Indie Showcase: Critical Force Entertainment’s Critical Missions: SWAT (iOS, Android and Web)

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Contributions Postmortem

Indie Showcase: Critical Force Entertainment’s Critical Missions: SWAT (iOS, Android and Web)

April 8, 2013 — by Martijn van Dijk

Critical Force Entertainment Ltd is a new game development studio founded in Kajaani, Finland. The studio created Critical Missions: SWAT, a first-person shooter available for iOS, Andriod (released under Studio OnMars) and playable on Kongregate. The company focuses on developing premium and free-to-play crossplatform games with a special focus on the Asian market. So far, the company is self-funded, but investors are welcome.

Veli-Pekka Piirainen is CEO and founder of Critical Force Entertainment Ltd. He is a former studio manager of Supercell North as well as a lecturer and head of Kajak Game Development Lab. Piirainen is also co-founder of NMP Games Ltd.

A student’s hobby project

In December 2011, I hired Igor Levochkin – one of the students at a school I taught at – as a programmer in my new startup company after following his work for the past two years. Igor and I would make games for the Apple AppStore, and we started making a prototype of a game called BomberBall. At the same time, Igor put his hobby game project in Kongregate. Early January 2012, Igor showed me that there were hundreds of players playing his hobby project game, but I didn’t pay much attention to it. I just thought it could be a good marketing channel for our iOS game.

However, at the end of January 2012, there were a couple of thousand players playing it and I started to get more interested in it. I gave Igor a Sony Xperia Play phone and told him to port the game to that device. Igor managed to have it up and running in a matter of days. Next, I told Igor to port the game to iOS; this was bit more difficult since he was not familiar with Mac and Xcode. After a week, the game was also running on iOS. Now I really started to see some potential in the game. Despite all this work on Igor’s project, we also continued to develop BomberBall because I wanted to have a good prototype for the GDC in San Francisco. I demonstrated both prototypes at the GDC and Igor’s project, Critical Strike Portable, gained more interest from the public. After that trip, we decided to concentrate fully on Critical Strike Portable.

Keeping up with high popularity

Igor started fulltime development on Critical Strike Portable by adding new weapons and features. I still worked part time at the university and couldn’t fully concentrate on the game development. I trusted Igor and also a team of Russian volunteers, who supported us in the growth of the user community as well as map creation. Another important task was to make a proper and more user friendly User Interface (UI) for the game. Unfortunately, Unity 3D’s tools for this job were pretty limited and we didn’t have any artist or UI specialist in our team to design a nice, good-looking and functional UI. So Igor made a “coder-style” UI with many different settings and options inspired by Counter Strike style menus. That UI was easy to use with a mouse, but for mobile phones with touch screens, we needed a different kind of UI.

The user interface of the mobile version.

Because I was inexperienced in game marketing, I hired Teemu Riikonen in April 2012 to lead the studio as well as take care of publishing and marketing of the game. Our next employee was Thanabodi Thongchat, a 2D artist from Thailand. She started designing backgrounds and UI graphics for the game in June 2012. Igor implemented more and more features to the game like new game modes, zombies, graphical effects, as well as fixing bugs. We released new versions on Kongregate weekly and got feedback from players on how to improve the game. At the end of June 2012, we had nearly 30,000 daily average users playing the web version of our game, but we were still growing.

We got over 1 million downloads in one month.

On June 26th, we released a free Android version of our game with exactly the same UI and almost the same features as the web version. Even though it was not so easy to use and the menu elements were pretty small on a phone screen, its popularity surprised us. We got over 1 million downloads in one month.
But the problem was that many players didn’t continue the game after their first try. Only hardcore players did so. We decided to create a totally different and simpler UI for mobile devices, because the current quality was not good enough for Apple’s AppStore to sell it as a premium game.

At the end of August 2012, two game development students, Olli Lahtinen and Aapo Lehikoinen, started their internship in my company. They started to build a totally new UI, added new controls for the iOS version of the game with a new NGUI toolkit we bought from the Unity Asset Store and started to design new maps for the game with Hammer editor. We also needed new character models, guns and animations for the iOS version. Modeling and animations were outsourced to freelancers in Thailand and our Thai artist was leading that work. Unfortunately, the quality was poor and delivery was very late. After that, all animations were outsourced to two Finnish startup game studios and for the modeling of guns, I hired another student.

A screenshot of the zombiemode of Critical Missions: SWAT. — A screenshot of the zombiemode in Critical Missions: SWAT.

Unfortunately, we had to remake all maps done with the Hammer editor (16 total), because our lawyer said we probably weren’t allowed to use that tool, since it’s licensing agreement is not clear enough. Our lawyer also recommended us to change the name of the game from Critical Strike Portable to something else, because that name reminds too much of Valve’s Counter Strike (Critical Missions: SWAT was born then). Our original plan was to release the iOS version in the end of September, but it was released in the end of November due to these difficulties. A new Android version was released just before Christmas, a Lite version in the beginning of January 2013 and the Mac version is in the review process as of this writing.

The iOS market is very competitive

At the end of the year, the amount of our players had increased dramatically. We had almost 200,000 daily players on the web and over 100,000 daily players on mobile devices, but all were playing our free versions. Monetizing with premium version seemed to be much more difficult than we thought it would be. The iOS market is very competitive and full of games, so getting visibility is very hard. We also had bad luck with a very important review, because the reviewer didn’t like our controls at all (many other not so significant reviewers did like them, however). Because of this, we didn’t start to get income fast but our server costs rose dramatically due to the massive amount of users. We also had some trouble with one specific server provider, who just calmly cut off the lines to our map server without any warning due to dramatically risen network traffic.

Looking back

Our biggest mistake was to save money in wrong places and get low quality from our international freelancers. We trusted our own artist’s capabilities to handle leading of the outsourcing, but she was too inexperienced for that. Of course, rates a quarter of the price compared to local studios were very attractive, but then the harsh reality revealed we had to do everything over again after that miserable trial period. It would have been wiser to use more professional outsourcing studios in the very beginning.

Our second mistake was not to solely focus on Critical Strike in the very beginning, but to also make the BomberBall prototype. Something else I would change was not to have a tighter management; everything went forward more or less without proper planning and scheduling. A fourth mistake was not to take a professional publisher to publish the premium iOS version. We thought it would be easy to self publish, because we had such great success with the free Android version, but we were wrong. A last mistake was not to pay enough attention to the server capacity, but that was more or less because of our inexperience with servers and also our idea to save money.

The team is currently working on a new game, called Critical Missions: Space. It has the same nostalgic fast paced FPS gaming experience as Critical Missions: SWAT, with the addition of space rangers, space pirates, laser guns, aliens, space themed maps and more.

Next to that, they keep adding more to Critical Missions: SWAT. They’ve scheduled new guns, characters and maps as well as unlockable content for the next update of their very popular shooter.

Contributions Postmortem

Post-mortem: Playlogic’s Fairytale Fights (PS3 & Xbox 260)

March 18, 2013 — by Bart Eijk

Released in November 2009 for the Xbox360 and PS3, Fairytale Fights is an action hack-and-slash platform game supporting up to four players. The game combines cute looking fairytale characters with over-the-top slapstick violence. The game was developed by Playlogic Gamefactory, the in-house development studio of Playlogic. The studio previously had worked on titles like Xyanide (Xbox), Cyclone Circus (PS2) and Xyanide Resurrection (PSP, PS2). The studio also worked as first party developer for SCE London Studio on titles like Eye Pet, Mesmerize, Aqua Vita (Aquatopia in North America), Tori-Emaki and Pom Pom Party. In this post-mortem, Martin Janse tells the story of Playlogic’s game Fairytale Fights.

Instead of a making a game for children, we wanted to create a game that would appeal to an adult audience by using over the top slapstick violence and comical gore

The game started as concept for the PlayStation 2 Buzz controller party game. Gradually, the concept started to evolve into something bigger that could only be developed on the Xbox360 and PlayStation3 platforms. In Fairytale Fights, you play the part of a used-to-be-famous fairytale character on a personal mission to regain his/her lost fame by going on quests throughout the kingdom. A quest could be rescuing princesses (and princes), fighting wicked fairytale characters or finding magical treasures. The fairytale world consists of cute characters and vivid animations as seen in many 3D animation movies, but instead of a making a game for children, we wanted to create a game that would appeal to an adult audience by using over-the-top slapstick violence and comical gore that also can be seen in cartoons like Happy Tree Friends or Itsy and Scratchy from The Simpsons.

Since the game was targeted for Next Gen-consoles, we felt the game should include some unique features. One of the programmers had been working on a real-time fluid system and we wanted to incorporate this technology in the game, not just for creating all kinds of liquid effects, but also for the blood that would cover the whole scenery and drip from objects. Another idea we had was that the player should be able to slice enemies and objects dynamically so in theory, the player could slice everything he wanted in any direction he would choose.

In early 2006, a team was assembled. They started working on the high-level game design and creating a short animated movie showing some of the core gameplay mechanism and general visual style of the game. After a couple of months, the team of animators, visual designers, modelers and a game designer produced a stunning short animation that convinced everyone that this had the potential to become a fresh and fun game.

Pre-production

The preproduction period was challenging

Before pre-production started, our technical department evaluated different middleware solutions. They came to the conclusion that Unreal 3 Engine was the most suitable tool for creating Fairytale Fights and other possible future titles. It had a very strong editor and was by then the only middleware solution that proved it could deliver quality results on both PS3 and Xbox360. We knew that it would take some time to set up the work flow and to learn Unreal 3. As a result, a small team was assembled to start learning Unreal while also working on the liquid and dynamic slicing technology and creating content in order to develop a vertical slice of the game.

Our ambition to make the game look like an interactive cartoon was finally met." — “Our ambition to make the game look like an interactive cartoon was finally met.”

The preproduction period was challenging. The team encountered several technical obstacles such as recreating the experience of the prototype movie to a vertical slice of the game. Fortunately, a couple of weeks before the Leipzig Games Convention in August 2008, something magical happened. After making some harsh cuts and redesigns, everything fell in place. The vertical slice became a game with a soul, fun to play and a delight to watch. The vertical slice looked gorgeous and the dynamic slicing and liquid system worked. You could even jump into the puddles of blood and red drops would color your surroundings. Also you were able to slide through the blood puddles, painting the world red.

Sometimes we could see the journalists thinking “Oh no, not a kiddy platformer! Another 20 minutes wasted of my precious time!”

The decision was made to present the vertical slice only to a select group of press behind closed doors during Leipzig Games Convention. We all knew we had something special, something different. But the question was if the critical games press would like it as well? We all knew we took a chance with Fairytale Fights. Everyone was using the power of the recently released Xbox360 and PS3 to show realistic looking masculine battle scenes in space or industrial locations. Alternatively, we were creating a game that from the first glimpse looked like a game made for children, but contained cutting edge technology to recreate cartoon violence (salami violence as we called it internally) like dynamic slicing and dynamic liquids.

When we started our presentations during the Games Convention, sometimes we could see a journalists thinking “Oh no, not a kiddy platformer! Another 20 minutes wasted of my precious time!” But once we started the dynamic slicing on the first innocent bunny into small pieces and slide through the puddle of blood from the bunny, you saw a big grin on the faces of most of the journalists and they were keen to learn more about the game.

Starting Production

After the Leipzig Games Convention, it was clear that Fairytale Fights might become something big. Some journalists even wrote Fairytale Fights was the biggest surprise at Leipzig GC that year! Now we had to develop the full game. It took almost 1.5 years to create the vertical slice, a tiny fragment of the whole game. Some key features of the game were working, but still a lot of work had to be done, especially creating content (models, animations, levels) and making sure it would run on all supporting platforms.

One of the biggest issues we already faced during pre-production was finding skilled people. A studio in Rotterdam (not far from the development studio) called Coded Illusions went bankrupt. They were working with the Unreal Engine for several years and we were able to make several formal employees interested in working at the studio, but this was far from the amount people we needed to develop all the content needed (creating models, animations and levels). So we got in touch with a studio that was specialized in building props and animations for feature films and animated TV-series. They were in-between projects and were eager to enter the game content business. Only there was a small problem, our team was not finished with the design and they were working day and night to make sure all the deliverables were available to them on time.

Fairytale Fights was scheduled for a late 2009 release. Sometimes it felt like a mission impossible, especially when things didn’t work out as expected. We had to some cut features and content that was originally scheduled for the game. Everyone at Playlogic was extremely dedicated and spent many hours to finish the game on time.

Looking back

Not being able to attract as many experienced candidates to the studio as we would like also caused delays

As mentioned before, the pre-production took longer than expected. Most of the lead members of the pre-production team were recently promoted and had no or limited experience with starting projects from scratch. Also several key members of the team had to support other running studio projects every now and then, also delaying the pre-production. Not being able to attract as many experienced candidates to the studio as we would like also caused delays. We were recruiting, but it was difficult finding skilled people that were also willing to relocate to Breda (the location of Playlogic Gamefactory, in the south of Holland). After the positive feedback during Leipzig GC in 2008, it became much easier to attract skilled personal. Also the decision to outsource work to other companies meant that people who otherwise could help in production, were now managing outsourcing.

Another thing that caused the delay was that sometimes development was dictated too much by the visual design of the game. For example: at the start of the game, the players and enemies are moving on forest paths with varied terrain. It looked great, but it caused a lot of problems regarding Artificial Intelligence, collision and physics. Looking back, too much time was spent on trying to solve technical issues that were caused by these visual decisions instead of finding alternative visual solutions so these technical issues would not arise.

When the game was released, it received mixed reviews. Many journalists liked the colorful visual style and over the top cartoon violence of the game, but found it a bit too repetitive or didn’t like the usage of the right stick for performing combat moves. Combat is indeed sometimes a bit too repetitive. There were many more puzzles and platform challenges in the original design of the game, but not all of them made it to the final version of the game, making the game too dependent on combat alone. After speaking with a lot of players (especially female players), there was also many who liked the usage of the right stick for combat. It made the game accessible and suitable for co-op play with less experienced gamers, because using the right stick for combat felt intuitive. Several male players told me that Fairytale Fights was one of the few games their girlfriends or wives enjoying playing and they both enjoy playing in co-op mode.

Several male players told me that Fairytale Fights was one of the few games their girlfriends or wives enjoying playing and they both enjoy playing in co-op mode

Not such a happy ending

After the release of the game, a small team continued to work on DLC, which was released shortly after. The rest of the team started pre-production for Fairytale Fights 2. The first Fairytale Fights 2 prototypes were very promising and showed the team had many new fresh ideas. Unfortunately Playlogic encountered financial troubles and the studio had to close its doors halfway 2010 just before winning 2 Dutch Games Award 2010 for Fairytale Fights a few months later.

Some footage of early prototypes of Fairytale Fights 2 has leaked unto the internet. If you are interested, you might be able to find it. Playlogic is currently only publishing games, primarily focusing on publishing digitally on consoles, handhelds and mobile devices.

Contributions Postmortem

The Global Game Jam and beyond: Catch-22 (2012)

January 25, 2013 — by Mariia Lototska

The Global Game Jam and beyond series sheds light on the few brave Global Game Jam (GGJ) teams that have decided to take their GGJ projects to the next level and continue development after those challenging 48 hours. We ask each team to tell about their experiences, share learned lessons and offer advise on their attempt to turn their Global Game Jam project into a full fledged commercial product.

Last year’s edition of the Global Game Jam saw its biggest entry of games yet. Combined with the rather obscure theme of Ouroboros, the ancient symbol of a serpent or dragon eating its own tail.

Based on the Oroborus theme for the GGJ2012 the team behind the quirky one-button arcade game Catch-22 wanted to make a game in which your actions bite yourself in the ass. This resulted in them not only winning the local competition at their jam site, but later also won a prize for being the best Dutch Global Game Jam game. Catch-22 also later became one of the PAX 10 selected indie projects to be showcased at the PAX Prime event in Seattle back in August 2012.

Catch-22 has been in development for iOS ever since.

After we finished the game we realized we made a game in which there is no AI entity or anything attacking you in the game, but yourself. Contrary to normal arcade games, Catch-22 doesn’t pump you full of adrenaline with upbeat music and flashy stuff, or send in hordes of enemies towards you to defeat. You do that by yourself, because this game is all about the endless battle you have with yourself. That idea was truly unique and something that we hadn’t seen before ourselves, so we decided to continue developing Catch-22.

What triggered your initial consideration that your game was worth to continue development?
We didn’t have the idea that our game was worth continuing until after the GGJ ended. We only came to insight on what our concept was worth after the Jam, when we won first place in the national Dutch Global Game Jam. During the Jam itself, we were really just focusing on making the game, were exhausted afterwards and just glad we finished it.

Since our game is a one-button game it’s really easy to port it to any platform since you don’t need a controller. We also made it in Unity 3D, which gave us the power to port it to handheld devices (iOS and Android) instantly. So we figured; why not?!

Catch-22’s AppStore logo

What do you believe was the main element of your game that allowed it to be commercially viable?
After the jam we had a working proof of concept and it only need a lot of polishing. Next to that the game doesn’t require a specific input device such as a controller so it’s easy to port it virtually to any system. And again, Unity 3D gets you a long way.

What really got things in motion was that we got the Dutch “Gamefonds”, a local subsidy for creative projects, to financially support the development of the game just one month after the GGJ. I’ve seen enough projects die young because of the lack of funds, and our project almost suffered the same fate. The funding enabled us to finish the game, fly our butts over to A MAZE IndieConnect, PAX Prime and IndieCade, and hire the necessary artists to work on the game. We simply couldn’t have done it without this initial starting money.

How did you manage the step to go commercial in your team?
We have a really simple way of working which translates to this line; Drink beer, smoke cigarettes and make video games. Rinse and repeat this until the fat lady sings. Really, just flip the switch and go for it, because there is only two ways of doing things; Do them really well, or leave it for someone to do it really well. Because making games is hard, tedious work and you, my friend, are not a robot.

What were the three most important experiences/learned lessons and/or challenges that you had while further developing your game?

Make some solid agreements beforehand

First of all, make some solid agreements beforehand. If you do get in a situation where there is a conflict within the team, you can still have a level of conversation where you can clear the air. If you don’t do this, then be prepared for some hard loving from your close friends. For example in our team, team member Roel had spend a lot more time into the project in the beginning stage and wanted to be compensated for it. I agreed, but team member Marlon didn’t and had his own reasons for it. In the end we arranged to have a team leader (aka a neutral party) who overlooked the project and could talk to us as a supervisor. This made all the difference for the balance within the team. So unless you have really, really good agreements, you can’t simply overcome the possible conflicts that arise within your team. There are one too many teams who think they can do without a good agreement, and it just doesn’t work like that in any kind of game development setting.

Make sure you get your long-term focus right

Second, make a plan to where you want your game and/or company to be in a few months. Make your goals achievable, because just talking about it with your team will not just make it happen by itself. Things change over time and personal situations can get the upper hand if you don’t. I got de-motivated by the fact that things took too long or just simply weren’t done during a certain period of development. Motivation is the only thing that keeps you going when making games, whether it’s money or just finishing your game. So get your mind straight and make sure to get your long-term focus right. Nearing completion, we would regularly go out for drinks and enjoy ourselves from time to time. Having the release of the game within reach, things got a lot less stressful. Most conflicts took place at the beginning of the project. In retrospect, we also stayed motivated by the achievements we got in the meantime; from winning the GGJ to getting 25k honored, to being selected for PAX10 and IndieCade, and finally the release ahead. Having stuff to look forward to is great, especially finishing your game.

In your case, what did you learn from getting the game out to the public?
Start doing this as soon as possible. You will be surprised where it can take you and your game! We can’t stress people enough to do this. If you feel uncomfortable doing this, talk to some people, practice and work on your pitch. Because the public doesn’t see your game like you do and their opinion is the most valuable one you can get. It’s also a really good way to test if your game is commercially viable. If you get some reactions from people who ask you if it’s already for sale or available, Ka-ching! You got game!

What kind of tips would you give to other GGJ participants who might decide to continue developing their project?

It takes time for your game to pick up momentum

Stop crying and making excuses to not release your game or get it out in the open right now. It’s the first sign of failure and I witnessed this in person at the company where I did my traineeship.

It takes time for your game to pick up momentum if you haven’t released any games before or are a well known game developer. Don’t think people will be jumping and begging for your game, because there is a lot of competition out there.

Last but not least, get accustomed to the Nike mentality; just do it! And that goes for everything in your project, from making your game to marketing and PR. Best practices come from experience, and it’s ok to “fail” on your first go.

Cath-22 for iOS can be downloaded in the AppStore.