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ContributionsPostmortem

Atoms: From College Project, to Adult Games and Beyond

January 16, 2019 — by Industry Contributions

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The following Postmortem is by a winner of Gamacon 2018 which is a nomination partner of Indie Prize. As a winner, Juan Pablo Méndez Altuzar is provided with 2 free conference passes and free spot to showcase his game at Indie Prize. Gamacon is a convention for independent game developers. It is a conference which celebrates the artistry and fans of indie game development. Juan has decided to participate at Casual Connect USA 2019 in August at Indie Prize.

Juan standing with Hugo, Gamacon organizer and Juan’s booth with his prize to Casual Connect

At the event, Juan met a person that became his friend there, and this new friend seemed more excited about him winning than he felt. He relates that was because it all felt like a dream, “I was all like: really? Holy cow, I didn’t think I’d win.” When asked how he feels about coming to Casual Connect and competing at Indie Prize, he said “It does still feel kinda unreal, but it makes me really excited. I’ve seen a ton of videos of Indie Prize and oh, boy - I wanna go! I feel really pumped! It also pumps me to polish the hell outta my game to share it at Casual Connect.  


My name is Juan and a few years ago I set myself the goal of releasing a simple game I could complete on my own.

The original idea for the game started as my college graduation project. I wanted to create an educational game that was as attractive as any commercial game. One that could simultaneously appeal to gamers and to students seeking to learn whatever the game wanted to teach.

Asia 2018ContributionsDevelopmentVideo Coverage

MyTona: How to Make Your Arts Work | Casual Connect Video

December 6, 2018 — by Industry Contributions

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In the gaming industry monetization is key to keeping in business and making new games. Conventional strategies include in-app purchases or ads and yet there is no single right answer for all games for a monetization strategy. Join Diana Platonova, CBO at MyTona, as she described evidence-based examples of what worked well for MyTona. In her talk, Customising for Your Audience: How Game Art Affects Monetization, at Casual Connect Asia, and see how they were able to incorporate these ideas into their game Seekers Notes. Diana advised, “Strive for excellence and never stop there. There is always something in your game that can be improved, changed or tested.” Tune in a video of the full lecture below.

ContributionsDevelopment

GameStylus: We Want to Allow all People to Create Their Own Games

November 14, 2018 — by Industry Contributions

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By David Moren, GameStylus consultant

GameStylus is a small game studio located in Prague, Czech Republic. It started in 2013 with one idea: To create a simple game engine and game editor, which would allow anybody to create his/her own adventure games without lengthy programming. And so, many months later, the GameStylus.com web site and game engine were born. And first adventure games came, one of them reaching more than 1,4 millions of downloads.

GameStylus game studio was founded in 2013 by Petr Mandik, who had previous experience with adventure games development from his previous game company Agawa, which published adventure games in 1990s in the Czech republic. These were games for PC, published on CDs - who remembers these times? But the times has changed and this time he decided to target broader audience - mobile and PC gamers around the world. But as aforementioned, he wanted not only to create games, but also to offer his game engine and game editor to other people.

Contributions

Key Insights Learned from the Social Casino Track at Casual Connect Europe

August 13, 2018 — by Industry Contributions

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By Merav Katz Gershuni, Head of Growth, yellowHEAD

yellowHEAD staff had the opportunity to emcee the Social Casino track at Casual Connect Europe in London, where some of the social casino industry’s best and brightest came together to help you get the most out of your gaming apps. yellowHEAD’s Merav Katz Gershuni and Marina
Sapunova compiled information from the event that can help you navigate the waters of this
competitive vertical, from little things that you can do to boost your game growth, to common
mistakes that may inhibit your success.

We heard from seasoned directors, supervisors and CEOs with years of experience at leading
brands in the gaming industry, including Product Madness, The Stars Group, KamaGames and
Whow Games. They shared key insights about different areas of the field - from creative to legal
to data science and more! Among the lessons shared, the experts discussed best practices
from real money casino that can be applied in social casino, maximizing performance with game
economy prediction, common mistakes made at different stages of a game’s lifecycle, effective
creative team management, successful A/B testing of creatives, revenue growth success
stories, localization, gaming vs. gambling, and virality.

It was a great opportunity to learn from real experiences gained through tried and true strategies
or failed attempts. For more on optimizing your games in the social casino space, read the full
synopsis at yellowHEAD.

ContributionsDevelopmentExclusive Interviews

Behind the Title: An Interview with Olga Khomenko, Co-Founder and COO at PlayToMax

July 12, 2018 — by Marina Sapunova

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In this interview, yellowHEAD’s Marina Sapunova speaks with Olga Khomenko about her life as a drummer in an indie band, what exotic places she wants to visit and why she loves playing board games.

Marina: Hi Olga! So we are at Casual Connect Kyiv. Could you please share with us what you do?

Olga: First of all, I want to say that I’m so excited that Casual Connect is back at Kyiv because it’s my native city and I adore it. A lot of new people come to your city and see how cool and beautiful it is. I work at PlayToMax and we create HMTL 5 games. We develop our own games, as well as provide outsourcing services. And I’m also here at the conference together with my friend - he’s an indie developer who’s working on his own game and I’m helping him, so please vote for him.

Marina: Sure! I still haven’t voted so I will do it. Are you a gamer?

Olga: Yes, I am.

Marina: What kind of games do you play?

ContributionsDevelopmentIndiePostmortem

The Office Quest: A Story of Success

May 31, 2018 — by Industry Contributions

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By Lior Bruder, Founder and CEO of 11Sheep.com

I guess that every single games developer in the world could say that everything started when they were kids and, with gleamy eyes but steady hands, played their first game. But I’d like to finish this post before the year is over, and that’d be a bit cheesy anyway, so let’s fast forward a little bit. In some sense, everything started when I decided to found a small development company. But then I would have to talk of 10 years of hard (but rewarding) work, during which we developed more than 50 products and saw many of our clients succeed – one of them sold his product that we developed for him for 50 million USD to NASDAQ!

So, fast forward again to the moment when we decided that the time had arrived to create our own “baby,” to make a game for us and not for others. The idea had crossed our minds before, but it wasn’t until some random day, having some coffee, when I saw a beautiful demo that Oren Rubin and Alon Simon had created. Back then it was something really tiny, but I instantly saw that it had something special – it was eye-catching, quirky, and funny. So I contacted them and told them that maybe we could make a mobile game out of it. We all agreed that it was worth a try.

And here we are, one year, one nomination to the Google Indie Prize, 20 times featured by Apple and Google (even featured once in the “Today” tab), and 4 million downloads later. It was definitely worth the try, don’t you think? But let’s see how we got here – the path is as important as the destination!

CONTINUE READING

ContributionsIndiePostmortem

Creating PROZE by SignSine

May 15, 2018 — by Industry Contributions

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Company/Team Introduction

We are SignSine - a two people game studio from Kyiv, Ukraine.

We are developing PROZE, an atmospheric survival adventure game focused on telling a compelling story “about friendship with massive Cold War conspiracy background” and providing an immersive experience in VR.

Where did everything start?

In August 2016, we went to a countryside house (dacha) nearby Kyiv with a company of old friends. After getting lost in the woods we were very inspired telling the story to each other from a different perspective. Some time after we decided to turn our memories of that evening into a game screenplay, that’s how the initial idea came together.

ContributionsIndustry

Behind the Title: An Interview with Jessica Tams, Founder and Managing Director of Casual Games Association

April 25, 2018 — by Marina Sapunova

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In this interview, yellowHEAD’s Marina Sapunova speaks with Jessica Tams about her life behind one of the most successful events in the games industry, why she moved to a farm and what she was like in high school.

Marina Sapunova: Hi Jessica! I’m happy to have you with me. I don’t think that you need an introduction for our audience, but it would be great if you could say just a few words about what you do.

Jessica Tams: I’m Jessica Tams - I am the Managing Director of CGA. We have a couple of things that we do: Casual Connect; we also organize Indie Prize, which is the scholarship program for indie developers; and a media outlet - Gamesauce.biz. We’ve been doing this for 13 years. We do 4 shows a year. So that’s what I do.

Marina: Nice! And you are so good at what you do! But let’s talk about Jessica. Who’s Jessica behind her title?

ContributionsDevelopmentIndiePostmortem

Hyperforma: A Way From Web Design to Our First Game

April 19, 2018 — by Industry Contributions

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As winners at GTP Indie Cup which is an Indie Prize Partner event, the Nord Unit team were given the opportunity to compete at Indie Prize London at Casual Connect Europe 2018.


Our team is called Nord Unit and there are 3 of us: Fedor, Denis and Dmitry. We are true indie developers and Hyperforma is our totally first experience in developing and releasing a game.

Fedor Danilov creates art, game design, interfaces, writes a story and does CEO stuff.
Denis Dorokhov does UI, creates animations and scenes, makes sounds and works with freelancers.
Dmitry Konarev does programming, creates levels, compiles the game in Unity3D. So he deals with the technical side of the game.

And of course, we discuss game balance and mechanics together, so it’s a constant game-design-team-work.

How We Met Each Other

ContributionsDevelopmentIndiePostmortem

Fhacktions: Mapping the Way

March 14, 2018 — by Industry Contributions

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By Juan de Urraza, Ceo of Posibillian Tech

Fhacktions is a location-based mobile MOBA game developed by Posibillian Tech, a Paraguayan startup founded in 2015. Set in a near future where the world is ruled by factions of hackers, players must battle each other to maintain control of strategically placed servers that provide them with currency and power. The core of the game is its location based mechanic, with servers placed in real world places, like your local coffee shop or the laundromat next door. Conceived before Ingress and Pokemon Go were launched, Fhacktions had an uphill road to follow in order to finance, code and promote a game with mechanics no one yet understood.

The game received several awards, like winning the “Best Audio” category in Indie Prize USA, and being finalist in Indie Prize in Asia and Europe in the “Best Multiplayer Game” category. Google selected Fhacktions as one of the 15 best games in the Google Indie Games Festival LATAM in 2018.

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