s free to play and has only one IAP, but you can play all of it without it ☺
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