AskGM #3: Can Splatoon + Brawl Stars = Mega Hit? | Action.Reaction Studio Indie Game Development

all right here we go all right good see you guys good you meet each other how are you doing there all right done all right yeah great great to meet you guys here in video conferencing and you know got myself and Paul you know I took a quick look at some of the materials you guys sent to us it sounds like you guys are doing like super cool stuff the concept of your game looks ridiculous like it looks really fun but I thought maybe we should first start by um could you guys just sort of introduce yourselves and then talk about sort of the company and then the game and and you know maybe we could also just talk about like the key problems or the key issues that you guys are dealing with that we could potentially help out on here for sure so stutters I'm Thomas the CEO and founder of factory African games and so so basically I'm sure you guys know what's the roles of CEO so I'm

actually dealing with everything from finances to raising our seed round and obviously a little bit game design as well and here I have our producer and program it Joseph yeah so I'm doing the production here I also do a bit of the code a bit of art and general design and stuff like that and keeping everything rolling here at extra large case and so couple words about actual reaction games so we're casually a massive multiplayer game and tech company exclusively focusing on the multiplayer markets and along the way we're building a technology that all small independent and team to develop large-scale multiplayer games so we are only a team of four guys here so the cat filling massive games have a forest initial chat ristic that we want to live by they are made for a touchscreen generation they are designed multiplayer as the core element and the social game plays always considered as part of the core gameplay mechanics and in our games there is this intuitive feeling of progression

competition and team play yeah and can you sort of show us a little bit in terms of like the gameplay if you wanted to like share screen you can just go to the bottom middle where it says sure all right so I'm gonna give you guys a little walkthrough of the splash battle game mode so it's three versus three your first objective is to grab a key brush that is near your spawn here you can see me grabbing the brush and now I can actually use a goo that's my advantage to move faster and here the next objective is to paint the middle area so you can see the enemy is trying to do that as well the first team to paint the whole Middle area gets a potion and that potion gives you a super strengths and gives me a you know double the damage doubled HP and now you can actually feel damage to the enemy core and that is the green condition of this game-mode so here you can see me approaching the Cora hammering it down and you know while your team is helping you at the same time the task is to destroy that core you can use your goo

as managed to move fast or make the enemies move for us they have done quite well here with with the pink in us you go City but that's it that's the game one that I'm actually very simple and challenging you know challenging enough for those kind of like exciting back-and-forth game play when you just kind of like want to be just faster than your enemy team having the portion on there painting some strategic spot for the map

oh very good you guys did a good job on the ball part yeah the bot that's the bots are quite good at this point yeah but so basically we are rebuilding the whole core gameplay will be based around this cool mechanic that is rendered in real time and everything you do is based on the guru so you can move faster in the gooey sauce and be really creative so we're getting all the creativity for the players and down the road we already have like this so you interact with an environment so if you find a turret yeah

in the game map you can tag the turret so it's on your side or if you find out dinosaur land in the ground you talk to Jon Shore and it's playing on your side you can hop on the dyno and you see that's your advantage so everything is taxable and you can interact with the environment quite much and that's just kind of that's the mode explanation and then around like the actual real core of the game we obviously have a roster of characters and they all have unique abilities and roles so this one for example has a boomerang and a rocket and all of American character to character and you said you guys are only four people so in terms of like the back end and like are you are you guys using just kind of curious in terms of like you know how does how does that for people within your team how does that split out in terms of role and functionality and then you know - I assume you guys are using some you know like third-party back-end or using additional art sources

to like able to you know complete the project alright that's that's the beauty of it like Dom so we got a really really talking about receipt hero here and we're using unity as a back-end which gives us a much more you know freedom to kind of like we don't need to worry about they back into you also we're building our own framework on top of unity and I'm not sure if you are you guys seeing my screen I guess yeah you're doing great so unfortunately I wasn't prepared that we gonna go so much on checks so I would have obviously wanted our CTO to but no yeah just just kind of high-level curious unity but we've written our own kind of code our own simulation code and all kind of like just basically like using unity to its almost independent of it in a sense like so we still use some immunities like core components like that but really trying to keep it all I would have unity while using it on topic

he's my kind of like sums about sums it up quite well so the market we actually framework is being developed that then shorter development times becomes and equality and complex it gets better and better so we're creating an exit value through the framework and obviously through our portfolio of games and it's also enables us to be very very lean and keeping the theme so it's quite minimal this is something we briefly judged we did Joseph in San Francisco that we our pipeline is very streamlined in in terms of like putting existing IPs on top of any of our existing games so we can basically prototype and test like hypothesis very rapidly let's say me and I key words in a brawler game so we can do that like in a way right cool so what's the current

sort of development stage are you guys you know I close to softlock soft launched yes so currently we're in a better in a better launch in Finland UK and Canada and we are running in a one-month better test and then you're working with company called super scale on the cheap you heard of the guys oh yeah I know mica and actually I've done a video interview with them which I'll be publishing soon so yeah yeah lot love the guys from supers go there they're doing a great great job so we're working with guys and actually at this time for our company well this is very exciting time because we're closing our seed round as we speak so we're getting the data for from the from the beta launch and then sharing the data with our seed investors and our goal is to cost around june latest july and we have already raised

three hundred about three hundred thousand last year so things are looking well in three or four four guys only yeah i think it's amazing what you guys have been able to do with such a small team and such budget and so you know it's you know you know hats off to you guys you guys are look past jobs so that's that's great you know just just sort of also curious like how did you guys come up with the idea for this particular approach and it does seem that there's a lot of people you know in in and sort of like within the finland community that are that I've been thinking along the lines of like brawl stars quite a bit but they made sure to party where multiplayer gamers so we love you know everything about playing together or playing with your friends so kind of like try for that barbecue kind of like element that you play together

with your friends next you and just you know shared the sure the fun of playing together so we thought about obviously brawl servers has been a huge reference for us yeah mom everything about what you and it's such a well designed game and they brought something new to the shooter genre with that we think spreading mechanic so that the player is not only focusing on killing the enemy but actually doing tasks we can't love that variety so we were thinking that [ __ ] now why don't we just bring that to them kind of like brawlers on rare that brings a lot of creativity to the players so we kind of like one about a sweet spot where there's something very familiar but then something quite new today mobile mobile markets right and then in terms of the current be like could you speak in terms of what you're seeing with respect to early metrics GCU guys who have been pushing into the game and what you think the key challenges are right now definite is so

we're seeing like the d1 retention is close to 40 at the moment which is pretty good for a a product that the product is like five to ten percent complete it's such an early stage so that's pretty neat and we're only missing like day one and day three and during next week we're going to hear about this CPU on Sun and other metrics but the system length is 36 minutes so that's pretty neat so people asked to play it again and then we have a funny KPI of our known which is the players have covered about 45 football stadiums of new so that's next time it is is that six minutes is that like too much on average two matches or three matches the average amount of times both for three to four minutes so they're getting about two two to three in average okay then we have a couple questions where you guys want it in terms of the game

besides sauce and then probably we have time a little bit touch about some questions regarding to the close beta launch itself I guess I kind of the concerns that we have with the current game mode so obviously like this GU mechanic is introducing a new I don't think many people are doing this like spreading guman came like that but then mechanic we're also introducing like picking up guns destroying cores which aren't like new features the thing but my actually like kind of put the goo in a back seat maybe you know so we're kind of thinking like how we can bring the goo more into like the focus and then we also have another kind of game mode of demo so where did that so basically no spot you were right yeah yeah great so there's the turf war game mode so we are

iterating on that basically like bringing the turf or to mobile so that's actually even more simple game on what we have now going on so the question is would you guys recommend us to introduce a new game-mode to this beta beta launch or should we keep improving the game mode we have now because the I mean is always it's always like a tricky question in terms of how especially for it for a team as small as years with just four people like where do you where do you spend your resources and how you think about allocating your time so from from that perspective you know generally like you know just high-level exercise that you could typically do is to try and understand with all the different types of features whether it's a mode it's a new sort of monetization system or any specific feature would be to use some

kind of either like expected outcomes or ice rice type of famer meaning like you know you try and characterize what is it what is the cost and then what do you expect in terms of what the impact of the game is going to be and and so whether that's like an arc now impact or a retention impact and then to try and translate that into the ultimate like you know what do we think that the overall LTV impact is going to be and so like so what I would generally recommend is so you're in soft launch you know one of the tricky things about is especially given the situation that you guys are in again small team limited resources is you know really trying to understand what are the most important things that you have to work on to make yourself successful and so generally I like from a soft launch perspective having you know what's what's called sort of a you know a North Star model so meaning that you know when you think

about fundamentally what what is it you guys need to do to make sure that you guys have a high enough sort of LTV so that you guys can be like ROI positive against your user acquisition of marketing is like you know just trying to break down what to work on and by North Star metric meaning the one metric that you guys work on that you guys focus because again you guys are so small and with such limited resources and so you know generally speaking that that typically that that typically starts off with with let's say d1 because without a good d1 you're kind of you're kind of hosed and so like you guys are in a good spot with what the 40% d1 and you know especially if that's your d1 metric that's you know world wide blended against multiple you know sort of geographic tiers and that that's great then it's like then what's next you know so is is the next thing that we're worried about is it d7 retention and

then is it like your your art our monetization right and then it's like just working with super scale you know maybe what you need is you know as you're starting to plot your arc you curve is is trying to understand what your monetization looked like in soft-launched and then it's going to be more about what is your for example you know D 14 Rome as or D 30 grow as yield targets for example right and and so like but just to have you know a few key metrics that you're working against and then to just focus on that one and so going back to your question should be should we be working on a game mode well I guess the question is you know what is the objective in terms of like first of all high level what are we trying to do right now right and so if that target for example is you need your d7 retention up then you know that might be a key thing to work on if it or it could be like let's let's say you need to work

on monetization and early mid term retention then it could be some kind of let's say you know what's popular in this type of action based Jonah right now is some some form of battle path system because it really you know reinforces sort of like you know quest progression and it'll have a pretty strong impact in terms of your your early mid retention so I think that would be the way that I would approach it is thinking through okay what would are what are our goals and so you know let's say we're good with d1 you know the the question for this type of game what I would probably suspect is naturally like d7 retention and so you know is that good enough and if the if not then what is it going to take to get the d7 to let's say you know 20% for you know whatever our target is and and then from from there think about okay what are all of the specific features whether

it's a gameplay mode or a battle past mechanic or you know it could be very attention retention types of mechanics so on the home screen it could be like a daily quest progression it could be you know different things that you put in in terms of home screen retention so those would be like once you like then say that's our this is our target here are all the different features that can address that target and then to look at each of those features and say you know what is the cost what it's a risk and then prioritize and work on that sort of see really when I was working with a game that felt similar to this I had the ability to make many different game modes I had like a mini game section where I can do all kinds of stuff that I wanted to do many different things one of the things that I had I was forced to do because you know III understand where dos was coming from and I was actually

wasn't even to the point where just wanted worth talking about yet so if you got if I had the metrics and I knew every because basically what we wanted was everything everyone wanted everything we wanted we wanted high day one what's your Woodrum key metric everything now right that was that's what I was up against so when that when that's when that's like when that when I had that pressing down on me you know I still was pretty adamant about what I wanted regardless of like the the like regardless of what the company was like would wanted to see like for example I I believe in most of the time that different game designer should make his mind up as fast as possible and change mine as slowly as possible because people change their mind so fast that it's just ridiculous and free-to-play it's so overwhelming that we want it to like we want it to be successful but we

also want it to be the vision that we had and you know somebody has to own that vision and if nobody owns that vision then nobody on this vision so sometimes I would not even allow myself to change my own game like once I had the idea it was on paper I'd be like you know that's it that's just how it's gonna be we're gonna do that I'm a slave to this now like that's it and we're gonna do this and it's gonna suck and hard work sucks and that's why it's gonna be good because it's worth doing because hard we're not going we're not gonna back out right so I've had those moments but this is what ventually happened I made a screen where I put locks and chains on all the [ __ ] I couldn't finish man it's like coming soon coming soon coming soon I tried to see how I can release these things in content and I ended up having Fayette focus on the one floor area which was gameplay I had engineers taking vacations in the most important part there's performance problems we were giving demos and it was like

itching out and all we needed was this game to be functional and working in the core mechanics and you know it sounds like you guys got you guys are pulled between two two mechanics right there's like this one goes paint mechanic and there's other mechanic layered with it and you know you wanted to be different or you want to focus on one if you don't make if you don't make the decision now the decision is gonna be made before you eventually so like down the line six months from now if this whole thing's broken you guys are gonna go you know what let's just focus on paint mechanic so like I don't know if I think I would I would really be gauging like my engineering future like I sit down with engineers often and I say hey what are you doing how's it going I had two engineers having babies the same month what do you guys do on the weekend and I was like come on they're like you have I'm having a baby this month hey I'm having a baby this

month and I was like - but had two engineers down all these things so your small team I talked I talked to the some of the people who are working on and if there are serious problems in the mechanics you know and we'd have to figure out like how much times are going to take for us to really reach this because if not we need to pivot because I don't want you can't arrive this thing's broken and choppy and not working we want to go with these two mechanics and if they can work the damn it let's do it but if they can't work we need to know right now you know and to the Joseph - Joseph point like like knowing what you really need if it's not everything now then then what then what then what are those things right like what are those things battle passes you know super hard to build they very hard to build I mean you need to battle pass you need to integrate most likely dancing characters emotes maybe special emojis so you can give to another person it's it you have to introduce probably like five or six new features just to do that one right

and you know so if your if your main mechanic was retention in day one and that was what you needed then you know battle passes you can gonna really help you and you know bugs in the game will help you fix day one right like Savin so yeah I like it fix those you'd be way better for day one and the gameplay itself will help you really well with day one and some small mechanics right like you could do like loot chests those little things but you know it really comes down to in my opinion I think that I would have a talk with my with my team about like what we're doing and I would look at our map as like humanely as possible like is there vacations coming up what's going on how much time can we put on this and then how much further do we think we have to go until we actually master our current vision because if we don't think we can do it and we don't we just bought we won't do it we'll lock it behind another node and we'll make a cool menu out of it a block and chain

will swing from it and it'll say new mode coming soon and we'll put a countdown on that thing just so we just try to stick to it you know I'm saying like we try to stick that in line but that's that's just something I wanted to say on top of justice metric design that's that's kind of more of a life that's like this a game designers a new challenge right a new challenge this is it this is it game design it's not all the way about it's not hey I have a cool idea anymore it's how do I work with it within a company where everyone's going you know back and forth from work some people are sick some weeks we have time deadlines money and we need to get this thing out or else we'll do all survive right this is a new game design it's just like this is it right welcome to it you know and so I think you guys should either not change it I probably say not I would probably say I'd be careful about changing it once you change it I don't know I don't

know how then then you start opening up this big gate of change and then you start welcoming to change all the time and never nobody thinks you know what you're doing right but a game designer can change his mind if it's right and if it's true and it's just like let's do it everyone's like hell yeah but it has to be hell yeah because somebody said let's make with the game mode right now it's the best and if you say it's not well what happens is I think within our teams they're like okay we'll change it and then you're like [ __ ] I hope this works - you know these two have the same problem you're like well I hope this decision yeah and one other way to think about what Paul is saying is that you know so especially again for for a team like yours that's so small and where every person is so precious the other sort of way of thinking about you know sort of feature changes or King play mode changes is you know is in terms of doing development proxies and what I mean by that is instead of having to actually make that game mode have your

engineers coded do they'll all do all the art and actually implement it is there any way you can get insight in terms of some of those features or things that you might want to do in terms of the game without actually implementing it so what does that mean so it means that you know is there anything quick and dirty whether it's like okay well let's just bring in you know ten ten of our players and let's just like walk through a wire flank wireframe of the different gameplay modes that we can do and get some initial reactions that way because again you know with with such a limited team and time you you're-you're every single feature for every single thing that you want to do you know how do you feel good about making that decision without actually implementing it right and and so you know fundamentally sometimes it just comes down to well this dude's a lead game designer and that's his vision so let's just go or you know to get data or whatever via focus groups or surveys or whatever you

can you know simple prototype just so that you don't have to spend that full cost would be the other other kind of wave wave way to think about it yeah that's brilliant a little kind of detailed questions were about game mechanic early one here to Paul your your comments on this we're gonna quickly small my screen here okay here we go so we are also iterating on quite quite a quite quirky game mechanic which is like you would actually paint in real time using your finger which is pretty damn cool but then you know we have faced a problem that you would have your finger on the screen but still I just wanna show you guys and hear you guys so let's hope the video is clear here oh do you see the video I'm not seeing a video right now I'm just seeing the slide there we go how about now yep

beautiful so here you can see you're actually spreading the goo with your finger in real time it's pretty neat and it gives you a advantage of you know helping your team and that is on the other side of the map so you spread goo in front of him and he moves faster or you spread the goo in front of enemy and he start to move slower so this is really pretty neat mechanic but but we kind of like felt that it's what too much because then you have your finger on the screen all the time so I want to hear you guys thoughts about that maybe could be capped like it's it's a gun that you use for a three seconds you can actually quickly paint cover some areas so how do you got something about that okay could you explain that one again sorry I didn't quite yeah yeah I can speak to a little bit so let me take on

this great Joseph and maybe he'll learn so there's a girl feel great so the first time I played one of these games was called mini Gore you guys really me or really go anywhere so much but he's like - Joyce they run around games I was just talking a team about this yesterday I think sometimes our users are like this their best student to be treated like kids and that's why we have things in game called tutorials and that's why they locate to have tutors and everything that's at Oriel you can find in the kids industry where they teach children how to read from repetition color coding audio feedback positive reinforcement everything everything everything that we do in our children's education environment is the same kind of things we do in video game environments so we often get a little bit confused about what video games are some people think they're trying to take advantage of kids but really they're just techniques that we do to teach people right that's how people learn

stars good job right these things feel good so when I see like when I imagine someone riding a bus and there there's a glare on their phone and you know there's like notifications coming like this is like the kid in class we cannot sit still right he's like throwing spitballs or whatever it needs you trying to teach this guy that's kind of what our users are like our boffins right they're there they can't focus they they're getting notification for their friends saying hi you know there was a glare they're doing it why there's someone's in the car or something like that so in the name of like you know simplicity I think that it's hard I think this other feature is super hard but it is okay for like probably the sit down I'm really focused on this game I'm gonna kick some ass and I'll figure it out right because people were playing for night like crazy and it's so hard on the touchscreen right so what people are willing to push themselves through that learning curve pretty big so with this particular mechanic I would probably say that I may

try to find another way just because you're even asking about it's a bad sign no I maybe paint can just dump by you pressing a button wherever you walk it starts painting these types of controller games are very hard to do well and then what happens is you end up just scooting backwards most of the time and then aiming if somebody's coming at you or something like that so the strategy in these games feels like you're always just kind of moving and pivoting and if there's a subtle other element then you probably just move backwards pivot and color or something like that people will figure out some strange rhythm and you'll just like what's going on right because I'll just go like this they'll just move backwards and both guys will do the same thing or something like that but I think it could be I think it could be worth changing just because you're gonna have one hell of a tutorial and yeah I don't know but it I guess it really just depends I'd have to really try it because some games are hard some games

are hard to use but you know I just can't but it's rather confirmation that to our thoughts and we actually we don't have this mechanic in our game at the moment but we just be back and we got really good feedback especially for me but then we went but you know investors they you know they might not be the best game designers ever oh yeah we went back and tested it it's pretty cool then we can do in conclusion that hey this doesn't work but I just want to kind of confirmation from from experience like you so thank you yeah yeah watch out for that watch out you might have some kid playing for a night on mobile and you think hey anything's possible then you cancel making your game and it's just like great but I can see how it necessarily love that oh yeah love that between lunch and dinner right yeah I just want to step back a bit to the few constraints we have the game mode so

again like we want the focus to be on like this to spreading the can but we have all of these other things again like picking up potions becoming a giant destroying the core and all of that stuff and then we also have been watching the replays of our players in the game so we've actually seen you know sometimes like people really don't pick up the goo gun at all or they don't know how to grab the potion or they get confused by that so we're just thinking like we're thinking here and we were just talking about you know it's kind of risky to make changes like dramatically just the game mode but I'm wondering like if to actually really ideally just get is the main focus of the game mode it can go into that splatoon kind of turf war game where your only objective is to fill the entire map with your team's field as opposed to having all of these other like destroyed core pick up potion pick up group down kind of thing it was literally just like break it break the goo mechanic down to its most simple form yeah I mean I I think that you know what an apology is you know we haven't played the game so it's hard to kind of

comment on some of these issues without without actually experiencing and playing it but if you have the resources you know the typical the the typical approach to this would be if you've already implement in both modes is to you know kind of launch both and see what the relative KPIs and metrics are so some form of you know AV testing or ideally you know a more of a multi-armed bandit approach would be better but you know you could simply you know sort of EB test those features but you know again if we're if we're talking about a small team with limited resources and fundamentally like the cost to execute this is very high and especially for these demos where you're trying to test with a game that requires high CC you so you've got to push like a [ __ ] ton of users to both modes or it's a three modes or - whatever - like really about and two gets stat sig against that is going to be pretty expensive and so fundamentally just just speaking more philosophically that sometimes in these

situations with limited team's limited resources then about whether it's some form of development proxy or just you know it's it it can sometimes come down to like you know who is who owns the vision for this game and so maybe if it's you Tomas and you're the CEO you're like okay you know what fundamentally we're just gonna have to make a call so like [ __ ] it we're going with like you know plan B and then and then but I mean it sounds like at least from a gameplay perspective that you know maybe some of these minor issues whether it's like the specific in-game objective or whatever that that may not be the thing that kills you it may or may not be it may be something else and so then trying to think about you know if you guys if it is like if you guys camera in a B test great do that you know that'll be your the most definitive way of trying to figure this out if it is going to be too expensive to time it you know and you know again

companies like yours only have a limited number of you know you only have a limited amount of runway and bandwidth and so like then it's like you know how do you prioritize that limited amount of time that you guys have and so then developing whether it's an expected outcomes or ice rights framework or something like that help prioritize and focus your team is important and then to understand okay well if it is let's say it's d7 retention is your issue is your primary focus right now then you know aligning everything to be around what it's what's gonna move that and forgetting about everything else right so whether it's like the gameplay mode or whatever then it's just like okay well you know what [ __ ] it what we have right now is good enough these are the other things that can impact d7 whether it's like you know whether it's a bug or a feature or retention you can have whatever it is then that's how I would be thinking about that but having said that you know maybe if you guys are open to a follow-up call then you know Paul and I can actually play the build and if

there's specific gameplay sorts of questions or issues we can certainly weigh in on those and you know we I can even potentially bring in some of my friends who are you know very gameplay focused who could you know potentially comment on some of that stuff like that that would be sort of the high level thinking from from from my side grunt we can totally shoot up the touch lines or whatever really like today be great I don't think a game that's not I don't think it confusing games are the biggest problem in the world most of times just to be honest but that was kind of I don't I don't want to say that too too too aggressively for you to take that because it could be the wrong answer but it also sometimes doesn't matter I've worked on some games where people say this game is ugly it's confusing and I say well that's the [ __ ] we are so we're gonna be that way now okay and then we turned out to be you know a pretty big deal on that particular product you know and I was just I was just in a arcade bar and there's this game called like Killer

Queen or something like that I don't know what it's called it's called Killer Queen and it's like four on four and everyone's got to do something and I have no idea what's going on none right and nobody else does either ah all right good joysticks and buttons everyone's having their drinks and the game's huge people are doing these big competition now no tutorial nothing and I know it has a social element to it where people can talk and stuff but sometimes being a confusing game could be a strength if you just it's really hard to fix some things it really is it's intense on the game though you might be saying hey guys get this bucket or get this thing now get it get it get it and in some ways you know you might not need to do that to a community who's like the guys like I know I'm like it was lucky because last time I got it I kick some ass alright so so you know the user base could become a little bit more hardcore in that sense to where the things that you're not able to highlight can actually become like a part of it you know so you could own you

can own your flaws and that could actually be a good thing so it is an option I believed in game design I do believe that the I do believe it's often it's not a it's alright it's not a common option but if you're making a crazy crazy fighter imagine some like Chinese freaking fighter game and nobody knows how it works they take off it's going on right it's possible but but just this game's a little bit more casual I've worked on some pretty heavy and notifications that say big being text like do this now and this thing if things help but those were more for like events work before I wanted people to go spend so I don't know and it really just depends I think I should play the game and but I just wanted I just wanted to throw that opinion out and sometimes a game that is confusing wins and that's that's that that's really against the norm right people think we have to be very clear and make this great tutorial everyone's gonna understand it and here comes some game and it's like what is

this right I have no idea how this works you're afraid to look at it and it was like the one other way to kind of think about this game in terms of like a simple framework that I like to use is just one in terms of like the high level in terms of like the the fiction the genre the high level concept how strong that is and so I think what you guys have done is very interesting from the perspective of you know Brawl stars plus splatoon but having said that we also have to understand that right now in the market today there are a lot of companies that especially you know from from your part of the world where teams have been thinking about brawl stars and so you know whether it's Spacey it was their game and there's a lot of folks kind of coming in with a brawl stars type of mechanics and then thinking about like you know from a marketing perspective you know whether the you know sort of brawl stars platoon angle is that is that strong enough and how you would be crafting your marketing message to try and attract players against you know a backdrop where there might be a lot of competition that's one

the the second piece is just thinking in terms of the King play which seems like you guys are thinking a lot about with respect to different game modes different sort of in-game objectives and things like that and how to optimize that so and you know what whether we optimize that through through an a/b test or whether we optimize that and kind of prove upon that just given the cost of testing the different types of gameplay for your kind of game that requires such ICC you would be you know how to determine which gameplay mode to pick and the specific optimizations from a gameplay perspective in the third part which we haven't talked a lot about would be like the systems design or the the way that we monetize against the game and so you know we talked a little bit about battle paths but it would be good to get more information with respect to you know are you monetizing against you know cosmetics battle pass fashion you know for for these types of games and especially with like a four audience they don't like to monetize you know against sort of like more of a PETA

win but it you know is it just cosmetics are you gonna do more of the you know clash Royale model where you are able to sort of have different you know tiers and trophies and you're actually able to monetize against power in the game or you know and just the general sort of monetization design or philosophy that you guys are thinking about so maybe you guys could talk a little bit more about that third piece yeah yeah sure so again it's kind of following the processor's formula there where the characters are the highest value item there but like I'm totally going against that pay to win kind of thing cuz again that's a huge problem I think in gaming personally and I think a lot of players think that as well and of course Cosmetics down the road will be a huge aspect of monetization but other than that it's really about like kind of the gotcha mechanics the characters and them showing like with the most value of everything around exactly and then one thing uh it's gonna share my screen again here quick quick interesting a

little bit further here is - so we're actually thinking of introducing like we briefly touched it that would actually be picking up different guns and different objects from from the from the battlefields so basically that would be a Content plan so we need characters we could introduce like bimonthly near-constant that you could actually find from the end game so keep bringing this mystery from battle royale games to this kind of vodka brawl in a genre as well we've got a really good feedback for this and and we're definitely trying to thank pull that off so obviously want to hear your thoughts on that as well yeah I mean it looks super cool again you know I kind of wanna from for me personally I I know if Paul can win but like I I personally would would refrain from giving too much feedback on the game before playing it but definitely sounds like a a pretty cool idea and certainly the amount of like variety and kind of surprise and

new things that except overall the one other thing I would just caution is you know supercell has a sort of a built-in advantage with respect just because they built such a great brand name you know when they saw font something everybody tries it out and they get so many players and then also just like in terms of the amount of so you know there's there's a lot of public data with respect to how much marketing companies do with respect to the revenue that they get and so there's like this this typical metric around the percent of marketing relative to your bookings or your revenue and for a lot of companies public companies like glue or Zynga that's that's generally in like the 30% range whereas with a supercell because they're so well known and because you know they are who they are and they built this great reputation I I would suspect that's closer to eight percent and and why do I talk about this though the reason why I talk about this is like from a monetization perspective

you actually as an independent developer without the brand name without like the you know or without IP are gonna be facing you know basically uneven battle where structurally you know the amount the amount of economics that you have to overcome is actually higher than supercell so you have to not only match brawl stars you got to be better than them right from from a monetization design from from like almost every it's not a it's not fair to some well you know I mean nothing in life is fair but that's just the situation that you you you're gonna be faced with and so when we have seen supercell kind of struggle right where it had brawl stars out and saw for such a long time trying to improve the game trying to get it to be where it is you know certainly there are challenges challenges which you know I I am Paul probably haven't been studying closely enough but well you know we'll plan what will stay this in and try to help you guys but you know I I guess my

point is that you know that the tricky part is going to be whether it's you know the monetization design or whatever that there is gonna be a little bit of a higher barrier so like for us to just like match supercell is probably not going to be good enough right yeah and we're definitely of course thinking about the battle paths and on all like the newer things that some of these games are introduced as well on transportation terms like circling back little bit to our investors like we have got like it's one of our strengths also to be these freaking ambitious as we are so some of the investors are liking that exactly that [ __ ] yeah these cars are super ambitious like we want yes highway our case like if this canal is successful it's really gonna be successful so we're also thriving on that but obviously keeping our feet in the ground and understanding the realities of how expensive it is marketing these days and these are user application etc yeah and I mean I think you guys have done a good thing with partnering with with a company like super steel like those guys

are from what I mean I I don't know them super well but from what I've seen and heard they they're they're really killing it and definitely it seems like they're picking up so many companies in in Finland like everyone all the Finnish got to like working with them but anyway you know and from you know I would say that like one of the really encouraging things about you guys is I you know I just have to admit I'm super impressed with with what you guys have done with such a small team on that like but but my perspective investors would be crazy not to just like you know continue to invest what you guys have done with like such a small team and small budget it's ridiculous so yeah I'm one congratulations I mean I think and you know I I think we will you know Paul and I will try to help you guys out I don't want to play the game yeah I definitely want to check it out yeah but I do think that from for us I think we probably do have to play the

game a lot more and you know what we'll also study that that sort of brawl stars genre a little bit more so that we can give you more specific feedback with respect to the gameplay but um you know kind of my recommendation in terms of like if you guys want to you know keep talking to us and potentially have you haven't stopped out a little bit more is couple of things one so so Paul and I well you know check out the build will play the game will study the sort of will study brawl stars a bit too try and give you more focused and specific feedback around the gameplay too I think it'd be great to like just just sort of review what your plan is from a soft launch planning perspective in terms of like you know how you guys have structured your soft launch with with respect to you know you know your features roadmap how you're you know are you are there like a bunch of different a be tests or different things that you're new that you're working on but like how you've structured this your

soft launch and then how you are developing your your development roadmap for this time and you know one of the things that I found you know very often like 90% plus of the time is that most companies that jump into soft launch do it without a specific plan so that it's usually [ __ ] up right and she's like oh hey we're in soft launch what are we doing oh well let's look at the metrics okay oh wait oh this is [ __ ] up well then what do we do well let's try and plan a feature oh okay well here's a feature now we got to get someone to design it do we have to get on the mark for it then we have to integrate it then we have to get like the the telemetry that and like the data and stuff to try and measure it and then it's like [ __ ] dude we're like two months in whereas you know if you plan it ahead of time it's like okay boom we're gonna do this feature than this feature of this a/b test and this ap test and you know we're gonna be you know going against this Northstar metric and then here are all the different things that we can do against that and all this stuff's already all the telemetry in terms of

the KPIs and things you're gonna measure Rd in then you save so much time and soft lines and so like you know it'd be great in terms of the second objective in terms of understanding you know how you guys have thought about your soft launch how you guys have you know whether it's like the different tests or the different features and and and sort of just kind of reviewing that and then third eye I think that it's probably worth thinking about from from the perspective of like the high level concept whether you know the approach you guys are taking is the right approach and I normally like I normally wouldn't like want to focus too much time on this aspect just because you know just just as a player or you know just as someone looking at the content it seems like it's so strong and so good already but I kind of worry you know you know space ape has there kind of brawl stars type 3d sort of game and then there's a bunch of other companies coming in that I would worry a little bit about just let's just kind of

make sure we optimize the the marketing message in like the specific way that you're kind of you know presenting that high level concepts so I would put a little bit of fun into that and then fourthly is the that you know the underlying problem behind all of these kind of multiplayer PvP games which is around CC you match around you know can we build a model for how many players that it's gonna take and and so for you guys you know I mean you guys really need to align with super scale very closely because you know if they're managing your user acquisition like they have to understand what you guys actually need to make sure that you guys are testing the things you guys need to test right and so whether it's from okay well we're going to be testing these two three different gameplay modes and so we need stat sig and we need a certain amount of CC you that's X or Y right to be able to you know work with super scale and tell them okay this is what we need in order to test this properly what instead of being like

um I don't know maybe let's just try and bring in you know you know twenty thousand players or let's try and hit like 1,000 or 2,000 veu or whatever it is like and again for these type of high CCU games and depending on how you've implemented your matchmaking and all that and how how much you see you you need to like get your match times down and then whether you guys have box or not like this is actually a big hairy kind of issue and problem that underlies all of these sort of PvP match based games and so to characterize that a little bit more formally so that you know again we want to be as efficient as possible especially for a team like yours that's so small with limited budget limited time going against some of these diane's be as smart as possible and so that would be the other area that I think we can try and put a little bit of more formalizing and then on let me also note if if you guys wanna dive deep more to the proprietary framework we're building

cuz we've been talking about a lot of like scarce resources but actually like talking about game launch we can actually pump a new game of being in one day it's so streamlined even Jose - yeah I built I built like the the turf war game mode in a matter of like two hours and then it takes you know an extra two hours or three hours to get everything like all the little nuances everything like pretty much kind of pre-built in a sense but I'm also like kind of not you know we have full flexibility well things are also kind of like already there plug and play okay cool yeah and if you guys are looking for funding you know I do you know I'd be happy to introduce you to a couple of folks as well that who I know on my side looking to invest in companies like yours so that would be lovely okay well what do you need to know we can continue like maybe we can wrap it up here but then I'll send a follow-up

email against those four different things and then in terms of specific action times if you can get pollen I like a you know test with you soon or something like that and then then probably the other piece is like if you have a game design doc around the monetization or how you've planned your whether it's your battle past or how you plan your your systems design then maybe in our follow-up call we can also we can cover the gameplay and then we can also dive a little bit more deeply into the systems design and then I'm hoping I'm hoping that I can like if if you do have that systems design aspect I'm hoping I can get our buddy Jeff wet Jeff if you're listening to this please please don't jump on our next call but I'm hoping you guys some very like you know he's a systems design master so like if he can give you guys some feedback with respect to your specific met assistance designed as well the [ __ ] with sign in the sky okay great

well in that case I think that's it hey guys thank you so much for your time and your interest oh you know what I love doing this stuff and then and then you know also just congratulations on you guys have been able to accomplish so far I mean you guys definitely have a lot to be proud of but there's so much thanks [Music]