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USA 2014 Video Coverage

Rob Jagnow - Exploring A World Of Possiblities | Casual Connect Video

August 22, 2014 — by Catherine Quinton

“If we are really lucky, in the span of our careers, we’ll make maybe 20 games,” he said at Casual Connect USA 2014. “I think that it is important for everyone to ask themselves what they want those games to be. And years from now, when you reflect back on your career, are you going to be more proud of your work on Farmville 4 or that little weekend project that you spent 48 hours on and have one friend been touched so closely that they cried?”

Dr. Rob Jagnow, the founder and CEO of Lazy 8 Studios, came to a career in the games industry almost by accident. Although he enjoyed games as much as anyone, he had a different career path in mind. While getting a PhD at MIT, he interned at Pixar and intended to get a full-time job on graduation. But by then, he was in a relationship and needed a job that would allow him to stay in Boston. He found a job with Demiurge Studios and discovered he enjoyed the challenge of game development as he discovered the potential of games as an interactive art form. He worked on a variety of projects for Demiurge Studios, Gearbox, Kaos, EA, and WXP before deciding to found his own company.

rob-travel800 — Dr. Rob Jagnow, Founder and CEO, Lazy 8 Studios,

More Innovation To Come

Jagnow believes that as of yet game designers have explored only a tiny space of what is possible in games. His desire to push the envelope and explore new spaces is what keeps him going in the industry. He is intrigued by creative spaces that are visually oriented, so he might have chosen a career in movies or music video production if he hadn’t found his creative space in games.

He admits he had no real idea what he was doing when he founded Lazy 8 Studios in 2008. But he had been dabbling with the game concepts in Cogs and wanted to see if he could succeed as an entrepreneur. This eventually become Lazy 8 Studios’ flagship game. His academic background at MIT gave him a significant advantage because he was able to use his knowledge of high-end shader development to give Cogs much more visual polish than the typical casual game. Another advantage came from other indie developers. He says, “I quickly fell in with a group of indie developers who were unbelievably generous in sharing their wisdom. When I got lost, they would point me in the right direction.”

cogs-screenshot01 — Jagnow was able to use his knowledge of high-end shader development to give Cogs much more visual polish than the typical casual game.

Cogs won the grand prize at the Indie Game Challenge in 2010. The $100,000 award gave Jagnow the freedom to take even greater creative risks. With this safety net, he had the confidence he needed to create Extrasolar, a project he is extremely proud of.

Jagnow has other passions besides games. He is heavily involved in fitness: running, lifting, and racing. He spends at least 90 minutes a day outside, running or walking the dog. By scattering breaks through the day, he is able to step away from his desk to see the larger perspective. He admits, “I solve a surprising number of creative and technical challenges while I’m not in front of my computer.” He is also an amateur photographer; his current project is to take one photograph a day. He feels that his passions for photography and orienteering came together beautifully in Extrasolar, Lazy 8 Studios’ latest game.

extrasolar-screenshot02 — He feels that his passions for photography and orienteering came together beautifully in Extrasolar, Lazy 8 Studios’ latest game.

For his gaming, Jagnow prefers the PC. He has just recently finished Escape Goat 2, which he tested on the PC before launch, and he calls it an amazing game with great puzzles and a surprising number of mechanics. He does own Xbox 360 and Wii, but nothing in the current generation of consoles; in his home, consoles just don’t get much use. For mobile gaming, he likes Android, feeling the open platform and the less rigidly controlled OS has allowed the UI, tools, and ecosystem to evolve more quickly than iOS.

A Savvy Marketplace

In the next several years, Jagnow sees players growing more and more savvy, and demanding more from games. He expects free-to-play to continue dominating the market, but players looking for premium experiences will begin looking elsewhere, sustaining other niches. Big companies will lose market share if they refuse to innovate, but there will be some surprise mega-hits from indies.

rob_june2014 — In the next several years, Jagnow sees players growing more and more savvy, and demanding more from games.

Even more interesting to Jagnow is the question of where the games industry will be in 10 years. By that time, he believes platform dependencies will start to break down and the Web (with WebGL and potentially new Web compatible programming languages) will become an increasingly dominant platform for games that can run on almost any device.

USA 2014 Video Coverage

Bart van den Berg: Building Games For the Mobile Web | Casual Connect Video

August 11, 2014 — by Catherine Quinton

“We’ve been doing premium and freemium for the last 15 years, and it’s still there. It’s not all free-to-play,” Bart van den Berg explained in a panel at Casual Connect USA 2014. “If you can’t manage in the free-to-play, the method is too tricky for your game concept, or you don’t think you have the long tail, definitely try freemium as well, because it’s still alive.”

Bart_vrij_compacter_square — Bart van den Berg, Co-founder and CEO, Blue Giraffe

Bart van den Berg started his career at a website agency, just around the time of the dot-com bubble. He remembers, “Back then, the sky was the limit. We would organize a weekly soccer game in the ballroom, and we might have broken a vase or two.” But he quickly realized the situation couldn’t last, and within two years, he was working at an online agency. This agency was just across the tracks from the parking lot, which couldn’t be reached in winter because cars would slide off the icy slope. They worked for many different customers, mainly retail, and the service was very customer oriented. Clients could call at any time, and what the customers wanted, they built. At this agency, van den Berg was responsible for accounts and programming. He says, “We didn’t make a lot of money, but everyone was happy.” In 2013, he made the switch to the games industry, where they are still putting the customer experience above everything else. Now he is the co-founder and CEO of Blue Giraffe, a casual games studio.

Kicking Off The Business

The proudest moment he remembers in this journey was on April 2, 2013, when Blue Giraffe got the key to their first office, a small studio in the industrial area of Eindhoven. He describes, “It was a sunny day. We had four computers and four desks, one license of Photoshop and three of Visual Studio. We agreed that day never to move.” But within a year, they had moved to a larger office.

During Apple’s WWDC’14, the support for WebGL on all mobile devices supporting iOS8 was announced. Van den Berg believes this will be a game changer for both studios and publishers. Until then, he wasn’t sure how HTML5 would work for casual games. For many years, they have been building games in C++ and have certain expectations for animations, graphics, and performance. So, he says, “When WebGL was announced, I was jumping around the room. Literally.”

Blue Giraffe had already begun building games in HTML5. Now, with their new platform Playte.st, they believe they will provide an outstanding new service to the casual games community.

giraffe_tablets — Blue Giraffe had already begun building games in HTML5.

The Netflix Business Model

Van den Berg is waiting to see Netflix subscription models for casual games, something he would love to see happen. As well, he believes casual games are limited because they are bound to one platform. But within the next year, he hopes to see level progressions shared across all platforms, whether you are playing on desktop, laptop, Android smartphone, or Apple tablet.

Bart_Website_site2 — Within the next year, he hopes to see level progressions shared across all platforms, whether you are playing on desktop, laptop, Android smartphone, or Apple tablet.

Van den Berg claims his favorite hobby is trying to build awesome games with his friends at Blue Giraffe. But when he is not behind a computer, smartphone, or tablet, he likes to go for a run. You will find him in the park on Sunday or with his family somewhere in the Alps in the summer because he believes no game can compete with fresh air.

But he also admits to being in love with his iPad, where you will find him playing stacks of different games at a time. Most of the games he plays are either free-to-play or freemium. Some of the games he is currently enjoying are Popcap’s Zuma HD, Bejeweled, and Castaway Paradise, an island adventure game on iPad.

Bart_vandenBerg_Mobile — He has a love-hate relationship with free-to-play.

He has a love-hate relationship with free-to-play. From a business point of view, he finds it interesting to see how behavior science and psychology can be used to motivate people to buy boosters and upgrades. But looking at the choices the casual games industry has made, he feels it would have been wiser to keep prices at a decent level, and premium would work just as well.

Van den Berg still appreciates consoles, particularly Dreamcast, which he considers far superior to Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft. He still plays Shenmue, Crazy Taxi, and Sonic. The most recent console he purchased was an Ouya, which he is using as an XMBC player, but he is not yet sure what he thinks of it.

At Casual Connect USA, van den Berg announced that Blue Giraffe is building a new platform to support studios in developing games on any device. Playte.st will be launched in Fall 2014. The platform consists of a toolkit for developers building games in HTML5 and allows them to easily acquire, register players, as well as prototype, test and co-develop with players on all devices. Playte.st is an online service and several companion apps that gives testers a way to quickly test, as well as giving studios a way to view metrics that matter.

Video Coverage

Sara Lempiainen: Reaching and Supporting the Developer Community | Casual Connect Video

October 30, 2013 — by Catherine Quinton

Sara Lempiainen was excited to talk about WebGL during Casual Connect Kyiv 2013. “WebGL is the biggest leap in browser technology and will unlock creativity,” she says.

DOWNLOAD SLIDES

Sara Lempiainen is an evangelist for Goo Technologies, where her work involves engaging the community of Goo Engine developers. She came to this work with a background in leading teams in a variety of projects, where she developed the ability to support and transfer energy to others. She also emerged with the confidence necessary to reach and inspire this community of developers.

The Power of Listening

She tells us the greatest challenge in her career has been learning to understand how to influence and get through to different types of people. This critical skill requires her to truly listen, and she is still learning every day.

Her greatest satisfaction comes through reaching someone with the speeches she gives. “When someone comes up to me after a speech and tells me they felt inspired by my talk, I feel truly humble and thankful that people take the time to listen,” Lempiainen says. “I make sure to put hard work and energy into my presentations so the audience gains value and walks away with new energy.”

Colleague at Work — A colleague working on the Goo Engine

Lempiainen describes herself as curious, an aspect of her personality which explains her preferred music genres of alternative rock and progressive metal. She enjoys their excellence in creating interesting sounds combined with strange and thought-provoking lyrics. In her free time, she prefers to play games, read novels, draw and code.

Cloud-Based Gaming

Currently Lempiainen is following the rise of cloud-based gaming and distribution channels for games and apps made in WebGL and HTML5, feeling that this is the games industry trend that will most affect Goo Technologies over the next several years. They plan to respond to these developments by making sure they are able to give content creators the support and care they need in order to produce and get out there the games they have built on top of Goo Engine.

At Casual Connect Kyiv, Lempiainen announced that Goo Create will be released November 1st. This is Goo Technologies’ tool for creating browser games on top of Goo Engine through a user interface on the web.

Contributions Postmortem

Lost Toys: Landing on Games

August 26, 2013 — by Mariia Lototska

Barking Mouse Studio is a two-person indie game studio in San Francisco, consisting of Danielle Swank and Jim Fleming. They consider Lost Toys to be their first full game. While both are software engineers and artists, they come from opposite backgrounds. Jim took computer science in college and is a self-taught artist. Danielle took ceramics in college and is a self-taught engineer. Together, they tell the story of Lost Toys.

Barking Mouse Studios — Danielle Swank and Jim Fleming

Wandering Through Projects

We met when Danielle hired Jim to work at an interactive media agency. From the start, we wanted to work on our own projects together, but finding the right one took a bit longer than expected. Financial management app? Built it. News reader? Yep, several of them. Database GUI? Yup, it’s open-sourced here. With each new project, we learned a lot, but none of them ever felt quite right.

We did a couple of game jams and had a great time making the (often less than) 48 hour games. With every new jam, we would brainstorm ideas ahead of time. Suddenly, we were talking about games all the time. So naturally, we thought, “We’ll make a game to sell on the App Store! It’ll make a million dollars, and only take a month or so!” We barely knew game-making, we didn’t know mobile, and we really didn’t know 3D. It was nearly a year later before we were finally ready to launch our first game.

First Attempts

Our old GUI system, and the first time we were able to play a level.

Our first attempt at Lost Toys was with HTML5 and WebGL (using Three.js). For us, it was a nightmare. It felt like we had to re-invent the wheel, the scene view, the model importer, the audio player, the renderer, the camera, and… you get the idea. We struggled for about a month, and then realized that we needed something that would just work. After noticing a lot of fellow game jammers using Unity, we switched. In addition to being easier to develop in, this opened up a lot of doors for us, since we could now publish on nearly any platform.

In the trough of doubt between the switch from HTML5 to Unity, we questioned our initial game mechanic. It just wasn’t fitting with the aesthetic (creepy toys) and wasn’t as immersive as we wanted. Our budget was too tight to let us hire voice actors. We needed the environment alone to convey our story, and an unsettling theme can convey a lot of emotion. In the end, we drew inspiration from a lot of sources like Leonardo DaVinci to Apple to the San Francisco Exploratorium and games like The Room, Zen Bound and Cogs.

Scope and Resource Restrictions

Lost Toys — We made progress, but the build was still really unstable.

Neither of us has any audio background, but we know the value of it. It was important to us not to compromise the game aesthetic. Having no soundtrack was better than having one that didn’t fit, and the budget wasn’t there for something custom. Fortunately, we found the beautiful, classical and free Creative Commons licensed work of pianist composer Peter Rudenko. We’ve listened to “The Fall” about a thousand times during development. It’s one of our favorite pieces of music ever, and it fits the tone and aesthetic of Lost Toys perfectly.

We also didn’t have the budget for any kind of custom audio samples or to hire a sound engineer. We looked at a number of websites that sold or offered free stock audio. Most of the sites didn’t offer trial samples, and we needed to playtest different sounds as cheaply as possible. Pond5 was great for this, we could download watermarked audio clips and see if they matched what we were going for.

Since the game needed to be as immersive as possible, we felt that everything should be a part of the game world - including the GUI elements. At first, we tried to make everything skeumorphic, “physical” elements of the game. The first version of Lost Toys was more of a ghost story with little “wisps” that flew around and “oozed” off of the toy at the start of each level. Made up of little puffs of glowing smoke, wisps were ethereal “undo” buttons. Unfortunately, the wisps complicated the code and gameplay quite a bit. None of our playtesters understood what to do with them. So they fell into the dung heap of history, in favor of a minimalist on-screen GUI. Surprisingly, we found that the new GUI helped players remain immersed in the game because they didn’t have to learn how to interact with the wisps.

For us, building a 2D game was never an option we considered. Neither of us are 2D illustrators, and Jim had some old experience with 3D graphics. Plus, we really like the aesthetics of minimal but realistic games (think Zen Bound and The Room) and enjoy puzzle games like Cogs and Flow that take advantage of a touch interface. Because of our 3D requirement, keeping development time under a year was very hard work. We ruthlessly limited the scope over and over again. Despite this, our main rotational mechanic in this “simple” game took three months, several revisions and many individual attempts before we pair programmed a solution.

Getting The Word Out

Why do we need a trailer? We’ve got a laggy video of the whole first chapter!

Lost Toys is our first attempt at a professional game, and rotational math was only one of the many things we didn’t know how to do when we started. We had no idea how to market or distribute a game. We just assumed that was what app stores were for. Fortunately for us, we live in San Francisco, where there is a wealth of established indie developers that are incredibly generous with their time and advice (thank you, thank you, thank you!) Many of them we met through our local IGDA chapter, which is a great organization to join if you’re interested in indie game development.

The biggest advice we received was to start reaching out to potential players immediately. To do that, we needed a great trailer. Like with the rest of our game, and indie development in general, we didn’t have the budget to hire someone to make our trailer. We had to figure out how to make it ourselves with zero film-editing experience. It took us about a week of studying movie trailers to come up with a rough storyboard. From there, we needed to figure out how to make what we wanted. The solution we came up with was to turn exported image sequences into movie clips. The problem with this method is that in-game audio can’t be used. To get around that limitation we borrowed a trick from all those movie trailers, and have a single piece of music playing throughout the trailer which helps tie together all the different bits of gameplay.

Everything Comes Together

The finished trailer

So here we are, almost a year from when we started. Lost Toys won “Most Promising Game” as part of the Indie Prize at Casual Connect, and we’re launching on iOS at the end of October with Android and BlackBerry to follow. As part of the process, we learned to say “no” to every idea we had that wasn’t in direct support of launching a solid game and that building the game is only half of the job.

You can keep up to date with launch notices for Lost Toys by following them on Facebook or Twitter.