As big gamedev events are becoming quite rare in Kyiv, Ukraine, game developers themselves are organizing informal gatherings to still share experience and discuss their ongoing and/or fresh games. As for gamejams, Ukrainian devs have already got the taste of these, and just-for-fun projects become award-winning hits — think of Party Hard, for instance, who won the Critics’ Choice award at Casual Connect Europe 2015 Indie Showcase.
So the CEO of a Kyiv-based studio of Gestalt Games, Andriy Tykhonchuk, and his wife Olena decided to organize a 48-hours gamedev challenge of INDIE|48 that took place in April 2015 at the G13 project studio.
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Awakening of Heroes: Making MOBA Interesting For A Wider Audience
COFA Games is a game development company from Serbia, currently working on a pretty ambitious project for an indie studio, called Awakening of Heroes. This is an unusual multi-player game that combines elements of team fight, strategy, arcade, town development and pre-game unions. Although still in the Alpha phase, Awakening of Heroes has appeared on Steam Greenlight waiting for your thumbs up to help it enter this huge PC game download store.
COFA Games’ CEO Nikola Mitic shares the story of their game taking place in a dreamlike city, and featuring a sweet old lady obsessed with extreme sports such as tombola and knitting, a mellow-heart butcher with an alter-ego of a math genius, a sexy chimney sweeper with a vendetta against Santa, a hipster in an atypical bad mood, and a grandpa daredevil. And of course the craziest superpowers one can come up with.
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Orange Jet Fighter: From News Stories to a Jet Fighter Game
GamesOnly.com is a Dutch game studio and game portal founded in 2009 by Robin Ras. Located in Amsterdam, Robin started to work with other game devs to develop Unity 3D games like the Orange Jet Fighter. “Being a big fan of jet fighter games, it was great to finally be able to develop something similar”, Robin says as he shares the story of Orange Jet Fighter.
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JELLIES!: Developers’ Team Gathered Through Instagram
52 Hertz Whale are 3 guys from Nizhny Novgorod, Russia. They were once working at the same local IT company and decided to create an indie game together. Inspired by titles like Limbo, Badland and Ridiculous Fishing, these developers tried to create something unique and gorgeous, and they got it. JELLIES!, a color-matching arcade game. “It has a great simple design, unique entertaining gameplay and awesome little wicked jellies”, says Mikhail Shagin, the co-founder and developer in 52 Hertz Whale, as he shares the story of the game.
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Puppet Punch: The High-Quality Game From India
Mech Mocha Game Studios is a videogame startup based in India. Founded by Mohit Rangaraju (Chief Mech) and Arpita Kapoor (Chief Mocha), Mech Mocha was part of iAccelerator 2013 batch. They are also proud alums of Chartboost University. Mech Mocha’s co-founder Arpita was awarded “Most prominent Female Indie” by Casual Games Association and both founders are past IGDA Scholars. Mohit shares the story of their freshly released game, Puppet Punch.
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Traplight Games: Revolutionizing Gamer Creativity on Mobile
Talk about doing a 360. When Traplight Games started in 2010, they began by publishing their own in-house game The Hero. However, after that, they quickly turned into a full-time work-for-hire enterprise — working on projects for companies such as Redlynx, Supercell, and Tuokio.
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The Terminal 2: A Realistic Airport Simulator For Those Who Like The Theme
FrameLineNetwork is a mobile app development studio founded in 2012 in Budapest, Hungary. The team calls the company their professional „cave-dev-laboratory”, where they are designing games available in more than 150 countries globally on most major platforms from PC to mobile. Their most famous game series is The Terminal Game featuring The Terminal 2 that FrameLineNetwork had the biggest success with as for now. The company’s CEO Attila Kilian shares the story of this airport management game.
A Realistic Airport Simulator For the Fans
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Bronko Blue, the kitten copter: Feedback Can Be a Lifesaver
bytecombo is a two-person indie game studio based in Berlin, Germany founded in 2013 by Katja Krone and Lars Quentmeier. It was formed in order to produce small, cross-platform mobile games. Their first game Bronko Blue, the kitten copter just hit the stores on July 2014. Lars looks at the journey of the game, the importance of feedback, and what they learned from it all.
Before we founded bytecombo, we were both working as full-time software developers (mostly web projects) in Berlin. This is where we got to know each other. Both of us were interested in developing casual games and came up with thousands of ideas just talking about it, so we decided to simply go for it and try our luck in developing mobile games. To do so, we both reduced our day jobs to part-time jobs and started working.
Too Many Concepts
Bronko Blue, the kitten copter is bytecombo’s second project, but our first real game. We started working on it in May 2013. Our very first idea was to create a really simple copter clone with some nice toony graphics and release it as soon as possible. But we felt that such a game would be too boring and small to earn any money, so we extended the concept with physics, interactive elements, enemies, and a small storyline. Actually, this was so much fun that it was hard to stop. It is just too tempting to include another cool feature into the concept!
We released a first prototype to our friends in June 2013, asking for feedback and their thoughts on our game. It was at this point that we realized most people didn’t get all aspects of our concept, so we had to reduce the functionality. Back then, we had one extra button to control the player. The basic idea was that, once in a while, lightning would strike, and the user had to press this button in order to protect themselves from the lightning while simultaneously collecting the energy to use some of the other functions (shoot energy balls and use the torch). Unfortunately (while I still like the idea), this proved to be much too complicated. So the idea of collecting energy was completely removed from the game so that the player could concentrate on flying and avoiding obstacles.
Work, Work, Work
We definitely underestimated the time necessary for us to produce Bronko Blue, the kitten copter, and so we had to learn to keep calm and continue working. At the end, we worked for more then one year, spending two days a week on it in order to finish and publish the game on iTunes, Google Play, Amazon, and Blackberry World. But sometimes, keeping calm and pushing forward proved to be very hard.
Especially annoying was the fact that the actual development of the game was done within three to four months, but fixing cross-platform issues, fine-tuning, testing, and optimizing the concept took a lot more time and energy than expected. It often felt as if for every fixed problem on one platform, a new problem on another platform occurred. But nevertheless, development with the feature-rich programming language HAXE and the frameworks OpenFL and HaxeFlixel at the end worked out for us, as we were able to target several platforms including iOS, Android, Blackberry, and Flash with one code base. However, it proved to be more difficult to get the game running stable on each platform than expected.
Listen to Feedback
Another difficulty was getting proper feedback. It was a lot more difficult to get feedback while developing than expected, especially from friends and family. They are very nice about things, and criticism isn’t always very specific. It’s hard or even impossible to match the taste and level of difficulty for everyone as their gaming habits are so different. Of course, you can get useful feedback from other gamers and developers like bug reports, but more often, it’s only a negative or positive rating, which doesn’t help a lot.
In order to get some more opinions, we first published the game as a free flash game on Kongregate. We received some useful feedback that we used for fine-tuning our app before we released the game to the mobile app stores. Actually, we should have listened more carefully to all of the voices on Kongregate, as we unfortunately missed fixing one very crucial bug before releasing to iTunes and Google Play.
I had implemented a small system to localize our game to different languages. But unfortunately, we never really tried to set the system language of our devices to any other language than German or English. So the game simply crashed on application launch for every person who did not have an English or German language set on their device. Of course, this is a really nasty and unnecessary bug. Especially because it takes a lot of days to be able to publish a bugfix release in some of the appstores. The same error actually occurred and was reported in the flash version, but we simply could not find the reason why some people seemed to have problems running our game. We thought it must be some problem with the flash player and definitely not our stupidity 😉
A Learning Process
Yet our biggest challenge was and still is marketing. It proves difficult to get some visibility in the appstores with so many awesome contenders, especially with a small budget. Although we received some very encouraging reviews from the press at launch, we haven’t been able to reach any noteworthy visibility in the stores so far. But we still have some ideas to promote Bronko Blue, and will be implementing these ideas soon.
We have worked in the software industry for some years, with a number of projects under our belt. But in all of these projects, we were only programmers. Game development doesn’t only consist of programming, but of an awful lot of tasks that you will have to do on your own if you are an indie developer with no money to pay anyone else to do it. For us, it was a very long way from the initial idea to the published product, involving a lot of different tasks that we knew next to nothing about (and sometimes still don’t) when we founded bytecombo. Luckily, Katja is able to produce some lovely graphics besides solving complex logical problems. But our marketing skills still suck!
Love What You Do
Since game development (or any software development at all) usually takes a lot of time (and you can’t be sure if you will finally succeed financially), you should love what you are doing and be aware of the risk that you are taking as an indie developer. You should love playing games, love being creative, love implementing, and even love promoting it. What you need is patience and some solid funding. Working part time in our own company and the other half of the week for other companies proved to be rather productive for us. Sometimes a break and change of focus is very useful, and of course, it is a really good feeling to be sure that you will always have enough money at the end of the month, even if your current game might fail commercially.
It has now been two months since Bronko Blue, the kitten copter has been released to the mobile appstores. Reading the first customer and press reviews was an exciting feeling. So far, the desired success is not reality, and the sales are still low. But nevertheless, we are awfully proud of our game, as we do think that it is a good and fun game and a nice start for bytecombo into the interesting and challenging world of game development. We are currently brainstorming and will soon start working on a few game prototypes to decide what will be our next project. I’m so looking forward to coding and being creative again 😉
Find out what comes from bytecombo’s brainstorming by following them on Facebook and Twitter.
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Jazon And The Dead: From Film to a Game on a Budget
2nd Studio is an indie studio based in Denmark, Viborg. The company was founded in the summer of 2013 by Nikki Starostka and Dennis Jensen. The story of Jazon And The Dead starts in a dark room in Copenhagen in 2013. “The development evolved into a struggle for funding while trying to keep the project moving forward,” Dennis recalls as he shares the story of this action-adventure game.
A Game From Sketch
The story of our company actually starts back in 2011, when I was in school studying at the Animation Workshop in Viborg to become a CG artist. Back then, I was already interested in starting my own company and also wanted to gather a strong team to create our student film. Nikki and I were good friends, and we both had high ambitions and expectations about our work, so we teamed up with Tommy Kinnerup, a great artist. We always had the dream of making our own projects, and the student film was to become our very first one. The result was a short animated movie called “Out of the Ordinary”.
In April 2013, I was fiddling around in my room while working as a CG artist for EUCROMA, an organization teaching students about game development and trans-media. I like to do quick sketches for fun, and I made this one about a guy killing zombies and saving ladies. He was running on a huge horde of zombies, with a girl on his shoulder and a shotgun in his hand. I liked this idea, and I’ve always been a huge fan of zombies. So what was supposed to be just a quick sketch evolved into a game idea.
I pitched the idea to Nikki, and we started working on concepts and ideas. Jazon And The Dead was born. We had a tiny room where we worked till very late. I was sleeping right there and the only thing besides my bed was a desk where we worked. We applied for funding after one week of hard work, but the project wasn’t ready yet and the competition was too high.
Gathering a Team with No Money
We saved up some money and decided to found a company (having worked on the game full-time for three months), and then to apply for funding through government organizations. The company was started in a little office in Viborg. It’s the perfect place because it has a nice environment and a lot of people from the animation and games industry. Besides that, it’s a lot cheaper to live in than Copenhagen. The best thing was that we were accepted into an incubation course, which meant we didn’t pay rent for our office space. We also got in touch with a game consultant, Emil Kjær. His help turned out to be amazing. He was giving us feedback on the game and consulted how we should approach funding and communication with people. Now all we needed was a team.
Gathering a team with no money was a challenge. We had to convince people that our idea was amazing and worth working on for free. Normally, we would pay people, but since we didn’t have the means, we had no choice. We had an ambition of getting two programmers and a music composer. I had a friend named Matt Barr who had previously been involved in different game jams and had experience in both game development and art and graphics. Matt had a friend, Josh Long, and they were filling the roles of programmers. Matt was a link between our engine Unity and the 3D assets because he has knowledge in both areas. So it made a perfect team. We still needed a music composer, but we started developing our game immediately, because the time was ticking.
Feedback Emails Brought a Composer
We decided early that we wanted everything in the development to be transparent. So we often made updates on social media, and shared our work in progress on different websites and forums. This resulted in a lot of response and feedback, some of the emails we got were even from people willing to help out. One day, we received an email from a guy called Johnny Knittle. Just the day before, I started contacting different composers to ask if they wanted to participate in the project, and this was exactly what Johnny was offering. He became part of the project instantly, and his sense of how the music should fit, along with the ability to compose for the mood and tone in the game, was just amazing! It took the game to a whole new level.
Making Things Work With 33% Budget
In the middle of September, our deadline came. Even though we worked very hard, the project was way too ambitious for only three months. We had a basic prototype, but it wasn’t resembling our vision of the game.
We were running out of money and one of the programmers was going to work on another project and wasn’t able to continue. Despite only having a prototype, we decided to apply for funding anyways. During October, we had to live with almost zero money, so we started looking for work for hire, just to get some money. We basically took every job available, from web designs to music videos. Not perfect, but we had no choice.
We basically took every job available, from web designs to music videos, just to earn for a living.
There were a few responses and some funding, but not nearly as much as we needed. Only 33 percent of the budget. However, we got contacted by a big publisher company that showed interest in the game, and this triggered motivation to continue. We spread the budget thin. Nikki and I were working on the project part-time. We found a new programmer called Kasper, whom we were able to give an office space. Even though we had no money, we made it work.
Comic-Inspired Art in 3D
One of our biggest challenges was to achieve the look we were aiming for. It’s inspired by comic book artists like Mike Mignola, which is very graphical and shape-based. Therefore, it was important that our characters had a clear silhouette. Since our game is in 3D, it was a very difficult process. The Walking Dead game series is also inspired by comic books, but we wanted to take the look one step further: dark ink lines in the texture and hard, dark shadows. The blood was to stand out and not be affected by the shadows, and it should have a toon-shaded look.
The decision of showing the process and taking the transparent approach to development was one of the best choices we did. Even though we feared that if we failed people would point fingers and laugh, it showed the world that we existed and gave us a lot in return.
The team is still working on the game in-between work-for-hire projects. They have a playable prototype, and are applying for funding at various places. The game has recently been showcased at Select/Start Play in Viborg, Denmark. If everything goes as planned, the game will be in production in early 2015. If they get the funding they need, it will be published on PS4, PS Vita, PC, Mac, and Linux.
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Simply Twisted: Hand-Crafted, Engaging Puzzles
After finishing his Word Crush Mania game, Tom Kier, the founder of Endless Wave Software, wanted to create a simple casual puzzle game. Being a solo indie developer with no budget meant that the project had to be simple enough for one person to do all the work, yet he wanted the game to be challenging and entertaining, Tom recalls.
Puzzles with Multiple Solutions that Keep Players Engaged
The original idea was to create a simple casual game about untangling lines. The gameplay would be twisting and turning a set of tiles so that a path gets connected between two dots on the game board. Each tile would contain path segments, and once all the tiles are rotated in to the proper position, the path through the tiles connecting the dots would reveal itself.
Inspired by other popular puzzle games like Flow, Strata, and Lyne, I wanted my game to be easy to pick up and learn, yet provide challenging puzzles. It had to be casual enough that most puzzles could be solved in a couple of minutes or less, yet be challenging enough to keep users coming back for more. Most importantly, I wanted each puzzle to generate that “aha! moment” when the pieces finally rotate into place and the solution reveals itself. This meant each puzzle’s solution needed to be unique and challenging. I did not want to have dozens of similar puzzles that have little variation.
Another important design goal was that I didn’t want users to feel stuck and get frustrated if they were having a hard time solving a particular puzzle. I wanted to make sure it was enjoyable for players of all different skill levels. So I decided that each puzzle would have multiple solutions, with some easier than others. I settled on the typical three-star scoring system. Solving the puzzle with a simple solution would only be awarded one star, two stars for more difficult solutions, and three stars for the most difficult and challenging solutions.
Balancing Complexity and Simplicity for Casual Players
The original prototype used square tiles, with four path segments running through each tile. I built a puzzle generator tool that allowed me to create custom board layouts for the tiles, and then the program itself randomly made the path segments for them. The first playtest showed a couple of problems.
First of all, generating random tiles was not working as desired. Sometimes the puzzle had too many solutions and was too easy or, on the contrary, only a single one or very few that were overly difficult and challenging for some casual gamers. I understood that in order to get that “aha!” effect for each puzzle, and also enable multiple solutions, I’d better craft the puzzles by hand and tune each to make sure it has a unique and challenging set of solutions. So I modified the tool to allow more manual control over the tile generation.
In order to get that “aha!” effect for each puzzle I’d better craft them by hand.
The other problem was with the tiles themselves. A square tile had two path connectors on each side, which meant there were four path segments on one tile. This produced lots of interesting and varied path designs, but again, made the puzzles too complicated and overwhelming. I experimented with using only one path connector per side, which meant only two path segments per tile. That did reduce the complexity, but also made the puzzles too simplistic. I needed a way to get three path segments on a tile. Using a hexagon tile with one path connector per side solved the problem.
If the game catches on and there’s demand for more puzzles, I may do a puzzle pack with square tiles for those looking for more challenge.
Design Makes Players Sleepy, Gameplay Keeps Them Awake
Once the switch to hexagon tiles was completed and the updated puzzle generator started working, it was time for several weeks of long evenings building the 120 different puzzles in the game. Turns out that creating puzzles with multiple solutions is harder than I originally anticipated, so it took longer than planned.
Along the way, I introduced new elements such as path teleporters, which transport your path to another tile, and puzzles with multiple dots to connect. This allowed for increasing challenge and variety for the higher levels.
Once the puzzles were done and tested, the whole thing became a matter of completing and polishing the visual design. This is where I made my biggest mistake. Being a solo indie developer with no budget to hire external helpers, I have to wear numerous hats: game designer, developer, graphic artist, and sound designer. I am a much better developer than graphic artist. I wanted to go with a minimalist look, inspired by the new iOS 7 visual design and the style of games such as Letterpress and Dots. But unfortunately, this didn’t work. As Jordan Minor at 148apps.com wrote, “Simply Twisted‘s looks could probably put a player to sleep. Fortunately, its smart gameplay will keep them engaged and alert.”
An updated version of Simply Twisted has recently hit the Apple AppStore. It includes a new updated visual design that hopefully won’t put people to sleep, the developer says.
“I thoroughly enjoyed creating Simply Twisted,” he recalls. “Each new game I create comes with its own unique challenges. Simply Twisted was no exception. Even with my missteps, I believe it is one the best games I have created to date. I am currently exploring different ideas for my next game.”
