Matthew Hall, Founder and Developer of KlickTock, describes his career as the childhood hobby that never went away. He decided on his career direction at a very early age. He was five years old when he watched a news piece on Atari with some footage of the factory floor. He turned to his parents and said, “When I grow up, I want to be an electronic engineer.”
By eight years old, he was making his own games. Recently, he took out a 30-year-old cassette of these games and was impressed to discover that almost all of them were complete. “These days,” he admits, “I have a lot more half-finished games lying around.” Hall began working as a professional game developer in 2001 and now he can’t imagine doing anything else.
A Hard Choice
Starting out as an independent developer is not an easy choice to make. When Hall decided to start KlickTock, he tells us, “My wife and child moved back to the family farm while I toiled away there on the original Little Things. When the original launch of that title didn’t go as well as I had hoped, it was a pretty dark time.” The problem was not that he had made a bad game, it was that he had made it for the wrong audience. When it was eventually released on tablet, it was very successful. Fortunately, he was able to move on quickly and found a niche for his unconventional products on the App Store.
Video games have always been a source of inspiration for Hall. Zelda: Link’s Awakening was the first Nintendo game he purchased. “I was completely captivated,” he says. Luxor by Mumbo Jumbo inspired him to leave his day job and start KlickTock. Recently, he has been playing Forget-Me-Not by Brandon Williamson and Nuclear Throne by Vlambeer. He claims, “They are the two most inspirational games I’ve played and remind me just how much I have to learn about writing games.”
As an independent developer, Hall especially values being in charge of his own destiny. He believes the best thing about his work is never having to convince anyone that his idea is a great one. But the most difficult thing is convincing himself of its value. He has discovered, “Without perspective that you can rely on, the only way to properly judge your own game is to take a few months off, come back later, and play it again. This obviously makes development quite slow!”
As an independent developer, Hall especially values being in charge of his own destiny.
A Change in Indie Development
Hall points out that independent developers have been around since the birth of computers, but recently game development has changed in ways that benefit them. Unity and UDK have given independent developers the opportunity to compete with the big studios. Previously, they had to write their own 3D engine to release a 3D game. Now, any major problems can be quickly solved with a search, especially with Unity, since it has such a large development community.
The rise of portals such as Steam and the App store has also benefited independent developers, allowing them to make money, sometimes in significant amounts, from their hobby. Unusual games that were once played only by hobbyists can now find an audience.
Getting Noticed
Hall has been working on Age of Solitaire, and expects to release it soon.
The biggest challenge developers are facing, both in the indie space and in the mobile space, according to Hall, is getting noticed. Building a great product doesn’t guarantee success. He states, “For the indies, a cult of personality has emerged. Not only does your game have to be remarkable, but your personality also is a factor.”
In the mobile space, he has seen that the issues of a crowded marketplace have existed since the early days of the App Store. He emphasizes, “It’s important not only to build an amazing product, you also have to be ready to pick yourself up and try again if things don’t go well the first time. Building a profile as a reliable and interesting developer takes time.”
He gives this advice to independents starting out: “Build titles! Take a small idea, prototype it to prove it’s worthy of completion, then complete it.” He has noticed that developers are often overly invested in their ideas; playing them can shatter preconceptions of the game in a good way.
Preparing for the Future
Hall sees huge changes coming to the electronic entertainment industry with the advent of virtual reality via Oculus Rift. The original Oculus Rift dev kit has a profound effect on anyone who has tried it. Hall believes, “With the new technology, new genres and new opportunities will emerge. I’m very excited about making VR games, even if it isn’t the wisest business move at the moment.”
Hall is currently in “development hell” working on Deck War
And the future of KlickTock should be just as exciting. Hall has a wall covered in game ideas ranging from the esoteric to potential top grossing titles. For several months, he has been working on a new title called Age of Solitare, which he expects to release very soon. He also tells us he is currently in ‘development hell’ working on a collectable card game called Deck War and hopes to release it later this year.
Hall will be sharing tips to getting featured on the App Store at Casual Connect Asia 2014! Read more about his session on the conference website.
Founded in 1997, N-Fusion Interactive is a New Jersey game studio with a portfolio spanning console, PC, and mobile platforms, and across a variety of genres. Recently, N-Fusion added to its portfolio by creating Deus Ex: The Fall, an installment of the popular Deus Ex franchise designed for mobile devices.
To learn more about N-Fusion and The Fall, GameSauce interviewed the CEO of N-Fusion, Jeff Birns, about his background, the company’s history, working on a Deus Ex game, and future plans for the studio.
Starting Out - Jeff Birns’ Early Days
Jeff Birns, CEO of N-Fusion
“There is one specific game that really inspired me, Ultima on the Apple IIe,” Jeff Birns said when reflecting on what inspired him to enter the gaming industry. Birns would play this fantasy/science-fiction, role-playing game at a friend’s house and was, in his words, “amazed” by it. At that time, Birns never imagined that he would go on to make games for his career, but his early love for videogames led to him developing an “admiration for companies such as Origin, Sierra, Lucas Arts” and many more.
Reflecting on what the industry was like when he first got started, Birns noted that back then the industry “was smaller and way more specialized, or rather ‘elite.’” For example, Birns says “a lot of the code was written in assembly,” but “there was also a lot more room for creativity.” Birns thinks that while the industry may have lost some of its creativity since those early days, he does “feel that a good amount of creativity is starting to return to the industry” due to smaller teams willing to take greater chances, and the fact that the barrier to enter the industry is lower than ever.
Founding N-Fusion and its Work Culture
After working at other companies such as New Realm Entertainment, American Laser Games, and COLECO, Birns wanted to work on a different type of product. Starting off as a PC/console developer, Birns said, “When N-Fusion was created, our goal was to make the best role-playing game ever, and man did we try.” The early demos that N-Fusion produced were frequently met with publishers praising them, but then asking if they could “convert them to something else, such as a military game.”
Realizing that they couldn’t make the game they wanted to make, N-Fusion began to do work for hire in order to gain the funds needed to create their own properties. As an independent studio, N-Fusion has been able to develop and maintain a unique business culture. For instance, Birns feels that N-Fusion has “a family culture” given that most of the employees have worked together for a long time.
Being an independent studio has also allowed N-Fusion to create a work culture that is able to quickly adapt to production changes.
Being an independent studio has also allowed N-Fusion to create a work culture that is able to quickly adapt to production changes. “Being independent enables us to steer our own ship and make quick turns when we need to,” Birns said. “And this happens quite often.”
A change that N-Fusion deals with on a regular basis is the shifting requirements for each game they work on. Given that many of their games are targeted at completely different audiences, Birns said that N-Fusion generally approaches “each new franchise with a unique starting point, so that we are sure to design the title for the audience that we are looking to capture.” Starting anew means N-Fusion has to build each game’s art from the ground up, as such, the company’s art “style guides from game to game are sometimes drastically different.”
Deus Ex: The Fall and the Shift to Mobile Gaming
Beyond changing art styles, one of the biggest shifts N-Fusion has had to deal with is the move from console to mobile gaming. According to Birns, those at N-Fusion “still have a console mentality hanging around, regardless of the type and scope of the title” they are working on. Specifically, this market change has required N-Fusion “to design for touch screens and iterate quickly [while] still thinking big in terms of production quality,” according to Birns. And one project that tested N-Fusion’s ability to bring console and PC production quality to mobile games was Deus Ex: The Fall.
One project that tested N-Fusion’s ability to bring console and PC production quality to mobile games was Deus Ex: The Fall.
“This was one of the biggest design challenges we’ve ever had,” Birns said when first discussing The Fall, “There were so many different pillars and design concepts that needed to be represented, it was an amazing journey of focused creativity.” From a GUI design point of view, Birns said, “The game has so many amazing features, it meant that there needed to be a huge number of buttons on the screen and we wanted to make sure players could configure them to their liking.”
A particular design challenge was adapting Deus Ex’s console-based interface and gameplay to the mobile devices. “We weren’t fond of virtual controllers,” Birns explained, “so we created the tap-to-move option, which was my preferred way of navigation.”
A particular design challenge was adapting Deus Ex’s console-based interface and gameplay to the mobile devices.
In addition to adapting a console interface to mobile gameplay, N-Fusion also had the awe-inspiring opportunity of adding to Deus Ex’s expansive universe. It was a challenge that N-Fusion was excited about. “We were really excited about exploring the story of the Tyrants before they are introduced in Human Revolution.” It was their opportunity to explore the Tyrants prior to Adam Jensen’s story in Deus Ex: Human Revolution.
The story for The Fall was first developed by N-Fusion’s Lead Designer, Tyler Munden. As Birns stated, “he read Icarus Effect and basically placed our timeline right when the book ended.” In addition to James Swallow, the author of Icarus Effect (the novel based on Deus Ex franchise that Munden turned to when writing this story), helping N-Fusion on the script, Birns recalled how the process of creating the story “turned into a wonderful collaboration between N-Fusion and Eidos Montreal (Eidos Montreal being the studio behind Deus Ex: Human Revolution)”. N-Fusion also had “a brainstorm session here in NJ with Jean-Francois Dugas and Mary DeMarle, who were the original chief designer and head writer of Human Revolution” in order to keep The Fall’s story in line with the rest of the Deus Ex universe.
Birns recalled how the process of creating the story “turned into a wonderful collaboration between N-Fusion and Eidos Montreal.”
Android Fragmentation Mobile Adaptation
Outside of developing Deus Ex: The Fall, N-Fusion has dealt with making a wide variety of other games for mobile devices. A significant difficulty that has accompanied this move from consoles and PCs to platforms like smartphones and tablets is the lack of standardization. As Birns explained to GameSauce, the differing hardware specs for Android devices can be “a difficult technical hurdle to overcome.” To address this issue, Birns stated that N-Fusion “used Unity as our choice of engine, and this eased the process of making the title compatible on as many devices as possible.”
N-Fusion “used Unity as our choice of engine, and this eased the process of making the title compatible on as many devices as possible.”
In addition to varying hardware specs, mobile game developers also have to deal with knee-jerk reactions that adapting an established console/PC franchise to mobile causes the property to lose some of its quality in translation. However, instead of focusing on what is lost, Birns made it clear that N-Fusion focuses instead on what can be gained. “When a franchise makes the leap to a mobile platform,” Birns explained, “there is an opportunity to reinvent and re-imagine aspects of the game.” In the end, Birns believes that expanding into mobile is beneficial because it “will widen a franchise’s audience and give players an amazing gameplay experience that they can hold in the palm of their hand.”
Reflecting on the Past and Looking to the Future
Since N-Fusion was founded, the gaming industry has gone through massive changes. “The amount of people playing games now is so much larger than when we started,” Birns stated. “Back in the old days you were a ‘nerd’ if you even played video games!” A clear benefit of the number of gamers increasing is that there are now “a wider variety of games available.” A concern that newer developers should have is that while there are a greater number of different business models present, Birns pointed out that “each one requires a different design methodology.” Meaning that people entering the industry must take the time to figure out how the finances for their project should be shaped.
N-Fusion’s new project Space Noir has recently been announced for iOS, Android, and PCs.
Since the release of Deus Ex: The Fall, N-Fusion has recently announced that Space Noir will be getting released for iOS, Android, and PCs. As a narrative-driven space combat game, Space Noir further highlights N-Fusion’s ability to adapt to ever changing expectations of the gaming industry, while building a diverse portfolio of games.
Previously the Managing Editor and Creative Director for The World of Chinese, Andy Deemer was recruited to work on The Stormglass Protocol. He shares the story of its development with Gamesauce.
The Birth of The Stormglass Protocol
Like many things, The Stormglass Protocol was born of secrecy, borders, and government lies.
I was running a propaganda magazine for the Chinese government in Beijing when I received a strange call from India. One of the founders of GameSpot — that celebrated and oft-disparaged website — had moved to India’s tech capital, Bangalore, and had a fantastic idea: a series of games and books about a secret school for junior secret agents — a Hogwarts for spies, perhaps — filled with gripping adventures, devious criminals, and terribly fun puzzles. The GameSpot founder was looking for someone creative to helm the operation. And he thought of me.
I had absolutely no experience in producing games or writing novels, but I’d worked alongside him at GameSpot for eight incredible years. My recent film, a chicken-zombie musical called Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead, had been hailed by The New York Times as “perfect.” My photo-novella, Pyongyang Too, was about to be released in France. And Bon Appetit had just publicly mocked my recipe for Philadelphia Cheese Steak Ice Cream. So I must have been an attractive choice.
Oh, and the GameSpot founder was also my older brother. That may have sealed the deal.
And so, over a series of international calls, he convinced me to quit working for the Chinese government and outsource myself to India. After all, I’ve always wanted to make a game. And write a book. And live in India. I got to do all three.
Some of the Stormglass 1.0 team
The Original Failure
I arrived in Bangalore to an office filled with employees, computers, and even a resident stray dog: a playful mongrel with no name, but called “O.D.”, short for Office Dog. A team of twenty was already coding away, and within hours, I was whipping out storylines and adventures for the game. Some ideas were “Two San Francisco kids have disappeared — help track their kidnappers!”, “The drinking water at a New York high school has been polluted — find the culprits!”, or even “Catch a magician/confidence man in his lies!”
Video Shoot for Stormglass 1.0
We spent a year perfecting The Stormglass Protocol. It would be web- and subscription-based. In-game videos were shot on RED in a London studio using actors I’d hired over the web, with me directing over a flickery Skype connection. A fitness instructor in Boston developed a series of exercise assignments for kids, a Chinese factory manufactured secret agent Stormglass pens with hidden compartments and UV flashlights, and a Hugo award-winning novelist in Berkeley, Tim Pratt, wrote the first draft of a novel. All development was done in Bangalore. This was a truly international production.
Workdays were 10 hours, sprints were two weeks, and we documented in Jira, coded in Javascript, and tested with a crew of 8-12 year old kids — Stormglass agents — from a local international school. The kids- sorry, agents assured us this was the greatest game they’d ever played, more addictive than Skyrim or GTA. They adored the storyline and in review sessions, they gave Stormglass five stars out of five.
After a year of development, we knew the game was ready for the prime time. On November 6th, 2012, we pushed it live.
And there was nothing. Silence. Utter, painful silence.
Finally, with sick stomachs, we shut the Amazon servers down.
Sure, we could drive users to the site with Google AdWords and Facebook campaigns, but they never stayed long. When the ads were turned off, our analytics flatlined. We spent six months trying to fix gameplay, tinkering with the backend, modifying the UI, tweaking the stories. But it soon became clear we weren’t going to succeed. Days became more disheartened. Members of the team floated away to other companies and more secure jobs. Finally, with sick stomachs, we shut the Amazon servers down.
But this isn’t the postmortem for that original version of The Stormglass Protocol. This is the postmortem for Stormglass Version 2.0. And that didn’t fail.
The Return of Stormglass
The company had six months of operating cash remaining, and I had six months on my Indian residence visa and my apartment’s lease. All three ended on November 1st, 2013. That trifecta of timing seemed to give us just enough space to produce a great game from scratch, but we didn’t want to repeat the same mistakes we’d already made. So we started by brainstorming an entirely new game. Time was short, pressure was on, but we spent two full and very valuable days in an off-site. How can we reinvent Stormglass? I broke the day into individual brainstorms, paired brainstorms, group brainstorms, idea-generation challenges, and absurd physical exercises. The walls became plastered in layers of poster-pages, each filled with scribbled notes, golden gems, and some really truly terrible ideas. Yet we kept coming back to one seed: an iOS room escape game in fully-immersive 3D. Something that — as far as we knew — had never been done before.
I broke the day into individual brainstorms, paired brainstorms, group brainstorms, idea-generation challenges, and absurd physical exercises.
It would be filled with the same dark humor as my other work. We’d feature puzzles parodying Gilbert & George, Magritte, and even one level mimicking Yayoi Kusama’s infinity rooms (This was mere months before her real infinity rooms led to six-hour queues in New York’s snowy streets). In-game ads would promote Fracking (“It’s Like Hugging the Earth”), Affordable Laser Lobotomies, and — of course — Cheese Steak Ice Cream. There’d be Monty Python quotes, celebrations of classic b-movies like They Live and The Toxic Avenger, and subtle references to North Korea and Kim Jong Il.
However, we only had six months to complete it. To start with, I rearranged the team. Only one of us had ever worked in iOS before. Bijoy, a smiley, mild-mannered junior developer, was also the charismatic lead singer of one of India’s leading Christian rock bands, Cross Legacy. He’d spend all day coding, and then ride his motorbike across town to play a stadium show to tens of thousands of cheering fans. He became the dev lead, Javascript-diving into Unity.
Meiding and Bijoy hard at work
For 3D, we were a little luckier. Meiding and Ebey both had experience. Meiding started out like every other man in his family, as a career soldier in the Indian army. But one day, Meiding decided to put down his gun and pick up Maya. I’d found him on India’s job site Naukri, where I was inviting potential employees to model and texture a vista of auto-rickshaws. Meiding took the challenge, and gave me something that looked like a photo. We hired him immediately. On the original Stormglass, he was a junior designer, but I loved his vision. I put him in charge of the game’s “evil prison-laboratory-office” aesthetics. Meanwhile, Ebey was just a kid, appearing out of nowhere. He was, and still is, a full-time student in 3D and filmmaking, but heard about Stormglass and sent me an unsolicited Hollywood-level demo reel. We didn’t need him, but we couldn’t let him go. So he agreed to juggle full-time work and school. I’m still unclear how he managed it.
Every week, we’d hold all-hands brainstorming sessions to establish room themes and puzzle-types: a game show, a dream room, a museum condemning Thomas Edison’s cruel business practices! And while the dev team was building the first two levels, and the 3D team was building the third and fourth levels, I’d be writing the descriptions and stories for the fifth and sixth levels. Almost every two-week sprint followed that process.
One room idea was a museum condemning Thomas Edison’s cruel business practices!
Learning From the Past
To avoid the largest mistake we’d made with Stormglass 1.0, we didn’t develop for a year and then release a polished product. Instead, we pushed out a rough product with only three basic levels as early as we could. We didn’t have much time — less than six months now — and we needed to know what real users thought, immediately.
Fortunately, they loved it.
We kept a close eye on iTunes reviews, though, and modified the game accordingly. These were our focus groups. When users complained about the navigation — a valid complaint — we redesigned it and pushed out a new release. The next comment was about the puzzles being “too easy”, so we ramped up the difficulty.
I was still working on my novel, editing and rewriting whenever I had time.
This release-review loop quickly became circular. Fans realized new releases addressed their reviews, and updated their reviews with revised feedback. Two-star reviews became five-star reviews. “Too easy” became “Wow.” And most new feedback became three repeated words: build more rooms. We were building as fast as we could with two developers, two modelers, two modeling assistants, a designer and me! Still, we didn’t want the level of immersion — or the quality of the game — to suffer. We wanted Stormglass to have the dark laughs of Limbo, the obsessive confusion of The Room, and the snark of Infocom’s classic Hitchhiker’s Guide. Also, I was still working on my novel, editing and rewriting whenever I had time.
The Final Push
Our November 1st deadline was rapidly approaching. It wasn’t just a goal; it was the last day I could stay in my apartment and in the country. And, perhaps even more important, it was the last day we could afford to pay the team, and still give severance packages. With each release, and each sprint, I found myself cutting so that we could meet our deadline. Puzzles were removed. Characters were eliminated. Easter eggs I’d so loved when they were written, axed. But most of it made it in. Through long nights and dedication to the game, the team managed to fit almost everything in.
And, with one week to spare, we pushed. And the reviews started to appear….
“A definite must-have.” - JustAdventure.com
“A room escape puzzle game like no other.★★★★½” - 148Apps.com
“Rich graphics, an immersive storyline, and puzzles that will have you turned upside down.” - iDownloadBlog.com
“The Stormglass Protocol… pulls the genre out of its stationary roots.” - JayIsGames.com
And, at precisely the same time, the reviews of the novel started to appear. And they, too, were great…
“Like a Bond adventure for kids… undeniably entertaining.” - Kirkus
“A brilliant twist on the classic theme of villainous world domination… a captivating read…★★★★★” - ForeWord Clarion Reviews
“Action-packed and fast-paced… barrels along with a cheerful intensity and no shortage of middle-grade Bond-style adventure.” - Publishers Weekly
The Stormglass 2.0 Team
But time had run out. We said goodbye, the team and I. I didn’t know if or when I’d be back in India, but every member of the Stormglass Protocol 2.0 team — Bijoy, Dharma, Ebey, Krishna, Meiding, Uday, Varun, and Yagnesh — was a crucial part of the game.
In the Bangalore airport, with my visa expiring in just three hours, I checked in for my 2 AM flight back to San Francisco. Repatriating myself, I filled out the customs forms with a smile. I was, after all, using my hidden compartment and UV flashlight Stormglass pen. My spy pen. And my mission, of course, was accomplished.
The Stormglass Protocol is on iPad, and you can experience The Stormglass Protocol for yourself here. You can also purchase the Stormglass Novel here. You can see more of Andy’s traveling adventures on his blog and his weird eats on The Huffington Post.
This article was written by Sergey Babaev, Creative Director of GD-Team.
Hello everyone! Recently, GD-Team began the development of MO-shooter Metal War Online. The project seemed to be a multiplatform one, meaning it will unite all the gamers with browser and client versions. Metal War Online has run only in Russia as a stand-alone client game and a social application. Over time, we decided to enter the global market via Steam. Like many of our colleagues, we realized this project via Greenlight. We devote this article to our experience of getting approval.
Please note that we don’t pretend to any creative and innovative approaches. We saw some simple and available communications gap on Greenlight, so we collected all the points together and show their importance for reaching the main result – getting the Greenlight! This consists of two parts: the approval process (advises, mistakes, etc.) and the early access (results, measures).
Is it Possible to Go Without Greenlight?
If you are not a big publisher or if you don’t have any friends who deal with the top-management of Valve Corporation, you can forget about getting directly to Web Services.
Let’s be realists. If you are not a big publisher or if you don’t have any friends who deal with the top-management of Valve Corporation, you can forget about getting directly to Web Services. Even if you deal with regional or local managers, they will only compliment your project, express their happiness to work with you as potential partners, and ask you to get through the modest approval on Steam Greenlight.
Don’t take it personally. There is not much choice: it is either supreme privacy or attempts to form some self-regulation procedures and filtration of incoming requests. You could possibly avoid the approval, but let’s suppose this measure is an impossible one and don’t take it into consideration.
What Does the Public Like?
Getting on Steam shouldn’t and must not be your end in itself.
Now for the favorite question of all developers: what can we do to get on Steam? This is the wrong question, and it leads to many dangerous consequences for developers. Don’t try to find favor in the eyes of the platform. Getting on Steam shouldn’t and must not be your end in itself. You can give the look to the audience, you can manipulate the understanding of your project, but you needn’t repeat the games which have already gotten the Greenlight and ARE waiting for release. Here are the reasons:
The public probably doesn’t want the same game project.
You don’t know how the game will operate after release. The service of “games access” isn’t a shop. You can’t be sure that by getting through Steam, the project will collect good feedback and money for release. And the other way around, it doesn’t mean that the project can’t be a successful project without Steam. Greenlight is some kind of Steam level. It expresses the whole trend in the Greenlight-community. This group of users bought time to look through games which would never be released with Greenlight, allot the marks, and comment. They are like aid men of their favorite social medias, saving 90 percent from spam information.
If you try to duplicate the success of any other game projects, you may face comments like “downvote for the same one”.
We are not going to discuss deeply some main questions. We believe that each developer will decide if its project can pretend to be a successful one or not. We are just trying to allay concerns which face developers during preparation for Steam.
Preparation
So you are going to bring you project to Steam. First, you have to register by paying $100 and filling a form. Let’s divide the process of statement into some main parts and try to explain general mistakes in each one, because the first days in the catalog of specialties are the most active. Even if you can find an extra source of votes, you can’t maintain the same level of interest to your game for weeks.
1) Media Content
Preparing Metal War Online for Greenlight, we decided to post some of the most beautiful screenshots and our launch-trailer, quite stylish and dynamic demonstration, especially for F2P-projects. But here we faced the first catch…
Our Russian launch trailer
The first mistake…and it wasn’t mistake at all… was that the trailer was only in Russian. The soundtrack was made by Russian actors, and it consisted of Russian text. We didn’t consider that it was the first reason of negative understanding by gamers. We received comments like, “They just didn’t try to translate the trailer”. That’s why we didn’t want to waste time with translating the soundtrack. We had prepared for negative comments, but suddenly we saw quite nice ones: “Finally, it’s perfect Russian speech”, “We are tired of warped words”, and “The game is by Russians, and it is so cool!”. Some gamers thought that we just saved the style of Russian military negotiations and tried to interpret them for gamers.
We don’t advise you to repeat this event. Effect of such activities can be different and you can hear the same comments like “They just didn’t even try to translate”. If you have some Russian soundtracks, it’s better to add English frames – subtitles and translations. In this way, the gamers will understand that it isn’t the result of you poorness or laziness, but that you try to convey your own unique atmosphere.
If the enthusiastic gamers fixed their eyes on the trailer, the most hyper-correct ones wanted to look through screenshots because these screenshots are the unique demonstration of the live game. What they ended up seeing: Russian text in chat, Russian elements of interface, Russian indicators on speedometer. They didn’t accept the project. They decided to look through the application form in order to find some information about localized languages. More patient games gave some comments, and others commented with a “downvote”.
Comments regarding our Russian trailer
This little mistake created several thousands downvotes. But later, we corrected. We posted the screenshots without the interface. These screenshots looked more subjective and didn’t consist of provocative information. You can also use fake screenshots with localization as promo material.
Screenshots without an interface can be useful on Greenlight
If you are going into the international service, you need to prepare an English version and, even better, German, Spanish, and French versions. There aren’t many words and verbal cues in our project, so we could do the localization quickly and inexpensively. We realized our mistake, and we began the localization of our project in four more languages except Russian.
Another mistake was the gameplay. It’s the most important point, but we will not pay much attention to it because not every project has a good and useful build for making a video for Greenlight. Many times, the gamers saw a lot of perfect screenshots, but later found out that these screens were just fake promo materials. That’s why they don’t believe the screenshots as a demonstration of gameplay. Also, they don’t believe the CG-trailer provides insight into real gameplay.
More negative comments we received….
If you don’t have any gameplay video, the gamers may doubt your project because they think you only have screenshots. Of course, such projects can still get the Greenlight. Still, you should try to make a video. Ordinarily, there are several demo scenes from the engine. This shows how you are progressing and developing. Speaking from the perspective of developers, such scenes can lead to negative comments and points of view. The users will be able to understand how much money and powers you have spent. It’s definitely easier to make a demo scene than paint a fake screenshot. It is important for ordinary users to understand if such a project has any chance for success. If you can’t make any video or promo materials, then the Steam approval should probably not be the most significant aim.
Another point to look at is multiplatform. You have to appreciate it, especially if the engine’s authors decided to support it. For example, look at Unity3D. It isn’t perfect (if we speak about service and support), but qualified specialists will make your game for any platform. It’s stupid to ignore an opportunity to reach a whole category of users. Some of them react to the absence of their favorite system very bluntly:
Linux is just one platform users want….
We aren’t saying to promise everything to users, because unfulfilled promises on Steam aren’t the right tactics. You have to estimate your resources and the opportunities of chosen technologies. If the engine is multiplatform, it’s better to think of a Linux version and its start. If the technologies and resources don’t give you opportunities to make everything like you want, we advise you to inform them that you are preparing a version release for some platforms during the months after your start on Steam. Also, you should name these platforms. In this way, you can collect hundreds and maybe thousands of upvotes.
2). Title and Description
Our description looked like typical promo text, but everyone has their own point of view about effective text. That’s why we don’t aim to give you any experience in this sphere. However, here are some simple rules that may help you avoid problems:
If the project is in the development stage, you need to indicate the dates of the main levels: close alpha, open alpha, closed and open beta testing and etc. You can construct a diagram, if necessary. People don’t want to pay for obscurity. If the project is in close beta testing, you should refer people to your site where users can find out information. The gamers can’t get into this level, but they begin to understand that it works. If the project has already started in one region (in our case, Russia), you must inform the users. Call the number of gamers and the places where the game has been started (in our case, it’s social media).
You should also specify system requirements. Although nowadays nobody takes into account system requirements when starting to play, they calm the users. The users will think, “If the guys know how their game works, it means that the tests were held.”
We have used such a logo where our reconnaissance equipment Chimera looks like a head of manlike robot.
And the most important part: you need to provide a description of your project in all the languages which you localized in. Unbalance and disparity leads to misunderstanding and doubts from users, meaning they will probably not be clients.
During the fulfillment of your title and description, you will be offered to choose an icon. We suggest that you shouldn’t abuse GIF-animations. You will be in the list of news even if you don’t have cool animations and perfect colors. It’s better to choose a good big logo to mystify the users. We have used such a logo where our reconnaissance equipment Chimera looks like a head of manlike robot.
After fulfilling everything, you will be published on Steam Greenlight. Now it is up to everybody to see and critic.
Work with the Community
Now you are at the beginning of a difficult road. You’ll have to face the gamers who have their own opinion about all the details of your project. It’s better to prepare for unusual critics – from dubstep in trailers to disgust towards F2P. People can say “no” to your long service only if they don’t like the music in trailer! It’s a harsh world!
And the negative comments keep coming….
Don’t despair! You did nothing bad. Sometimes, you can’t talk around your opponents. They are using their right to judge subjectively about content and are trying to exclude any aggravator. If they don’t like dubstep, the best you can do is load another soundtrack from the game if possible. But unfortunately, all your attempts will go to waste. Don’t play with moody gamers. You should try to connect with those who are making contact. Let’s consider some ways to connect during your time on Steam Greenlight.
First of all, you have to discuss the special aspects of your project. All the MO-games which include any technical equipment have one meme wrangler – the users see futuristic clones. We wasted a lot of time discussing all the special characteristics of our project to the gamers.
….but good comments come as well!
This doesn’t mean that you need to poke holes in or try to criticize the same projects. It’s the wrong way and leads your comments to flood with showdowns and mutual disses. Such a situation will create negative understanding and will influence the opinion of other gamers about your project.
Another famous style of trolling is to offer excuses. Who is offering excuses usually seems guilty. You always need to hold your position. If necessary, you can mention that your team isn’t big, and you can’t meet the needs of all the users. If the project gets to Steam, you will have more resources. It’s more difficult to talk in such way, especially if you are launching a fundraiser campaign in one of the crowd-funding stages.
Remember: don’t delete the comments. There can’t be perfect comments. Only inexperienced developers can dream about them, but others avoid such fact. There should be critics, good feedback, and arguments in your comments. You must instill order only in that way if you see that there are a lot of haters in comments from other groups or games. In all other ways, don’t remove the comments. Just take a breath and ignore the negative words.
Attracting Traffic
Gradually, the number of limited traffic of Greenlight came out:
The yellow line represents the number of visitors (not more than 50 per day). Less that 40 of them vote and only half of the visitors vote for. But these factors are not as important. The number of visitors isn’t so presentable, and you can’t collect 17-20 thousands of upvotes in such a situation. A demand to attract new users aroused. We decided to do it and faced some mistakes and problems.
The 1st Mistake: Attempting to Attract an Unknown Public Page
We placed a banner to attract the community
The most obvious way to attract new users is to place interesting banners on game resources.
We can’t say that such placing was ineffective, but the number of new users was poor. Then we remembered the social aspect of our project, which is more active. We posted an inset calling to vote for our project in the main news of the page. The mistake was that this call was understood as advertising and aroused resentment. The number of profile views and votes rose, but the proportions were the same.
Was it possible to attract social traffic properly? Of course, yes. You could just include in the news feed information about your project, attract the users to play in social version and than offer voting. Also, you need to inform them that it is the project of one team and not any registered post. Later, we held some activities. The quality of traffic from our other projects improved. The number of votes also rose.
We kept trying different ways to attract votes
The 2nd Mistake: “Administration is spoiling the game. Downvote!”
The second mistake was our attempt to attract the users to vote for the social version of Metal War. The gamers can vote only in that way if they bought something at least once on Steam. It affects the public, which can influence on your project and opinion about it. When we called the community to vote, the traffic suddenly rose. But there was a problem in the social version. Haters began threatening to revote or something similar. The haters always use the thunders if they don’t like some negative activity. But, don’t despair too much. It’s just a negative fact for the group and its moderators. Several times, we saw some misbalance in votes, but it was the result of such thunders.
The 3rd Mistake: Not Ready to Vote
Like many others, there is an original news digest in our project, and can be seen upon entering the game. We decided to post the news about voting, but there was only one problem: The digest was shown to everybody, including the new gamers who just started playing. They either were not ready to vote and just close the digest or were displeased by the project and ignored the voting. What’s worse is they could just vote against it. That’s why mobile game developers ask you to estimate the application. They want to do their best to remove all the negative factors. We thought about it late, so we lost part of our gamers. But we realized our mistake and offered the vote option after some successful levels in the game. That led to a 70 - 90 percent increase of votes for our project.
The Results
With the mistakes, we did lose some traffic, leading to a lot of downvotes and difficulties in getting the Greenlight. The diagram of voting pattern in several days was the following:
The first day, the number of downvotes was 845 among 1700. The next day, the number rose, and the traffic began to fall. In about four days, the number of reviews was less than 1000, and the number of downvotes still rose. Only in 1 - 5 weeks did the situation changed.
Discussing the problems of project localization, it is important to understand that we didn’t notice the habit to revote in Greenlight. You can correct you mistakes and attract other user to vote for your project. The users who speculate don’t vote for or against. They just do “Ask me later”. The number of such users is quite low. Even if you can talk them around, it doesn’t help you. Try to surprise the new public all the time. Those gamers who have already voted made a choice and forgot about you.
If you have some strategy for voting, you can only wait. In our case, we needed to gain 18 thousands votes to get the Greenlight. It can lead to accessing the Top 100. Top 100 is a life order which settles in each project selection. During several such selections, you can be in the Top 10 and get the Greenlight.
We did it!
After successfully getting the Greenlight, you get access to open beta testing. You need to prepare the integration of a payment service provider, authorization, a CDN for giving a game client, and develop a promo site, implement achievement system, and many other things which we are still working on. After getting on Steam, we will prepare the next installment in order to tell you about the technical and business aspects and what you should pay attention to. We hope that you have found something interesting in our information for your projects! Stay tuned for the next installment!
Sir! I’d Like To Report A Bug! follows a QA tester on a quest to destroy bugs that have escaped into the real world after a new prototype tech goes crazy. This side-scrolling platform game was made by a three-man team who took a break from their own solo projects to come together and make this pixelated adventure. Ash Morgan, the man who worked on the design and coding of the game, talks about the experience.
It’s kind of hard to believe that a bunch of moving images and a bit of music coming from a thin lump of plastic and metal can fill you with such pride. It was a Thursday evening in late July, and I had just merged some newly-created art assets with a level I had built, and put in some music. It was that moment where Sir! I’d Like To Report A Bug! was no longer a prototype, but was now an actual game in development.
But I’m getting ahead of myself, let’s rewind to this past April.
One Crazy Idea
I’m one of those people who is always thinking up of something for a game, be it a character and their backstory, a neat little idea for a mechanic, or how one could advertise their creation. That’s why it was no surprise when I thought up the premise of a guy going to and from work while the world around him changed and glitched out like bugs in a game. Instead of just having a laugh about it and continuing my walk home, I actually started to concept how the game would look and play in my head. Later that evening, I had Unity loaded up on one screen and a tutorial on how to make a 2D platformer on the other.
That’s why it was no surprise when I thought up the premise of a guy going to and from work while the world around him changed and glitched out like bugs in a game.
I really don’t see myself in anyway as a programmer or coder, I can’t draw to save my life, and a cat can compose better music then me. This was just a bit of an experiment to see if I could actually make something, and if that something could be fun. After a few evenings of tinkering, I had a prototype on my tablet. It was nothing fancy, just a side-scroller with basic controls and some ideas I had for bugs scattered throughout some levels. Everything was basic, and the character on screen was a Mario sprite I “borrowed” from the Internet, but it was a fun few minutes of jumping and laughing at the weirdness that appeared on screen.
A few more evenings went by and I had created more. It got me thinking, “I just got a Unity license for Android, and I know about getting apps onto Google Play. Why not turn this into something and see what happens?“
Dev Team Assemble!!
As I mentioned before, I’m useless at most parts of game development. If I was going to turn this into something people could actually download and play, I would need some talent. Thankfully, I knew a bunch of talented people thanks to my days at University. After a few emails, I was able to rope in the very talented Matthew Calvert and Adam Grant. We didn’t want to spend ages talking and debating about what kind of studio we would be and how we would market ourselves. We just wanted to focus on the task at hand and make something fun.
We just wanted to focus on the task at hand and make something fun.
With new blood came new ideas for levels and bugs, so we got to work coding, mixing and drawing. Production boiled down mainly to myself prototyping an idea someone came up with, Adam doing a few tester assets, and then all three of us looking at if it worked or not via nightly builds. We didn’t focus on team meetings and using fancy progress tracking software. Instead, we just shouted at each other via Facebook or texts. That makes it sound like it was an unorganized mess (and to some degree, it was), but it worked for us. We rarely wasted time due to lack of communication, and everyone knew what they were doing. If anyone had an idea, we were quick to make a prototype and try it out.
Hold On Chaps, We’ve Got a Problem
It’s a commonly unwritten rule in game development that something will blow up badly. The longer nothing goes wrong, the bigger the problem, and yes, it happened to us.
It’s a commonly unwritten rule in game development that something will blow up badly.
It was just after I had that moment of pride where our game no longer seemed like a crazy idea and seemed like an actual game. Level layouts were done and all the bugs were working to a degree. Some music was missing, and there were no animations, but we had a beta to test and work upon. I decided to play the game from start to finish and record what defects I ran into, so that I could get to work fixing them the next day. There was just one problem though — I had finished all ten levels of the game in less than 15 minutes!
The game had no challenge. I had died a few times on the later levels, but was still able to blitz through at break-neck speed. You could argue that because I had designed the levels, I had a huge advantage, but after letting my brother play, I could tell the game was too short. We spent ages thinking up new ideas and levels, but they just didn’t feel right. We had worked hard on what we had, and now it felt like we were bolting on content just because we had to.
Then came a crazy idea – let’s make the game as hard as retro games from the 80s and 90s! We swapped out a few assets to make the game look more pixelated and tweaked the difficulty. What followed was an afternoon of swearing and raging, but the game was still fun, and it took us a lot longer to beat. We decided it was our hook: a retro-looking game with a retro difficulty to boot!
What followed was an afternoon of swearing and raging, but the game was still fun, and it took us a lot longer to beat.
And Now For Something Completely Different
The game was nearing completion, and we started thinking about how we were going to sell it. I had seen the horrors of new studios charging, so we wanted to stay away from charging, and we couldn’t bolt on in-app purchasing, as there was nothing to buy in-game. We were stuck with either offering a donation version of the game or just offering it for free.
We were ok with giving away the game, as we weren’t really in it for the money, but at the same time, we wanted some kind of reward for our efforts and to start building up some capital for future ideas. It was here we pondered about combining the concepts of donating with crowdfunding, and thus our system of “Post-Crowdfunding” was born.
We have hope in our players and the future of our little creation.
We wanted to reward players that believed in us, as well as build a sense of community around the game, so we started to plan additional content and offer it if we hit certain funding goals, much like the stretch goals on KickStarter. The system was quite basic, as it was just a link from the app that pointed to a PayPal page where players could donate, but we were excited at the fact that no one had ever tried this before. If it actually works or not remains to be seen, but we have hope in our players and the future of our little creation.
If you would like to find participate in the Post-Crowdfunding, check out their website, and find out more about the game through their Facebook.
The first global conference program to recognize and serve the game development community in Eastern Europe, Casual Connect works every year to bring great speakers, the most current topics, valuable industry learnings, and meaningful connections with the most qualified, successful game development community in Eastern Europe and beyond. The show included speakers from a number of multinational organizations such as Facebook, Game Insight, Big Fish Games, G5 Games, and Unity, as well as key domestic success stories like Odnoklassniki and Creative Mobile Games. More than 60 speakers from all over the world presented information-packed sessions about free-to-play games design and operations, social casino games, technological evolutions, development methodologies, new platforms, postmortems…and the list goes on.
More than 60 speakers from all over the world presented information-packed sessions.
In addition to the sessions, attendees at Casual Connect had the opportunity to build relationships with other businesses and create strong community ties, something that Casual Connect strives to accomplish with each conference. Networking opportunities were everywhere, including at the fun and unique sponsored parties. The Indie Prize Showcase also gave new developers a chance to talk to publishers and other developers about what they’ve been doing.
The Indie Prize Showcase also gave new developers a chance to talk to publishers and other developers about what they’ve been doing.
The Most Prominent Woman in Games Award from Casual Games Association was also awarded in Kyiv to Julia Palatovska, Business Development Director at G5 Entertainment.
Julia Palatovska, The Most Prominent Woman in Games Award Winner
With Casual Connect Kyiv now a fond memory, Casual Connect turns their attention towards their return to the location of the FIRST-ever show, and hopes to see you in AMSTERDAM in February 2014!
If you were unable to attend the show, the presentations were recorded on video and made available for free on Gamesauce and the conference website.
More videos can be found on the conference website.
Other Coverage of Casual Connect Kyiv:
“Mario is Out, Mobile is In” - App2Top
The Long Lasting Aftertaste of Casual Connect Kyiv - Renatus
Shorts Cuts: Why Fishing Cactus wants its next game to turn gamers into coders - Pocketgamer.biz
Big Fish Opening the PC Market to Android Devs - App2Top
BlueStacks partners with Big Fish on mobile game integration - CNET
WildTangent Expands to ASUS Tablets and PCs - App2Top
5 promising indie games from Casual Connect in Kiev - Pocketgamer.biz
Casual Connect Kiev 2013: Interview with DeNA - App2Top: Russian Version and English Version
Community spirit: Why every dev needs to foster a relationship with their players - Pocketgamer.biz
Casual Connect Kyiv 2013: App Annie will soon open an office in Moscow - App2Top: Russian Version and English Version
‘Mario is out’: Why BlueStacks believes microconsoles will fill gaming’s console shaped hole - Pocketgamer.biz
Casual Connect Kyiv 2013: interview with WildTangent - App2Top (Russian)
Short Cuts: How small studios can benefit from the power of recognised IP - Pocketgamer.biz
Casual Connect Kyiv 2013: Interview with Big Fish - App2Top (Russian)
Casual Connect Kyiv 2013 - glafi.com
Jessica Tams: People Don’t Sneer at Casual Games Anymore - App2Top: Russian Version and English Version
Kumakore, the self-funded gaming backend as a service based in Dallas, Texas, was founded in 2012 by ex-Zynga With Friends product managers to help expedite the process of making games that need a server-component. Kumakore is a tool made for game developers, by game developers, so that people building the next mobile hit can focus on crafting a great game. Eric Shen, Vice President of Business Development, tells us how they went from a game studio to a service studio.
Originally, we were going to create our own games, not be a gaming backend as a service.
The Start of Kumakore
The idea of Kumakore was not always to be a gaming backend as a service, but to create our own games. Having been a part of the Zynga With Friends studio, and originally part of Newtoy, Grant Yang was the product manager that worked on and launched some of the most notable With Friends titles, including the classic Words With Friends on Android, Hanging With Friends on iOS and Android, and Matching with Friends. Having seen the power of With Friends-style games, it was clear to our mind to try and replicate that success. Based on what we learned from the success of Words With Friends as an indie, and then from launching more hits for Zynga, we knew that we wanted to do two things: First, hit as many platforms as possible; Second, get our game out as quickly as possible.
For a self-funded and cash-strapped business, we did what many indie studios have probably done: resort to contract work. This is often an extremely valuable learning tool for developers. Our first endeavor was to ensure that we could develop a game that would essentially be our “pipe cleaner” in our development cycle. As the original idea of the studio was to make turn-based, asynchronous, With Friends-styled games, we wanted to create an engine to do this. However, we soon realized this was a foolish proposition. We wanted to make games, not build tech. So we proceeded to evaluate many of the cross-platform game engines, such as Unity, Corona, and Marmalade.
It was around the time we chose Unity as our game engine that we obtained a contract to make our “pipe cleaner.” This game was Makkhi, based on the Bollywood movie of the same name. It was a quick game to make, particularly with our budget, but we were able to prove that we could build a game that we could quickly launch cross-platform.
Makkhi proved that we could build a game that we could quickly launch cross-platform.
Moving to Tech
Once we finished Makkhi, we turned towards making our turn-based, asynchronous game. Once again, we went through the exercise of trying to find an “engine” that would suit our needs. We looked at all the big names, like Game Center, Urban Airship, Parse, and Kinvey, and we discovered something interesting. We found that there were no solutions focused on games, not just having basic features, like leaderboards and achievements, but actual logic with retention-driven features, such as push notifications tied to moves, inventory management, and dashboards to balance a game economy. Essentially, we were looking for a Unity for the backend, but didn’t find one. At this point, we decided we were going to do what we were trying to avoid the entire time: build an engine. Bubble Pals was the culmination of this effort.
Bubble Pals and Changing Goals
Bubble Pals combines the fun of a time-tested genre (the bubble shooter) with the best aspects of a With Friends game. While Bubble Pals started off as being a part of the standard bubble popping genre, the creation of the game quickly became the tip of the iceberg. Kumakore’s team took the best practices of social gaming learned from making freemium games while working at Zynga and applied these features to the backend.
Bubble Pals in the Indie Prize Showcase at Casual Connect USA 2013
The Bubble Pals project was the genesis for the Kumakore Backend Service, a one-stop gaming backend as a service which provides dashboards, inventory management, user management, leaderboards, achievements, and much more to be put in the hands of any game development studio. Now any team, large or small, can tap into the power of Zynga-level product management and the server-side features implemented in the top-grossing freemium games. While the Kumakore team had to ultimately sacrifice being a game studio, it did that so other game studios could live the dream.
The Future and Beyond
Kumakore is now partnering with other game development studios to provide their server backend infrastructures with features that other games will be able to take advantage of. Whether it is creating a With Friends-style hit or the next Candy Crush Saga or Clash of Clans, Kumakore is building the infrastructure developers need so they can focus on what really matters – making their game fun!
Kumakore is currently in private beta and is offering exclusive benefits for its beta developers. Developers interested in participating can contact the Kumakore team at www.kumakore.com.
In the meantime, Kumakore will be looking to launch the backend service by GDC Next and would be happy to meet with developers there. Additionally, anyone who wants to reserve a username or signup to receive info when Bubble Pals officially launches can visit the landing page at www.bubblepals.com.
Find more information about Kumakore on Facebook or Twitter.
Otter Bytes Interactive is an independent game studio consisting of five talented artists and programmers. Founded in 2012 by Michael Gill, Island Raid is their first published title and was released in the Spring 2013. Michael shares their story.
An Island Dream
Having recently developed mobile games for clients under my software development company, I decided in early 2012 that I wanted to start making my own games. The new iPad with the retina display had just come out, and because of my design background, I wanted to create a game that was visually appealing and could take advantage of the retina display’s pixel count. So I set out to create an iPad-only game using the Unity platform and self-publish it to the App Store.
My vision started as a top-down island defense game, but I wanted to steer clear of a strictly tower defense game, as I felt that genre was already flooded. Hoping to add a unique spin to a genre hybrid, I drew inspiration from Firemint’s Flight Control HD. Admiring the simplistic approach to a fun top-down game and liking the inherent frantic nature of trying to direct incoming objects, I started merging my ideas together.
Incoming enemies would be small and simple, so the focus would be on the uniqueness of each island, and the methods you’re given to protect that island, using its characteristics to your advantage.
To meet my desire to create a visually rich experience, I decided that the island maps would be the focal point. Incoming enemies would be small and simple, so the focus would be on the uniqueness of each island, and the methods you’re given to protect that island, using its characteristics to your advantage. Now my ideas were filling up sheet after sheet of notebook paper. It was time to put fingertip to keyboard.
Creating the Islands
By far, the most fun I had during development was in creating the island maps. Ironically, they were also the main source of frustration and heartache. My original goal was to have several levels take place on each island. In one level, you may be protecting your shores, then the next level moves the battle inland as you retreat, culminating in the final level of each map being a fight at the center of your island. The problem was I could already hear how repetitive that format would become after the first few islands. I didn’t want the maps to feel like the same formula with a different design, but rather each island be its own experience.
The creative process began to take its course. I ended up with a list of ideas for islands that could be featured in the game, and it was time to start designing the look of them. I found an art piece that inspired our unique design style for the maps. Our designer David began the process of creating all of the shapes that make up our islands. The various curvy layers when placed on top of each other created the sought-for whimsical feel. Once we had the shapes, I got to start the fun process of painting and texturing them. We spent a lot of time deciding on the right color palettes to create the right feel. Designing a top-down island is a challenging process because not all shapes are recognizable from above, and an image of an island is usually bookended by water and sky. Our game would have no sky, so we had to create the feeling we wanted without it.
These island maps became the identity for our game.
Another focus during the design process was on the textures. Once we added the textures to our colored shapes, it all began to click. These island maps became the identity for our game. That made our next challenge even more frustrating. Many of the ideas we had ended up getting cut during the design process, simply because we couldn’t create the visual feeling we were looking for in some of our maps. Now our goal was to release a solid game with only four island maps and add more over time, for the sake of being able to achieve the quality we wanted.
Enemies and Weapons
To meet our goal of the islands being the focal point, we kept our approach to enemies very simple. Enemy ships would come from one or two sides of the screen, and head in a straight line towards the shore. Depending on the type of ship, it would either drop a scout or build an enemy camp when it reached the shore. Once on shore, scouts would head toward the island’s center. The goal in defending against enemies would be to watch the paths they’re taking and put obstacles and traps in their path. The creativity would then come from the play in terms of the best ways to lay out your defenses.
For power-ups, we created things like whirlpools that swallow all ships in the area, and the ability to set enemy camps on fire.
The last ingredient for a fun, yet simple game was the proper mix of weapons and power-ups. Our formula was equally simple: weapons would be placed to stop one or two enemies from advancing, and power-ups would deliver devastating results, eliminating large numbers of enemies at once. For weapons, we started off with sea mines for blowing up enemy ships, and jungle traps for stopping enemy scouts. For power-ups, we created things like whirlpools that swallow all ships in the area, and the ability to set enemy camps on fire. We then began to create unique power-ups for each island that went along with the characteristics of the island, such as the “eruption” power-up on the Volcanic island. Finally, we added a “cool down” meter to each of the weapons, and a max number that can be deployed simultaneously so that the player has to strategize when defending.
When it came to controls, we wanted to stick to what iOS users were already familiar with (Why re-invent the wheel?), so we decided to use simple one-finger taps for weapons, and press-and-hold actions for power-ups. This also helped create a sense of frenzy, which made the game more fun. As enemies are coming in, you can frantically tap to place defenses, but if you want to use a power-up, it takes time away from tapping, so you have to use them wisely and plan ahead.
Challenges Along the Way
A large part of our development cycle was spent setting up the game to detect and load the correct textures for the appropriate iPad resolution.
One of the bigger challenges we faced simply had to do with our texture sizes. It was our first attempt at creating a game with retina display textures, and we learned quickly about the differences in memory between the iPad 3 and the first-generation iPad. The latter simply could not handle the memory usage of our textures, and a large part of our development cycle was spent setting up the game to detect and load the correct textures for the appropriate iPad resolution.
Another mistake we made was using Unity’s built-in GUI system. It wasn’t until I went to the Unite ’12 conference in Amsterdam that I learned even Unity themselves recommend against using it. In version two of the game, we retrofitted everything for NGUI, which handles everything much better.
Adding to the usual challenges of game development was the fact that we’re not yet a full-time game studio. We have to supplement our development with client work, which always seems to creep in and take time away from the production schedule. This was not a huge hurdle, since we didn’t have a publisher’s deadline to meet, but it had an impact nonetheless.
Lessons Learned Post-Launch
After self-publishing our game to the App Store, we learned a few valuable lessons. The first was that the adoption rate for the iPad among iOS users and among gamers is much different. We knew when we released an iPad-only game that we were segmenting the market, but I think in the end it was a bigger issue than we thought. An iPhone release quickly became our #1 request. We worked very hard on version two of the game to make sure it was ready for both iPhone and Android devices to help expand our market.
Achievements were in the plan for the first release, but got left out as production ran past schedule. However, they were able to add them to the next version, available on the App Store.
Achievements were a big feature that was missing from our initial release, which stung a little because it was in our original plan but got left out as production ran way past schedule. We have since added them to version two, but we missed an opportunity with some of our early players who were looking for something more to chase than simply a high score.
Through it all, I was very pleased with the finished product. We met our goals of creating a simple yet fun game, with visually rich graphics, easy-to-understand controls, and a moderate replay factor. We have also continued our goals of providing Island Raid as a free download, expanding it to new platforms, and adding new islands over time. In July 2013, we added two new maps in our version two release, and we have two more maps scheduled for release in the fall. The entire process was a pleasurable learning experience, and I can already see the fruits of our labor manifesting themselves in our currently-in-production titles.
They are currently working on their next two titles, scheduled for release this fall. Follow them on Facebook or Twitter for more information!
Starting out AAA games, Jodon Karlik decided he wanted to go indie. With his skills in C++ and Unreal Engine, he created Coding Jar Studios and set out to create unique games. Fling Theory was the first product of this mission, and he describes the road he took to get there.
While working on console games at Propaganda Games (Disney Interactive), the studio decided to spark creativity by holding a game jam. The speed at which decisions were made and functionality came together during the game jam had sparked an interest in me. I made up my mind to leave the console games industry to try my hand at small mobile games. I enlisted the help of my friend, Doug Insley, who jumped at the opportunity to quit his sales job and join me in our adventure to create our first game, Fling Theory.
Jodon and Doug, ready to start!
Enough With the Violence!
After working on many violent games, I knew that I wanted to do something different. I always had a fascination with physics, so writing a simple physics simulator with educational aspects would be something that I’d find fun, and I could feel good about putting it on the market. After a few hours of brainstorming and prototyping, I came up with the idea that you could manipulate atoms to solve puzzles. The initial idea was that you could use electrons, protons, and neutrons to craft specific atoms to solve puzzles. With that, the development of Fling Theory had begun.
Simple Physics
We found that the knowledge range of the users was too wide to tune as a one-size-fits-all game.
The initial version of the game was extremely difficult. The fact that we were trying to teach the concepts of atomic physics while crafting difficult puzzles overwhelmed and frustrated many users. We spent weeks trying to tune difficulty curves and context-specific tutorials which would detect if you were having troubles and give you hints. Ultimately, we found that the knowledge range of the users was too wide to tune as a one-size-fits-all game. We ended up cutting many of the educational aspects in favor of casual game play.
The final version of the game simplifies the concepts to two rules: Opposites attract and like-charges repel. This allows users as young as five years old to enjoy the game and will hopefully encourage users to explore the science on their own rather than trying to hammer it into their head.
Would They Want it?
We were always worried about how the mobile market would receive the game. When we released an early version of the game on the web and received a 3.5 star rating, I decided that a failure in the mobile markets would mean very little to us. Was it the quality of the game, our marketing, or a lack of interest in the subject matter? With a low-rated game, these questions would be hard to answer. For this reason, we decided to redesign a significant portion of the game to achieve a higher quality bar.
We decided to redesign a significant portion of the game to achieve a higher quality bar.
Facing a redesign instead of crossing the finish line is always an enthusiasm killer, and our love for the product was soon diminishing. Furthermore, since we were self-funded, our bank accounts soon ran low and we ended up taking contract work to fund further development. After taking a long hiatus, we returned with a strong desire to polish the product to a higher quality bar.
Since this was our first independent game, we had a lot of questions surrounding our release strategy that went unanswered for a long time. We heard of people making money on all sorts of platforms, and since we were using the cross-platform Unity engine, we tried to port to all of them. This turned out to be a big mistake. The effort required to get the game running at a high-quality bar on many platforms did not make sense financially. For instance, we braved the Unity-Flash alpha and ported the game to Flash in the hopes of getting a sponsorship from a portal site. The effort required to do this far outweighed the highest bid we received, so we decided to hold off releasing on any platforms until we explored the best release strategy. It is best to focus on a single platform first, then expand to further platforms when you’re ready. This gives you time to do the important things like marketing and platform-specific features that make the difference in quality.
Time to Publish
We had many offers from publishers during our downtime, all with dubious terms, including one publisher that made an offer to keep 90 percent of the revenue. Eventually, we resolved to self-publish and were days away from releasing on the Apple iTunes Store, when we finally heard back from a publishing fund we had applied for called App Campus.
App Campus is a joint venture funded by Microsoft, Nokia, and Aalto University in Finland. The program terms for them were quite simple: create a high-quality mobile app and receive funding in exchange for a three month exclusivity period on the Windows Phone platform. We pulled the plug on the iOS release in order to comply with App Campus rules. It turned out to be one of the best decisions we made.
Successful Launch on Win8 & Win Phone 8 Platforms
We met Microsoft and Nokia evangelists at the Vancouver Global Game Jam, who turned out to be amazingly great contacts to have. App Campus flew us to Finland, trained us in how to market our game, and gave us even more contacts. Eventually, we were in contact with the director of product marketing for Windows Phones, who helped create buzz for our launch by showing it off at the Microsoft Booth at GDC. The amount of support Microsoft and Nokia provided is unparalleled to anything I’ve seen. Their evangelist programs are very friendly to indie developers looking to make a big splash on their platforms.
The extra work paid off and our ratings increased.
We launched the game, and the extra time we took to polish the game appears to have paid off. We are averaging a 4.5 star rating on the Windows Phone 8 platforms and saw over 100,000 downloads in the first month alone. It feels really great to finally release a product and be generally praised by the public.
Fling Theory will launch on iOS and Android in mid-September. They would love to hear from you! Contact them on Twitter, Facebook or their website, where they’ve been posting some of their other educational projects, such as game development tutorials.
The MADFINGER team, founded in 2009 by four game industry veterans who were sick of the over-managed development process of big console and PC games, received a lot of praise for their mobile games Samurai and Shadowgun, and within two years, grew from four to thirteen members. Then in late 2011, they started thinking about a ‘side’ project, which MADFINGER could develop along with the planned multi-player game Shadowgun: DeadZone, to use to experiment with new features, technologies and gameplay ideas – or simply kill after some time, if it wasn’t viable. Petr Benysek, Senior Programmer, talks about how the Dead Trigger project started as an experiment and where it went from there.
The Beginning
Since there weren’t enough people for two projects, Mara, Emeth, Babec and Robotom, the founders of the company, decided to hire three more people, who could be fully dedicated to this new project, along with Emeth, the graphic artist and project leader. We are all long-time friends and have worked together in the past, so it didn’t take me a lot of thinking to take this opportunity and join the team in February 2012, along with two coders: Tomas Stepanek and Martin Capousek. Since we joined MADFINGER right after finishing a big console project, the first thing we actually did was to go on holiday. You can hardly be creative and fast when you are tired, and fortunately, MADFINGER is a company where people know this (we all have seen the results of infinite crunch too many times). There were several goals that this yet-to-be-born project should try to achieve:
o To serve as a training ground for the three of us, who already had a long history with games development, but not with mobile platforms and the Unity engine.
o To experiment with short and quick missions, as opposed to the huge areas and story-driven gameplay that we had been used to.
o To explore the new field of In-App purchases.
o To develop new technologies, such as cloud service and social network integration.
We had a time budget of 3-4 months to finish it. Coming from a ‘triple-A’ industry, I saw this as a joke more than a serious plan. Just imagine having to master the new engine, get familiar with C# (which none of us was seriously using before), create a completely new game and publish it on two platforms we didn’t have any experience with! But Mara’s answer was just: “Don’t worry, you’ll make it.”
Fortunately, we could stand on the shoulders of the Giants. We got support from Babec, the character artist, Robotom, the sound engineer and Ondra, the animator. We also got the full range of MADFINGER’s talent at our disposal for the last month before the initial release, and the entire team stayed onboard for few more weeks after the release to help us with our first updates. We were able to draw from the extensive knowledge the other team members already possessed of Unity and iOS/Android platforms. That way, we wouldn’t have to spend more than a few minutes looking for an answer to our questions. Mara was also able to take the code base from Shadowgun and establish the roots of the project, with the game’s framework and some tools. Of course, I also have to mention the Unity engine itself. I’m still blown away by how fast you can iterate, how easy and intuitive it is to extend and to add new things. Working with complete and satisfactory technology is essential when you want to make things fast and well.
The first thing we actually did was to go on holiday
The Design Decisions
We had neither much time or people at our disposal, so we had to be wise with our decisions. What kind of theme would it have? Zombies, of course! People like them, it’s positively necessary to mow them down and they don’t need to be super-intelligent, so you can spend less time debugging your AI. What about mission size? That had to be small, of course. Small missions can be created or redesigned quickly, and you can stuff them into the memory without the need to stream. As for gameplay, we went with several gameplay modes plus generated missions, with the possibility to have scripted story missions. Players should level up as well as the enemies and be able to unlock new game content.
People love zombies!
Next step: story. Having one would be nice! So we ended up with our apocalyptic version of the events of the apocalyptic year 2012, creating the Dead Trigger story. For the main menu, we chose to have a city map, which would allow us to connect the missions, story, shop, equip menu and other areas that the player could visit. It’s clear and expandable. As for the devices it should be played on: anything that will have enough memory and power to render our environments with six zombies spawned at the same time. After some tests, it turned out that we could run it on the iPod 4 Touch and comparable Android devices if we used lower level detail models, environments and shaders. We also created an ultra high-end version for the Tegra 3 and the newest iOS devices.
Small missions can be created or redesigned quickly.
Cuts, Redesigns…?
One of the great things of the Dead Trigger project was that nobody was forcing us to do anything. It was all up to the few people determining the direction of the game to discuss and decide what we were going to make. There were no publishers with their “amazingly cool ideas” that we had to implement, no producers trying to stuff ideas from other games that they just played into our game, no management guys cutting things they didn’t believe in, no design documents (that usually become obsolete as soon as you finish what’s in them). There were no designers, we all were designing the game with the passion of those who have the freedom to create what they wanted. For this reason, there was very little to cut or redesign and most of it was done on paper, before we even touched our keyboards or other input devices. For every considered feature the first criterion was: can we make it on time? If so, is it worth the effort, compared to other features?
“Knowing the limits, we wanted to achieve a scalable building set, composed of a game core that can be extended with any number of missions, types of gameplay, enemies, weapons and so on.”
With this simple approach, we’ve selected the most wanted features for the first release and left the others in our backlog for future updates. Knowing the limits, we wanted to achieve a scalable building set, composed of a game core that can be extended with any number of missions, types of gameplay, enemies, weapons and so on. We also wanted to re-use our environments as much as possible, so we created a system for defining spawn zones, gates, objects, enemies and objectives. On top of that, we created a data-driven game flow manager which generalizes the randomized missions and provides scripted story missions based on the player’s rank. In our first release, we had four different types of gameplay and just four maps. With that, we were able to generate over 60 unique gameplay configurations, which resulted in about 10 hours of fun.
…no management guys cutting things they didn’t believe in…
Release
As we were approaching the end of our four month deadline, the game was shaping up and it became apparent that it really is possible to finish and release a solid product within that timeframe. Still, we had a lot left to do, and we knew that some really cool things would probably have to wait until future updates, so the company decided to pause other development and allocated everybody to Dead Trigger for the last push. It was a huge help, because they contributed with new content, by polishing existing stuff and also by testing (it’s always a good idea to ask your friends’ opinions, since you will lose your objectivity after some time).
Paymium vs. Free2Play
One of the last things to decide was the business model. We definitely wanted to make the game very user friendly and affordable for everybody (we really disgust pumping hundreds of bucks out of players for virtual goods as some other games do), so the prices in the game were set fairly low, and we paid a lot of attention to balancing the game. That way, it’s playable without the need to spend money, while keeping it interesting for those who want to enjoy the game even more with premium weapons and gadgets. In the end, we set the price at $0.99, keeping the option to raise the price after release or to change it to a Free2Play model.
“Nearly all aspects of the game, as well as the price, blew people away.”
After four and a half months of development, full of expectations, we hit the release button and went to a pub to celebrate! We already had a few beers when the first player reviews started to appear and we finally knew that we did a good job, because all of them were fantastic! Nearly all aspects of the game, as well as the price, blew people away.
We finally knew that we did a good job
Mistakes Made, Lessons Learned
Although we’ve played it safe with most of our decisions, there were several areas that we had yet to explore, to learn how we could use them to our benefit and that of the player. One of those was In-App purchases. We’ve realized that some people didn’t expect them in the game (Dead Trigger was the first MADFINGER game with those) and were giving us one-star reviews just because of that. Unfortunately, somehow they didn’t realize that they could earn enough funds just by playing the game and don’t need to spend anything! Lesson learned: highlighting such facts clearly in advance should prevent any confusion.
“We realized that the game gets too hard for players who do not have any experience with First Person Shooters on phones or tablets.”
We’ve also recorded a significant drop in players after the first few missions, so after some research, we realized that the game gets too hard for players who do not have any experience with First Person Shooters on phones or tablets. Another lesson learned: make it even more casual in the beginning and slowly increase the difficulty. At the same time, provide harder difficulty missions for hard-core players. Related to that previous point is one of the things that we’ve omitted for our first release: the tutorial. It’s usually a pain in the ass to make, and most players skip it anyway, but it definitely helps the casual audience along, and there’s a lot of casual players on mobile platforms. Yet another lesson learned: to provide a tutorial even when you think everybody will understand your controls anyway.
Last but not least, we wanted to give players an easy way to contact us, so we added a mail form to the game (the Post building in the City). But we underestimated the number of players who would actually use it and moreover, didn’t expect so many (iOS) players to click “Send” rather than “Close” when they change their minds. The result was our mailbox getting spammed with hundreds of thousands of emails with just a preset signature in them - and some really important messages from players got lost (at least for week or two).
The Day After
The success of the Dead Trigger game exceeded all our expectations. The initial interest players took was amazing, and it only increased enormously a few weeks later when we decided to make the game free, relying just on the in-app purchases. Since then we’ve released around ten updates for each of the platforms, adding new content and improving the existing features in each of them.
Within nine months we’ve achieved seventeen million downloads (iOS +Android)
Within nine months we’ve achieved seventeen million downloads (iOS +Android), and even now have over fifty thousand daily installs and more than five hundred thousand daily active users. The game got several highly regarded awards, of which I should mention at least Unity’s Best Technical Achievement and Community Choice, Apple’s Hall Of Fame, Editor’s Choice or App Store’s Best of 2012 Showpiece Games, which we really, really value.
The game got several awards, including Editor’s Choice or App Store’s Best of 2012 Showpiece Games.
During the few weeks after the launch, all of us got back to work on Shadowgun: DeadZone (a great and challenging multi-player project), while revisiting Dead Trigger from time to time to work on updates.
MADFINGER Games successfully released Shadowgun: DeadZone back in November 2012 and right now are working on support for both Dead Trigger and Shadowgun: DeadZone, while also creating two new games; one of them being Dead Trigger 2.
