Bringing Peglin to the mobile market | Dylan Gedig from Red Nexus

foreign by Dylan getig of red Nexus games how are you doing today I'm doing pretty well thanks for having me this is a treat for me because I now get to talk to an actual developer I speak to a lot of AD platforms and whatnot and it's nice to finally talk to someone who makes the games that these people are advertising so thank you for that yeah don't worry um what do you hear promotion what's the game that you've been working on and uh tell us a little bit about it that sounds good yeah so our most recent game is called peglin uh thing about an early access in April of last year and we've just been continuing to throw content at it to try and make it better and better and what we're up to now is starting work on the mobile Port which we'll be rolling out towards the end of March or early April so we're here at Pocket Gamer to kind of try and learn as much as we can and form the the Partnerships that we might need to make that as successful as possible well you said you've been working on the

game since roundabout 2019 and you were doing console platforms first and maybe we're going to introduce it to mobile later but you've now sort of moved that up a little bit what what has that been in reaction to yeah that was our original plan so yeah we started the game in 2019 and then when the pandemic kind of hit in full force that was when we really started focusing on it and also when the game kind of found its own footing so we found an audience you know decently early on and thankfully that led to a successful Early Access release and you know in our original kind of naive planning it was like we'll do PC Early Access consoles with our 1.0 and then mobiles later on as this kind of a half of the game there available make sure it's you know playable and ready to go um and what happened was when we got into that CC Early Access the community started asking like you know I would love away to play this on the go like it's such a good fit for a mobile platform like why can't I play this on you know my Android phone or my Apple phone um and that was when we kind of revised visited our plans to bump that up make

mobile part of our Early Access release and then we'll still have a big 1.0 celebration kind of a little ways down the line so really reacting to the community response then what type of game is it by the way uh it's a Pachinko roguelike we call it so as opposed to a traditional like deck building roguelike we're reflecting cards that you would play to defeat enemies uh you play almost a little game of pinball you collect different balls of different attributes different physics uh different attacks attached to them bounce them through a little Peg field and that determines how much damage they'll do to your enemy gotcha now you're launching the game is a premium model I imagine that's partially a result of coming from console where it's so much more familiar nowadays some people might say premium model on mobile that's a bold move because everything is kind of moved into either free to play or ad supported what were your feelings on it what kind of advice did you get prior to taking on the the development of the game yeah yeah it's funny we tell people that we're gonna to release this game you know premium ten dollars on

mobile and a lot of people at this conference have looked at us like we have two heads like you're insane that's not like optimized or mobile you know here are the things that you have to do to be successful on mobile uh and no we did spend a little bit of time investigating that like does the design of the game match that can we have a fun game with the tools that we have with the platform that we built that Embraces that model and leans into it and we eventually just kind of came to the conclusion that like anything we change for that degree wouldn't be the same game anymore so whether or not in the future we have like a spin-off or a sequel or something that it goes into that free to play model instead you know that might be something that we do and that would be nice in some ways because it would make the game a lot more approachable for you know a wider audience but just given the fact that we've cultivated such an excellent like Community with the existing premium model we decided that that was just a better method to Branch out to and go that route for our mobile release as well more of a just one-to-one direct

Port than a mobile specific build essentially gotcha and with the this mobile build being out towards the end of the year only certainly the The Early Access version of it what is it that you're looking for the show you mentioned about maybe meeting up with other Developers for a little bit of the old mind share but are you looking for publishing are you self-publishing how are you going about it yeah we'll be self-publishing this release as well you know we kind of uh interviewed some Publishers for the initial PC release and didn't find anything that was a great fit for what we were looking for it didn't help that you know the initial Publishers kind of passed on the game until it had reached a certain level of popularity from what we had already done so by the time they were interested it was almost too late so no no partner steps kind of materialized there uh so for mobile we're just gonna kind of skip all of that like looking around stage uh self-published with the community that we have uh available already um

yeah do it our own way um so what we're looking for here is this kind of like best practices and pitfalls to avoid from other developers that have done the same thing and other Partnerships that you know aren't necessarily publishing but might help us make the best game we can and get it in front of as many people that might be interested so acid like developer these days with a Marketplace is saturated as it is and visibility so difficult to get without you know the amount of people to spend on trying to you know user acquisition and all the rest of it and even that's by no means guaranteed you've obviously enjoyed a bit of a community ground swell there what are the concerns when you're bringing something to mobile and how much of a gamble does it feel like as you sit here now do you feel quite comfortable that you'll be able to do something or is it genuinely like a flip of the coin and you have to wait and see yeah for us thankfully like we're not really relying too much on the mobile release uh the release that we're going for is mostly for the community you know it's just

been requested so much that's why we kind of bumped it up so we're not super worried about user acquisition or you know finding the audience like you know there's kind of a mobile game method where you kind of figure out your like lifetime value for users and you throw as much money as you possibly can of that user acquisition and then you know focus on retention a little bit um and coming from like the Indie scene specifically in the premium games where you're just trying to make a game that's as fun as possible and your marketing is kind of uh content creators playing your game because they enjoy it users playing your game the users players finding your game and liking it sharing it with their friends so it's really you know we're kind of researching the mobile way that's kind of taken over and is the industry standard but we're really going to approach it our own way and do it the kind of Indie way that we've we've found success with already you know the original game started as like a hobby project and I think the way it was designed because of that really

resonated with people and so you really don't want to lose that along the way I'm going to assume a fairly small team is adjust yourself or you've got a a bunch of posts with you yeah I was just myself originally but we've grown to six people now so we're not a massive team but we're a little company now which is kind of nice and I imagine you're all focused on this at the minute are you already looking at potential future projects or are you just keeping your eye on the ball of them in yeah I would absolutely love to be like dabbling with future projects this game came from a game Jam so it's been really killing me like not participating in game jams for the last like several years uh but we just owe so much to our community that we are just like solely focused on like getting this game to the Finish Point uh you know we're still in Early Access right now so there is a lot of people that have kind of given you know shown their faith to kind of jump on this early with the uh idea that it will one day be like this fully polished printed game so we're really just like focusing as much as we can on that right now and then we'll

start thinking about next projects as we get a little closer to the end of this one foreign