Line Wobbler & Beasts of Balance: Two Routes to Custom Hardware Goodness

[Music] my name is Alex I'm the founder of indie hardware game company called sensible object there's about eight of us in London working and I'm a maker space but a whole bunch more people who work with the studio here in the US before that I ran a games agency called hide and seek super keen for tweets feedback through ammonite that's me and beast imbalance so yeah hello hi this is Robin yeah hi I'm Robin I'm an independent game developer and I used to do mobile games in London and now I do just experimental Hardware stuff and how that works out I'm gonna talk about it during this talk and the main focus of this talk for me will be line wobbler and few bits of balance right so we have a short intro prepared of the game but I also brought it on stage so this is the game physical

things try switch it on yes right it's working so for those of you who don't know the game it's it's a one dimensional dungeon crawler so you control this green light and it's kind of impossible for me now to play it but you're trying to avoid these red lights down there because when you hit them you you kind of die a colourful desk so what you try is you kind of get close and you can clean the spring I have to kind of guess blind wobbler this is amazing you heard it here first all right yeah so that's a game and a line wobbler yeah okay and I also brought what I made so there's the box base the balance and some of the pieces the beasts of balance and here is the trailer

[Music] [Music] [Music] so what was kind of interesting about being invited to do this talk together is that Robin and I have taken different paths to shipping Indy Hardware game

over the pretty much exact same time so Robin study with line one the game jam around the same time that we started some funded R&D for what was then called fabulous beasts we both showed prototypes here at GDC in March 2015 we both were selected as part of the in decades first of all in November 2015 both won prizes yeah got design right yeah I got technology which is excited well we got technology but then it diverges so on my side what we then did was aiming at mass manufacturing and retail and e-commerce and all those kind of things so we raised investor money we tried to go through this whole process of Kickstarter we've been manufacturing in China and we're actually now shipping the game to retailers and that is a different route to the one that Robin is going to kick us off talking about which I will now hand over to him and go and sit down all right yeah so for me it was much

more like a linear progression so I kind of kept showing the game and improving it over time and I'm gonna talk in detail about you know what kept breaking what worked well and what I learned from the progress but before we dive into that it's just a tiny little Prelude about why you should all be making hardware games now and yeah especially if you hold the soldering iron wrong it's they're gonna be so hard but yeah in general it's easier to use than ever there's like little kids like makey makey I don't even need to do any programming you just plug the cables into banana and suddenly you have like a controller like that it's cheaper than ever it's easier to buy so you can buy it you know from China even even though it takes like two months to arrive but you have done before a few times and you forget about it and you arrive and so surprise arrives on your door it's quite nice the harbor gets getting better so lots of devices get honed so I am using a like an type of Arduino it's called a teensie which is kind of much better in every way and I kind of rave about it at every chance I get

but there's also a lot of Kickstarter devices and you know in all kinds of different directions connected devices and the community is getting better as well both online and offline so offline there's a lot of hack spaces and maker spaces so I almost exclusively wake work from the hack space London which has a kind of lots of different tools but there's also a lot of online communities and forums that kind of help you with everything you need so if you want to get started making these games there's a few kind of events where you can do this so there's for example there is the alt control game jam which is kind of weird as far as hardware games Jam does go because you submit online so nobody can actually play any of the games so it's a bit strange but I mean it's worldwide so what else can you do but as for example then on the right there's zoo machines festival which is a small tiny festival in France but everyone's making weird controllers there and that's it's a really nice event if you can make it over there I made the game ones they're about knives where knives spin on the

motor and you have to put your finger in it's very fun very fun but also you can make you games I like all kinds of game jams so this was me three days ago soldering we're kind of cat finding game on the train to San Francisco so it's possible to do it on the train you have to kind of make sure your tools are fairly small there's like a USB soldering iron which I love so it's it's definitely possible to make your games everywhere you like but yeah now let's more specifically dive into line wobbler which is why I'm here so I'm going to talk about what inspired me to make the game and then how I iterated it towards proper art piece in a way so first the game was made at the Exile game gem which is a small game jam in Denmark and it's a very nice setting and I made it there teamed up with Matias magic so and we kind of together kind of brainstormed on different things so I was looking at Springs and Mattias was looking at the

LED strips and I got the idea to look at Springs just before the jam by doing research online and as you know you look at cat videos when you do research online this is the actual literal inspiration for the control of line wobbler so this is a cat apparently it's not my cat unfortunately but unfortunately I guess because it does that every morning at 5 o'clock apparently I don't like you know the cat has so much fun so I want to make a controller that has like this kind of cool vibrating feedback and so humans should enjoy this kind of interaction as well so it took me a while to figure out how to measure the movement of the spring so at first I thought like it could be been sensors or it could be like a little joystick on the base but finally arrived at accelerometers and so we figured out how to kind of use the spring and at the jam

yeah Matthias was working with the LED strip and so it was a very kind of mechanics driven design process so mechanics in this case I mean like literal mechanics like physical objects that kind of define what the game will be so you wanna so what we wanted to do is we want to build a game entirely based on these two objects only so no buttons nothing else just the one dimensional display and the spring so the this limitation to this this the simple interaction meant that we were quite limited in what we could do so obviously you can bend the spring back and forwards so that kind of works just like a normal joystick in a way but you also got this additional interaction of kind of flinging the spring right so it kind of that's it's an new thing and once we tested this so we had like a debug output on the LED strip just like the spring position and once you with flying it back and forth so this looks kind of violent this this this movement so why don't we say this is an attack and we had some enemies to it so that

kind of kick-started the idea for line wobbler basically and it went from there so it said okay if we can move along the spring what else can there be so that could be like a timing challenge wait you wait and I need to go they get pushed in one direction and that is basically all the game is so that's not much more to it I mean like from from the mechanic's perspective and yeah so once we put these little accelerometers in here they're actually behind this inside this little 3d printed knob here and they'll work way better than expected so the accuracy is much much higher so that could maybe detective its forward or backwards but it's actually very precise joysticks so that allowed me to push up the skill ceiling by making the game much faster and that's a bit harder so it's kind of a very difficult game but I can kind of you know make the levels easier to compensate so over to the graphics because it's an LED strip it's only one line of light you don't really have much depths of information to to convey to the player so there's no surprise

there's no text you know this is barely any information besides color and so I I decided to stick to we decided to stick to a very limited set of information we could convey so it's very much like a traffic light in a way so Green is good red is bad and an orange is somewhere in the middle so that's kind of what we used and that also kind of prevents me in a way from kind of expanding the game to make it deeper because like now when I add search that's at some teleporters or some pickups then the question becomes you know what does this weird blue purple thing mean and that is not quite as obvious so it might make sense as a kind of a hardcore mode or like an advanced mode where people want to discover what they're doing but I found like showing this game because it's so simple also non gamers play it and surprisingly or I don't know for me surprisingly they're not willing to explore so when they see something they don't understand they stop and so then you know you need to have some kind of way to convey you know what they are doing so I actually was forced to cut

this whoa not forced but like with this little short instruction sheet that you can kind of see it on the screen there that was necessary to have people understand you know this is lava you shouldn't go there when it's bright I mean good you know as gamers that we figure that out but ignore more players that or people that are not as exposed to video games that they don't have this kind of exploratory mindset so they kind of want to be told what they can do so it's an interesting balance you need to find there also the LED strips are really cool because right so whenever I work on them I kind of see these little dots afterwards in my vision for four hours almost so they're painfully bright and but I kind of decided to use that to my advantage to kind of not quite torture the player but kind of really when when things happen in the game you kind of you flash them a bit so it reminded me a bit of asteroids I don't know if any of you played that's in the vector graphics this play is like how bright this looked and it was so cool Wow how can a TV look that bright and so kind of wanted to

capture that feeling as well so all the main objects of the game have like full brightness and then the the rest of the game is kind of a very mellow color and also when you've been kill enemies no no no I'm not going to show it now but um then the entire screen flashes in full brightness but it's very fast because the frame rate is so high so it's almost subconscious and this high frame it also helped me to kind of make the game look really buttery smooth and together with the with a low lag was a low latency of this accelerometer I get a really immediate feedback of what the player is doing and that I kind of think help also kind of make the game feel so nice because I think in a lot of modern games there's a trend to a higher and higher latency especially like mobile phones when you tap it there's like a built-in latency of I think 50 milliseconds at least and it goes up with certain devices so it's like this this immediacy is going away and I wanted to recapture that in in this custom hardware game and I'm also looking into when I make more games I want to keep this kind of snappy response there oh yeah so one was saying

the the DES effect it's like it's a 1d particle effect I mean it's just like little things running on the screen and it's almost too beautiful to be a deaths animation so I thought Duke players really understand that they just died or is it just right pretty too pretty but everyone really comments immediately on like how nice it looks and it almost makes the players a bit suicidal because I just want to die all the time but yeah it was too pretty to change so I had it and read for a while like blood but that doesn't quite work so it's it's that might be doesn't kind of communicate so well it sticks with the players and there's like subtle effects for example there's I guess it's absolute dimming around the player I don't know if I can show this now it's very hard to see but there's you see there's like a like gradient around the player it gets darker so it's just kind of to increase the contrast even more and then there's like a shader running through the entire thing like if you want to call it a shader but it kind of dims or like kind of smoothes out the entire movement so when you move really fast you can kind of see a trail behind the

player even though it's only one pixel widths at any time so it just kind of fades it out where it was yeah so now that you have this game how do you show it so there's another nice aspect of this LED strip is that you can embed it into the real world or you have to in a way so again the screen it's always flat and that's it but with an LED strip you can kind of show it and arrange it according to the to the existing architecture of wherever you show it so for example at maze in Berlin where one of the first places I showed it had to go over the players heads and even behind them so the everyone had to kind of crane annex back and kind of almost have been painfully look at the game and it was a nice eye catcher and I kind of liked to annoy the player a little bit was that's--it's kind of bring them out of that comfort zone zone so here's another show that was in it was at the zoo Machines festival that I mentioned earlier and they had exist like some nice art piece there and I just arranged the LED strip inside it in an espera

there so that what that was good fun or you can kind of go all out and put the game for some underwater so some background chatter at home in my from my parents they have a little pond and I put the LED strip underwater it doesn't really change the game at all but it just kind of looked really cool and I could well let's see like having like some weird wet sensors on the strip so you can have it go underwater a little nude enjoying the party that's fun but yeah so you can you can show the game in different ways and yeah so once you have the game and you start showing it you you immediately notice mistakes you made and with normal video games you have all these software bugs you discover usually at the worst kind of moment but with hardware games you also on top of it have Hardware bugs and these are almost impossible to debug beforehand because you don't just don't know what's gonna break because you know you think I assaulted this properly but

no you and or if this cable is strong enough of course it is not and you know kids won't unplug this by mistake no they do it on purpose so it's fun so this was for example an exhibition in Italy so in Rome I showed the game at the Maker Faire and so I don't think any Italian the kids don't speak any English so there was no way of communicating and also when when kids play they they don't you know they forget everything so just kind of pushing each other out of the way pulling on this thing as hard as I could so there was an ideal stress test for the game and that enough also revealed one of the biggest flaws at that time of the game and I'm gonna go into detail of that certain that is spring design so initially when I first made the game and he saw that in the screenshot earlier maybe I used these shoot tree Springs I used for leather shoes to keep them in shape these are actually my grandma's so I kind of took them from her and we appropriate them into a video game and so these work fairly well so they're kind of big and

very springy but they kind of awkward to mount to a table so you can see the clamps of others you need to kind of make this weird wooden thing so that doesn't quite work and also getting more was a bit complicated and it just couldn't just steal all that stuff for my grandma it wasn't not cool so in the end I changed over to the door stopper Springs that was actually the original inspiration so these are much easier to use so they can come with the mounting holes they're smaller and much cheaper to use so you can actually see the accelerometer up there as well but they have one main issue and they are not strong enough so so this is how it looks after kind of a couple well this is a couple months at I was in Berlin at the the game Science Center and so you can see they did the the loops of the spring come loose and so it's it's very difficult to use that way so what I decided to do is was make my own Springs and I luckily found small scale spring

manufacturer in London so I talked to them they either called small order Springs and fittings limited so it was kind of ideal not only do they do Springs but they also only do small orders of it and I only wanted the small order so this is kind of weird what companies exist but there were fine it took me a while to convince them that I want [Music] that makes these brains as you can see there's a base on the bottom that's for attaching it to the base and then in the top it kind of gets a bit smaller like there and that's where I touch the it's quite fascinating to watch and yeah so I made 50 of those there they are and so now I have 50 of those Springs lying around it's not too expensive to do this like that so I think overall this turned out to be like five dollars per spring which considered the other cost is not too much yeah and then on to

to kind of manufacturing the other things so there is a laser-cut boxes these are super simple to make so you just using sky barney vector drawing program and there's even plugins that kind of make these tabs for you can super fast to kind of assemble those there are 3d printing of course there's kind of new and exciting materials to some our look like wood some are flexible and I use the flexible one so you can actually squeeze that in I don't know if that's visible so it's kind of much more comfortable to use and also when you work in a hack space so this was all taking in the hack space you get sometimes little little playtesters like this one so I want to really make a dedicated cat version of the game so I want to rub some catnip into the controller so then one cat controls it and the other one runs after the led so that I would be the ideal game I think such a cute cat yeah right yeah so it's just one more thing then of the

manufacturing process so I used to use like these bread boards as you know like just to plug everything in and so just make it a bit easier for me to make more of them I learned how to make PCBs it's not too hard to do that the software is free it's a very archaic software as you have to like use a combination of buttons and and command line commands but overall it's not too bad here's the part list it's not really important just in case you're curious so I'm using this teensie which is like an American version of an Arduino it's just better and faster in most ways but essentially it's an Arduino the accelerometer is just the cheapest one and the first one that was recommended so I just googled for accelerometer auto you know and that was a full you know discussion I'll use these ones there's three dollars and these are the pins you should use here's a library and done so that was super simple and the LED strips I think they are the most expensive part of the project so there are individually addressable LED strips for now like these rolls come to about like $150 but

it's also the highest density you can buy and the longest you can buy them so if you want to have shorter or less good ones it's way way cheaper yeah so then the progression from from this prototype I built to installation art or kind of is it's not is yeah it's like a question of where do you show the game so and I started and I guess like some of you here also started with or will start with the old control GDC exhibition which is a really cool initiative now in its fourth year by John Paulson here at GDC so if you don't know about it this one from Wednesday in the play area I think and they show like weird experimental games and all kind of all stages of development so like really simple little things to really complex like sewing machine controllers and all this weirdness so that's super super nice and that's like a couple of other ones you can go to and I've kind of written up this progression here so you started these events that are really good for experimental games for example I'll control a maze fantastic acade and then you go on to normal game shows

tokyo game show was really fun for me and then you expand to more artsy events so for example this was at occlusion tronic music festival in Romania which was very fun to go to and like you know electronic music everywhere and and his light games that worked out really well and finally you can show it at museums as well so game science centric museums or kid centric museums love to show that stuff yeah well you showed that like weird events like Burning Man that was a very fun event to go to and it turns out people on sa really like blinking LEDs or so I hear so that was that was really cool and good stress test for the hardware as well yeah so making money from installation art is always tricky and for my from myself my route was line wobbler was to make this kind of like a piece for museums and festivals so I

rent them out now and I get are often emails from from curators and I think they see them at these events I showed before and it depends really on the on the size of the museum but it's you can get around like $500 or more for showing it at the brief event it depends really on the size so I don't really know if that's a good number or not it's just what I've been seeing and it kind of sidestepped this durability issue a bit because you only rent it out for one week but you know if I want to make limited editions then that question will come up like what is Warren what about warranty what about durability what about like kind of electrical safety testing and haven't done any of this so that's gonna be a next big question and also price will be a question because these are handmade now by me so the hardware is not that cheap so it'll be probably north of one thousand two thousand dollars per copy which is definitely more than I would pay for a copy of this especially because the game is so short but yeah so almost done here

with my part so I've just covered like or I kind of identified like three main ways to kind of bring your game forward so the small-scale installation artist but I have two been doing with this line wobbler you can also license it out to to arcades companies to toy companies there's like different ones that always look for innovation and try to license your games I have no idea how how trustworthy or good these deals are but then there's experts in those fields that can help you all you do the Kickstarter mass-production approach and that's what alex is gonna talk to you about in a minute but just to wrap up my part so what's next with line wobbler I really want to build a massive version so like really building size would be amazing so this is a CN Tower in Toronto and we actually started talking to this guy so because I have an interactive led thing on there or think it's just screens no like a normal lamps but it turns out that the system is super archaic so they they actually how they

do it is they have like one big PNG like one picture and they read it out line by line once per second and that's what they put on this string so I don't know if it's at all possible to have a faster update you know it's like a frame rate of one isn't that great but yeah I said now kind of play around with the games I want to make a multiplayer version like an endless bird and I can loop around the room for example or different games on the same hardware but it's actually very limiting so I mean line whopper seems to have come together by itself almost when we made it but coming like thinking specifically of more games it's very tricky so I have to see if I come up with other cool fun ideas but yeah so that's my part so now hand over to Alex yeah hardware really

good with the super good with the hardware so yes a line wobbler is one kind of way of doing it and here is a different way so yeah I am the founder of sensible object and kind of brought the idea for beasts of balance into the company kind of started the company to make games like this having before this run a studio called hide and seek and hide and seek work with some incredible game designers so people have Margret Robert stern and hologram Osseo to make a lot of games that intersected physical and digital and one of those was this game called blocks which we created for the launch event of the PlayStation Move controller in 2011 so blocks was a game which combined stacking these slightly offset wobbly translucent cubes with this kind of spatial reasoning mechanic every time you added a block to the 2x2

Tower you had to match all of the adjacent faces which for the PlayStation symbols so if you put a sort of you could always go up because you could go triangle to triangle but if you wanted to put the the fourth block in in a row of four you would have to match the two spaces there and the one below and it kind of just exploded in terms of the amount of fun that it generated it was one of those games that we were like wow that was good and I always think of the reason why it worked so well is having something to do with like these two different kind of cognitive flavors so I could talk about it like the cheese and pineapple on a stick of games you know so on the one hand you have this chewy savory like spacial resource manager kind of game and on the other you have this sweet tangy like performative snacking dexterity game and you put those two together and something about that was just super satisfying I always wanted to make a quote/unquote digital version of the game but in 2011 when we

designed the game that the technology wasn't really there to support that we did have some conversations with Playstation around a kind of screen only move controller version but I never really felt like that would do the idea justice so it kind of got filed away so kind of fast-forward to 2015 2014 2015 when I was looking at what to do for this game and as you can see as kind of game design and creative director drawing is definitely not one of my strengths but as a kind of illustration you can see that the kind of key concepts of what I was trying to think about we're starting to be here so I had this whole kind of idea that we would use computer vision to attract their positioning of the objects and the alignments of the shapes on the objects to kind of integrate kind of match-three style mechanics with the stacking game so that you would be trying to align different patterns and and score points

and kind of have combos and bonuses as a result so because we started from a different place with sensible object which was really to take kind of event games and the kind of thinking and creativity which I've been putting into event games but try to kind of pack that down into a scalable product business so something that could be sustainable something that can potentially you know board games and tabletop games can be kind of popular for pretty long time and they can earn revenues and enable you to do more R&D to make more games and so much more tip kind of game studio commercial model I was thinking from the outset about what the kind of commercial thinking that went into this game would be and it was trying to kind of overlay between three things that I guess I'm super into but also that I felt kind of had some kind of interesting alignment so on the one hand was dexterity games Jenga is of course the most popular but if you're into your German tabletop games we'll know games like bandeau and hamster ala collectible card games CCGs so they

bring sort of really valuable play experiences but also there's kind of long term models of like continuously updating and evolving a game and then you know in 2013/14 and I was thinking a lot about this you also had a kind of an emerging array of hybrid games so the first of those were the kind of toys to life games which were doing super well and very commercially successful and clearly did something that players really loved there were these kind of physical collectible toys and they were unlocking things in a videogame but for me they're kind of limit or the thing that frustrated me about them having made event games for a pretty long time was how little action there was in the real world that you basically just had this toy and it was either on the platform or off the platform so trying to kind of merge those things together from a commercial standpoint so that kind of first four month R&D period put together a kind of core product team which is still with the company today so timber I'll say word on physical design George Buckingham on digital game

design and development Lyle McCarthy on art direction and Chris Shaw was our engineer who is our engineer and one of the things I think which kind of I bring or which I'm very like obsessive about as a as a kind of creative director CEO type of person it's how do you get teams with skillsets and cultures from different disciplines to really work together and having had lots of experience about how that can not go well one of the biggest things is language and use of language and being able to translate and kind of understand across different domains and disciplines I've been on many projects where two people were describing the same thing but thought it meant something completely different and it wasn't until the night before demo day when it turned out there was some chasm in the way the project work that was only discovered at kind of 6:00 p.m. with 12 hours to go before we had to ship it out on a plane that that kind of problem of language was kind of picked apart so something that I picked up from my old colleague Margaret Robertson

hide-and-seek was this idea of this we believe so this we believe is a tool for collaborating across disciplines where you set this aspirational set of goals and we used it a whole bunch and basically it's not a feature list it's a kind of slightly pretentious set of goals that helps you kind of aspire to what you want to be but it has some things in there that really helped us so we took these two sentences and from those reach the conclusion that computer vision was a really bad idea that basically was to risk to be kind of effective in all situations and too expensive to translate into a family game so our engineer Chris Shore went away and kind of did a bunch of research came back with a whole bunch of options about how we could like look at the tower or sense the tower and the only one of those that really was effective in his view was putting a weighing scale underneath the tower now the trouble with that was that it didn't in his view give anything like a good enough image of what was going on in a tower it

wouldn't know things like proximity for example but this is where that kind of interdisciplinary collaboration really comes off because as designers George and I were able to look at what that kind of one dumb number of how heavy the child was gave us and start to derive ideas of game mechanics that would really work so the one that's probably most effective which you had a little look at in the trailer is when the player knocks over the tower then the basically the tower goes from the weight that it was at to zero or close to zero if you can rebuild the tower before the volcano erupts then you get to keep playing so that's quite kind of simple from a sort of sensing perspective we're just looking did the number get back to the number that it was before in the time available but from a player perspective it's an incredibly dynamic and exciting moment another advantage of dumb sensors when and the kind of I think we share some sort of thinking here is super low latency so we're taking this one feed of data from a single sensor and we're doing some signal processing to kind of turn that into a game input that low-latency gives a nice crisp

cheery effect in the game so we also iterated through exhibition kind of similar thing of taking it to expose and so on original prototype was this more geometric 3d printed abstract to play a competitive game had a ton of pieces had breeding and battling mechanics had more regions so we took that into play tests it turns out that if you put a play test up on Eventbrite in central London and you say free pizza you will get literally anybody who will come to that event and they will sometimes quite often not know why they are there you'll say so you're here for the pizza yeah this pizza right I should say that's actually the design team from us too so they did know why they were there but actually it turns out that super useful because trying to communicate your weird indie Hardware game to people who don't know what's up is very valuable we also did a whole bunch of exhibitions and for us what we were trying to do in those situations was could we get the game to

be readable and understandable by somebody in like 10 seconds because you know in that kind of environment you're getting a lot of people coming through and you're trying to get people hooked and that's super important what those two types of playtesting gave to us is that that first version we created was wrong in two ways one the core gameplay was far too complex and the second was that we needed to switch from a competitive game to a cooperative game so we were asking a lot we do ask a lot of players when they come to our game they have to absorb a new interaction model there's like these pieces there's this hardware it's connecting to this world they don't match in a kind of completely obvious way and the thing about a competitive game is that you are going to keep the information that you glean about the way the system works to yourself because it may give you an advantage whereas in a competitive game you get to share that knowledge and it becomes a form of social currency so actually a lot of what George and I tried to accomplish with the kind of

design of the first like hour of gameplay is not giving you too much tutorial much like a kind of sort of mobile game would do these days but instead to give you a set of mechanics and sort of through scoring and different sort of things you can discover that you can really enjoy figuring out and piecing together as a group and that's been a very effective tool we get a lot of people coming back to us saying that that experience of discovery is a really big part of what they they dig about the game so conscious of time some can they kind of whip through all of this we had a pretty big year last year we successfully kick-started the game we manufactured and shipped on time we had coverage and sales all around the world and we actually got into a whole bunch of fairly premium retailers none of which were stuff that we knew or thought we were going to do at the start of the year so it was pretty exciting and that kind of translates into some pretty cool

numbers so we manufactured about 13,000 we've sold through so there are now kind of in people's homes about 10,000 at $99 so that's you know like pretty good we see that when people come to our e-commerce site that that thinking we were putting in about collectible card games is starting to play out so there are four different upgrades you can buy from beasts to balance com2 of those add gameplay and the ones that add gameplay are way more popular than the ones that do not and yeah basically people are into this idea that this is a game that gets more fun than more pieces you buy and they're kind of doing it because they want to not because they have to it's being played a bunch so we talk to tabletop game companies about this statistic that like 15 or 16 games among is average number of times our game is played and they like a don't know obviously because if you ship a visit plastic is plastic games or somebody how would you know how many times it's played and if they do know they would

not expect that number to be so high so we're kind of moving into a sort of different territory with the industry as we kind of start to flow this data into our communications with people so that's just a quick scamper through kind of the design history a little look at some of the headlines but I want to spend the kind of last piece of the talk just looking at like what this means for you and what this means for people who want to enter this exciting world so I think you know like we're doing this in different ways but really what I would say like because I'm an old person as I remember in kind of 2005-2006 just as indie games as a kind of concept we were really starting to migrate into the mainstream that it was the kind of two things that were driving it were it was easier to publish games and it cost less to make them and that's what made it possible for everyone to do that and what Robin and I are both doing is is finding that is now true but also with hardware and

electronics and retail and that's exciting because it means that what we've done you guys can do - and as what I kind of quickly look at the stacks there are these four kind of stacks that we think about as we kind of rest on and some of these things will be super familiar to you familiar to you like unity everyone's probably using that but then that's integrated with the kind of Arduino and 3d printing technologies that we both use to kind of help make our prototypes we also kind of see maker spaces as incredibly important to what drives this there's probably a makerspace if you're making hardware you're probably in or near a makerspace the whole bunch and it's not just the resources although those are important this is an early 3d printed version of a prototype you definitely do not want to be trying to 3d print that many pieces by yourself because each one of those things takes like 24 hours and there's a complete pain if it works at all which of course is the joy of 3d printing but more the community that we have access

to so just in in our one makerspace in central London there are four or five different companies that have kick-started in the last six months and there between them raised well over a million pounds in kickstarter revenues so everyone is sharing ideas information mailing lists all of this stuff that you know you're just an emotional support like everyone knows like if it's day 27 of your Kickstarter that you're in a very particular emotional place and you need shoulder rubs and pizza and just kind of pushing through the last few days of your campaign and yeah like find those communities because they're incredible so then there's your supply chain so what we did is we went out to China and we found that Chinese manufacturing partners we did not try to do that alone there are lots and lots of different knowledge networks that you can tap into that they're gonna help you find the right manufacturing partner in China that partner exists for everybody but there are very very very very many different ways of getting it done so we found a sourcing company that actually sort of transact with and

manages our supply chain and we found them through Hardware Club which is a members-only community of startups who are doing Hardware all around the world you then need to deal with getting it from the factory to people so there are a whole bunch of third party logistics companies that you can use we're currently using ship wire which is really great for e-commerce and Kickstarter not so great for shipping into retail and then you need to deal with customer service but then you can use something like Zendesk to help you kind of automate and manage that process we talked a bit already about launch new commerce through Kickstarter it's incredibly important for revenues and also for kind of awareness and marketing if you successfully kick start your project you have a good chance of getting onto Amazon launch pad which is a kind of startups only program where you get a whole bunch of free additional services delivered to you by Amazon that you wouldn't normally have to pay a bunch of money for like putting that video that is on our Amazon product page normally you have to pay thousands of dollars for that and we get it for free and finally the stuff that I don't need

to tell you guys about because if you're an indie game developer you're already doing this really well MailChimp you know all of these different sort of promotional tools that you've already got and one thing I would say is I think Robin and I both found this that if you have a really weird interesting indie Hardware game you have a much better chance of getting good coverage because it's so different and you know we haven't yet paid any YouTube content creators for any of the courage that coverage that we've had today and I think that's largely a function of they look at it they think that is sufficiently weird and interesting that I just want to try it and if I'm going to try it I may as well make a video out of it and that makes a big difference when you're trying to get started so super quickly Kickstarter ton of things we got right obviously a whole bunch of things we got wrong so many things I could say about Kickstarter but here's my one big takeaway for you all your pricing is more your marketing are really about pricing jumped by $10 and it was after we'd

raised about a third of our target and basically the person 501 who came to our site had to pay 10 bucks more than person 500 and that just piss people off so they didn't and numbers dropped really badly in a kind of scary way so like there's a ton of knowledge out there about how to do physical kick-start is right look at the boardgame community especially a guy called Jamie Steg Meyer who's super expert in kind of and has shared very kind of much information on that okay so one more thing for us about how manufacturing works and how profitability works so it's a very different world to be coming from Indy software to Indy Hardware you're used to Apple or steam taking kind of 30% there's a whole bunch of different people who are gonna take money from you in a whole bunch of different ways and you kind of have to be alert to which what all of these mean so when you're thinking about that ninety nine dollars there are game costs if you go by in

marbles the brain store around the corner firstly the retailers are going to take a chunk and that chunk varies massively depending on what channel so if you're on Kickstarter they're going to take about 5% if you're like a start-up doing a deal with a niche we tailor who's going to help you launch your product they might take as much as 60% that channel also varies depending on which category you're in so if you're in what's kind of stem and electronics they're much more used even in big department stores to thinking about twenty to thirty percent but if you're in toys and games then they're used to cards against humanity' type products where that doesn't cost him hardly anything to make and you can take a much much bigger slice of the pie for the retailer so actually like figuring out where your product is going to sit in retail and knowing how the kind of margin and buying structure works is actually a really important thing so on the other side of it you have your cogs or cost of goods sold so that's basically everything that it costs to make one copy of the game plus everything it costs to get to a

warehouse in the country where you're going to be selling it so also kind of container shipping import charges other other crap and then if you're all kind of there's the actually warehouse to retailer or warehouse to customer kind of bit which is another five percent the mathematically savvy of you will have noticed that if you add up all of those costs you can end up making no money on your own retail product and that is possible really possible and you can underestimate these things very easily so like we knew pretty much where we thought we were going to end up before we did our Kickstarter campaign and we kind of planned all of our sort of pricing and everything around that because if you don't you can end up with all sorts of troubles down the line so you have to be very very kind of thoughtful ahead of time about this you're gonna have to work with those manufacturing partners you're not going to be able to get to this number on your own you're going to have to talk to people in China who are going to have to help decide what components you're going to use all of these sorts of things so give you a quick example of how that

looks like in the sharp end of design this is our engineer Chris Shores patented custom in-house frictional coefficient bug fixing test yep it's an angle and a bit of plastic and down to the right you can see a shiny bit of plastic that has fallen off so if you've got a stacking game one of the most important things about a stacking game is that your pieces can stack our 3d printed prototypes and our epoxy resin kind of next kinds of prototypes had a very sticky kind of finish either through paint or through the kinds of materials that were using and that meant that when you kind of built a tower out of them even if that tower was slightly janky they would all kind of just hold in place and that was really good because it meant that you would sometimes stagger piece and be convinced that it would fall off and it didn't and you felt good with the pure kind of ABS like the so these are the first shots that came out of our injection molding tool they were slippery as hell there was nothing if they weren't exactly parallel all the way up it was really just they would it would sort of

the tower would just kind of explode without warning which is not good so instead what we did was look for different solutions to that there were two different ways we could solve the problem the way that we thought we were going to solve the problem is by etching the molding tool so this is basically a process where you apply some kind of texture to the stainless steel to so that when you shoot the plastic into it that texture kind of gets up so everything about like a a walnut veneer dashboard in a car or something like that it has that kind of texture that actually made it worse because there was actually less kind of contact area between the zhihui thought if they're rougher it'll work but actually what happened they just bounced off each other even more so then we had to go to plan C which was the thing we really didn't want to have to do which was this so this is a rubberized spray coating which gets sprayed on to all of our hero pieces it doesn't get sprayed onto all of the pieces but so it gives it this lovely tactile kind of premium feel and

it also makes that kind of stackability really work this added about ten percent to the overall cost of our product which is bad and where we were was basically like this is what game design looks like if you're manufacturing there is this dance happening between your product team which is one place your manufacturing team and your sourcing team which is another place you're having a ton of Skype conversations your FedEx seeing prototypes backwards and forwards you're making videos you're kind of doing me if you're just figuring out how to test stuff and you're trying to relate all of that back to I kind of creators idea about what you want your experience to be when somebody gets this number and unpacks it in our case we were also having that conversation with investors because we're also saying yes so all of our estimates were off actually we kind of allowed for a margin of error but our margin of error wasn't enough so we were kind of actually only about 5% over but that was still that was still bad now that is my idea of fun

[Laughter] so I like I would not recommend it if that sounds like stressful but the dance the relationship between this supply chain and all of these incredible people like I've met so many amazing makers in China and the kind of skill and the insight and experience that they brought to this process was really a kind of humbling thing to interact with and we got it and it works so basically the end of that story is you have to take the hit on your margin because there's no point shipping a product that people don't enjoy right you know and ultimately there are a bunch of ways you might be able to solve that problem down the line for example changing from ABS to PVCs are kind of underlying material but we can only do that if we've generated enough commercial interest to redo the tooling and all these kinds of all these sort of nested things but it's possible but what you can't do is ever get back from this

product sucks you can't stack the pieces there's no fun so that's where we ended up so what we were surprised by was that Kickstarter drove interest not just in consumers but also from commercial partners like retailers so we had a bunch of emails pretty early in the campaign saying you know this is really cool we want to stock it will you come and show us a prototype and those translated into purchase orders that meant we could basically triple the amount that we made in that first run so cash flow and financing is another thing that you have to kind of get into it's it's it's hard but not impossible to do that if you have a purchase order from a reputable retailer it's you what you can't do is go to a bank and say hey this new product that we've never made before I reckon I can sell ten thousand will you give me some money please I did try that it doesn't work like no so that was the great thing so marbles also brilliant company in lots of ways gave us all of this great in store presence all of that work we done taking

the game to exhibitions and festivals so it turned out to be super useful in boiling down what the demo experience was in retail so it turns out there to be a very close analog between what happens when you walk into a specialist retailer in terms of how they get into and understand your game and what happens at a conference the bad part was that you need to be aware that if you're working with small scale retailers like marbles the fortunes of those companies can go down as well as up they went bankrupt a couple of weeks ago and we're coming in the middle of a whole bunch of bankruptcy court stuff with them so another good reason for working with Amazon as a partner is I am pretty sure don't quote me but I'm pretty sure that Amazon is not going to go bust anytime soon so I could super recommend working with with those guys for that reason if you get to this point that we've got - so where we now sold the game with doing more deals with retailers we just come back from New York Toy Fair it's all super exciting you're then going to kind of come back up up against an interesting thing which is different between digital indie and physical indie this is a quote from a CEO of a similar

company that she's about three years ahead of where we are so she's my kind of go to person for wisdom and this was really challenging when she said this to me if you didn't write another line of code or design another piece this year you'd have a better year and what that is is actually just a challenge saying right now we're a making company and we had to be a pretty good making company to get through this process we had to be obsessive about the product this year we could just be a selling company we could just concentrate on our retail deals and our e-commerce channels and growth marketing and getting Facebook Ads better and doing better automated email and building the brand and doing ads and blah blah blah although you know like a million stuff now that isn't like natively what we're into but she's right we would have a better year if we did that but we're not gonna do that because we like making games so this is a little sneaky peek what's coming up next for our game so anyone who's played the game will know that that co-op game is where we are right now we are going to be

shipping a competitive game mode hopefully later this year timing slightly TBC it's going to come with a whole bunch of new pieces that they're going to completely change what that game is all about and it's also going to ship as a free update at a free app update to everyone who already has the game and this is where you start to get into some fun blending of the kind of digital game model and the physical game model so we're used to cool new features being a reason that draws us back to digital games right and we can do that we can just ship an app update that means hey person who bought our game you now have a completely new experience and that's free thank you for getting into our game we can hopefully then convert some of those people to buying the physical upgrade which is if you like that then there's all of this extra cool stuff that you could be doing too and then hopefully that gives us some more capital to work with to keep making cool games and I think this is like you know not many companies get to play around with these kinds of things and it's really exciting to just be trying this

stuff we don't exactly know how it's going to work but we feel pretty good about making it work in some kind of a way so that's me I'm gonna bring Robin back up yeah and say thank you for having us Thanks I mean yeah I just don't really have so much it's gonna wrap this by saying ya know is that there's never been a better time to make hardware games than now and there's many routes to success and also many more routes I think then what we've shown you today I've shown you two right here and hopefully that talk inspired you to to kind of make a game for yourself and yeah kind of get into the hardware scene so thanks it's a tiny piece of housekeeping please don't forget to fill out your evaluation forms if you enjoyed what you saw if you didn't enjoy then don't fill them out

and we have a couple minutes for questions so there's a mic in the middle so you step up to the mic in the middle there and ask away you have to go to it I think yep it's stunning yeah hi those are really insightful talk Thanks so you talked a lot about iteration through exhibition how do you encourage your players to give constructive criticism how do you gather all your feedback and things so for me as I kind of a more passive approach so I kind of watch them play I mean I guess that works well because it's a very simple interface so you can kind of visually see what they're doing what they're doing wrong so for example it was lime wobbler was always they the idea was you you would shake the controller like this but everyone would kind of grip the controller and would not let go people aren't used to letting go of anything so in the first day I was like oh no you can let go you can let go and I kept repeating this but you have to kind of give in to that so I made the game playable was kind of holding it so it's

it's kind of observing and process and also kind of level balancing when people stop playing that's kind of aha maybe I have to change something here so for me was a very kind of passive observant process so I think we do we do a lot of that just sitting back and kind of taking notes we also every time we run a play test we agree a set of questions that we're going to leave everybody with just a simple google form with an ask them to fill that out in their own time we usually make sure that a member of our team like a producer or somebody who's not on the front line of game design runs the process so that we kind of get as much you know kind of emotional distance between the makers and and the play testers as possible basically shut the up that's my main rule about observing a play test for me no no not like right any other question anymore anymore yeah come on down

you both mentioned the low latency and can you give some tips how to from robben maybe can tell how you make a video or promote yourself because to get to those shows you need to show something on the video it is very difficult and especially it was like oh sorry thank you yeah and you you need to sell the product so you actually need to convince the actual buyer to so how you show that this low latency like this stuff you can only feel or so how you deal with that yeah it is very tricky and and it's actually a good point an important point like especially with these LED strips and which has a bright they're almost impossible to take good videos off we say immediately saturate the the photo sensor so I now know how to do it but it's kind of difficult it's like HDR photography you can do it but it is very difficult to convey what the game is about online so if you see video

of it you just see in kind of flashing LED strip and weird spraying and you have no idea what's going on and it's also one of the reasons why I never thought about doing a Kickstarter because like you only get this on an impression so it's very you have to kind of convince them does they have to trust you basically and for these experimental exhibitions that works for more general games exhibitions it helps if you have shown other elsewhere but it's kind of tricky to see that in video I always shoot 60 frames per second so that helps a bit so it makes it look smooth but it doesn't really convey the kind of tactile Ness and so it's tricky so there's there's a marketing consumers question but there's also the marketing to industry and actually it turns out that the whole toy industry runs on face to face demos like we just came back from New York Toy Fair but we had a booth and it was just like being at an expo you know we were there and basically all the buyers and all the toy companies come by the booth we're in the Kerner so there's a every single one of

the toy fairs there's like a new startups area you can only be in there one time so you want to make sure you do it right but everyone will come by there because they want to see what new stuff is around that year so summer we worked super hard to kind of figure out who we tried to get to there so we had a whole kind of sales process to get people to turn up the people by the toy industry is an incredibly old-school industry and lots of ways and one of the ways it is is people go to these big toy fairs the one in Nuremberg the one in Hong Kong the one in New York they put their hands on a bunch of things and then they decide what they want to have in their stores that year and they make those decisions pretty much there and then you can do it outside of that but the absolute huge majority of deals get struck in Toy Fair so actually that's one way in which it sort of can be okay one more and then we'll have to wrap up all right so do you guys you guys like patent all this stuff or so like what kinds of precautions do you take as far as like preventing people from just like

ripping off your idea so I I didn't patent anything and it seems to be very tricky in general so was Hardware it I have read conflicting reports but once is when when you showed publicly for the first time you basically waive your right to patent it it depends on the country as well I guess but you especially if you make weird hardware have no idea if it's going to be successful unless you show publicly so it is very tricky to do that and then in terms of gameplay you can't or shouldn't fight in software anyway so it's it's for me it's all open so I just hope no one copies it and so it's just by presence so it's like I show it everywhere so everyone associates the game was me so that kind of so we have patented and that's part and parcel of going the kind of VC investor route they're going to expect a different degree of kind of intellectual property underpinning for the stuff that you do so we've got patents and trademarks we've tried to trademark fabulous beasts

and then JK Rowling's lawyers says so how be so balanced was a great name we would super happy to change that really fast so yeah like I I think you can do that so in hardware we are patenting a combination of hardware software and intended use so you're looking at the kind of overall system and the specific relationship between the sensors and the software any sensing algorithms that you've written so that that is I think that is very sort of top-line defensible in terms of water patent attorney will tell you it's super expensive and you have to do it before you disclose so you're going to need some kind of backing and a decision to go in that direction as well as brand and identity the other thing that's defensible is make a weird thing because frankly the stuff that gets ripped off but a Chinese factory if fidgets cube had been patented it wouldn't have bothered the Chinese companies that have ripped it off it's just easy to copy it's super

successful and it's easy to copy our thing was reasonably successful and a real pain in the ass to copy because he was going to go to the trouble of designing all of these pieces and kind of getting all of that stuff right so in a way going weird is a good way to defend yourself against imitators and slightly higher ends like there is this kind of market emerging for tech toys which are 100 100 bucks and up and they necessitate more stuff in them and that makes them harder to imitate and copy than anything which is just like a single piece of plastic or a single idea so there's another thing there to kind of think about [Applause] you