Founded in December 2000, Yamago has now been developing games for over a decade. The team is based in Paris, France, and has all the skills required to develop quality games! Historically, Yamago focuses on 2D games for the web, based on TV and film intellectual properties, and has worked with clients like Cartoon Network, Disney and Lego. The company created game adaptations for global IPs such as Star Wars – The Clone War, Batman, Naruto, Adventure Time, and Gumball. Though in the last few years, Yamago has been making the transition to mobile games to keep up with the ever-changing games industry, and relying more and more on their own IPs to generate revenue. Their first in-house mobile game Hilomi started as a project for the Imagine Cup contest. Pierrick Lete and Sandrine Olivier, Yamago’s CTO and director of production, share the story.

A Student’s Contest as the Impact to Make a Game

Hilomi started out as an entry for the 2011 Imagine Cup. This annual competition is for students from all over the world to create projects that address the idea of a world where technology helps solve the toughest problems.

Xavier Cliquennois and Norbert Tran Phat, both interns at Yamago at that time, wanted to participate in the Imagine Cup in the Mobile Game Design category. They came up with the game’s idea (a 2D platformer where the player can reshape the environment) based on the Imagine Cup’s theme. Mathieu Anthoine, our creative director, helped them refine the concept by finding the right genre (puzzle game), adequately balancing simplicity and depth, and deciding on the character design (Hilomi, the female protagonist, and the animals).

Eventually, Hilomi turned out to be a rather long adventure. From March to July 2011 the team managed to proceed to the second round of Imagine Cup, win the Jeuxvideo.fr Reader’s Choice award and the Silver Medal for Mobile Game Design at the Imagine Cup France Finals, and then enter the worldwide Imagine Cup finals and win the Silver Medal for Mobile Game Design.

Moving Away From the Contest Theme Towards an Original Game Vibe

Following this encouraging reception and feedback for Hilomi at the Imagine Cup, we decided to make it into a full-sized game that could be featured in Yamago’s portfolio.

First of all, we refined the controls to make the gameplay more understandable and easy for players. Hilomi is a puzzle game where users reshape the environment within “touch gameplay” to help Hilomi make her way through the levels. We found out that players manipulate the game in various ways. The controls had then to be adapted to all of those, and that on a large panel of screen sizes: it was huge work!

The need for cheap and quick updates was the reason behind simplified game design. To increase the lifetime of a puzzle game, we had to be able to produce a large number of levels and design them as efficiently as possible.

The original story hasn’t been perfect for the game as well. It was based on the Imagine Cup’s theme, but did not speak to the players. We had to integrate a touch of ecological theme in the storyline to fit the competition rules, but this resulted in a story too complicated and hard to narrate in a puzzle game.

We also altered character design and artistic direction to make the game more appealing and HD-friendly. Since Yamago is recognized for high-quality graphics, a game published by the company should stick to these standards.

iOS and Android tablets and smartphones were our main target. Imagine Cup is a competition sponsored by Microsoft, so the first version of the game has been made for Windows Phone using the Microsoft native SDK. We wanted to have a larger exposure for Hilomi, so decided to target the two main mobile OS’: iOS and Android.

The freemium model with monetization based on level packs was chosen on an early stage of development. Although this business model wouldn’t ensure that the game makes profit any more than a paid model does, it would make the project and our studio more visible. Creating commissioned games is Yamago’s main activity, and a high-quality, highly rated, and highly downloaded mobile game in the portfolio is a strong argument to convince clients that they can trust us to make great mobile games for them.

Sponsorship: a Solution If the Company Has Less Money than the Game Needs

Thanks to these starting points, we were able to estimate the budget required for Hilomi’s production. But since our revenue comes mostly from work-for-hire projects, investing in our own production is difficult… And the estimated budget for Hilomi was out of proportion with our financial assets at the time.

Hilomi became possible thanks to Adobe’s sponsoring. Being at a technological crossroads with AIR, Adobe chose to get involved with the game industry (Stage3D, SCOUT, Starling, etc.) after Thibault Imbert’s recommendation. They were looking for a game that would put Starling, their API hardware acceleration for 2D games, to test on mobile. Hilomi was picked because it matched the objectives, and partly thanks to Yamago’s being an active contributor to the Flash community from the studio’s very beginning. We’ve invested a lot of time in beta-testing Adobe (and formerly Macromedia) products.

Following Adobe’s sponsoring, Yamago secured a second aid from CNC’s fund for the creation of intellectual property. This combined help allowed us to conciliate our work-for-hire projects and Hilomi. We were able to assign team members to work on Hilomi for long periods, which contributed to making the project a reality. 14 different people worked on the game (fortunately not full-time and not at the same time).

Technology as a Convenient Constraint

Before the start of production, we were not quite sure about which technology to use. And again, Adobe helped us choose. They sponsored Yamago to test their technologies on an ambitious game that fitted the game industry standards and to suggest relevant features to improve these technologies. The solutions provided showed encouraging performances from the beginning, but we had to help fix a number of bugs, push for the improvement of certain features, and cope with optimization issues (due to memory allocation).

Free-to-Play Mechanics: Better Integrate in the Beginning

Knowing that a freemium game that gathers a large audience is not necessarily profitable, we wanted to integrate free-to-play mechanics to the gameplay loop. The main example is that we wanted to authorize players to increase the number of possible moves to solve a puzzle-level.

Despite numerous iterations, this mechanic never felt right. It worked against the gameplay and was making it more complicated. The “fun-factor” in a puzzle game was highly related to the “retry” option, because when the player retried, he got hooked. So every distracting mechanic that gave the player the opportunity to avoid it cluttered the message and thereby jeopardized the core loop.

This experience taught us that that free-to-play mechanics need to be integrated into the game from the start. Adding them later is a long and costly process, and the results are not guaranteed.

Art and Story Makeover

Already at the Imagine Cup contest, where Hilomi was stuck to the topic of ecology, the jury did not find them particularly relevant. Later, we chose to adopt a more lighthearted tone, while preserving the theme of the natural world and its animals.

The animals are both the challenge and the “cute factor” of the game. In design terms, they are collectables. We didn’t want Hilomi to just pick them up like if they were “stars” or “coins” (a staple of puzzle games), since she is not a hunter. 🙂 We wanted the collection to be more related to the game’s storyline and universe. Having Hilomi photograph them in order to collect was the ideal solution, as it also allowed us to create the photo album. The photo album adds a collection mechanics that increases the replay value of the game.

In the Imagine Cup version of Hilomi, all the art had been created in a matter of days, leaving very little time to think of a coherent artistic direction and character design. So we rethought all art in the game in the beginning of production. There were villains in the first storyline; they were “polluting” Hilomi’s world. The world, thus, looked sad. Hilomi then had to look angry against them. But thanks to the lighthearted tone of the game, we were able to create a more cheerful character. Originally, Hilomi also had red tentacles for hair; and we discarded this design (only because it was not readable on small/mobile screens).

We kept the idea of odd mixes for the animals: a porcupine with logs for spikes, a mix of a ferret and a fennec fox, etc. As for the environment, we made square shapes a part of the artistic direction, with sharp angles and square structures often featured in the background. Hilomi has a tile-based gameplay, we wanted to create consistency with the graphic design.

We continuously receive positive feedbacks about the graphic design of Hilomi. And since we wanted to have a cute and cheerful character in a fantastic and colorful world - Mission Accomplished 😉

Hilomi is currently available on the App Store and Google Play, and we’re proud that in its first week after launch the game was featured by Apple in 128 different countries (including UK, France, Germany, Russia and China). We have passed the 200K download marks 15 days after the launch. It is also really great to see that the game is highly rated by players and critics (4/5 by 148apps and 7/10 by PocketGamer).