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Steameria: Tournament - Experience is Not Everything

September 3, 2014 — by Industry Contributions

Storm Bringer Studios is a world-renowned company that made a revolution in the game industry in early 2000s of the 21st century, the founder and CEO Irakli Kokhrashvili recalls, meaning their first IP, the hit game of Steameria:Tournament.

Successful Titles in the Past Don’t Make a Company Fail-Proof

It may have never happened if we didn’t participate in the GameFounders program in Estonia in 2013. When we came to Tallinn in December 2013, we had very little experience in pitching and presenting ourselves, and got pretty frustrated after the first few sessions with the mentors. At that time, we were pitching some mobile game prototypes that we made a few weeks earlier, like Flower Power, a direct clone of King’s Candy Crush Saga.

Gamesauce_01 — Styles the developers tested in their prototype.

I still remember how miserable we felt in the first few weeks. Our pitches were terrible, so we started thinking about what we’re doing wrong. We asked ourselves: why are we now making games this unsuccessful? We’ve got history! We got used to making big and complex titles for more than 3.5 years. We were creating console games like GeoPolice 1 and GeoPolice 2, first and third person shooters. We did outsource for Microsoft, Kixeye, and Larva Game Studios. The shooters got millions of downloads worldwide. I will never forget that feeling when in 2011, I first saw the DVD with the game our team was working hard on, GeoPolice 1. It was time to make The Decision about our next games, and eventually, we headed back to Georgia and had a long meeting with the rest of team.

A screen of “Limbo”, an Easter egg level of the company's second title Police 2 — A screen of “Limbo”, an Easter egg level of the company’s second title Police 2

Another Shooter, in a Steampunk World This Time

This was the turning point for us, an experienced team of 25 professionals. We finally decided to make another shooter using the Unreal engine. Now everything fit well, we ALL got organized and had a clear goal. The clock started ticking. We needed to make one fully polished level based on assets from Police 3, our game that was 90 percent finished but never released. Meanwhile, at GameFounders, we had to think out a concept of our own commercial title. Having researched the shooter market, we decided not to make just another realistic shooter but instead go for alternate reality, the steampunk world of Steameria. Steameria:Tournament was the first title in this universe. Later, we released several other games in the same world, but this is now all a part of history.

The first thing we learned during the GameFounders program was that game development is a hard and competitive business. To sell a game, you need a solid business model - the most popular model at that time was free-to-play plus in-app purchases.

Ok, we said, we can make a free-to-play online steampunk shooter, with 12 unique characters with their own backstory and motives. The game will feel like Quake III Arena meets Mortal Kombat. We’ve done an online shooter in past, so were able to create more, but we’re a startup company that needs to experiment and try new and innovative things. This time, we decided to support Oculus Rift VR and ordered the devkit. I personally was very skeptical at first. We had experience with VR devices in the past. They were big and not so impressive, and I had no idea of how this one could be different. Back then, most people were still using common flat PC screens (!). Having tried the new VR kit, we were shocked! Feeling everything physically and reacting to it naturally looked like the next big thing we surely needed to support and optimize our game for it.

Skilled Players Can Earn Real Money

We decided to allow skilled players to earn money. For example, when a gladiator reaches level 40 in Steameria:Tournament, he can challenge another gladiator of the same level, with an equal weapons and armor set, in the same Arena, bet real money, and have a series of duels. The winner gets money as the prize. Each player pays to enter a tournament ($1, $3, $5, $10), and the winner gets it all. This is now quite popular on mobiles with skill-based gameplay. We’ve partnered with Cashplay and are using its solution in three of our mobile games already.

10273392_271960242985816_4165091670550834402_o — Having a certain weapon lets a player enter a tournament to win real money.

This idea was later developed much more: we did an extension and free DLCs in a year after launching the game. The extension added a partner mobile application for all major platforms that allowed mobile players to login, see live statistics, and bet on Steamerian gladiators!

We’ve finally mastered pitching and which words to choose for that, all thanks to numerous mentors’ sessions we had almost every day at GameFounders. There were some mentors that we called “nicers”. They came, we talked, they said - “oh that’s nice, keep working guys” - and left, and we never heard about them anymore. On the other hand, there were a few mentors who almost insulted us at first meetings.

“Some mentors almost insulted us at first meetings.”

We didn’t understand their motives at first, but soon realized that those were real mentors, the ones who cared. We partnered with them later and understood that connections are everything in this industry!

We were ready and fully motivated to enter the cruel world of game development by that time. We attended Slush 2013, had Demo Days in San Francisco and Game Connection Paris 2013, visited Sony, Facebook, Microsoft, Zynga, Funorama, Google, and met iconic people of game industry. We’ll never forget how we met EPIC’s VP, Mark Rein in a game event at Helsinki, or how we talked to Robin Hunicke and absolutely loved her vision and company.

This helped us realize one very important thing: people who work for those companies are not demigods, they are talented workers who think and talk almost the same as you. Maybe this doesn’t mean much for other companies, but it was almost everything for us. Being the first game development company in Georgia was hard. We were pioneers. Not a single person understood why we were doing this at that time. Nevertheless, we have confidence about our goals.

As for now, Steameria: Tournament is still being made, but very slowly, since the developers have switched to mobile games for now and are still looking for an investor for the big game of Steameria. They’ve released 10 mobile games in 3.5 month on iOS, ported 8 titles on Android and 10 on Windows phone.

USA 2014 Video Coverage

Amy Dallas Leverages Her Determination & Experience | Casual Connect Video

September 1, 2014 — by Catherine Quinton

At Casual Connect USA 2014, Amy Dallas, the co-founder of ClutchPlay, described her views of running an indie company during a panel. “When you’re starting a company with other people, you’re essentially getting into a ‘business marriage’ in that you’re legally bound to those people for as long as your company is around. So, you need to know that your co-founders share your goals and values and that you’ll stick by each other when times are tough,” she said. She was excited to announce the release of ClutchPlay’s second game, “Skullduggery!”, in Fall 2014 on both iOS and Android.

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What is “Skullduggery!”

She describes the game this way: “”Skullduggery!” is an atmospheric, fling-based physics platformer, in which you’ll play a Semi-Organic Autonomous Skull, working as a collection agent for the INFERNAL Revenue Service. Your mission is to collect taxes from the ‘deadbeats’ of the afterlife. You do so by using the elasticity of your own brain to flick yourself around the fortresses of the netherworld’s worst tax dodgers as you repossess their underworldly belongings. You also get to do a lot of other cool stuff like slow time to avoid deadly obstacles, pull off crazy trick shots to collect riches, discover hidden caches, and slip past surly guards. We also have a multiplayer mode we’re calling ‘head to head’ which allows you to play against your friends to become the afterlife’s most successful agent. Oh, and you also get to fill out paperwork and reflect on the inherent emptiness of existence. And I ask you, who doesn’t want to do that?!”

“Skullduggery!” also features an endearingly grotesque art style created by Bill Mudron and inspired by the Max Fleischer animations of the 1930′s.

It was announced earlier that “Skullduggery!” will be featured in this year’s “PAX 10” Indie Games showcase at the PAX Prime event. “Being part of the PAX 10 is a tremendous honor,” says Dallas. “We could not be more honored that “Skullduggery!” was chosen.”

SkullduggeryLogoMaster copy — “Skullduggery!” features an endearingly grotesque art style created by Bill Mudron and inspired by the Max Fleischer animations of the 1930′s.

Determination & Experience

Dallas co-founded ClutchPlay in 2012 with Bernie Rissmiller, Jon Guest, and John C. Worsley. The studio they had worked for was downsized, so the four seized this opportunity to create their own studio. It wasn’t an optimal time to start a company with no promise of a salary for any of them. Dallas’s husband had also been laid off, Rissmiller and his wife had just had a baby, Guest had two children, and Worsley had upcoming major travel plans. They had no VC, angel investors, or funding of any kind. But they knew they had the right team, so they took a giant leap of faith to begin their company.

What they did have was determination, lots of experience, some savings, and an idea that became Little Chomp. Within their first year, they had developed a proprietary cross-platform game engine and had launched Little Chomp on both iOS and Android to great critical success. Little Chomp was selected as a featured game in the 2013 PAX East Indie Showcase. In their second year, they did a contract project for KIXEYE, Inc. which involved using their proprietary game engine to take KIXEYE’s Facebook game, Backyard Monsters, to mobile. Besides their consulting fees, KIXEYE licensed their engine source code, and the proceeds from that are funding the development of “Skullduggery!”.

StartupoRow_ClutchPlay5 — Within their first year, they had developed a proprietary cross-platform game engine and had launched Little Chomp on both iOS and Android to great critical success.

She says, “So far, it’s been the scariest, craziest, and most exhilarating time of my career, and I wouldn’t trade a minute of it. It’s true what they say. Feel the fear and do it anyway!”

Because ClutchPlay is a small, four-person studio, and Dallas is the only one who is not an engineer, she does almost everything else, and is, among other things, the producer, chief of ops, QA, and biz dev person. She has worked at a number of different game and tech companies and has been a producer most of her career, so that part of her work is second nature. But other things, such as marketing, have involved a giant learning curve. She claims, “If you aren’t at least a little freaked out at your work, then you probably aren’t pushing yourself hard enough or learning anything new.”

Another Discovery Challenge

Discovery is unarguably the mobile industry’s biggest challenge, especially for indies, according to Dallas, given the sheer volume of games flooding the market. It isn’t enough to make a great game, you also have to be great at marketing it. But that is difficult for indies who lack the resources to compete with products from larger producers with more experience and greater resources.

10580205_10152317417152099_5528871506159199524_n — Amy Dallas, Co-Founder, ClutchPlay

“As a developer,” she insists, “you have to do everything possible to keep your game visible”. At ClutchPlay, they do this by going to as many festivals and conferences as possible to meet press people, reps from different platforms and, of course, other developers. She is amazed at how willing the indie community is to help each other out. They also share their development process through blogging, forums like Touch Arcade, and weekly events such as Screenshot Saturday. This is a good way to whet people’s appetite for the release of the game.

Dallas believes the next few years will bring the release of more premium games, especially on iOS. She disagrees with those who believe free to play is the only way to go on mobile. Free to play titles do have the potential to bring in more revenue for a longer period of time, but they also costs more to produce, have on-going maintenance costs, and require huge user acquisition budgets.

Bigger Spend Equals Bigger Risk

The more money you spend developing a game, the more it must bring in. This pressure leads to taking fewer risks and going with a formula you know will succeed. The result is a lot of very similar freemium games, which is why Dallas believes premium is due for a renaissance. Some of the exciting titles out now, such as Badland, Duet, Monument Valley, FTL, are all premium games at a higher price point. She claims that these games are made by small, scrappy companies who can not only afford to take risks, they NEED to, and because risk is at the heart of innovation, we’re going to start to see a lot more really weird, cool, interesting games come out of the premium space. And so far, people are buying them.

Dallas says that the best thing about working in the games industry, by far, is the people. Game production can be brutal, grueling, and utterly exhausting. Sometimes, she feels blown to bits by it. But what gets her through is the people. Game teams will do whatever it takes to support each other and get the job done. There is a passion and camaraderie that she hasn’t found in other industries.

10536363_10152317415877099_7751828300127124062_o — Amy Dallas sitting on the panel at Casual Connect USA 2014

More and more, she realizes she is a mobile gamer at heart. She doesn’t have time for epic console games or MMOs. But on mobile, she can play in short, concentrated burst, which fits her lifestyle much better. She has just finished Monument Valley and has recently been playing Monsters Ate My Birthday Cake, which has just been released by another Portland studio.

Dallas has discovered that when you are an indie working from home, the line between work and personal life becomes blurred. When not working or playing games, she gets as much exercise as possible “to keep from physically fusing to her office chair.” She also loves to cook, describing herself as a huge food nerd. She enjoys reading and is working on writing a novel.

Studio Spotlight

KIXEYE - This is Not Your Momma’s Game Studio

July 18, 2013 — by Vincent Carrella

KIXEYE. If you’ve played Backyard Monsters or Battle Pirates, you’ve heard of them. If you’ve ever been to GDC, you’ve seen their recruitment campaigns - the billboards, the taxi-top ads, the signs on the sides of MUNI buses. There was a time when the KIXEYE logo (a chess knight unicorn) was ubiquitous. And that’s because they were growing quickly and hiring like mad. They still are. And talent is hard to come by here in the land of Google and Zynga, which is why KIXEYE has had to be aggressive as well as creative when it comes to talent acquisition. Thus, the video.

If you really want to get a taste of what KIXEYE is all about, you need to see what Executive Producer David Scott calls “The Video.” The KIXEYE recruitment video basically espouses the company’s fundamental dogma in the form of a parody that skewers Bay Area gaming stalwarts EA and Zynga, among others. It’s kind of hilarious, and definitely ballsy. Their send-up of Mark Pincus is more than a shot across Zynga’s bow, it’s a cannonball sent through their topsail, and what it’s saying is we’re not like other gaming studios, we’re different and we’re in it for the long haul.

“First and foremost, we’re a company built by gamers,” says Scott. “And that is deeply embedded into our DNA and culture.”

What’s the most important question asked in any KIXEYE interview? What games are you playing right now, and what is your all-time favorite game and why? This is a company conceived, founded, built and run by actual gamers who were born and raised with controllers and keyboards in their hands. And that, sadly, is not the norm in this industry, which has become so heavily reliant on formula, imitation and data mining that innovation is all but dead. KIXEYE harkens back to an era of developer-owned shops that placed the game first. Profit is (gulp) a secondary concern.

KIXEYE founders Paul Preece and David Scott met at a local LAN party in the UK and immediately hit it off. They were each building Flash games for free-to-play sites like Addicting Games and Kongregate, and had huge early successes with Flash Element TD and Desktop Tower Defense - games built by a single programmer/designer in pure indie fashion. Those games did so well that in 2007, they quit their day jobs to form The Casual Collective, where they built a total of 13 games and a social network that enabled players to form groups and compete with each other on the site.

“I posted Flash Element TD on my website in 2007 and linked it to Stumbledupon.com,” says Scott. “Within a few hours, it received 500,000 visitors and went on to be played by over 100 million people by the end of the year.”

The Casual Collective’s initial business model was based on in-game advertising and though they experimented with subscriptions and micro-transactions, they didn’t see the growth or revenue they had hoped for. But they were learning, and in 2009, made the move to San Francisco to find a CEO that could help the business scale. They hit it off with Will Harbin, an Entrepreneur-In-Residence at Trinity Ventures who was looking to start a game company. Harbin, like Scott and Preece, had a burning passion for games - he was the man they were looking for.

This was about the time when social games were blowing up, but Preece, Harbin and Scott were uninspired by the offerings available on Facebook to core gamers.

“We saw that as a huge opportunity with a lot of runway”, Scott says. “We knew there was a winning formula if we were able to deliver on both accessibility and fidelity.”

So they decided to pivot the brand and changed their name to KIXEYE. They also scrapped the advertising-based revenue model and began promoting the sale of speed-ups to players that allowed them to progress faster. In other words, they were selling time. That first year, KIXEYE launched their first two Facebook games, with Preece creating Desktop Defender and Scott focusing on Backyard Monsters. Smash hits. The company was profitable and grew from three to fifty employees that year. The following year, they launched Battle Pirates and War Commander and hit nine figures in revenue. KIXEYE now employees five hundred people worldwide, with four-hundred fifty in San Francisco alone. And they’re still growing strong.

“Our biggest challenge today is to continue hiring high quality talent,” Scott says. “There’s no shortage of opportunities for talented engineers in the Bay Area, and we’re competing against everyone else for these individuals. It’s why we created The Interview video.”

KIXEYE is adamant that quality is their chief concern. They are serious gamers, hell-bent on crafting experiences that not only make money, but that are loved; and that are played by millions of hard-core gamers. They stress gameplay and good old fashion game design over analytics and formulaic re-skins. And it’s working.

Working — They are serious gamers, hell-bent on crafting experiences that not only make money, but that are loved; and that are played by millions of hard-core gamers.

How’s this for proof? Three plus years of continuous profitability, 2011 revenue 11x over 2010, 2012 revenue triple that of 2011, 20x higher ARPDAU [Average Revenue Per Daily Average User], engagement [MAU/DAU] is 5x longer than other popular social game and KIXEYE users play more than two sessions per day, one hour and thirty minutes total per session. Folks, that’s staggering. Something is definitely working over there at KIXEYE. Could it be that quality and game design truly matters?

Team — If they can duplicate their successes on iOS and Android, then all that bluster and bravado found on the video will not only be vindicated, it will become legend.

“The vision for KIXEYE is simple,” Scott says. “To build the biggest and most successful game company on the planet, to push the envelope and redefine the intersection of fidelity and accessibility, to create innovative, mind-blowing experiences for competitive gamers. We have never deviated from that strategy.”

Keep in mind that KIXEYE has done all this online. They’ve yet to storm the gates of mobile. With mobile versions of all their hits in the offing, KIXEYE is poised for a mind-boggling 2013. If they can duplicate their successes on iOS and Android, then all that bluster and bravado found on the video will not only be vindicated, it will become legend.

“We’ve been patiently waiting for the right time to make our move into mobile,” Scott says. “When other game companies were abandoning their online strategy, we were doubling down. Now we’re ready to dominate mobile by leveraging our browser success, and have the right internal resources in place.”

They’ve got a Massive Online Battle Arena called TOME: Immortal Arena on deck that sounds very promising.

KIXEYE has three mobile titles coming out shortly based on existing IP, including Backyard Monsters: Unleashed and War Commander: Rogue Assault. KIXEYE will release mobile versions of all future games at or shortly after their browser debuts moving forward. They’ve also got a Massive Online Battle Arena called TOME: Immortal Arena on deck that sounds very promising.

Unicorn Head — Who wouldn’t want to work for a company like this?

At the end of the KIXEYE video (which Scott claims has increased recruitment 1,000%), CEO Will Harbin says “40 years from now, when you’re bouncing your grandkids on your knee and they ask ‘Grandpa, what kinds of games did you used to make?’, you can say ‘Little ones, I made games that kicked serious ass’…[and] they’ll understand that you worked for KIXEYE, that you redefined online gaming, imitated no one, compromised nothing and had a fucking blast doing it.” Then he dons a unicorn mask and climbs a rope ladder dropped from the sky, ostensibly from a hovering helicopter above.

Who wouldn’t want to work for a company like this?