How The Walking Dead mobile game was brought to life

we have the absolute pleasure to invite the team who've been behind making of the walking dead about to join us so we've got from IO you go you get on Dan Merrick from sky bound and Jory pistol from Skokie if you guys could come up and join us dime obviously you can't go anywhere at the moment without being aware of the walking dead can hear that has face it it's it's been an incredible kind of phenomenon from the early days of the comics so I'm busy to the TV show and what we're going to try and do is really try and understand what's happened in the game and you guys have done some amazing things with the game so let's start off just you know if I can just ask you to introduce yourselves and kind of what you guys do and the teams that you work with and what you contributed to the game so yeah great don't start yeah my name is Jory Piersol

SCP a product at scope lee i basically after the product management group of scope lee and served as the general manager for the walking dead wrote a survival basically from from day 0 all the way through launch just a little bit about scope lee we're a mobile entertainment publisher we've had six consecutive number-one free apps on the App Store most recently was walking dead rubber survival and we have two games right now kind of consistently sitting in top 50 grossing and I think wrote a survival right now is sitting around 11 on on Google Play so doing pretty well for us let's see what else about scope lee we're running at about a hundred million dollar annual run rate were ranked by Deloitte as a second fastest growing tech company in North America so it's been an exciting couple years hi i'm dan

murray a run skybound interactive Skybound is a media company that places craters at the center it's it was founded by Robert Kirkman who's the creator of The Walking Dead and he basically the philosophy of our company is to extend sort of the same opportunity that happened for Robert by retaining the rights to the walking dead to other Creators so we partner up with a lot of different creators and all kinds of different media obviously my focus is on the game side and most people recognize us from the tail tail games that we've done around the walking dead this is sort of the second for rave the walking dead in the mobile I mean in the in the game space other than a walking dead as a mobile game that we did a couple years ago but this is the first free-to-play game in this space you know we're doing a lot of different stuff when it comes to all kinds of different platforms but really mobile is sort of a big area focus for our company

as we sort of always look to try to engage our fan base directly hi I'm white que han so I'm the EVP ago I helped up with production products and technology at the studio are you guys been around for 13 years I've been at the studio for 11th we started out making feature phone games you know flip phones boooo as do i remember those yeah 64k games and a small ones that big we had a 24k joe limit on some of the earliest of the third matrix Wow yeah so we we came out from that and then we we did the smartphone games and obviously are right around 2010 2009 we switch over to free to play as the market did and then we have been building different products since then acting offers notable success will solar power

okay so I believe that was 2009 Pocket Gamer free premium game of the year so that was a it was a lucky hit it was one of our first first free-to-play games we did five games after that I didn't succeed and then until then we hit knights and Dragons with grief so that was a good success and then after that we did three more that there wasn't really considered commercially successful and then we did walking dead so based on that maybe we just need one more failures never hit the next one but you don't really like say there's a lot of material in there a lot when I we talked about the lean startup earlier with the I paper guys and I mean this idea of failure it's obvious I think thoroughly misunderstood particularly in the UK and but I think it's incredibly important part I mean my whole career could be arguably defined as you know colossal failures in massive ways I did some of the first online gaming services i was first mobile operator guys playstation home I mean it's a sit as some sort of biggest success failure things going and obviously no longer

with us but the mount I learnt from those near misses was incredible much more than if I had actually been managing one of the services are continued ever ever forward I mean do you think how much do you think you brought from those early experiments into the walking dead I think in general as a studio we grow with it I think we are we celebrate failures in a sense I think it helps us in many ways technologies one big thing whereby with every product we put out there we see what a deficiency we improve it you know failures actually exposes a lot of the weaknesses in your platform and the tech that you are deploying how you're running life ups and stuff like that the other big component is the team and the team experience with failures experiences successes that helped them understand and improve the processes and even like direct it in a more efficient manner for the next one so you increase your chances of success is never a sure

thing but I think we are on the business of making sure that we have the highest powerful video success and I think that idea of technology and the protis is anything this isn't again another area the less understood by people who haven't been involved in long-term services as often deep desert so how did the process get started for the game you know with deer come idea come from to make a Walking Dead game was it from yourselves yeah i mean i could probably touched on the beginning of that because i joined about two and a half years ago you know Robert and his business partner David Alpert had an appetite to do more in the game space I think obviously the success of the tail tail Walking Dead game helped fuel that and you know and and so when they brought me in you know the initial sort of mandate was to go out and just sort of not you know sort of reach out to you know developers and try to you know figure out how we could you know connect to the development

process and figure out ways to do that in an authentic and efficient manner but when we started looking at mobile obviously it's much different especially in the free-to-play mark it's a much different beast than per se making a premium game so you know my advice to them is like look we're going to happen you know we're going to have to find some some firepower you know and especially with this kind of brand we're going to we're going to this let's go seek out a publisher that's really aggressive and and is looking at sort of you know and to grow with us and so for us it's always you know I think you know failure is something that we always try to embrace because if you're not trying if you're not trying to do something different or innovate and those come in all different ways then you're you're not taking it you're not taking a chance to the end result you're probably not going to make something that for us our fans are going to probably going to recognize is something that's not unique you know especially with the walking dead there's so many different products now out around the walking dead and it's

really important for us to figure out how to take it you know a risk and find the partners to do so it's cutting a really important thing I think they you've just highlighted which is that you didn't just go out there think it all will make a game you actually SAT back and think Hannah it if we're going to make a game we need people have got the experience on technology to do it yeah but also publishing process that's got the pardon the pun scope to be able to take it to the level that it should be I mean is that kind of where you guys come into that process I mean for uh for me speaking from the scope lee side it was just kind of a dream opportunity in many ways you know I have a background making our bee gees for for a while now and had the pleasure working with I you go and pass jobs and so when we started talking I was just like this is the perfect you know it's the perfect world to build a game with it right i mean when you look for when you look for that right context right it's linked how deep and immersed in the world do you have you know do you have kind of compelling characters story all these things you can kind of build on top of so it was really it was it just

made perfect sense to do a game yeah I maybe just became a conversation you know I actually was it was Henry you know Lowenthal's and I that sort of you know I met each other events like this you know and so we basically just got together and started talking you know and they had approached me initially about hey you know we're looking to sort of transition into more of a mid-core type of game and you know we're looking at sort of ips they can marry to that and obviously the walking dead offers a lot to that because it's not just about zombies and about the end of the world about the beginning of the world and there's a tribal war aspect to it which really marries well to the pvp elephants that you can introduce into a game a free-to-play game so you know that's where it started literally just Henry and I sorta chatting it events like this and and then it kind of evolved where they introduced you go and it wasn't natural you know like looking at knights and Dragons that's what we really took a close look at but you know and you wouldn't naturally just look then go

that's the perfect fit but when we got into it and we actually knew some of the people that worked at skybound myself and one of our managing partners we knew about you go from our past days being on the development side so that we knew that they had the chops to really execute but we saw in knights and dragons were the bones of something that could really apply to this style of game really fascinating that you know if you think about it you wouldn't have been automatically gone for a bill battler game with the brand like you know walking dead given the history of the tell-tale getting narrative art because they you know historically haven't been very strong in terms of the overarching narrative and yet you've really tried to take that on so how did you how do you make them to do the Builder backer and then move on to make something it would then keep true to the narrative yeah it was a good go ahead I think I think there's a lot of discussion between the three partners I think one thing that really well is that we are always open conversation with each other on this kind of stuff so

with the narrative it's it's a couple things is about making sure that the art books right to the fans and the story is true to the cannon weekend like a pics like stories and stuff like that I want to do but we can't change the cannon so that's one big thing and I think picking out the writers I think we've asked Islands help is really really crucial I think the writing is such such a delicate thing that that if you had it a little bit off the fans can can sense that you know so that's one of the stuff that we did well with this product yeah you know it was a big challenge be perfectly frank we actually we had there's a good six month process there where we got undercoated no no it was it was hard and we had a lot of arguments back and forth about sort of the importance of narrative in a free-to-play game and how to do that authentically and and we and yeah we went down a couple different paths and had to come back and what we ended up you know figuring out is like you know

for Robert you know specifically you know he's writing a comic book you know the Walking Dead is still a living breathing IP and you know there's a TV show that you know that takes some bits of the comic book but yet messes up with other parts so he kind of likes to mix and match and treat each medium very specifically unique to that medium but when once we got too far and if we went directly in the cannon we knew we were going to just run out of runway we're like the content would be gone in a matter of months because people consume content so quickly on this type of game so what we figured out is we brought in a guy named Jay Bonin singha throughout a lot of the governor actually about the governor novels with Robert so there's a lot of backstory that hadn't been put out in either a comic or the TV show and so we really leaned in on the town of Woodbury as a way to sort of introduce new characters and to create a mission structure that would allow us to sort of do what we did with tail tail in the sense create sort of another parallel

sort of set of characters that are sort of going alongside what was happening in the comic book but at the same time that would afford us the ability to then create a limited time events that we could pull directly from material itself because the woodbury pit time period is such a pivotal ball of the narrative of the whole story we could intersect essentially as what would happens we could kind of go back and forth but we could still kind of keep the the main threat of the mission main mission structure over here while we then just went ok now we're going to go back and forth and time and tell these side stories and so it really allowed us that ability to constantly you know I have to have enough content but we kind of hinted at me it seems to me this there's a whole bunch of compromise that has to happen to make this stuff work I mean gameplay in particular I'm thinking about because in order to support the initial narrative there's going to be a certain type of game player is going to work but over time do you have to adapt that do you have to sort of think about the the way that you retain an audience in a different way and how does it

affect kind of keep things a narrative affect the way you build the game I think the product is is evolving a girl it's evolving along with DD comic and the show and we try to take advantage of a lot of the things that's happening in the media relating to the IP if you if you play the game at the beginning it's very insular it's very pdes you have small groups PvP the kind of stuff we're slowly building that up into a different form of gameplay there's more evolution along that lines whereby there's a there's a bigger world out there is not just you're not alone you know no no and you get into gameplay whereby pits you against massive groups of our other players I think that that's how we evolve that game play along threat yeah we knew we knew we could get there because there's the whole arc with the TV shows about it literally in season 7 that's coming up we're just about to get to this you know the arc in the comic which is called all-out war

you know so we haven't even gotten to it in the TV show so but the comic you know it's something for fans of the comic know that that's out there so we had a target to get to as far as like alliances and figuring out PvP and really looking at how to bring people together so that they could create their own you know their own factions and fight each other and if we got to that if we hadn't if we could get enough of an audience to and sustain that and that once we got to that point we knew that we were going to be in a good place so does this introduce them some particular challenges the publisher in terms of the marketing and the kind of ongoing support and the kind of customer management how does this affect you guys and it's good so for us when we're trying to create a product's gonna be able to stick around for a long long time and you know as stan and YK alluded to where we're revolving the game is this kind of deep deep sense of community right kind of getting factions to participate with each other against each other and all out war kind of build

a sense there's a larger world out there right and so I think as a publisher if we can kind of funnel people into this world where you immediately jump into the game you see it's authentic you see it's you know this is a walking dead experience right this is the real walking dead world but then we evolve it over time so that there's a reason to stick around and kind of really engage with this community as you're playing the game that sets up very well for success and obviously we eluded the TV show and I kind of feel like I have to us because obviously i first encountered it as a comic but it's not to people who first encounter it as a TV show things like having a hand or not you know that those kind of questions how do you deal with those kind of shocks to the system where there are those differences I mean what you did not need to do you find that people just get used to it yeah I mean from our side you know they're obviously it's set in the same world right so the core kind of world that you're living in with the walking dead is is the same across you know all these different properties you know kirkman's very involved and all big thing but yeah I mean we're

authentic to the comic story line and that served us very very well you know it's nice to be able to see into the future actually and know where things are headed a little bit ahead of the TV series for example and you know i think it's it's pretty clear that fans are excited about even if they haven't been exposed to the comic book before I mean we're over over 20 million downloads already less than a year live and I mean it seems to me it's quite accessible so if you were to sort of say oh it's a zombie game historically you'd have said actually that's quite a niche game but it feels to me that something about the nature of the brand of the way it is so obvious across so many different properties that does that that deficits to work in your favor you see more mass market audience is playing or would you say that it is more gamer yeah I mean I absolutely think it's available it's accessible for a mass-market audience for a lot of players this is their first experience to an RPG and we're intentionally trying to do something very different than you would get in a

normal RPG you know it's gritty it's mature there's blood there's violence you know it's it's the real walking dead world so I think you know mechanics work across a large spectrum of players as long as we can kind of get them in the door and give them an authentic experience yeah I'm scientist is really important and we're running out of time college last the last one was really about that the crossover between telltale and this game I think I saw them being amazing kind of thing you know how did that come about and was it easy to do or or did it take it was pretty easy I mean you know I you know I first skybound it's really important that we don't be perceived as just a license house you know that we're not just going out and doing straight licensing deals you know you know we have a team of people that come from game development on our side and so we are coming we're speaking sort of the same language as hopefully as I you go and tell tale and so when I first came aboard telltale was a little skeptical

like who's the new guy you know don't come in here and and ruin the party but uh you know I basically just said look that you know it's going to be hopefully it you know in spirit we want to do just the opposite and we want to we want to be able to sort of take our community and allow that community to experience lots of different things within our family underneath the sky bound roof so it really wasn't that hard it was just more of a conversation once they saw the game no one's tail tail sort of saw you know how players interacting it was nervous literally just get on the phone let's figure out how to do something cool that's offer some characters and we did it over the holiday and it was a huge success I don't think I can't think of many other examples of a what is really just you know traditionally a console pc experience although there's a mobile that it's on mobile as well but you know really it's a console game on premium co-mingling with a free-to-play game under it just booked because those characters have incredible emotional charge being claimed in particular

there's you know I had to get the rest of the walking dead because of plan that relationship that you know they had together in that first thing I need to know what happened to her and so seeing her coming across is it really interesting kind of idea yeah we're gonna do we're gonna do it when you're gonna do it oh yeah okay good yeah we think it's great you know the family fans loved it and you know it's not like we're recreating too much narrative Lee we are able to sort of again sort of allows us to sort of lean in a lot of these limited time events where we can just really sort of give what players want is the ability to play Clem play Kenny really play the characters and put them on their team exciting let them coexist and that's that's fun so why not puppet woodwind it thank you very much guys