FRAMED: A Recipe for Critical Success

[Music] okay so um thank you everyone for coming today my name is Joshua Boggs and I'm the designer and director of friend we've got a lot to get through so we'll just run through it as quickly as possible we don't have heaps of time so let's do it so as I said I'm Joshua Boggs I'm a game designer and director pride afraind I've been in the industry for about eight years now some of the time is spent at the EA in various other Studios and I've been independent for about four of them I've also been pretty fortunate to have won some awards and this talk is a bit about how we did that that's obviously not there all is to me one thing that's going to become clear in the talk is I have a talent for I

guess reading people but reading them inside a social system some may call that sociopathic I just call it being aware of others and their motives so in case you don't know what framed is framed is a noir puzzle game we rearrange panels of a comic book to change the outcome of the story as you can see we've done pretty well and let's go so it all starts with the choice right every project you make is just a series of choices this isn't rocket science those of us that make games know this well you make choices that impact the game and its development every single time things like what is this game about how old people find my game how I make money from my game and something that Bruce talked about a couple years ago what makes my game remarkable these are all very valid and important questions however there's one question one choice

that developers often don't ask themselves and it is this how do I want my game to be perceived this is an important distinction because as we know in game development we have a large control over many things but not necessarily what happens wants us out in the wild but that's not entirely true because every choice you make about your game during development during release during pre-production is you subtly speaking to the public to curators AppStore editors about how they should perceive your game this is the essence of what PR marketing is right hundreds of billions of dollars are spent every year to try and create a favorable message a favorable reaction to a product and your game is no different obviously sorry this talk is about taking control of what you're saying you'll hear me speak a lot about the decisions you made during development and this particular tactics were used but if you pay attention you'll notice that even among those development focus

choices is a common theme and their theme is that every choice we made was deliberately focused on tailoring and tailoring the public perception of framed prior to release so what choices do we make well firstly we're going to make a very different kind of game obviously something they could be recognized in a single screenshot something incredibly striking and carefully designed it needed to be recognizable in a pub on the tram or on the subway how to get people come up to you and ask you what is that game you're playing in public secondly we're going to distinguish ourselves from the kind of low flow fad going on at the time by handcrafting every part of every piece of art every piece of animation for every panel in level we felt that this would send a message that this was a real like a really high quality product in a really high quality game and we doubled down on this by actually focusing on Apple rather than PC PC was

the dominant platform at the time but we felt that kind of pairing of the interface and the careful design and just the kind of experience of using an Apple product would be a great pairing and most importantly we're going to focus our efforts on winning awards on the festival circuit so for anyone who's not where real quick what is the festival circuit put simply the festival circuit is a season of exhibitions conferences and award shows that you can submit the game to these shows take place all around the world and if you are successful in being picked as a finalist or a showcase game you get free booth space and the opportunities to network with distributors absolute it is publishers fans and obviously journalists but that's not the only goal of pursuing this route or I should say there's not the real goal of committing to the festival circuit because the festival circuit is really about shaping the perception of your game by being at festivals award shows and official selections you do two things first you

add that coveted award wreath to your marketing materials this further enhances that perception of quality and hyperness around your game there it is look at it how lovely - your marketing directly - tastemakers these are your these are your curators that cut the connoisseurs - youtubers and journalists they are at these shows it's their job to be at these shows and their voices are bigger than yours can ever be you just like at the same time and resources as someone like EA or Ubisoft so you need to spend your time as effectively as possible everything you're doing needs to be hitting two birds with one stone and this is the one-two punch of the festival circuit you increase hype and expectations around your game by frequently appearing it shows as a successful title this allows you to bring this allows you to bring in notice a larger influence in you to market your game for you to the rest of the world but this in turn helps

build a more hyper in your game which means that when you do submit to the next show chances are that those judges and show curators have heard about your game and a lot more likely to check it out this positive PR feedback lead is pivotal to cutting through the noise and shaping the perception of your game with something that is a must-have quality title so for those that aren't aware this is just a quick run-through of a bunch of events in the festival circuit these are the ones that we focused on but there's more festivals every yeah that are opening up and I could not recommend more the two URLs the bottom gain comps calm and promoter are calm promoter at without it we probably would have missed a lot of this and we probably wouldn't have done as well as we did it since you like really awesome reminders it's great really check it out sorry aside from the main

goal of shaping the perception around your game festival circuits also provided number of other great benefits the first one that lets you gauge the public perception of your game have people already heard about the game what are people saying about it when they see your logo your banner do they turn to their friend and say obvious is that game framed or this is you know hyper light or this is whatever game you're working on if they do then you're on the right track free interviews obviously if you're selected you give them a free booth and that lets journalists and media outlets just voxpop you right at your booth and pretty important is free play testing if you're going to be maintaining that perception of value and quality you need to be taking in as much feedback as possible this doesn't mean hounding people afterward oftentimes it's just about listening to their faces their body language and others around them watching them as they play reading these cues and matching them with what's going on

there's normally a service you'd pay a fair amount of money for attending as many shows as possible also allows you to test it among different audiences for example the packs crowd is very very different to the you south-by-southwest crowd South by Southwest is more like a general mainstream or public event whereas taxes clearly packs so talking about the benefits of the festival circuit it's all well and good but with the bar always rising particularly the competition inside the festival circuit your game really needs to stand out and cut through the noise it needs to be very very polished this means that people often don't start submitting to shows and competitions till the game is either finished or in beta however it is possible sorry-sorry it is possible to maintain their quality throughout development remember you want to shape that perception of quality and the best way to do that over a long period of time is to submit as many festivals as possible so here are the development strategies that we employ allow us to continuously

submit frames to competitions and award shows allowing us to shape that perception drop the entire development so the core tenant we've upheld is to ensure that you're developing your game to a timeline that adheres to the festival circuits award show so their submissions and their showings that means you need to always have a submission quality build on hand no matter what here are some of the ways we did that so number one your imagination is the best prototype play test your entire game on paper or Lego or anything faster than a computer you want that turnaround between design and experience to be as immediate as writing or painting video game creation has a long turnaround time between creation and experience but game design doesn't really need to be simulated in your mind if possible you need to make that turnaround between inception and execution as fast as physically possible then once you've done that practice on

others let them imagine the world you've left out because you'll be surprised by the results and it will force you to ensure that your designs are very readable and very intuitive number two and this one's a bit controversial but assume everything is final and don't create placeholder assets by not using placeholder assets the idea is that sorry ensure that you're not using placeholder assets the idea is more than the mechanic the idea is about how the aesthetics the things and mechanics will come together the magic that happens when they all learn to play that is the feeling you have in your imagination that is the core idea of your game often times so doing work-in-progress placeholders often doesn't give that feeling identify which parts are not essential and lead them to later but make sure you do not discard the feeling that you're trying to capture many people throw everything except the system of mechanics and they do this but doing that is just throwing out the baby with the bathwater the game is the feeling you're trying to

capture for example the witness right is it just a series of puzzles with nice art it's it's more than that it's a feeling of both mystery and Zen an idea that logic and spirituality and what and the same thing and all the mechanics and things are trying to give you you know a general grasp of that idea number three the only milestones are submission deadlines there's usually about ten weeks between each major Expo and award show this is how long it should take you to make significant improvements and add additional content if it takes longer your pipelines a bit too slow you'll be submitting your polish builds as many festivals as possible while maintaining the trajectory of the project the only way to do that is obviously the treat award submissions as your major milestones in ten weeks is the magic number it's not some arbitrary random optimal time I've plucked out it is literally the time between the biggest and most important award shows that you can get into and they're all in

different parts of the world you'll often find them seasonal as well IG f GC we are here now South by Southwest PAX East are all in this earlier part of the year and in the middle of you've got games calm you're a gamer took your games row as well I think unless that's moved out they're all seasonal and you usually have about ten weeks between each major one and the other one is to develop the game episodically if you can regardless of if it really is what you're really doing here so it's offal frying for example 30% of our 10 meter neurons were spent carefully and quickly designing everything that would happen the feeling we were trying to capture mechanics and aesthetics are mechanisms to achieve that feeling but not the end goal them so so focus on that higher feeling the quality title is really carefully and deliberately designed we spent our 10-week deadline as follows three weeks carefully designing all content six weeks creating final assets and then one

week for a view and polish this allowed us to build in final chunks or many polished prototypes over and over and over again by adopting this method you give yourself the ability to submit continuously through our development whilst building the entirety of your game not only that it means that when you hit the end wreath at are you done or B have just one more sprint to do when what ten week turnaround to bring everything together so make a game episodically regardless of if it is you all has to finish as many vertical slices as quickly as possible this one's kind of obvious but everyone's a hipster bring everyone and bring others in early your goal here isn't just for feedback it's to bring in influential people to talk about to talk about your game for you and for them to become familiar with the game refrain decided this actually started back in 2011 or 2012 when we first submitted the super rough prototype to IGF it obviously didn't get accepted but the point was so that there were a few people that were judges or

jurors would see the game and then in future would recognize the game and and that would help us further down the path of this for second this one's a little hack I like its visual polish is important but not as important as audio so the thing with aesthetics is it creates atmosphere an emotional target and great audio design will lift every single aspect of your game so if you have great audio early not only does it lift the entire experience but the game feels more polished and finished since audio is usually left at the end of a project so once you've nailed your strategies and submission processes to shows and awards excuse me it's time to manage your show floor presence again this has got shaping that perception of quality it's the first thing you want to do is control your crowd nothing draws people in like a crowd so the first piece of

advice is to cycle your devices this is so important particularly if you are showing a mobile game it gives you the unique ability to vary the number of devices he has out on your booth nothing draws people in like a crowd like I said so start with a device or two out on the table then only add more as the crowd becomes too large to manage importantly you should only remove a device though if the crowd is sort of listening to agree that it's unable to sustain itself you always want a little bit of crowd and you want players to actually wait a turn so that they draw in more viewers and more people doing the stringer circuit means that when editors or journalists or anyone comes by they'll see the crowd and are a lot more likely to check your game out always have one more spare build so all that said you never know when someone from developer relations or an editor or anyone or the media will come around you want to make sure that you make the most of your time at your booth so you want to always make sure they have a spare duck but sorry a spare device on hand and you never hand

this out to the public this way you can jump in and begin the interview or begin pitching a game immediately one time we were at PAX event showing friend and jury from Penny Arcade walked past so knowing that the comic crossover would work well I dragged off a device ran over to him that resulted in coverage all in front of opinion ok the next day and kind of telling everyone to go check out frame the following day so I always have a spare build down and know who's on the show for but also treat everyone like they could be a tastemaker because there are a number of people who do walk around without their badges just so that they don't get hounded this is my favorite one is being a member of the crowd it's often really hard to get honest feedback about your game and some people even carefully manage their facial expressions not to offend you so infiltrate the ground remove your badge or hide it and move to the rear on the side of the crowd watch them see how

the players react to your game and listen to the conversations that bystanders have as well you can gain a lot of really really valuable insight this way this one's a bit controversial but a open dialogue where they can critique the game obviously if you ask someone their opinion people like that and they like to feel smart so they'll often tell you what you want but if that doesn't work you can call them out nicely on their frustration you observed when you're masquerading as a member of the crowd the emotional desire and people to defend themselves will always kind of outweigh their cognitive practice of masking their emotions or desires so you can use that to your advantage but only if you do it in a really nice way that's not confrontational so this process this systematic approach the festival circuit was what we employed for framed so how did it turn out for us well as you saw before it went pretty well but it's important to remember that the festival circuit or award circuit is a

system and like any system if you understand how it works it can be gained and been to your advantage so bearing all that in mind a lots must have been pretty successful right well we launched framed in November 2014 and significant critical acclaim by the time we released everything seemed to be on track Apple we're ready they want to know a release day we had translated the game to 14 languages and it did go all right we got some feature spots in China and Japan and Australia and sort of just above the fold so you know this first four that you normally see on the app store we moved 20,000 units in the first weekend and by the end of the first week we'd move 35,000 so at $5 a pop for a premium indie title we weren't doing half they had but we were really underperforming our expectation is quite seriously and with

the budget of almost half a million Australian dollars half of it being salary sacrifice so it wasn't really that much then cost and budget are different we were looking at only breaking even at cost we had team the four to six people we are investors to pay back and with a game so hyped and so critically acclaimed with expectations of success so high this is bad news for us so what went wrong with our launch why was our launch internally a failure well the thing with releasing anything is there is always a huge amount of luck involved anyone who tells you otherwise or who say is that they succeeded in launching because they did XYZ in a very specific order there's glossing every huge fact that they likely don't want to admit that they also got extremely lucky we don't like to talk about it because it sounds hopeless right if it's all just a gamble what's the point what's the use of shaping that message the quality of pouring blood sweat and tears into your

project excuse me into your baby if it's all just a roll of the dice anyway and there's certainly one way to look at it you are literally taking your entire game budget walking into the casino and dumping that two three even four years of your life onto the table but there's a huge element of luck because in any release there are a huge amount of variables that are completely out of your control you've done all the preparations but you can't really predict the weather now you just got to hope no storm rolls in that a large game franchises an unexpectedly drop on that day will make a huge announcement well that the media in general line consumed by some other scandal at the time or their tastes have changed or that your apps redditor whose champion your game suddenly leaves their job so just don't make games honestly it's not like this okay jokes aside though as PR is not a silver

bullet it's about tipping the odds of success in your favor the goal isn't to have fine-grained control of your lease it's impossible to do that your lists attempt the results at the house in your favor every release is a gamble and all the work that you've been doing to make you gain great to shape that perception of value bringing in those tastemakers will help tip the odds further in your favor you want to walk into that metaphorical casino and have all the dealer's wanting you to win still a high-stakes gamble but your end goal is to slowly but surely tip those odds in your favor so if everything goes well and you've managed to lock it out congratulations but what if it doesn't what do you do if the odds don't go your way well the reason I thought so much about shaping that perception of quality of value is if I doing so not only do you create a great game but it's also insurance equality games the best

defense against a bad launch because the longtail diva game will continue to bring in people seeking quality experiences the owner we're just real quick the long tail is this part of the typical sales graph it largely stays steady and you can earn just as much money from it as you're launched if not more and this is some pricing helps this along with all the messaging and work that you've done prior to release on the circuit trailers interviews streams and importantly those award rates how many times have been looking for a quality movie to watch and made a decision based off of the critical acclaim it is I do it all the time I'm sure many of you do as well we make judgments based off the reputation of respected people of taste makers the festival circuit only helps in pre-release hype it's also an essential ingredient in maintaining assistant sustainable long tail after release so if you're launched doesn't go your way you still have a decent long tail to the 14 all we had certain things

not grow away during launch we also had a lot of things to you know that did joy away it's kind of just the nature of luck right cadenas Game of the Year endorsement was a great example of influential tastemakers weighing in it was lucky that he saw at that point in time Apple continually re feature framed in smaller features sales and bundles we're not the only in title that is unfree long long tail our friends that can mobius have done similarly well for too wet and I'm sure that there's many others who've done well in the long tail so the theory of the long tail is obviously that our culture and economy is shifting away from that big spike and towards niches and due to how our games are largely digitally distributed and how widely accessible our games have become through our phones we and many others have made more in our long tail than our launch period spike almost 10 times as much currently we're now sitting at almost

400,000 paid units almost 18 months after release we get featured regularly in minor future bundles and sales level China is actually our top of warming country why because we're filling gaps where others don't try to we ensure that the design stage of the game was intuitive and readable on the festival circuit another great thing about it so we did travel to many countries trying to included Japan and being able to gauge how people can play a game with that language barrier or culture barrier so premium pricing does still work on iOS but it's not easy to make it work you need to invest heavily in shaping your game as a premium experience and ensure it's accessible to everyone you're seeking to fill gaps our audience are connoisseurs they want well crafted carefully designed experiences the premium market does work just in to shift your perspective away from what everyone else is doing you won't get the same numbers as free-to-play but we're playing a different game we have a different scale of measurement for those

of us crafting premium titles on mobile it's not about quantity it's about quality thank you [Applause] I'm not sure if we have time for questions I think we do Gil five minutes yep do you I think you have to line up at the thingy yeah hey considering the long tail I'm curious if the festival circle is relevant after a launch of the game I mean you'll on and then do you still try to go to these events yeah that's a really good question we so the question was is the festival circuit still valid after you've released good question I know a lot of people who have still done it a lot like necrodancer still girl on the circuit and continually do well it shows well we particularly haven't done

it but I can only imagine that it helps bolster that long term here thank you hello Joshua so my question relates to anyone who's interested in making games but maybe doesn't actually have the capital to get to the stage that you are how does the festival circuit enable those type of game designers because obviously at GDC we get to see a lot of like games jam games and smaller sort of stands but is there any way that games like that in your experience have ever achieved those accreditations and should they even be seeking those kind of yeah so the question was do the for people with less money is the festival circuit still something that you want they should pursue I'd argue yes because the goal of the festival circuit is to be submitting to these things and all and if you are accepted as you know like a showcase game or either going to give you dates they usually give you a free

booth so it's a really good way to get free play testing and free booths you still have to cut the problem of travel and everything but I guess there's kind of one of the you know facts about making games I guess is that it cost money or time in time but you wouldn't say there's a glass ceiling in the sense then no I'm coming here yeah yeah I don't feel there is no cool hey so thanks for a great talk yes so if in this fight all the hard work you get you went into putting the festival circuit and getting awarded on there the initial launch was a little underwhelming as he said and it was only in the long-term quality that helped create the awesome long tail looking back on that was there something you misjudged with the initial festival response that make my contributed to that and if so are you trying to work on that for your next project mmm the question was was it something wrong I had done a lot wrong but like

misjudged during the circuit right to contribute to the launch it's a good question I mean you can always look back and say I wish you did XYZ better but to be honest I think that we did as well as we could do we did do pretty well but um you know I said I think sometimes you know like I was saying when you release something there's a huge amount of luck involved it's not my thing that hear or talk about because it sounds hopeless but I don't really believe it is you destroy my take yours in your favor sometimes it doesn't go exactly the way you want and that's just kind of a fact of life thank you Cheers cool I think that's it thanks for coming everyone [Applause]