Dragon Game Studio’s new game Balified is in the Indie Prize Showcase at Casual Connect Asia.

Jonas is a self-made businessman and Joan has a background in Marketing Communication. Working together as a couple was a completely new challenge for both of them. They are married, a team, partners and they work together. Not a lot of couples can do this, but here they are, at the beginning of their careers in the game development industry.

Before this big adventure, neither of them has been involved in the game development industry. Jonas has always been a typical hardcore gamer, but that’s where his experience stops. Joan started her interest in playing games when Jonas made her play Tetris against him on the Nintendo DS. Before that, she occasionally played games on the PC, but nothing much besides that. This made the adventure all the more exciting.

Setting Up a Game Studio in Indonesia

The first challenge was to find an office. It was necessary that they would get all the help that they could. They found a company with specialized services helping expats starting up their business in Indonesia. What was supposed to take only three months ended up taking one year! The hunt for the office was a tough one, but in the end, they managed to find one that seemed just perfect for the small studio they had in mind.

While looking for a studio, they were also busy finding the right people to build their Dragon Dream Team. Funny enough, the first employee they hired was someone they bought a dog from! He was a freshly graduated student and was looking for a job. By that time, there was not much to do, but they offered him the opportunity to study Corona SDK (in which BaliFied is built) while helping them set up the company.

Then there was the sudden application from their Art Director Gilbert. They were intrigued by his resume, so they went to Surabaya to interview him. Immediately, they realized that Gilbert was the right guy to have on board. After adding him to the team, they also met up with him during Casual Connect Singapore 2012. They felt they learned a lot from CC, and attending made them realize that they had a VERY long way to go before they could reach their goals…

Everyone is talented and has the great team spirit and attitude that they strive for.

After Gilbert, the other Dragons came in one after another. Everyone is just as talented, and has the great team spirit and attitude that they strive for. Dragon Game Studio nowadays consists of three programmers: Rocky, Jim and Christopher, one Art Director: Gilbert, one Studio Manager / Game Designer: Yon and an intern: Chris.

The first two games

The Harlem Shake vs Gangnam Style Dance Game was released on the App Store on 26^th of March 2013 and was made in seven working days. It was a side project to give the team a breather from working intensively on BaliFied. Jonas wanted to do something with the two dance crazes that ruled YouTube. It has a simple gameplay: you choose the role that you want to play, either Harlem Shake or Gangnam and you tap on the right icon as soon as they appear in the white circles at the bottom of the screen.

The second game Don’t Steal My Banana was released on 27th of March 2013 after being rejected by Apple twice. But the third time’s the charm! This game was made in five weeks and was another side project for the team. None of them had released a game on the App Store before, so all this, from the creative journey to the launch of these titles, was perfect to learn about the whole release process by trial and error.

Both games were received pretty well. Harlem vs Gangnam got to the #1 position in many European countries and the Indonesian store, and reached the top 10 in the US store free music games category. Don’t Steal My Banana reached the top 50 in the free games category in the Indonesian store and got them a lot of new fans.

The Masterpiece

A lot of adaptation processes was needed — communication, work standard and learning a new engine were just a few of the hurdles they had to get through.

The masterpiece and the dream that Dragon Game Studio was built upon is called BaliFied – Word Game of the Gods. It’s a project that they hope will blow casual word game lovers away. They are both huge fans of word games such as WWF and Ruzzle, so when Jonas stumbled upon an old board game from 1950s called Bali on the internet, they knew that this was it! They realized that this was something they had to turn into a new and improved word game, with all the multiplayer functions today’s market offers.

The beginning wasn’t easy. A lot of adaptation processes was needed– communication, work standard and learning a new engine were just a few of the hurdles they had to get through. They were a group of people that never had worked together before. Luckily, most of the team members have a background in the game industry, but there still was a lot of stuff that they didn’t have a clue about. The GUI was changed many times before the team was completely happy, and a lot of time was spent on trial and error. After more than three months of developing, they began to wonder: can this game even be finished? But they got through it by dropping the project for a while, and then came back stronger than ever! This is something they recommend every developer to do if they get stuck: take a break from the project for a while, maybe make a few simple projects, and then go back to the main project.

When the focus was back on BaliFied, the team was feeling great about it. Fortunately for them, Corona had just released the new Corona Cloud feature at exactly when they needed it the most. Once again, the Balinese gods were on their side! After that, they did some super intensive beta-testing, and finally, Balified was finished and ready to be published. And here they are, ready to launch BaliFied in the summer of 2013.

Developing a game from scratch with little experience from the decision makers, but with all the knowledge from the team was a very hard process. They lived and learned and were not afraid to start over again when an idea was not completely supported by the whole team. It’s a give and take process and at the end, they are very proud of all that they have achieved so far. They are ready to take this new word game to another level! The level of the Gods.

Look forward to the release of BaliFied this summer.

Besides receiving the Innovation Scholarship, Zombotron 2 was awarded for the “Audience choice award”.

95 game titles entered the Flash GAMM Game Contest this year. Casual Connect (CGA) selected 15 indie developers that received Innovation Scholarships for their trip to Casual Connect Europe and Flash GAMM Hamburg. The indie games that were picked to receive the scholarship are: – Goal Defense – Snail Bob – Jelly Cannon – Pheus and Mor – Acorn Story – Transformer – Dino Trek – Dream Symphony – Red Ball 4 – The Prince Edward – Lazerman – Intrusion 2 – On The Flat Of A Dream – Hordes and Lords – Zombotron 2 Besides a free accommodation and a conference pass to Casual Connect Europe, the teams are given the opportunity to showcase their games at the Innovation Showcase, an “art-gallery” style exhibition in which twelve games are displayed that are considered innovative. The winners will also have an opportunity to present a short post-mortem presentation about their titles. Flash GAMM is a conference for flash, social and mobile games, which has been around since 2009. Casual Connect Europe will be held from 12-14 February in Hamburg and involves over 1.600 professionals.

Made in Mumbai

Huebrix’s success might also have a larger, unnoticed impact that many outside of India might be missing. It is giving many developers in India the hope they’ve always wanted: that it’s possible to reach a global audience outside of their own non-existing games market. ”We have now seen that if you get the game out there in front of people and they see a good solid game, they will take notice of you,” he argues. The game is being lauded by the local Indian game press as one of the few Indian games that reached out beyond its borders that the Indian game development community could be proud of. “The Indie Development scene in India is pretty nascent,” Prabhu says. “There are quite a few people who are interested and intrigued by the scene but not enough people actually doing proper work. We run a small Indie Game Development Facebook group here called LIGD; we have about 300 odd members, but maybe only 30 are active. Also, since the local market is virtually non-existent, most of the developers face the issue of actually reaching out and making their presence felt at the global level.”

Staying afloat

The obviously delighted Prabhu receiving the award for “Best Original Idea” for Yellow Monkey Studios’ game Just a Thought at the HoPlay 2011 video games festival in Bilbao, Spain.

Yellow Monkey Studios has been around for over five years. During this time, four members of its team managed to work on three games and release them. In 2007, the studio started off designing and pitching a Nintendo DS based point-and-click adventure called Mortley – A Stitch in Time to many publishers. Regardless of the good response, many seemed to be quite skeptical that an Indian indie studio could complete and polish a game for the DS. “Most publishers ended up telling us to complete the game and then they would see, but that meant a $100.000 US dollars risk for us, and we didn’t have that money,” he says. The launch of the Apple App Store around that time meant a new opportunity for the team and they quickly decided to move to developing games for iOS. The first project to come out of that endeavor was Finger Footie, a top view flick-based Soccer game. Like many other game developers, the team had to struggle to get the game some visibility. So for their second game, Shailesh and his team decided to do something that would definitely catch people’s attention.

The resulting game was It’s Just a Thought, which won them the “Best Original Idea” at the HoPlay 2011 video games festival in Bilbao, Spain. Yellow Monkey studios has been financed in the only possible way most aspiring game studios in Asia are able to: work for hire jobs. “We’ve had to go back to work for hire in between projects or sometimes even during them to pay the bills,” says Prabhu. “The award at HoPlay 2011 with It’s Just a Thought had a cash component to that which, along with the work-for-hire project we did, helped us stay afloat during the production of Huebrix.” Though sales for Huebrix are still growing, the game enjoyed a steady climb up both the iOS and Android charts and has pretty much covered its development costs. Shailesh and his team were recently able to attend their first ever game conference back in May this year, volunteering at the inaugural edition of Casual Connect Asia in Singapore. The event gave them their very first chance to show Huebrixto publishers and meet other international game developers. But after disappointing leads, they decided to release the game themselves after all.

“We don’t have any publishers who take games developed here to the global market and we don’t have any internationally-acclaimed game development awards or more than one conference here,” Prabhu tells. “Even in the age of the internet, I think people really do value you more if they know you and can put a face to an email ID. It’s financially not possible for us at this point to travel to all these conferences to be seen, but we are trying to do whatever we can.” And until now, that effort to establish direct and strong relationships with the international press has not been in vain.

‘Hindi’ PR at its best

Regardless of all trials and tribulations, Huebrix has become an important milestone for the Indian indie game development scene for reaching the global mobile market, setting higher standards for a game’s level of polish and achieve outstanding recognition by game media from all over the world. They also recently spoke about their journey developing and promoting Huebrixat India’s prime game conference, the Nasscom Game Developers Conference in Pune, India.

One of many art styles that were considered for Huebrix before the decision was made to go for the more slick & simplistic design the game has now.

Prabhu and his team simply did what any indie developer would, and should do. They involved a blogger in game development, and he made their work noticeable by actively posting about their development process. “I think staying active on these channels helped us get noticed by the right people at Apple and we have been able to get on the New and Noteworthy sections on launch day, and even get some promotional banners in some places,” Prabhu agrees. “That helped greatly with downloads. Besides that, we did press releases and had a proper media kit and promo codes ready for anyone who wanted to write a review. We sent those things out in advance specifying the release date and such. We didn’t really have any budgets for promotion.” But that didn’t stop them from being smart about PR & marketing. They were able to involve the well known and beloved indie-friendly PR expert Joseph Lieberman from VGSsmart glory, who assisted Yellow Monkey Studios in writing and spreading their press releases to the right media outlets. “He really loved the game and wanted to help us.” So far Yellow Monkey Studios’ efforts bore all the fruit they’ve hoped for. “We have risen to Rank 73 in iPhone games and Rank 28 in iPad Games on the iOS App Store, and we hope Huebrix will rise even more,” Shailesh says. “It is actually tough to launch on the same day as Avengers and Terry Cavanagh’s game Super Hexagon, but I hope we will still be seen by enough people.” Prabhu and his team also spread the word of the iOS and Android versions by getting a Flash version of Huebrix published on as many flash game portals as possible. Huebrix has been submitted to IGF China and the international IGF as well, and the game also became a finalist in the ‘Best International Game’ category for the Freeplay Awards 2012 held in Melbourne, Australia.

Huebrix’s statistics till this week have been around the following numbers Prabhu and his team were gracious enough to share with us:
iOS: 22k+ sales
iOS ratings: average of 4 out of 5 Stars
Android: over 600k Downloads confirmed by their Android-focused publisher.
Google Play ratings: 4.4 out of 5 Stars
Huebrix’s Flash version:
• 187k+ plays on Kongregate • 207k+ plays on Armor Games
• 38k+ plays on Newgrounds
Flash version ratings
• 3.7/5 (Kongregate) (9100 ratings)
• 4/5 (Newgrounds) (1500 ratings)
• 7.6/10 (Armor Games)

Following features on many popular mobile game websites such as PocketGamer.co.uk and being mentioned on TheGuardian.co.uk, reviews are also appearing on Appspy.com and TouchArcade.com. Huebrix even received a review on EDGE Magazine’s website (a 7/10), marking another giant step for the little Indian indie game studio. Though Huebrix’s Metacritic just went up to 76/100 (it was 74/100 a few weeks before), the young developers at Yellow Monkey are obviously overjoyed by the attention their game has been receiving.

Not the very first, but certainly not the last

In the history of the rather booming Indian game industry, Huebrix is treading in rather giant corporate footsteps of international success of giant game companies such as Games2win Media, one of India’s biggest game development studios and portal operator that was able to generate over 10 million downloads of their Flash-title-turned-to-mobile game Parking Frenzy on both Android and iOS. Other Indian game titles might have slipped into the global market on various platforms including mobile, PC and console, but most likely have not even been recognized as coming out of a country with one of the fastest growing and incredibly talented game development community in the world. Relatively speaking Huebrix’s moderate global success compared to Games2win Media is not only a giant beacon of hope for the Indian indie development community and set the bar high for levels of quality and polish mobile games need to succeed in their competitive markets. It’s also a significant mark for many other indie developers in the other far corners of the world who are desperately trying to reach an audience beyond their country’s own, often non-existent markets.

Yellow Monkey Studios is currently planning their next title and have launched a major update for Huebrix today. They’re also adding a cool new update to Huebrix today that enables ‘Zen Mode’, a special mode for Color Blind people and the much delayed iPhone 5 graphics. Check out Huebrix for yourself here for iOS and here on Google Play.

In the last decade Brazil’s economy has been flourishing, spawning all kinds of new commercial and creative initiatives. Brazil has a fond love for gaming and a growing industry to match it. We had a talk with the cheerful Martin Fabichak, Technical Director of Insolita Studios in São Paulo, to find out more about him, his company and what makes the Brazilian game industry unique.

After Fabichak graduated in Applied Math with a specialization in Programming, he quickly realized that his true passion was game development, leading him to create flash games. In 2008 he joined Insolita where he recently became Technical Director and a partner of the company six months ago.

Size matters

Martin Fabichak's team at Insolita

One of the characteristics of being a young company in an upcoming industry is that you get to create all sorts of games. Insolita Studios has a diverse repertoire, from serious games to teach management skills, to comedic platformers featuring cavemen and devils.

While they were making three serious games to encourage entrepreneurship in collaboration with professional experts, they decided to make something less serious, yet important on the side: CaveDays. “This cool platforming game allowed the company get noticed in the Brazilian industry, especially after winning the Jogos BR contest for Best Game, a contest organized by the Brazilian government to stimulate Brazilian game design.” Fabichak explains.

To promote their game CaveDays, Insolita published web comics made with the graphics from the game.

The award was the first step to start more, and bigger, projects. Fabichak likes to describe them in superlatives: “Afterwards we made a huge serious game, LudoPark. Pretty much one of the biggest serious games ever made because it’s a real-time multiplayer management game where 40 players compete to manage their business.” Besides this “huge” game, Insolita Studios joined up with the independent Brazilian game developer Abdução to make something “mini” that turned out quite big.

Freekscape from Brazil

Freekscape was the first 100% Brazilian IP in the world market.

The two companies joined forces as Kidguru Studios to work on the first Sony-licensed game in Brazil for the PSP Minis platform, Freekscape. “We’re the only licensees for Sony.” Fabichak explains. “There is no one with a PS3 license here. It’s really hard to get that in Latin America. Being able to get Freekscape on the PSP Mini platform was a unique opportunity for us.”

Developing Freekscape took Insolita’s international relationships to another level in many different ways. “We developed a prototype with 3 levels and took it to GDC in 2009. There we got in touch with the publisher Creat from the US that gave us the opportunity to work with Sony that was looking for games for its new PSP Minis platform that had yet to be announced.” Fabichak recounts.

Compared to other PSP Minis games, Freekscape was a big mini. “Out of 40 levels we had in this project, only 15 remained in the game,” Fabichak admits. “We did not know that Minis would mostly be smaller-sized casual games. Most games come down to 1 or 2 hours of playtime, with a lot of replay value, of course,” Fabichak explains. “But Freekscape was disproportionately bigger with about 8 hours of gameplay. We believed and hoped PSP Minis was going to be a platform for small studios with big ideas.” Was Freekscape too big to be a Mini? “Sony was happy with the way Freekscape fit into their original idea of the type of games they wanted to offer on PSP Minis.”

Lessons from the little devil

At the Sony booth at GDC 2010. On the left is Daniel, Founder of Abdução, and on the right is Fabichak's partner, Winston Petty, founder of Insolita. Freekscape was a joint project of Abdução e Insolita as Kidguru.

Fabichak is happy with having an odd-one-out on a platform that has tough competition with delivering bite-sized portable games. He is proud of the game it turned out to be, but especially the lessons and relationships they gained through it. “We learned a lot from Freekscape. Especially in maintaining a relationship with an international publisher and a big player like Sony.” Fabichak says. “One of the things we struggled with was developing for Minis at such an early stage. Developing Freekscape before PSP Minis had even been announced, brought some difficulties, specifically nearing the end of our development cycle because the requirements and features for PSP Minis changed from one week to the other.”

Fabichak does not take his hardships for granted, however. “During this time, we had a great relationship with Vicious Cycle Software, who made the Vicious Engine we worked with. They helped us with a lot of issues. They even made some tweaks to the engine to help us out with some of the issues,” Fabichak recounts. “But when it came to one of the specific requirements from Sony, I spent about a month in the engine’s source code trying to solve it. That was really hard, especially since it came out of the blue, nearing the end of development.”

“Despite these problems, we had great help from Sony.” Fabichak admits. It also gave them more confidence to step things up. “Through this project we now talk to others on a whole other level. Now we can approach publishers and companies like Sony with more ease. You can’t reach this level as a company without earning your stripes with a previous project. Now we have the credentials to talk to them and prove we can deliver on what we propose, and our partners know that. We feel like we’re on another level now.” Fabichak says proudly.

The second part of Fabichak’s interview will be published next week, including his views on the Brazilian game industry, Insolita’s current projects, and his effort to inform upcoming talents about the real world of game development in Brazil through his podcast, Doublejump.

Shareware For Life

Robinson being interviewed by Morgan Webb from G4TV

Even in her early years, Robinson was a fan of indie games. She played every shareware game that she could get her hands on. “The first game I paid for was The Lost Mind of Dr. Brain and I did chores for weeks to earn the money. Maybe associating video games with chores was the reason I became a developer.”

Despite working in the publisher scheme nowadays, Robinson still believes strongly in her independent roots and free games. “For starters, your audience is significantly bigger. It doesn’t take nearly as much to convince people to check out an offbeat indie game if it’s free,” says Robinson.

Further, working on her own free games helped Robinson find her style and share it with players. “Free games can help a new developer build up a reputation. The style of your work will become more apparent with each project you release, and can help you find your audience, or help them find you!” she shares.

The Indie Road

Robinson having breakfast with fellow indies during GDC 2010

Finishing a game is a skill of its own, declares Robinson. “If you develop a reputation as someone who gets things done, it will only help you down the road.”
Most importantly, free games are a good way to get established and respond to feedback without incurring the risks of commercial game development.

Robinson has also discovered through experience that it is very rewarding to work on a commissioned project and pitch ideas. She experienced this first when designing Puzzle Bots and later when designing missions for social media company Akoha. “It’s the feeling of creating something from nothing that I find so engaging,” adds Robinson.

Into The Future

"Manning (ladying?) my booth at the PAX 10."

Lately, Robinson is learning how to program in Unity. “It’s going slowly but surely,” she admits. She is tackling programming because she understands how useful it is for game designers to be able to sketch out new ideas on their own.

Robinson is working on a small game that she occasionally updates people about using Twitter. “Nothing has been announced yet, but I can’t help but post concept art sometimes,” she admits.

Finishing a game is still the bane of her existence. “It’s easy to think a project is 90% done and then find your to-do list getting longer every day. It just happens,” Robinson shares. After all, releasing a game is only partly about ensuring a bug-free release. Creating promotional materials and sending a game to the press takes quite a bit of time and pushes budget constraints.

But in the end it’s worth it.

Erin Robinson recently talked about the neuroscience of gaming at GDC China, summarizing findings that video games are increasingly being used in medical and rehabilitative therapy and playing First-Person Shooters improves visual and auditory perception.