How Puzzle Retreat Started

Puzzle Retreat has gone through many iterations and has changed a lot from it’s inception 21 months ago. Yangtian Li, our in-house artist at the time, pitched to the team an elaborate design for a lumberjack-come-carpenter game. The player had to fell trees in a forest, bring them home and make furniture.

Henrik Pettersson, one of our former designers, was immediately inspired by the puzzle potential of felling trees in a forest. His first design was a puzzle game where the trees fall into each other and knock each successive tree down like dominoes. The second design, and eventual winner, focused on your player character who stands behind each tree to push it over. There must be enough space to stand behind the tree to push it down and there must be space for the tree to fall into. This puzzle design requires you to find the right order to knock all the trees down whilst keeping the appropriate spaces free, and not locking yourself in.

The team really liked the potential depth of puzzles this mechanic presented, and the simplicity of the interaction in the very first playable prototype. The theme of cutting down trees in a forest on the other hand, did not rest well. We decided to explore over 20+ designs in art styles and themes and finally decided to stick to the original forest theme, but instead of cutting down the forest, the player was saving it by cutting down evil degenerative trees.

We’re BIG on Playtesting!

Our development process has always had a significant emphasis on playtesting, whether it be in-house within the studio, taking our tablets out on to to the friendly people of Melbourne in the city streets, or even amongst other local game developers. Playtesting can be heartbreaking at times, because it can reveal the hard truth that your design does not work. Being mobile players ourselves, we understand the importance of designing games that are easy to pick up and play straight away and playtesting let us verify this.

Early on, players struggled with understanding the objective and how to interact with the game. Some players were able to work out what the objective was and how to progress. However, some players weren’t able to without any assistance during playtests.

Players were also getting confused between what they could and couldn’t interact with on screen. For example, the affordance of non-interactable wooden logs, produced after cutting down a tree, made players try to pick them up and move them. We discovered that wood cutting wasn’t a great metaphor for the game mechanics and that the third-person character was a major distraction from the actual logical puzzle solving.

A Minimalist Design Approach

In the end, we adopted a minimalist design approach and stripped the game back:

- We removed the third-person character.

- We replaced the core mechanic with one of it’s variations, where trees were covered in ice and could slide over icy logs.

- We removed the ‘stand behind rule’ to cut down trees, this helped with opening up a larger space for puzzle designs.

- We reworked the theme into something much more simple and understandable.

The game received a much more positive response from playtesters after removing rules and making the game much more simple.

We managed to get the game down to two simple rules:

1        Slide the blocks to fill the holes.

2        Use all the blocks.

Relax, Unwind and Focus

While we were stripping back the design, we took the opportunity to look broader at who plays these types of ultra-minimal, logical puzzle games. We found that the audience of these games is more mature and predominantly female. The majority of logical puzzle game players solve puzzles to relax, unwind, de-stress and get some “me time,” the same reasons why we play. With this in mind, we crafted a world free of stress and distraction. By letting the gameplay be the focus, and pushing the art into the background, the game could really shine.

Through our journey, we have learned that the very best logical puzzle games leave very little in between the player and the core problem. All the information to solve the puzzle is directly in front of you, and you just have to solve it. By carefully handcrafting each puzzle and cleverly pacing out the puzzles in each pack, we have been able to give players a great euphoric feeling and make players feel really smart after solving each puzzle.

Puzzle Retreat is available on the AppStore and Google Play. The Voxel Agents still have a dedicated team adding more content and features to the game. The plan is to bring Puzzle Retreat to more platforms in the future. The Voxel Agents also have another game in development that is planned for release later this year.

Michael Kalkowski

Michael Kalkowski is co-founder and managing/creative director of GameDuell, one of the leading casual and social games providers in the Western markets. Michael is responsible for GameDuell’s games, website, player community and user experience; a universe of more than 80 million registered players.

As Creative Director, he spends most of his time interacting with GameDuell production teams and giving feedback on concepts. Any additional time he splits between connecting with users, benchmarking competitors and attending industry conferences like Casual Connect. As entrepreneur, he influences the overall strategy of the company while cultivating culture rich enough in energy to ensure smooth execution.

Culture of Personalities

Intrigued by the people aspect of teams, the entrepreneur in Michael is asking questions: What brings out the best in people? What makes us happy? Why do some individuals produce world-class results while most don’t? What are the habits and “inner game” of the most successful entrepreneurs and teams?

Michael is proud that GameDuell has attracted world-class talent and leveraged the answers he has found to maintain a positive and collaborative environment. The culture and the chemistry at GameDuell, he maintains, create smiles throughout the ranks at GameDuell — more than two hundred game enthusiasts — that trickles down to the community that plays their games.

In contrast, he dutifully admits to the challenges: finding the right ideas, getting startup capital in 2003, hiring and keeping a great team, pivoting and fine-tuning their models and becoming increasingly agile. But the greatest challenge was overcoming the “growing pains” as the company grew from the three founders in a living room to where it is at more than 200 people today. Each stage of progression had its own set of challenges. To meet them he relied on fellow entrepreneurs and mentors who worked through similar situations.

Just Another Day at GameDuell….

Futures

Michael tells us, “We organize regular internal and external workshops and collaborate with leading experts, especially from the technology field and open source community, who help us implement key innovations faster.” GameDuell allocates about 10 percent of its resources to researching and prototyping such new developments so that they can pivot based upon their findings.

At present, there are many interesting things happening, but Michael identifies four that he believes will have a significant impact: (1) the continuing migration of consumers toward new touch and mobile devices; (2) big data, real time analytics and predictives for performance marketing, CRM and better retention; (3) further advances in production technology, including HTML5, Unity and open GL, enabling more efficient cross-platform development; and, (4) their own high-traffic destination platform at GameDuell.com.

In five years, he sees an industry that looks quite different. He claims, “Consumers will use completely new input and output devices – think of gesture control without physical touch and Google Glass on steroids. Everything will be connected and usable for gaming. This opens up a whole new universe for game play.”

Michael emphasizes the importance of Asia in the game industry because it is the world’s largest region in terms of both players and revenue. He continues, “Many interesting innovations are coming out of the region, including titles like GungHo’s Puzzle & Dragon, so it is critical for non-Asian developers to follow what is happening here.

Starting Alegrium has been the biggest challenge of Stefan’s career, particularly the first two years. He tells us, “It was harder than we thought it would be. Thankfully, we have a really great and passionate small team, with a very positive mindset and a huge dream. They put a lot of love into whatever they are doing. That’s what kept us going.” Working for clients, as Stefan did in his past career as co-founder of a digital creative agency, trained him to work under a lot of pressure and stress. Now he is able to focus more on details, since he feels less pressure in Alegrium. The user experience in design and creative thinking he learned in his previous career have translated well to his current work as well.

Making Connections

Stefan tells us he sees many quality works in game development coming out of emerging Asian countries; not only Indonesia, but also Thailand and others. Asia is particularly important to the game industry because of the large population. China alone has a population exceeding 1.25 billion. Add to that the population of other Asian countries, and you have a tremendous potential group of players/users. These countries also have a huge advantage in production cost because the cost of living is very economical. If a good team of great people can be assembled, the result is very positive output.

However, being a developer in an emerging Asian country presents special challenges. For Stefan, the industry is focused on mobile gaming, specifically the iOS platform. The location, half a world away from the largest market, is particularly demanding. Other barriers include the language and especially the culture. But possibly the greatest difficulty Stefan sees is the problem of finding exceptional talent. People in an emerging country like Indonesia are skeptical about a career in the game business. Many of those with great talent prefer a career in more mature industries.

To meet this challenge, Stefan believes the best way is to make connections. World class conferences such as Casual Connect, as well as events in local gaming communities, offer excellent forums for those in the industry to meet and share experiences. He believes the industry is in a good spirit to grow together. He also emphasizes the importance of building good relationships with his business partners. He says, “Good relationships are an essential aspect of every business.” Part of this is learning the culture. He relies on Skype to catch up with their advisor and close friend who lived in the US, using this as an aid to learning the culture. He insists, “You’ve got to believe in yourself and your partners, find your true calling and do the extra miles. It’s a spiritual thing.”

Developing his business has offered enormous learning opportunities. Among these are how to fight with and accept others, how to be humble, and how to fail and get back up again. For him, it has been a life changing experience.

Stefan Damasena

Splitman was created back in August 2011, when Bari was so inspired by the game Gravinaytor, a clone of another game called The Gravity Game. Bari wanted to incorporate several key features of the game and the visual of another very popular video game, Megaman. Bari asked Gilbert to learn pixel art to deliver a Megaman-like graphics for their upcoming game. And this is where their journey started.

Meet the 2-Man Team

Bari Silvestre is a self taught programmer and game designer. Although he always had the passion for drawing and sketching, it wasn’t his first career. His professional career started off making use of his degree in Accounting by doing clerical jobs after graduating from college. But the artist in Bari kept on haunting him. Last 2010, he finally decided to fulfill his lifelong passion of becoming a graphic artist. But as we all know, following your passion isn’t always too easy. Bari has been a freelance game developer for more than three years. Aside from making flash games like Belial, Splitman, Zombies vs Penguins, Pretentious Game and Vanguards, He has also released mobile games like Pinoy Hangman and Pingu’s Quest.

Gilbert De Vera has always thought of creating graphics for games, even as a kid. But, like Bari, it didn’t happen right away. In his case, his professional career started off in the BPO industry after graduating from college. But in 2010, he decided to accomplish his dream of becoming a game artist through the game Belial, which he co-created with Bari. He has also been in the gaming industry for more than three years as an animator and graphic artist. A proud husband and father of two boys, he has been involved in the creation of games like: Villainous, Zombies vs. Penguins, Belial and Nano War – to name a few.

Splitman 1 vs. Splitman 2

Splitman 1 and 2 were both widely accepted by players; this is pretty evident on the numbers of plays these games received.  They were both featured on www.jayisgames.com, front paged on Newgrounds.com and both were featured on Casual Connect 2012-2013 respectively. But what really makes these two versions different from each other? Here are the lists of differences that can be observed:

Splitman 1

- Pixel art
- Story style game instruction
- No level screen

Splitman 2

- Vector graphics
- Simple game instruction
- Added Keycards to collect
- Level  screen added
- 2 different endings
- Added reverse gravity
- Can stand on dead clones

Re-Inventing Splitman 2

The idea of doing some changes on Splitman 2 came up, when Bari and Gilbert were talking about how Megaman evolved from pixel art into a cartoony type of graphics. Since Splitman was based on this popular video game, they thought of doing those changes as well. Aside from the graphics, they’ve also considered adding some features that will make the game slightly different from its former version:

They’ve added the reverse gravity feature that really made the game more appealing and challenging.

Keycards were added for additional objectives players can complete, these keycards are needed if players wanted to see the alternate ending.

Talking about alternate ending, Bari and Gilbert were really used to making alternate endings for their games. They made several versions of Belial, wherein players can choose the ending they want to see, and they thought of incorporating this technique to Splitman 2 as well.

One unique feature of Splitman 2 is that the character can step on to its dead clones. This is pretty useful when traversing a series of spikes hazard.

Obstacles and Trials

There’s never been an easy way to success, as many would say, and this proved to be true when Bari and Gilbert created Splitman 2. Both are the father of two children, and are both working at home, so it only means that there’s a lot of temptation not to be able to work efficiently due to different distractions inside the house. Also a minor setback is that Bari’s location is a few miles away from Gilbert’s place, so they only communicate via skype or via SMS. However, these hindrances didn’t stop them on creating games. They were able to cope up with these obstacles and have become used to working with it.

Sweet Success

So far, both Splitman 1 and Splitman 2 did a fantastic job of satisfying its players, evident with the positive feedback they’re getting and the number of gameplays it has reached. Splitman 2 alone has reached 5 million views from February to March and is continuously growing. The game was featured on many big web portal including Newgrounds, Notdoppler, Mochi and many more. Here are some of the great comments we’ve received from different big portals:

NewGrounds

Kongregate

Bari and Gilbert are already planning to create the ^third installment of Splitman this year. They’ve already showed a glimpse of what’s coming at the alternate ending of Splitman 2, so fans could expect another exciting and challenging edition of Splitman on the coming months ahead.

“You know what would make a really cool game,” Arjun said as we both drove back from work, “a game with electrical cables and birds, with the player moving all those birds around.”

But I am getting a little ahead of myself here. I am Amit Goyal from SuperSike Games, and as you read this, our first game, Yet Another Bird Game, is out and about on the App Store vying for attention among millions of games.

This happens to be the story of Yet Another Bird Game, which started with the conversation between Arjun, the Co-Founder of SuperSike Games, and me two years ago.

The SuperSike crew and err.. someone!

The First Steps are the Hardest….

This would probably be a good time to mention that before starting SuperSike Games, we worked together for three years in a radio station. Arjun worked with production and programming, and I worked with sales. We both knew precisely squat about game development. So moving ahead from the idea to actual development was proving to be a bit of a roadblock.

In an effort to compensate for our lack of exposure to some extent, we decided to bring someone with experience on board for programming. We were lucky to find Sandesh Jain, who had only recently started up on his own with a development studio, Instafun, after putting some solid time in Digital Chocolate.

The art, however, was proving out to be tricky. We went through portfolio after portfolio in search of an artist we wanted to work with. From the onset, our objective was to achieve a visual design that could stand toe to toe with the best in mobile games, and finding an artist up to the task with our limited contacts was difficult.

A stroke of luck took us to Comic Con, New Delhi at the last minute, where we met Kshiraj Telang – an incredibly talented artist and animator looking for a break into the gaming scene. Kshiraj’s style matched the look we had in mind for our game perfectly. With Orange Byte Studios rounding off the team and after a search that lasted almost six months, our ragtag group was ready to roll out.

The Honeymoon…

For gamers turned game developers, the initial development period is nothing short of a dream. We were involved in shaping a game to our fancy, and ticking off various design choices, brainstorming and approving character design options was like living in a dream world. We eagerly looked forward to our meetings with Kshiraj, who wowed us every day with fantastic character designs and the animations that brought them to life. Kshiraj’s imagination and prowess was the only thing slowing us down, as he often left us with far too many choices and each meriting a place in the game.

Choices, choices!

This one… no wait… that one! Uh.. hang on a second!

We powered on, confident about having the game ready in a few months.

…And the Nightmare That Followed…

It didn’t last forever, though. Experience counts for a lot in any profession, and the gaping holes really started to show as we moved ahead. We had initially imagined a more deliberate pace for Yet Another Bird Game, with emphasis on creating a sort of a ‘game board’ with the available options on screen, and new birds flying in and out of the screen to disrupt the player’s game board.

As build after build rolled in, it became increasingly clear that this approach was flat out boring. We proceeded to speed up the game considerably, with the various strategic elements associated with different birds changing to impact elements.

For example, in the earlier builds, Beanbag’s fart was meant to make the close by birds fly off to other unoccupied spots. This was a disruption technique. With a faster game, the strategy was constantly ignored and players were more concerned with surviving rather than caring about what spots the birds occupied. So we changed Beanbag’s fart to send the adjacent birds off screen. This made Beanbag especially useful against birds like the Spartan and Scarecrow, which the players would ideally not like to have around.

YESSS!!! No! ARRRGGH!

The other major problem we faced can be chalked down to our experience, but it turned out to be a huge pain. Many people have noticed that the birds in Yet Another Bird Game are incredibly detailed in their animation. While it is something that we are proud to show off, it required us to pack an abnormally high number of frames per bird in the game. This led to not only some major performance issue, but we also ended up cutting a bird from the game.

A hero was.. well.. almost born!

Slowly, but steadily, these issues were resolved as we plodded on towards a finished product, the six months of development period now standing at close to twelve.

What Did We Know And What Did We Learn?

The total development period for Yet Another Bird Game stands at around fifteen months, if a game can ever be considered as “done”.

With zero experience in creating games when we started out, Yet Another Bird Game has been a fantastic learning experience for us. Most importantly, it made us discover what we really love doing, which is probably the most important take-away for us from the experience.

Over the past couple of years, we’ve learned (rather started to learn) the various aspects of game development. We are still coming to terms with pre-production. We realized that the more games we work on, the more we will learn about all aspects of the development process.

One of our biggest takeaways from the development cycle for us was the importance of upholding timelines. The mobile gaming market has a very quick turnaround time. There are a lot of people working on a lot of ideas; there are new features and new devices coming out in a blink of an eye, and new ideas become old before you know it.

There is always an argument against hard deadlines and how they might curb creativity. At SuperSike Games, we are fast moving to an approach where all team members decide the deadlines associated with their work. But once fixed, we go all out to meet it, sleep be damned!

So the moment Yet Another Bird Game got shortlisted among the Square Enix Game Development Contest, we immediately jumped into the pre-production and resource gathering for our next game, Catcher In The Sky.

The Battle Has Just Begun….

After development, we’ve had to deal with a whole new beast. The game is ready, and now we have to get it noticed. As most developers know, this in itself is no mean task even with substantial marketing budgets. With our meager budgets, we have kicked off our own marketing effort. We also have Joseph Lieberman helping us out with the PR for the game.

Just like the development process, we expect this part of the journey to be a great learning experience, and one from which we will hopefully come out wiser, better prepared and most importantly, with more stories to tell.

To find out more on what SuperSike Games is up to, follow them on Facebook or Twitter! Yet Another Bird Game is also showcasing in Casual Connect Asia’s Indie Prize Showcase this week.

Kiragames is an independent game studio based in Thailand. It’s flagship game Unblock Me was released four years ago in 2009 and became the most downloaded application that year and to date is currently the #17 most downloaded game of all time in the US AppStore. Kiragames’ actual roots started from a sole indie developer named Kirakorn Chimkool that worked on Unblock Me to learn a new programming language for him. Little did he know it would be one of those life-changing moments and lead him to go full time with his game career path and establish Kiragames later on in 2011. Aun Taraseina, COO of Kiragames and a developer of Unblock Me, discusses the creation of the game.

To fully grasp the whole picture of how Unblock Me started, you will have to understand the nature of its creator, Kirakorn Chimkool. He’s the type of person who is really shy and rarely speaks to anyone he doesn’t know. He has always kept an extremely low profile of himself, so it wouldn’t be strange if you have heard or played Unblock Me before but have no idea what and who Kiragames and Kirakorn are.

In 2009, Kirakorn was working at an outsourcing division in a company from the US. His daily routine would be consist of looking trough list of issues that he needs to get finish and send back to his employers in US. While it did have good pay, it wasn’t something he wanted to do for the rest of his career. Kirakorn said his dream has always been to create games. After hearing that Apple will soon open its gateway for developers in Thailand to sell their Apps through the AppStore, Kirakorn quickly jumped on the bandwagon and started learning the native language for the iOS platform. Kirakorn said that the main reason for his interest of the platform was mainly because of his geek nature; he wanted to learn something new and he wanted to try the new platform ecosystem that seems to be very open to indie developers. I remember at that time, Kirakorn start sending some game ideas to me and one of our friends, Tim Promwanna, who is now the Game Director at Kiragames, to get a feel of what we think of his idea. One of the last game ideas that he sent us was a link to an iOS game that was already doing extremely well at that time, Blocked.

Starting with Concept

As a gamer and developer, I have really high respect for Blocked. It was a fun game to play with great fluid design. And for all the good reasons, Blocked had a good level of inspiration to Unblock Me, but the core concept of the game and theme would be different. Kirakorn wanted a game that anyone can play, so he made sure that there were different levels of difficulties to the game, especially the easiest levels. He felt that solving puzzles is a human instinct, the instinct to find answers and challenges, so he designed all the graphics to match the natural elements that surrounds him, such as the sky background or the wooden blocks. I later asked him about the the name Unblock Me came from. His simple reply was, the name Blocked seems like it’s stuck somewhere in the puzzle so he named his game Unblock Me in contrast to Blocked.

A screenshot comparing Blocked and Unblock Me in the early versions

Development

After all the core concepts were final, Kirakorn started his development by buying a $700 Mac Mini with 10-month installments and a $100 secondhand iPod. The development for Unblock Me took Kirakorn about six weeks during his free time to complete from start to finish, including the time that he used to learn Objective C, iOS development and Coco2d for iPhone, which was the game engine used for Unblock Me. The puzzles were generated by a C# program that runs on Windows, and another python script was written to sort out the difficulties of each of the puzzles that were generated. After that, he would manually copy the puzzles to his Mac Mini and work on Unblock Me from there.

Kirakorn recalls that he was very fortunate that the decisions he made throughout the development cycle were correct.He didn’t have any problems or delays with coding at all, but he did take a bit of time to work on the graphics for Unblock Me since he’s not an artist. If you see the work he had done with Unblock Me in the earlier versions, you can see it is much cruder. With newer versions of Unblock Me, we have professional artists to work on the graphics, but the same feeling of those early versions still remains. I tried asking him what he considers to be the most difficult issue during development, but he couldn’t think of any. Most of the features took a couple of days to work on during his time from his day job. And I can related to this, as a long time friend of Kirakorn and as a developer that has been lucky enough to work with many developers, I can really say he is among the most talented developer I’ve worked with.

Screenshot as Unblock Me progress throughout the 4 years.

Getting Unblock Me to the AppStore

Kirakorn didn’t have much emotions after the game was completed. He felt that he really enjoyed the process of learning a new language, a new platform and getting back to work on games again all together. If the game will succeed or not wasn’t much of his concern since that wasn’t the point for Unblock Me anyway. This make sense to me now because the first version of Unblock Me in the AppStore came in two versions: the full version for 0.99$ with 1200 puzzles and the free version with 400 puzzles for free with no monetization platform. I still remember the night he was about to submit the game to Apple, he was talking with me and Tim on Skype and was asking questions like “Do you think my game will sell at all?” or “Maybe I should just release one version and release it for free, I don’t think it will make that much money anyway.” Of course, I was against going with one version for free but in the end, it was his call. He did however, went with two versions, which proved to be a key factor to Unblock Me’s success at that time.

While the initial development of Unblock Me was a breeze for Kirakorn, he said that the most challenging process of getting Unblock Me to the wild was getting it to the AppStore. The game was stuck in the Apple submission process due to uncleared bank account info. Kirakorn said that the problem went on for about a month and a half, and during this time, he would constantly send daily emails to Apple for help regarding the issue. At the end, Kirakorn decided to apply for a new iOS Developer account and use a new bank for the account. The game eventually went live within days using the new iOS Developer Account.

Going Live and Wild

After the game went live, the paid version of Unblock Me was able to sell about 10 copies the first day and then 20 the second day and then 50 the third day, and it kept going on like this for about two weeks until it reached the #60 most downloaded game. Both the Free version and the Paid version did very well during its launch. The free version eventually became the #1 most downloaded app in every category within a few days and became most downloaded app of the year(2009) in the AppStore. A lot of Unblock Me‘s success has to be contributing to having a free version at that time. While the free version didn’t even have any ads in it, it created a huge buzz among blogs and forums. People have no problem trying the game for free, and most of them were willing to paid the extra 0.99$ for more puzzles. The biggest competitor at that time was Blocked, but it came with only 100 or so puzzles.

With the success of Unblock Me that year, Kirakorn decided to quit his day job after his contract expired. He continued to work on Unblock Me alone for another year before establishing Kiragames in 2011, which is when me, Tim and many more talented developers joined him.

The Ongoing Development…

This is supposed to be a postmortem of Unblock Me, but I think everyone at Kiragames will agree that Unblock Me is still ongoing and everyone on the team is still heavily involved.  At the time of writing this article, I’ve just committed the last new feature for Unblock Me’s update on the iOS. Unblock Me on Android, which was released in 2010, will also get an update pretty soon, depending on how QA goes. We have definitely learn a lot from this four year process; we have seen how things quickly changed and got a better understanding of our users and the market in total.

Aun Taraseina will be a speaker at Casual Connect Asia in Singapore during May 21 – May 23,  and will be talking about “Key Points for Indie Success Globally.” Feel free to contact him via auntara at kiragames dot com if you are interested about the topic.

My name is Kinshuk Sunil and in April 2011, I started an independent game development company with two friends of mine – Yadu Rajiv and Mayank Saini. We spent the next year working on an Android game, Zap the Knight, which is out there as an unfinished game on the Play Store and would perhaps be best described as a vaporware for now.

As the calendar turned to 2013, our priorities had shifted from making games to just plain survival. Around that time, Yadu jumped into Global Game Jam 2013 with a few friends and ended up making ‘less than three’, a local synchronous multiplayer for the PC. ‘less than three’ (a play on the heart emoticon <3) was an experiment on a concept we have been planning to work on for some time and was received very well by friends at the Jam.

One Game A Month? Can We Do It?

During the Jam, we all started talking about taking part in One Game a Month experiment. less than three became our 1GAM entry for January, and the XP boost was relieving. We internally joked and poked fun on each other about our XPs. This led to us starting to discuss what our project should be for February.

It was evident that we needed it to be very simple, because we actually wanted to finish it in February. So before anything, we decided that the release date would be February 28. Vidhvat Madan, Yadu and Vasu Chaturvedi then actively started exploring ideas about what that simple game should be. The breakthrough came on February 3rd, when Vidhvat came up with a simple prototype of collecting circles.

Collect circles at a time and get points!

The idea was simple: a circle pops up on the screen and two players fight to collect it. The one who gets it, gets a point and the cycle repeats.

Wait, What Are We Making?

It was an interesting prototype, but not a game yet. Vasu, Yadu and Vidhvat were hard-pressed to find a game here. Yadu went ahead with experimenting with the idea of multiple circles instead of just one. But that made it a little confusing. There was no conflict anymore, each player could collect their circle at their leisure.

Focus on your color, please!

That was about the time when we set our first design objective: “It’s not about winning, it’s about who you play with”. And so we defined two factions. Each player was now assigned a color and they had to collect only their own droplets. That was what the game was called then, “Droplets”. Along with the two sides, we introduced a bonus color that was the bone of contention between the two players. With the addition of a timer and limited time, the game instantly became a riot.

Building a Game…

Around the same time, I finally jumped on board the team, primarily to take care of sounds. We were now four – Me (Kinshuk), Yadu, Vidhvat and Vasu. Between Yadu and Vidhvat, all game programming was taken care of and a huge chunk of design. Vasu added on top of it with more design. I brought sound and production to the table.

The game did not undergo any major changes since then. The base premise persisted. We did explore a different arc with a radical UI-redesign and a possible scenario where there were many more types of circulets and different behaviors in an effort to bring some tactical gameplay to the game. By this time the game had changed its name from “Droplets” to “Circulets” and that was going to stick.

…is not easy

By this time, we were fairly done with the game and started showing it to friends. The responses we started getting were amazing. A lot of them requested us to consider this as a game and treat it accordingly, and not just as a 1GAM project. Finding sense in the argument, we formally brought in the game to Hashstash and announced it to the world on February 24, 2013. At the same time, we opened up a beta with about 25 people testing out the iOS version and about a 100 for Android, we submitted the game to 100% Indie program by Samsung & Chillingo and they graciously accepted us, and Casual Connect Asia selected us for the Indie Prize Showcase at Singapore.

And then we realized a major problem in the game. While we were developers and understood what was happening inside the game, the beta players did not. What we observed was that most were not partaking in the conflict and only concentrating on their own colors. Even the bonus colors were being ignored. So began our crusade to bring a little chaos in the game world.

Over the beta, we explored different solutions but what did the trick for us were some subtle changes in visual and audio feedback within the game. Some of these were:
- while the circles popped up in their own sides, we made them slowly move towards the other side, unless they were moved by one of the players
- by throwing their circles in the other player’s side, players could now make the other player lose points
- we experimented with many audio cues for positive, negative, bonus score contributions and the current 8-bit sounds had the best influence on players
- the soundtrack samples were structured such that the pacing increases every 30s and becomes more frantic (the gameplay is structured in tiers of 30s)

The little waves from circles being collected added much life in the game.

To Infinity and Beyond

We also introduced a new “Infinite” mode in the game, which reverses the complete time mechanic. While the game was originally about collecting as many circles as possible in limited time, the Infinite mode lets you collect a limited number of circles in infinite time. What this does is give players an open sandbox to explore with another player. However, it is not much incentivized yet.

The whole minimalism of the game has proven to be a double-edged sword. While it brings a level of hypnotic beauty to the game and the simplicity makes it very intuitive for players; at times, it also leaves our players bewildered and confused. The limited beta was not a good enough sample for us to do anything about it quantitatively, but we are looking forward to real players and their behavior to bring in more gameplay to Circulets. Some of the concepts high on our priority list is exploration, interactivity and engagement between players.

That Hazy Glow…

All development come to a close on April 6th and we finally submitted for certification on the App Store, Samsung App Store and the Amazon App Store. We were certified and ready for sale on all our marketplaces by the 18th of April and the PR process kicked in.

Next came our trailer, the objective of which was to focus more on the interactions of people through the game, and not show the game itself. The end result proved to be pretty interesting.

Now as we try and take a breather from all the action, the chaos of first launch is on us. And it is a fun ride in itself. Circulets finally came out on May 9, 2013 on the Apple App Store, Google Play Store, Amazon App Store and the Samsung App Store.

Hashstash Studios is actively working on getting Circulets out to the world, as well as started work on their next project titled Vertigo, which will also be showcased at Casual Connect Asia 2013 along with Circulets. Connect with them on Facebook and Twitter.

And So the Journey Began

We waited for two weeks and a reply from Wooga popped into our inboxes: we were chosen for the Wooga Game Jam! Awesome! We were so thrilled! The weeks rolled by and March came, so it was time to pack our bags and fly (Wooga was kind enough to pay for our flights, a huge bonus for students) over to Berlin. Our journey took us from Kajaani to Helsinki and then from Helsinki to Berlin. We arrived a day before the game jam, so we had a good night’s rest and were ready and extremely excited for the event the next day.

Player 5 Has Joined the Game

As I mentioned before, I would be taking the role of team leader, but on top of this I would also be working as the designer. My classmates Petri Liuska and Olli-Matti Saarenpää were the programmers and Elsa Saastamoinen was one of the graphic artists. That’s right, one of them. A funny opportunity arose before the event: Minna Eloranta, my friend from Tampere University of Applied Sciences, contacted me and let me know that she too would be taking part in the game jam. I immediately thought of the team and how she would fit into it. I knew that she was a crazy, wacky and passionate person like the rest of us so I made a judgement call: She would fit in. I told her rather bluntly that she would join our team, and she didn’t resist. This turned out to be a very good decision later on. The game jam was about to start and we were extremely eager.

Team photo of us as monsters!

Arrival

A Wooga notebook, pen and t-shirt that we got!

We arrived at Wooga’s office, and I was very anxious to get to work and find out what the theme of the game jam was. I could feel the team was thinking the same as we discussed how we would start working and wondered on what the theme would be. The office was absolutely awesome: A small kitchen with coffee, tea, fresh fruit, cereal and a tad bit of beer for those Friday evenings. The office was also very spacious and a pleasure to the senses with bright colors. A lot of time and effort had clearly been put into the office as a working environment. Oh, there was also an arcade machine! At some point, we made our way to the auditorium, where the CEO and co-founder Jens Begemann welcomed us. After that, a few talks on prototyping and recruitment at Wooga came the thing we were all waiting for: the theme.

Physics Based Ancient Anti-Gravity Ants

As the title of this chapter suggests, the theme of the game jam was physics. In addition to this, there were three optional themes: ancient, ants and anti-gravity. To be honest, I was quite disappointed with the theme; it felt quite dull and uninspiring. I would’ve preferred a theme similar to the last two Global Game Jams, based on a picture or sound. These, I feel, give more room for interpretation, give the jammers more creative freedom and produce more interesting games.

As the theme had been announced, it was time for all the jammers to form teams. While we had our team already set up, the other 20 or so jammers started teaming up. We practically ran out of the auditorium to secure the best possible spot for us to work in. We chose a little area in the office known as the Fish Bowl. This was where the magic would happen during the weekend.

Round 1: Fight!

I was super excited and bursting with energy, and so was the rest of the team. We were ready to create something fantastic! But before we went brainstorming, I suggested we create a timetable for ourselves so that we would pace ourselves well and the team agreed. One of the most important points of the timetable was that we would sleep seven hours each night. This proved to be an extremely smart decision and was key to our success later on.

The team brain storming in the Fish Bowl

We had already predetermined our platform to be Windows Phone 7, since me and my classmates had the most experience with it and we could work fast with it. This was new to Minna, but she quickly got the hang of it. Next, we moved on to brainstorming. We stared off by thinking of a theme for our game: helplessness. Our initial concept for the game was a big room with different types of gravitational fields and you would have to guide the protagonist through these different areas. We played with this idea for a while but moved on because it just wasn’t an interesting concept for us. We moved on to our next concept, which was a game where you had to guide a character that was walking automatically by creating gravity points to push or pull him/her. The idea was that you would be guiding this robot to the end of the level whilst avoiding dangers. We saw potential in this and decided to take it further.

The First Prototype

The game started off with an isometric perspective but we quickly changed it to a 2D perspective and, instead of the character walking, he or she would be falling instead. We decided to keep the creation of gravity points as the way to manipulate the protagonist’s movement. We playtested the prototype ourselves and made changes to it accordingly, then at midnight, we went around to the other teams and mentors and asked them to give it a try. We did some final tweaks and then started heading to bed. By the way, sleeping at the office was more comfortable than you’d think! They had these really nice green sofas, which were great for a good night’s rest. Then, as I was drifting to sleep, I had this feeling that something was wrong, that something just wasn’t right. The next morning we woke up to discover something horrible.

Oh No…

Our game sucked. It absolutely sucked. I woke up with this feeling, came back to the Fish Bowl to start work with the team and everyone felt the same. There was nothing enjoyable about our game: the controls were sluggish and uncomfortable, dodging hazards was hard and gave no sense of achievement and we didn’t really have an interesting theme. We were all quite down; I had the sinking feeling that we weren’t going to be able to do this. That our game would just suck. But we didn’t let ourselves get stuck here, we started making changes to see how we could make it enjoyable.

We changed the game so that you went up instead of falling down and changed the controls somewhat. The controls got better, but they were still bad. Then lunch came around and we took a small break from work. We were eating and talking about the game and then it happened, like lightning, out of the blue.

Viva La Revolucion!

Our protagonist luchador with the other luchador

Minna suggested Vikings for our theme, which got me really excited. I came up with an idea where the Viking would first go up whilst avoiding hazards and then come back down destroying a small village with his battleaxe. We talked about this for a while and then Petri said that which would define our game: “What if it was wrestling?” I immediately jumped on this and suggested we go with a Luchador theme. The team was onboard in a heartbeat. We finished lunch and rushed back to the Fish Bowl with revitalized enthusiasm and spirits. It was like a lightning bolt of pure inspiration had just hit us and we were now back on track. The luchador would first go up and then come down and bodyslam the other luchador with great force. Yes. No doubt about it.
We then also started to discuss the controls once again and I suggested that we make it so that when you tap the screen it causes an explosion, which propels the protagonist upwards and you have to keep doing it to not lose momentum. This was a fantastic change to our game! The controls suited the game, although we noticed after testing that the momentum thing did not; so we ditched it. It was at this time I contacted our music/sound guys again. I had asked them the previous day if they could do something and they said yes, but now I could give them something solid to work with. Now the train was heading full steam ahead.

Ore Wa Jakku Bauwwa

The team toiled away; making the new vision a reality, and boy, did it become greater as each hour passed. Although we were working hard, we were also having a tremendous amount of fun. Our mentor said that all the other teams were really serious and quiet in their work areas but we were just constantly communicating and having a blast! It seemed weird that the others were so serious.

We were making great progress and were constantly playtesting the game with ourselves and with the other teams. This great progress could also be seen in our moods; we were ecstatic and I had never had that much fun at a game jam. It was simply amazing.

By the end of the day, the game was in a great state, we even thought we’d have time to polish it the next day! Can you believe it, polishing a game jam game? With this triumphant feeling, we went to bed.

Polish That!

On Sunday when we continued working, we had about four hours before the deadline at noon. We saw that there was no need to add anything to the game, so we spent this time polishing what we had and preparing for the presentation of our game. We also didn’t have a name for our game yet, so we started brainstorming. We wanted the name to capture the luchador essence of our game and so after some time, we came to a conclusion: it would have to be Late Night Luchador. The last hours flew by quickly and before we knew it, it was time to present our game.

Minna working on the main menu while Petri seems to be in pain

The Stage is Yours

We followed the rest of the jammers to the auditorium where we would present our game. The order of the team presentations was random, and wouldn’t you know it, we were last. I was sitting on the edge, excited to present our stuff, and it kept building up as our turn drew closer. Finally, it was our turn and we rushed to the stage to show our stuff. I talked about our game and the struggles that we had with it, and after that, we showed off our game. I could see the audience’s interest rise immediately as our menu screen popped up and our brilliant theme song started playing. The luchador went up and the audience was on edge as he was plummeting down to body slam the other luchador, and once he crashed into the other luchador, the audience erupted in laughter and applause. This was an absolutely awesome feeling, to see people really enjoy our game from just watching it being played.

While we were presenting our game, we had given the judges our game to play on some extra Windows Phones, which we had borrowed from our school for the trip. The judges then proceeded to announce the top three games. I was extremely excited and nervous whilst waiting to hear our team name. After the third and second place had been announced, I thought we would be the winners, or that our game had diverted too much from the theme and the judges just didn’t like it.

Victory!

“The winners: Late Night Luchador by Team Fuerte!”

We won!

The team with our fantastic trophies in the Fish Bowl!

Incredible! We came through. We made it through the game jam and produced a good solid game. For our victory, we got these small statues of characters from Wooga’s games. It was a really good feeling to make something so good in such a short time. We were extremely proud of ourselves, still are, for our achievement that weekend.

Conclusion

It really amazes me that we pulled of what we did in such a short time. I’m astounded how well the team worked together considering that this line up had never been tried out before and that Minna hadn’t met anyone else from the team before except me. I was especially surprised how well Minna and Elsa worked together and how congruent and unified their art style was. Petri and Olli-Matti worked tremendously well together as well. I also think that one of our greatest achievements was not letting our ideas get bogged down by the theme. By breaking away from that mold, we reached new heights.

I have also never had such fun during a game jam before. It was quite an emotional experience for me and there were very many laughs and smiles during the game jam. All of this positive energy is clearly visible in Late Night Luchador. Speaking of the game, I’m so proud that the game ended up being so great. Everything worked out so well: the gameplay, the art, the music and the controls. The game is whole, and it could easily be expanded upon which I’m extremely glad about. I wish I could relive the game jam and I want to thank the amazing team for an even more amazing time. It just goes to show that with a great team and the right attitude, one can achieve great things even within a short time span.

Julius and his team released the game hot from the game jam and you can get it here for free!

For the Love of Games

Growing up playing Pong and Atari games on the old family TV, Sean learned to love games early in life. When Atari released a Basic Programming cartridge, he immediately began learning the language and realized that programming consisted of a series of logical instructions. He discovered that building games could be an actual job.

Still, he did not plan for a career in the games industry. He graduated from Sonoma State University with a degree in Computer Science knowing he liked building things in software, especially games. LucasFilm Games (later LucasArts) happened to be hiring junior level programmers at that time. Up to this point, Sean had only created games as a hobby, but this sounded like the perfect opportunity for him. He was right: it turned out to be a great time to join the company.

Sean Clark at LucasArts

All of a sudden, he was working with a group of people just as passionate about games as he was; real artists, musicians, programmers– talented professionals who could bring unique creative elements to the product. “It was a blast!” Sean says. “It was also an experience that has helped me through my whole career, right up to today as 3^rd-party Director at Big Fish, working to bring fun game content to the company.” In all the roles he’s done, he’s always shown his love of games. He looks for the same passion and excitement for a game from developers, both internally and externally.

Point and Click Adventure Games Anyone?

Having been involved in multiple projects in a variety of roles, Sean has a soft spot for point-and-click adventure games. While at LucasArts, Sean helped develop The Secret of Monkey Island in 1990, a popular point-and-click adventure. It was a great experience, but problems always arise, and the solutions were often unique. Sean learned a lot about problem solving and creatively mitigating issues during this project.

However, point-and click adventure games started to slip into the background. In an interview with adventuregamers.com, Sean stated that the popularity of point-and-click adventure games would return. When we asked why he thought they had fallen to the background in the first place, his answer was emphatic. “I blame it on 3D. At the time, real-time 3D was such an amazing new capability that the faster computers and video cards enabled, it became the sexy new thing.” While 3D opened new areas of design, it also started a graphics arms race. Everyone focused on 3D graphics, with a game like The Dig being compared to Dark Force or TIE Fighter. But eventually, people realized that adventure games were a different genre to other games, like first person shooters.

He points out that in 2002, Big Fish took advantage of the 3D distraction and built a successful business recognizing and catering to the adventure gamer audience. Even Escape from Monkey Island still managed to do well in the “Adventure Games are Dead” era. Although there are not many classic 3^rd person point-and-click adventure games coming to market, there is the very successful line of Hidden Puzzle Adventure Games that Big Fish is so well known for. These, Sean asserts, are a modern version of adventure game storytelling, similar to those he started his career with.

Another reason adventure games seemed to go dormant was the fact that retail space is both limited and competitive. Because attention was so focused on 3D games, it was challenging to interest retail chain buyers in adventure games. The big factor in changing the situation was the internet. Brick and mortar stores were no longer the only way to purchase games. Sean attributes Big Fish’s success largely to its creation of an online place to find and purchase great casual content, including adventure games.

Adventure Game Evolution

This new cycle of adventure games has evolved, bringing lower-priced games, which are also shorter in length, and tend to tell stories in chapters or episodes. According to Sean, these new games are still high-quality, well-polished games with great artwork, and compelling stories, although the format is different.

Big Fish created a new format for adventure games, brought them to new audiences, and gave consumers a way to try the game before committing to a purchase.

Sean believes Big Fish has been instrumental in bringing more attention to adventure games in a number of ways. They created a new format for adventure games, brought them to new audiences, and gave consumers a way to try the game before committing to a purchase. They figured out how to make adventure games easier to find and consume, at a time when retailers had all but abandoned support for the genre.

Sean is just as excited about the future as he is about the present. “We expect 2013 to be a year of innovation in game, content, and delivery, with games on almost every device and in nearly all casual genres,” Sean says. “In March alone, Big Fish launched 2 highly acclaimed mobile games: Fetch for the iPad, an adventure about a boy on the search for his dog; and Match Up! By Big Fish, the first iOS game to have real-time, 16-bracketed tournament play. Add to that the world’s largest interactive streaming casual game service and continuing franchises like Mystery Case Files, which has been downloaded more than 100 million times, and you can see how there is something to excite all types of gamers.”

Sean reminds us that Big Fish is an incredibly talented and creative company, with exclusive partnerships with more than 140 developers all over the world. He expects Big Fish to continue bringing fun and innovation to the games industry.

Despite that, Creative Mobile Games might be the most successful mobile game development studio that you’ve never heard of. CMG develops and publishes social and mobile games, including the Android and iOS hit,Drag Racing. They are ranked in PocketGamer’s Top 50 game developers, worldwide. Vladimir Funtikov, the CEO and founding member of this enormously successful Android-first studio, sat down with us to discuss this studio and its success.

What Makes Creative Mobile Games Special?

Vladimir Funtikov

CMG made the commitment to Android in 2009, earlier than most. Their reasons for doing this illustrate the power of perception in shaping our view of the world. Although Apple devices were available in Eastern Europe, they were difficult to get, expensive, and out of reach for all but the wealthy. “In contrast, there were a number of inexpensive and easily available Android devices,” Vladimir explains, “so this led us to believe that Android’s open platform would eventually be the mobile platform winner.” Vladimir, joined by partners Sergey, Sehriy, and Marianna, pivoted their business from porting Java games to making their own games for Android-based devices. Their experience in porting gave them both the skills and the perspective needed to support multiple devices, and made supporting Android a less daunting leap than it might have been for studios used to less fragmented platforms.

Today, CMG enjoys nearly 100,000,000 installs for their games, and a solid presence on iOS as well as Android…a huge success by the measure of any indie game studio, anywhere.

A Bumpy Start

Creative Mobile did not experience immediate success; in fact, the early years were a difficult climb. For a year and a half, they experimented with a variety of approaches. Vladimir remembers, “We began with very simple games at a low price point of 99 cents. The games just didn’t sell at all.”  We thought our games might not be good enough, so we worked hard to improve the games,” He continues, “They still didn’t sell.” Not ones to give up, CMG tried free games with ads next, and finally started seeing some signs-of-life. with enough revenue to support themselves. They continued using this model of simple, easy to create, free games with ad monetization on Android. The results were okay, but definitely not spectacular.

One day, Creative Mobile noticed Google had a racing category in Google Play, but there were no racing games there. This type of game appealed to them, since the company is filled with car nuts. “I only drive an Audi Q5,” Vlad admits sheepishly, “The roads in Estonia are too bad to drive a Pagini or Hennessy or even a Corvette, but someday I might own such a machine.” CMG created Drag Racing in six weeks to try to capitalize on this obvious hole in the market. To their surprise, the game was an huge, nearly-immediate success. Suddenly, the game had 80,000 downloads per day.  Were they excited?  ”Stunned” would be more accurate. “We knew the game had lots of bugs and problems.” Vlad worried, “All of a sudden, we were five guys desperately trying to figure out how to deal with overwhelming success.”

They started growing, hiring, and growing again. They began learning how to run a big, successful, free-to-play game. After six months of extremely hard work, the game began to stabilize. Now CMG had developed a fairly large group of experienced team members. “Once the fixes slowed down,” said Vlad, “we saw an opportunity to expand their portfolio and create more games.” CMG decided to try to split into two teams: one concentrating on evolving the Drag Racing Franchise and the other would explore other games and new IP.

The first team did quite well. The franchise continued growing, and a new product, Motorcycle Drag Racing, extended the franchise.

The second team, however, was an abject failure, with no successful games.

Where Are They Today?

“We pulled the two separate teams and doubled-down on Drag Racing,” said Vladimir, describing their current position,“We committed ourselves to really taking the franchise to the next level with team-based multi-player action, groundbreaking physics, and heavy social and community aspects.” CMG has felt since the beginning that game community is critical, so they designed better embedded tools for managing large communities. They developed much greater support for a variety of car performance envelopes and different kinds of racing, with improvements in real physics such as torque steer, advanced weight distribution, wheel grip, suspension, and weight transfer modeling. “Of course, we had some experience with branded OEM and aftermarket performance from Drag Racing, and we wanted more support for that – to give players a more ‘real’ experience,” Vladimir brags, “Last May, we launched our next-generation game closed beta, with Android first, of course.”

Creative Mobile Games Team

The company now consists of more than seventy employees and has also become a boutique publisher for select external studios.