Beba Balasevic, game designer and product owner at Panza Games, says her company started in pretty much the usual manner: A group of young enthusiasts wanted to do something on their own and became entrepreneurs.
“There was just one minor difference: We were not really very young,” Beba says. “(We were) all in our 30s, tired of prior experiences we didn’t enjoy from outsourcing, freelancing, public and private companies and so on.”
Setting Out
So in September 2014, Beba founded Panza Games along with Dusko Bjeljac, Aleksandar Stojsic and Vanja Todoric. Eight months later, they’d released their first game, a match-3 called Clover Clash (on Facebook and Google Play), and a weekly webcomic named after the game’s main character, Twitchy O’Toole of the same name to accompany it. Artist Aleksandar Stojsic, a member of Panza Games, came up with the franchise and two other games (finished but awaiting launch) since the company’s founding.
“When you have guy who can do three games in a year all by himself, a comic strip franchise, and a lot of other things, you have to be really happy,” Beba says.
They hit a bit of a snag with the Facebook version when Google Chrome restricted Unity plugins, but all things considered the game has done well. Facebook featured the game in Top New. “We have signed a partnership and pulled back the game until its full release this year.”
An Expanding Universe
The idea for the Twitchy O’Toole comic strip came before Clover Clash. Beba says she and Alex would talk about their love for comics, and they eventually decided to make their own strip. They understood they wouldn’t be going toe-to-toe with decades-old brands like Snoopy and Garfield, but what did they have to lose?
“It feels good for us to enjoy our own little franchise,” Beba says. “People started to love Twitchy and friends, and who knows, maybe one day we will really turn it into a recognizable brand. We believe it’s a good move to build a world, instead of changing themes with each new project.”
Other projects Panza is working on include Paco the Sloth, an adventure platformer for mobile featuring slingshot mechanics and, like all Panza games, a focus on art. Their biggest project so far is console platformer tentatively titled Bonnie Hood, and Beba says they’ve had a couple of big offers from publishers so far.
Being Flexible
Looking back, Beba realizes it’s fortunate the team picked up so much unenjoyable experience earlier in their careers. “Learning how not to do things is equally as valuable as learning how you should,” she says. Based on their prior experience, Beba says they wanted to avoid “treadmill” workflow, crunch, creative atrophy, and greedy management.
None of the Panza founders had much experience with management — Beba studied literature and film direction in school, and the other three are artists. It fell to Beba to write game designs and organize the company’s workflow. As she looked at how other game developers worked, she noticed that many of the best were using agile methodology to manage projects. She ordered books on Scrum for the team, and they started learning and implementing the framework.
“It’s a pity that we’d never had a chance to encounter (agile) framework before, but we were all more than eager to learn and adopt it,” Beba says.
Panza emphasizes its departure from traditional corporate structure. “We haven’t built a company structure to have CEOs and CCO and C3POs,” Beba says. “In our experience that’s something most of the people do first before they actually do anything.”
Beba credits Scrum for their creative successes and positive work environment. Rather than set working hours, they have shorter “core hours” where everyone is expected to be at the office at the same time. “With a good sprint plan, it’s irrelevant if you work at night or early in the morning,” Beba says. “Creativity is not something you can wind up or set at specific time.”
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