“We like to make games using parody and satire, so we’re always challenging ourselves,” said Shaun Britton during Casual Connect Asia 2014. “We really think about a sentimental sort of game-play as well, so we design games that look like they were designed in the 80s. People will look at the games that we’ve got and enjoy the experience because they had a game that was similar.”
Shaun Britton is one half of the two-man team that makes up Clicker Interactive, an interactive design agency based in Melbourne, Australia. Britton does the art and design while Bill Trikojus, the other half of the team, is responsible for the coding and development. The business began when the two met at Swinburne University of Technology, where they both teach game design. They both had a keen interest in old retro games, especially those from the 1980s, and decided they would start making games, as well as teaching others to do it.
Shaun Britton, Art and Design, Clicker Interactive
Balancing Act
Britton finds that his work is very much a balancing act between game design and academia. He teaches game design and animation during the day and designs games after hours. He has discovered these complement each other well, because effective design teaching comes from practicing designers imparting their knowledge. He says, “At the university, we are constantly surrounded by discussions about best practice techniques from peers, the latest use of technology from design departments and current gaming community trends from students.”
For many years, Britton worked for Warner Bros. and Walt Disney, surrounded by the best in storytelling, animation, and character design, a background which has given him a huge advantage in Clicker Interactive. At these companies, he had intense training in design from the best designers in the business. As a result, he still has a very international involvement in the character design industry and an attention to detail in everything he does in character and game development.
Clicker Interactive is still a new business, but there already has been considerable interest in what they are doing. They won a grant from Film Victoria, a government film body in Australia; they expect this will make a big difference in moving forward with their game releases. Britton states, “We’re very proud of what we’ve done so far, and to receive this sort of help really cements our confidence in the business we are doing.”
Snip and Chu is one of their games, and winner of Most Innovative Game at the Indie Prize Showcase at Casual Connect Asia 2014
Britton’s simultaneous careers, teaching animation and designing games in the mobile game industry, leave him little time for other interests. He insists, “I still try to design characters every day, but with so much on, character design sometimes turns into more of a hobby now!” But he does make time to play a few games to make sure he knows what he is doing with game development.
Recently, he has been playing Minecraft on Xbox 360, finding it a great game to play with his son. They both enjoy the time spent together building in their worlds. The retro feel of the game appeals to him, while the mix of construction and danger makes for a unique experience. He prefers, as a character designer, to play games with strong characters and great graphics. The Halo and Oddworld series are games of this type that stand out for him.
Britton would say designing characters is a hobby of his.
More Mobile Opportunities
Britton sees more opportunities coming in mobile game development as the use of higher resolution tablets grows. “Even in 2D game design,” he says, “the opportunities to develop characters and environments with greater detail is very exciting. When we did our first two games, we tested them on various tablets, and the experience playing on the tablet with double the resolution of the others made all the hard work worthwhile.” Because they are experimenting with retro handheld “demakes”, the modern, lighter tablets made the game experience “seem more like the original handhelds, especially when we used one closer in size to the original devices.” He insists that lighter, more powerful tablets allow designers to present players with what they intend to show them, and not have to compromise on the quality of the gameplay and the graphics because of the technology at the end of the process.
“Even with the 2D graphic presentation in retro games such as ours, the higher resolution and lighter tablets mean that our games are played in the best possible environment.”
Britton will now be looking closely at what is possible with these newer, more powerful tablets and mobile devices. He expects that these devices will have the capacity to support many of the design choices that have been challenging in the past, including added character animation and animation effects, more detailed characters, backgrounds and levels, and more sophisticated gameplay. He maintains, “Even with the 2D graphic presentation in retro games such as ours, the higher resolution and lighter tablets mean that our games are played in the best possible environment.”
Britton believes the greatest impact for the games industry in the next few years will come from these tablets. He says, “The use of tablets for more than just mobile gameplay looks interesting, such as, for instance, the tablet feature in the console game Watch Dogs. Imagine a tablet used to enhance these sorts of AAA games, by giving a player control over a portion of the gameplay, or displaying maps or other elements. Tablets used as windows to display virtual or augmented reality as part of any sort of gameplay is an exciting advance as well.”
Living as an indie developer for more than five years and currently doing a weekly podcast with other indie developers, George Zarkua has created a summary of his experience in QA mode.
Working as an Indie
I believe the life of an independent developer is the choice for people who understand that in a company, they do not get what indie work could give them. He may be a loner who feels that he can grow stronger, can release a more independent product, make more money, or make better use of his time. After separating from a company, he gets all the freedoms and limitations that are inherent for indie.
The first thing you have to think about, unfortunately, is time and money. You must honestly ask yourself how much time you can share with your PC. Then multiply this figure by two. At this time, we need some minimum cash cushion, big enough to cover sickness (paid health insurance and gyms are not included in an indie life package), fun (very few people can be productive in a state of depression), and contingencies. This amount is the budget of your game. Of course, these issues are only for a full-time indie. If you are developing parallel to your main work, then it is simply impossible to calculate time.
You must honestly ask yourself how much time you can share with your PC.
When you becoming an indie, you become free. There is the freedom to choose a convenient schedule, programs, and partners. But almost immediately, it becomes apparent that indies can’t compete with the big companies. They must either create a studio with suitable rules or otherwise cheat. You are competing with studios that specialize in having spent a lot of time creating animation and content, and with a lot of people who are doing essentially the same job. In my opinion, indies should surprise the competition with ideas, unique style, and atmosphere. The ability to look to the future is the best quality for the companies; the ability to surprise is the best quality for an indie.
Making a Game
Experience helps avoid errors that you will understand only while making games.
Certainly, an indie’s first game could be a great game (Beginner’s Luck), but that does not guarantee that it will hit the top. However, the experience provides a broader view on the development of a variety of tools, working schedule, and a sense of the market. Experience helps avoid errors that you will understand only while making games. For example, you might forget to add a button of turning on sound and run into the crowd of disgruntled users who will write angry reviews and put a minus wherever possible. Or make an active area for a button on the screen, and not the button entirely. Even if your game has super cool music, particularly harmful players will not forgive you for these blunders. Welcome to the Internet! But through the experience of making ten buttons correctly, the eleventh will be done automatically. This will help you avoid a hit from a foolish fail and polishes your creation.
It is possible to gain experience without making games, but for me, this attempt turned into a failure. A long time ago, I found a great resource with a stupendous number of articles for indies. There was an incredible collection of articles on game design, development, sales as a whole, free graphics and music, and more. Almost everything was very interesting, and I read through it, trying to apply all in one game. But the negative of such articles is that they are designed for people who have some experience, and therefore were not dismantling the problematic issues that may arise for beginners. That’s because the layers are important in the experience. Layer by layer, we create an understanding of development. Reading articles about behaviorism in MMO without experience is like having a second-grader read Kafka.
In my opinion, the first game should be small and test-like. Even if you have a super idea for a super game, you still have no budget, nor the sense of the market and the audience. Postpone that idea for a while, and take up a small test project instead. When working on a small game, it is now incredibly easy to make a prototype of the game. In a worst case scenario, it could take three days.
Often, there is a sense to do it all from scratch as we learn a new technique of painting or read a book about the architecture of the code. Small games are good so that we have time to finish the game before we come to destroyable thoughts. And even if you decide to remake the game or after the remarks on the unprecedented lag of it even on the most powerful computers, you don’t rewrite as much. However, a small game does not have time to change ideologically. In any game, even the great games, it is important to keep the idea, the rod of the game. We can add features, change the appearance, but the idea of it should remain unchanged.
If you want new ideas to the game, or a second head, which will criticize you, look for a partner.
Increasing the quality of the game and leaving the level of “small games”, you will be competing with the big companies and studios. If you start to feel that you can not make a competitive game - look for an assistant. The type of the assistant should depend on your confidence in the game. If you feel the game itself is lame or you poorly see the idea, it is better to find a partner. If you want new ideas to the game, or a second head, which will criticize you, look for a partner. The only difference between an assistant and a partner is that the partner is involved in the development of the game, not just doing the job, but that difference is huge. Choosing a partner for a long project is like choosing a partner for a flight into space. If something goes wrong after six months of work, replacing will be very expensive.
Surviving as an Indie
I think an indie’s significance is hard to overestimate. Now is the era of indie developers. Indie games are no longer for hipsters. Steam introduced an indie games section where you can buy them on a par with the games from bigger campaigns. Apple Store gives indie games the same privileges as games of big companies. Sony and Microsoft are also looking for indie cooperation. The market does not reject that talent. There are sites for people looking for a direct link with the customer, such as Kickstarter, as well as conferences and meetings.
Now is the era of indie developers.
The issue of earnings is always painful. Each platform has their own rules and profits. There is practically no limit. For example, Minecraft earned about 100 million for 2012. But not all situations are so smooth. According to the well-known statistics of mobile applications, the top 25 developers received half of all profits in 2012. 80 percent of developers get three percent profit. 19 percent of apps earn $24k, and for the 80 percent, $300. Even if your mobile game will earn 100k on iOS, 30 percent of it you give Apple, 30 percent to your publishers, and then you have to divide the rest with your partner and tax.(source: The Game Bakers)
To start receiving more than you would have received in office and still do it all the time, you have to be strategic. I’ve learned to think about games in terms of categories. The first category are the games with new ideas, mechanics, and games with the new features of the devices. These are usually hits. Next on the list are quality sequels of old hits, complete with a bunch of fans and games that can be headed by a certain niche of the market. Finally, there are the games that cover some deficiencies of hits with new features. After that are the clones and trash.
To succeed, you must either make a game out of the first category (like Minecraft and Journey), or make one or two games from the second category (like Shank 2, the successful continuation of the epic Shank, and Limbo), or make lots of games from the third category. Surprisingly, some studios are ready to cope with it. For example, Berzerk Studio, a group of six people, provides great games month after month, almost always on the old mechanics. They have over 20 games. Berzerk Ball 2 went for 100k , and their new one went for 50k, so we can assume that the guys with such strategies have success.
I’ve learned to think about games in terms of categories.
However, I think everything in a game shouldn’t be unique. What should be exclusive is the idea and style. Freedom of game elements is a vise, and there is the possibility of being misunderstood. The human brain is based on past experience, so to enhance the audience’s understanding of the game, you should use images with recognizable patterns. Choose a technique for illustrations, so that it strengthens the idea inherent in the game and matches the audience. If you want to reach the maximum audience, then you need to learn from movies/cartoons with a maximum audience (Shrek, Pirates of the Caribbean, Cut the Rope). Use recognizable patterns and be moderately predictable. In the case of niche games, rules are dictated by the specific audience. Use references for the drawing and screenshots of successful games for the understanding of the principles of drawing, but do not copy.
Games are remembered for their distinctive features: Ideas, graphics, music, and easter eggs. In Alien Anarchy, I did a lot of content, but almost all the comments were about the Easter eggs from the movies that I left. When the player is done with the game, he remembers what can be shared with others: a tough situation, a high score, and funny stories.
Use recognizable patterns and be moderately predictable.
Food for Thought
Indies should remember that an end product is expected. Without a good product, no one cares how much effort and energy was put into the game. The game is above the developer; this is important. If you want everyone to know your story, then place it in the game. Independent developers are asking questions and answers themselves, rather than just doing tasks. This gives them the opportunity to show off their own look. But be prepared for the fact that your opinion is not shared by all, and your game will not be the second Minecraft .
Before you finish the game, it is best to show it to a test group - your friends, family, and colleagues. Do not ask them what needs to be changed in the game. This is the number one mistake. Never ask them. You need to watch how they play. Just watch.
Creating a successful game is consistently making the right decisions, from the selection of the engine and the platform to the last pixel. The secret to being a successful indie is to do what you like. Otherwise, what is the sense of been indie? Make your strong brands stronger and new games cooler.
Currently, George is working on a mobile version of his strong brand, Alien Anarchy, Jim’s Dream, and the new version of Dream Symphony, which will be available to play at Casual Connect Kyiv 2013‘s Indie Prize Showcase.
Paladin Studios is an independent game studio based in The Hague, The Netherlands. The company was founded in 2005. In these years, they grew to a team of 10 developers coming from different backgrounds - design, animation and coding. Paladin Studios usually worked on contract-based projects. But apart from client work, they’ve always wanted to be an independent developer and create and publish their own games. Momonga is their first big self-published game.
In 2010, with the rise of the App Store in full swing, we felt the time was right to work on our first game. We wanted to start small, so we set our minds on developing and publishing an iOS game in two weeks. We started from scratch with an idea and our brand new Apple developers account. After two weeks of concepting, arguing and developing, we submitted the game to Apple. These weeks were just one gigantic learning experience, which laid the foundation of Momonga.
So there you had it, our first game on the App Store. We made it, we can do it! Now it was time to take things more seriously.
Game selection
One game caught their specific attention - it made their eyes twinkle and some even played the prototype for 45 minutes straight
With Jimmy Pataya and earlier prototypes, we underestimated the importance of a game concept and its selection. We had several concept-candidates for development, but lacked a good selection procedure. This led to discussions and fistfights, but most of all; it left the team with the feeling that this might not have been the best choice for us. So we figured we would not just start coding away on a big project. We needed a more formal selection process to get everyone on the same page.
For this, we used the stage-gate method as a starting point. In the stage-gate process, each stage has a “kill gate” where concepts get trashed based on predefined selection criteria. Everybody on the team had one week to bring in his or her ideas. At the end of this week we had a hundred ideas. What followed was a big pitch and vote session, which resulted in 10 remaining designs that we took to the next stage. We rated the concepts on different aspects, like innovation, feasibility, monetization, strategic value and remarkability. Eventually, we were left with three game concepts.
This is what the prototype first looked like. You can still play it here: http://www.teampaladin.com/pinball/
We developed a prototype for each one and invited testers to come over and play those prototypes. They sat down and played the games. One game caught their specific attention - it made their eyes twinkle and some even played the prototype for 45 minutes straight, trying to beat their scores. That game happened to be a prototype called “Pinball Forever”. It was an unexpected winner, and the start of a journey that lead to the release of Momonga Pinball Adventures.
After analyzing the prototype, we decided to drop the infinite game design and instead go for a level-based design. With a level-based approach, we had full control over the levels and could use that to dig deep into the story. From this point on, you could say the game was called ‘level-based pinball’, with a storyline.
World building
We started with building the world’s geography
The first step in building the story was to create the world in which the story takes place. When you look at international politics, the “Grand Strategy” theory concludes that every nation has specific needs for a sense of security. These needs are determined by the geographic differences like mountains, oceans and deserts. That is why we started with building the world’s geography. Drawing a map from scratch gave us poor results - so we looked at different random map generators, ranging from Civilization to Minecraft. We ended up settling on the map that was created by the Minecraft map generator.
Our Minecrafted Momonga world
The Grand Story
With the geography and politics in place, we could start writing the grand storyline; what was the main conflict in this world? We needed ‘one ring to rule them all’, ‘the darkside’ or a ‘Voldemort’ in our story. The epic conflict in the story, where we would base the much smaller game story on, was decided as:
The continent Aya has seen peace since the Great War. The civilized world is ruled by the Guardians, powerful animals who have sworn to protect the Element Sources. However, the Great War has left some species scattered and exiled. These Shadows live as outcasts, on the edges of civilization, waiting for their turn to come to once again overthrow the Guardians and seize the Sources. While the Guardians grow weak in their cities, the Shadow animals grow stronger in determination and strength.
This grand story sets the stage for the game, and it gave us a foundation to craft the game experience and characters.
Characters
Next up in the process were the characters. Based on our grand story, we decided to create characters by asking ourselves a couple of questions:
● What is their history?
● Where do they live?
● Who are they hanging out with?
● What events impacted their lives?
● What special abilities do they have?
● What do they look like?
Of the four characters that resulted from this process (Momo, Fry the Firefly, Panda the Panda and General Kuton), we’ll briefly introduce Momo and Fry the Firefly.
Momo
Momo is our hero. Born and raised in the Momonga village, he lived a peaceful and carefree life. One day, a band of owls burned his village and took away his tribe. Momo barely survived the attack, and was saved by Panda. As the last free momonga, he sets out on an epic journey to defeat the owls and free his family.
Even before the game story begins, Momo already made an epic journey. He came to life as ‘Dash’, the little red ball with big eyes in Pinball Forever. When we switched to level-based pinball, we redesigned him. The world of Momonga back then was a universe centered around vegetables, with Momo starring as a radish battling evil broccoli, potatoes and pickles.
Radishes are tasty, but we felt that it might not “stick” with a casual audience. Fortunately, we were hooked on a website called cuteoverload.com. Our CEO remembered a picture of little cute animals sitting in a tree, that looked like they could roll up like a pinball. After going through several dozens of kittens, puppies and baby hedgehogs, we finally found the picture.
These cute little buggers are Japanese Dwarf Flying Squirrels. Japanese. Dwarf. Flying. Squirrels. We never looked back: we had our hero.
Fry the firefly
Fry is a firefly from a lineage of martial art masters. His father is the head of the Ha Chi Order, and one of the finest firefly warriors. Fry, however, failed to live up to the expectations of his parents: he was defeated by a bunny that he was supposed to chase away as an initiation rite. He left his hometown because of shame. After leaving his town, Fry got caught by the owl bandits. They used him as a light bulb for the owl camp. Bummer.
The final in-game model shows bright colors, big eyes and a “let’s go!” attitude.
In Momonga, you save Fry from a lightbulby life, after which he becomes your trustworthy sidekick. Fry is heavily conditioned in the firefly school of martial arts, and he goes into a frenzy whenever he hears a ringing bell. This comes in handy when you have to defeat a whole bunch of owls.
Real fireflies are red, and very ugly. The first sketches were fairly close to the real thing, and pictured a fat, lazy firefly. This didn’t really work, because nobody wants to drag around a fat firefly while playing pinball. So instead we made Fry an energetic and cute little bug.
Pinball Physics
One of the hardest things, and something we underestimated the most, were the pinball physics. Once you are dealing with pinball mechanics, it means you are dealing with very high speeds and collisions. The fact that the game needs to perform well on a mobile device only made it harder for us. We came up with the following solution.
The basics are simple. You take a ball and flippers, set up a table at an angle and let gravity do the work. It didn’t take long before we got the basic setup working and were able to shoot some balls. But the tricky part in physics is always in the details… and this is where you go one step forward and two steps backwards.
In an ideal world, the player has full control over where the ball should go, and the ball can go just about anywhere. However, we quickly found out that some places were impossible to reach. The angle of the ball was limited; it was very hard to get the ball to the sides of the level.
But the tricky part in physics is always in the details… and this is where you go one step forward and two steps backwards
The movements of the ball involve quite some variables, which can be manipulated in order to enable better control of the ball:
- Flipper rest angle
- Flipper maximum angle
- Flipper strength
- Flipper material (friction, bounciness)
- Ball material
- Ball weight
- Ball drag
- Table material
- Gravity strength
- …and many more.
Changing any of them affects the whole game, and this is where game physics starts to hover between science and art.
We created an isolated test setup to determine exactly how all these variables influence the ball trajectory. In this test, a ball gets spawned every couple of milliseconds, and the flipper is activated automatically. We then traced the ball to see where it goes. Now we could change one setting at a time, and see clearly how it affected the ball trajectory. This, combined with several prediction and correction algorithms, made the physics work well enough for the critical consumer.
The things we learned
Momonga was our first “serious” self-published game, so there were a lot of things we learned the hard way:
Don’t underestimate marketing. Something you have probably heard before. Marketing takes a lot of time and needs a lot of funding. Publishers have the money and the time, you don’t.
You can self-publish a game and do successful marketing for it, but your game has to be remarkable for anyone to talk or write about it.
Making a pinball game is hard
Creating a game takes longer than you think, especially when you are bootstrapping your way to the launch. And yes, even when you take this into account, it will *still* take longer than you think.
The odds are against you when you launch a paid download on iOS.
Think about your business model and target audience in the early phases. The decisions you make will impact every design choice along the way. We chose a story-driven, level-based game, so the game had to be a premium download. If you want to go freemium, make that decision from the start.
The story and world you create can be a great foundation for your future games.
Good level design takes a lot of time. No, really, a *lot* of time.
Momonga in numbers
So how did we do? Here are the results, six weeks after launch on iOS:
- Our invested budget was around $250k
- Momonga has been downloaded 39,577 times, with a total revenue of $33,530.67.
- Momonga has been played by 69,075 unique users. 39,577 came from the App Store, so we have 29,498 illegal folks (43%).
- We got 199 user reviews with an average rating of 4.35
Despite excellent critical reception and positive reviews, Momonga did not break even by a long shot. There are several reasons for this, all of which we are going to address in our updates:
- The game is short and sweet, but still rather short
- There are no viral features, no way to spread the word
- There is no way to try the game for free
- It is a great game, but perhaps not perfectly suitable for the mobile market
- It is too difficult for some people, and too easy for others
Currently, Paladin Studios is working on a v1.1 patch for Momonga, which will contain extra content, Facebook leaderboards, and several other tweaks. To see what they’re currently doing, you can check out their developers blog, Facebook page, or Twitter.
