Mike Bithell on indie design - PG Connects Bangalore 2015

uh I have a history coming from game developers so I was uh the head of marketing at bua I was there for two two and a half years while we launched a bunch of very successful titles on Facebook and then later on mobile uh after that I joined a finished game startup called Grand crew where we developed a game called supern that we launched close to a year ago now uh yeah what isn't in the the I I guess to a lot of people in this room in particular who love games and do games I would say what I'd say one common mental definition is that Indies make really good games and they they don't sacrifice quality for commercial if that's I need to find really good game though come on I I I don't really but it's hard to say but you know games we like games that I say maybe it's put like this games that take risks that aren't to uh you know to run of the mil Indies are not McDonald's Indies are cool little restaurants on the street corner who make some weird food so fashion plans and candid CR

they're McDonald's they're McDonald's they're for everyone so they're common denominator they're no long really obviously sorry they haven't been inie for a long time now well again I mean it's a quality debate right it's the same thing if you discuss movies which is the best movie ever is it the Godfather or is it the movie that made the most money so go M we we've F this last tell us what you think is the best movie ever is Avengers um you can tell cuz it Mak something funny um you Chang your tune I know no it is also the film you used to always say was the best film ever made what was the best film I always diard oh diard is the greatest action movie we were we were talking more general terms um I'm Mike um I'm I'm an indie G Dev um I I've stopped using the words so much I I tend to not say the word IND anymore we'll get to that um and I made a game I used likeing console and social games Facebook stuff um back Facebook games or of thing

um and now um yeah know in my hobby kind of time I'm made April Thomas Was Alone which which did pretty well um and now I'm making volume uh which is the difficult second album a disappointing for so that's what I'm working on now in terms of that I completely disagree with the gentl to my left which she's going to make for a very interesting conversation um I thought Grand Theft Auto was all right or and Halo and I Call of Duty's pretty fun um I I I I I like I like I like tripa games I love tripa games actually so I'm not sure I'd bring quality into it I think there's a there's a style and actually arguably I'd say I think India is just as susceptible to kind of prevailing genre and style as Triple L you know we have if I think about Indie now I think Rogue likes I think um you know comedy comedy games that are fun to watch on YouTube I think uh where used to be pretentious Platformers which I didn't well genre um what game mik did yeah Thomas Was Alone which is is the AL group pretentious

platform um it's it's the pretentious platform being squared um so I wouldn't put the quality statement on it and I I think we're just as we're just as PR to genre as possible I think actually in its current definition uh in Europe and America at least I think Indie is a genre I think India is a style of game that people are drawn to maybe a style with a slightly quirky uh take on an existing genre maybe it's got um a weird art style maybe it's just something that stands out and is feels different so I think on that be a great kind of it's a it's a a more Unique Kind of uh a more Unique Kind of experience um what I think is very interesting is the definition in the um in music in film in games tends to evolve so it tends to start off as a description of the mode of production so it's you know we were talking earlier about definitions uh and the idea of an indie game being a game that is made by the people who pay for it is something that a lot of people would have agreed on as that's what Indie means 5 years ago but then a lot of indie games are funded by own

Partners or by investors a lot of us now are at stage where we're seeking investment or working with Publishers if you're working with a publisher can you still be Indie um by that definition no but a lot of the games that you love that you would call Indie R LA because ind's side transition into a genre we saw this with film we saw this with music I think we're in that difficult transition period That's My take valiant heart so Valiant heart's an interesting one valiant heart is for me it's just over the fence because it's an internally developed game I think if Ubisoft paid an external team Val and hearts without pause but I think that's a great example kind of I'm talking about think B and hearts in 5 years time we will absolutely refer to that isn't it without questions um because at that point it won't be about the moneymore it will be about the content so that's where I feel so is this cuz you guys are kind of in this kind of this pocket exactly because you are owned but at the same time your content is almost exclusive that kind of

genre theme is that fair yes yes and no so for me it's I somee something micophone can you hear me go you to introduce yourself hi I'm Marina M I'm the commission director of B studios in London um we make Surgeon Simulator and I'm BR um for those of you who like that kind of game um so very it's a good game I'm ready good as Avengers how about a cross oh my God you do it bread you heard it here first um so um for me personally you know the definition of Indie isn't isn't an indie can't be defined by the size of the budget or the size of the team or the aesthetic of the game um it's it's more about creative Independence and I guess gu it fits in a little bit with Mike

Mike was saying um so you know what what difference does it make to the team into the sort of endgame uh you know now if you're funded by a Kickstarter or via sort of a hands of uh publisher like um like the Volver so it used to be the case that um the only access to fun you could find you know back in the day was going by a publisher and that meant you gave up a lot of your creative Independence um and that's changed you know now there's so many different sources of funding that mean you can retain that and you know VC money a new bre of Publishers kickstarted all of that still it means you can still sort of achieve um well retain creative Independence achieve achieve your vision um and yeah I I think that still very much falls into of any category I Inu myself I very rarely do uh so I'm Oscar Clark I work for

Unity uh for most of the time not all the time uh I talk about their gameplay recording sharing services and their ads and all that kind of stuff uh but I also write aot oops I also write a lot about kind of game design and so and so forth I'm kind of a failed in the really trying to make games and not quite raising the money so I'm going to actually almost trying to do the opposite I'm going to become a not indie they want to give me money um so but I think a lot this I think the core this I feel we're getting to here is is creative Independence is what matters I mean I'm not sure if everyone agrees with that is it creative Independence or is it commercial Independence so can you truly have creative Independence if you don't have commercial Independence so what's interesting about that sorry um what's interesting about that is um is creative Independence on a company level yes but what what we're increasingly seeing is as a lot of us kind of come off the back of a successful game and start building up our team and building up a group of people

my team don't have creative Independence my team have to do what I can tell them to do um but also you know obviously we have the standard kind of company thing you know everyone brings ideas and it all goes into a partner that's awesome um but at the end of the day they're not making the exact GES they want to make they're not creatively independent they they hopefully have autonomy and enjoy their jobs but they're not uh they're not independent in the same sense would you would you ever be able to realistically make game that you want and make that a commercial game Sur the audience no I'm incredibly selfish I I live by the rule that if that if I make games cheap enough and I make them for myself I will be able to find a few thousand people who agree with me that's my logic um and I I think that that's where the best stuff comes from I think the stuff where it's less interesting than McDonald's games other games where people absolutely go I want this to appeal to these 100 people I think actually deciding on one audience member and saying I'm going to make the perfect game for them you know I made Thomas was

for my girlfriend you know I made it to make my girlfriend laugh genuinely um and it did um thank god um and and and and volume is very much I'm making that for me as a 14-year-old I'm making you know and and I think choosing one audience member and that audience member can totally be yourself um you know it's a big world you'll hopefully find enough people and the way Economics work at the kind of the premium indd kind of endend of the market in the US and uh in the UK I don't need to find many people I need to find tens of thousands of people to make work but I wonder if it's because you I mean going to ask the others I you lots things to add to it but other com too um this whole thing about you've got a good sensibility and uh you you've got a vision and it's to have that Vision but you guys you've been involed presumably looking at what audiences are going to uh think about your G but do you pay any attention to you consider them your

I think you you I'm very much in agreement with M perh say I think you need to gu you know be aware you can't develop in a vacuum you need to be aware of what's happening outside in the world it's happening in platforms etc etc but that shouldn't lead that shouldn't be the principle from what you develop from that should be a consideration sort of questions you ask as you go about developing your game what I mean it it depends very much what you want to accomplish like I really like your view like am I making games for myself or am I making games for other people um and both are completely valid things but they're very different approaches am I going to do something that I like or am I going to do something that a billion people like some something that kind of IRS me a little bit is there tends to be a game snobbism and I think within in the community where people look down and like oh Candy Crush but I mean it's a game played by a

billion people it's incredibly hard to do that and it's you know sometimes Simplicity is the very hardest thing right it's a good saying about the Beatles when they wrote I Want to Hold Your Hand it's three chords and the most simple lyrics and everyone goes oh I could have written that in 5 minutes yeah but you didn't and sometimes that's actually the challenge right seeing the very simple thing perfecting that and making sure that something is available and you know by that logic I I'm sure there's lots of Indies by any definition that we're giving up here who are making CL who are making Candy Crush clones and they're not considered in this in the community because commercial approach I guess I I I have a slightly different view of it only because I spent a lot of time doing in judging the Lot G WS uh and I quite often see games which clearly the game that the player that the designer wanted to play rather than a creative work that was intended to be played by others and so well if I totally agree that you

you've got to have a vision you got to have this kind of sensibility you got to have something to say other otherwise why on Earth is someone play your game but at the same time we don't pay attention to the audience and we don't make a game for people to play and pay attention to their behavior as players then I think we get into real trouble so I I agree with you I think um I think there's a middle ground Sor really I think there is always a middle ground it's the easiest argument to make any argument A or B I don't know maybe um it's an incredibly pathetic play but ba there you go um I'm not going to start singing out you um so the um so the so I think what what what my point would be is is for me a game I'm making the game for the young me um but I have to test it that that's working um I have to make sure that I'm achieving my goal I have a goal but I have to test it and that's why I do lot of play testing so volume I think at this point has been played by at least a thousand people um at I take

to events um I or a team that will stand behind them that not don't everything they do uh we're doing more for play testing the moment which is literally side the room with kind of a target audience member and basically just playing the entire game through and finding all the places that she messes up and then like you know face farming and realizing how stupid we've been to leave those bits in the game um so what play testing for is not about finding out you know does this game appeal to everyone it's about finding out does this game achieve our objective to appeal to the people we want it to work for you know so it's so yeah making a game if you go into a room for 2 years and come out with this pristine object that you say this is my game I'm going to make millions you're an idiot what you need to do is you need to go into your room spend you know as short amount of time as you can making this this fvp this minimum viable product and then start showing it to people what's fantastic and what I'm so massively jealous of the generation coming up now

is how how available tools are to do that at scale that you can actually do the analytics you can actually look at this I know there are other tools available the ones Oscar's trying to sell you um but here's are good um and and yeah I think um so so that that's amazing you can actually you know I'm I'm boasting about play testing with a thousand people you could do that tonight you know on on the internet um and you won't get the same depth of data as I can get because well until they get the webcams filming people as they play um I'm sure they're working on it um but uh but yeah so I think that that base is really useful and I think yeah developing a vacuum is is a very unless you're a genius but statistically you probably are so guys what do you think is this uh is it something is it possible to still have the genius sitting in the room and then coming out with a pot gold or or is it an ongoing dialogue with players I can always speak fores of appr and it's very collaborative find that we end up with better products by uh sort

of balancing ideas around the studio and also with our with our community could talk a little bit about the game kind of appro you too CU I'm not sure if everybody is aware of that the game jams the game jams yes so um boss has got quite a unique approach to sort of creating ideas most of our projects come from these internal game samps that we run regularly every month and it's essentially 48 Hours you know very few rules everyone sort of brainstorms ideas and then goes away and makes it the only rule is you got to have someone else working with you and you've got to show something at the end of the 48 hours and the nice thing is often you get ideas that you know on paper may not have sounded like a good one um they actually look great on screen almost every you know Iron bread was one of those it's essentially a piece of bread rolling around the room very hard to control and it's trying to get toasted and you know on paper it sounds maybe not like the strongest idea I admit it but uh when it

we saw it at the end of the game jam it just came to life everyone was laughing and it was you know was really interesting um so that's and and and that is very very collaborative uh that's what works for us but I can only speak for us I'm sure there are geniuses out there what do you think yeah well just like you said what is the chances of you being a genius right for for every crossy road there's 50,000 crossy roads you haven't heard of because they failed and die so it's very dangerous to become too absorbed into that on the other hand again now it's a veryable position sorry on the other hand if you're just looking listening to Market and asking what is it you want how should we do it you're going to end up with crap it's a story about the iPhone the iPhone would never be designed by having 50 people describing what they want because people really don't know what they want so I really like your approach to you testing is incredibly

important and not really asking people so what would you like in a game because some people say well I like zombies okay and if I can just give a smart piece of Hands-On advice to everyone who doing user testing something we figured out at our previous Company Grand crew how to do it really well because we used to do it in a room with people standing over and we saw people getting nervous so we just gave them an iPad and then we had the genius and they what the hell we have an Apple TV let's just use the Apple TV so we can sit in the other room on our big TV and see exactly what they're doing we can leave the people alone and this works with chomecast and all these kinds of things so if you're doing user testing give that a try so sort of give the others a chance to ask question the last question I'm going to ask you guys is is this space for a triple game what is a tripa game nowadays um you know what do you think you know we talked about Indie what's the opposite of Indie your risk appetite becomes so much lower when you've got so much more on the line um so it it's not something really that's in our our in

our plans I think in some ways there's an almost irony to it though that the the ones who have less budget the Indie kind of theme as we know this challenges with the description of the word India but if we consider Indie to be a genre essentially that's where the experimentation is at um because even though they don't have the budget they have risk whereas traditionally AAA is a a marketing budget it's not a production budget nothing to do with production it's to do with how much money and effort and programming was spent on getting that content to Market through physical retail so I think the the this like M said you this transition dep we now have somewhere between 20 and 10 AAA big Blockbusters a year well that that's kind of inevitable I think in this in this um space and I wonder what it means for the console industry I wonder what it means for mobile um I I infamously said that people making premium games of

dead that's probably not fair but I think we're in this fascinating space and hopefully the lessons that we going be talking about through the rest of the day are incredibly regardless of the size of the company and I think the way we're behaving and innovating now is an incredibly important part of what makes this industry interesting and people should be paying attention to this room in some ways more than what the comp I think I think sorry sorry I forgot how this works um yeah no I agree I think we're yeah we we we're able to do this stuff and you know oh no k for a second uh that will shift I think I think we'll find ourselves in we we're going to see this constant rotation I think it's always been the case it's just we have a word for it now that kind of someone will make a weird Innovative you know esoteric project and then they'll make some money and they'll start taking less and less risks and slowly they'll work their way Activision started off as a as

a group of Indies who banding together because they weren't getting enough credit for their work you know that's and that's Activision now that's the cycle you know um you know various every developer you ever heard of started off probably making weird little ropey games um so I think that's something to kind of accept and embrace and you know realize that we we're we're not going to be cool forever there'll be a new generation that's cool and we'll be the boring old evil big corporations but we'll have money so you know be nice yeah I'm going to just give a chance we're running out of time so I just want to give chance for to ask a couple of questions anyone got any questions out there ask question um so this is little philosophical uh so is there a difference in someone who works for a big Corporation in in a so say someone makes a to play game and someone who is an IND developer for example um does a big developer need to be lot of you know depth expert as in you are a un expert or really Art Expert but the IND

developer is more of a ja tra is there a is there a DNA difference without ever having been in Indie so that makes me a great expert I would say as an India I mean you have to be a jackal traits you have to do many more things uh it's also a smaller team with more control more Shar uh sharing of knowledge and things like that that can get lost in bigger projects bigger games bigger titles so you you have to be better at everything I think and you get paid less so it's kind of hard yeah I I'd have to agree absolutely I've also you know got you know almost everyone has got you know a core skill set but also has an interest in other areas and we encourage that in those game jams people to try their hands of whatever they fancy so and often that leads to some really interesting results because you'll approach the same challenge in such a different way um so I think yeah Jack of all trades yeah no boringly very simp yeah it's um I think

in terms of like intent and emotion there absolutely no difference um in terms of like you know passion for games and your average dude making bricks for Call of Duty has exactly the same energy and passion and love of video games as I do um it's it's across the board they're they're just working a different field in terms of skill set yes there's definitely with especially with triple A because there's you know you know well Assassin's Creed would hit actually hit a thousand people more actually in core development on that game um so there you're pushed into a niche and that's where I used to be I used to do console games and I was basically very good at making particle effects uh so that was my job I would go into a level and we need some dust okay to throw that in and I would be wheeled around various projects with have B company like get Mike in this thing needs some more dust um and and you know yeah that was and that was my thing but then yeah Indie is I think really suits the personality type because I was sat there making all that dust and I'd be trying to work my way into other things I'm like can I

just like design a level or like can I do some can I do this or can I do that or can I set up that cut scene or can I do some typography or some gra and and what IND what India allows you to do is to do all of those skills so it is a jackal trades kind of profession very interestingly our CEO Enrique he was the sound designer and I am Brad he very much enjoyed breaking stuff for the purposes of capturing the sounds of breaking bottles and putting them in the game very cool I can imagine Enrique do yeah so I think we have to go it quits there thank you guys it's been fantastic hopefully you [Applause] go before they go can I just get hands up how many people still think they're Indie hands up as the B of sign so that's good news I do believe 15 minutes was a little short so I've tried to compress everything which is relevant in this so I hope uh you find it useful um so I saw and an initial build of uh soci ball at

the nascom game developers conference in 2013 where abura was uh showcasing it as part of the student showcase and he was still studying engineering then he just graduated last year uh and uh I really liked the game because it was super simple it was puzzle and very minimal and what was really cool was when I went to his stall when I went to his stall uh uh he wasn't there but it was his dad uh showing everyone the game and he knew everything about the game how it worked and everything like that that was really cool that was not something we expect at a games conference in India so um I just got talking to Okay um so yeah the game uh I has anyone here played soci

okay a few people okay so the there was a trailer in here but it's not working anymore so we'll have to uh it's a isometric puzzle game uh about where you have to drag tiles onto empty spaces in uh grids and then you have to guide a ball which starts from here and goes up to you have to guide it to the square gold so um the game actually uh has this really cool mechanic where you can create levels and the levels that you create can be shared via Twitter so that was something I really liked and I was like you know uh it's a PC game and I told him that you know it'll be much better uh in a mobile game as well because people kind of like to people are more prone to uh sign up their Twitter with a game on a mobile these days he also had this other game called the drill is gone which was uh part of the bog thing which also was really cool I think and he had a really nice attitude to game development he was uh always looking to

learn and grow and do better things and polish the game which was kind of our attitude to development as well so we got along really well so yeah as I said we had like-minded values and um I really like the game and uh my feedback to him was like he should definitely try and do a mobile game so we were on the same page and I think that's super important for uh any collab project like we didn't really have any big negoti ations about how we should do things or any long contractual discussions it was just like hey I like your game you like my level design we can work on this together and make it better and so that's what we did the the oure the core team was me and Aura and then we had help from AJ who did the um who did the music for the trailer and sound effects Maya who helped us with the uh the color schemes and adiraju helped us with the trailer editing and stuff like that so my my responsibility was game design and

helping him with publishing and things like that and abura did most of the programming and also all the art assets and also design Hello so we had we started the project on 3rd of March in 2014 and we had our final submission on 24th of October and in between we had like a almost a month of downtime so that's still about six odd months of uh development uh for a game which seemingly was super simple so a lot of people asked us like why did you take so long for this game it's so simple so um yeah it's we get that question a lot um I think so the main problem was that it was not the same game at all because the original game of protype was made in XNA we had to rebuild it in unity the original assets were all 2D we had to make everything in 3D cuz we had some ideas for transitions between levels and things like that so there was it was like coding an entire new game and it was good because he could redo uh change

all the things that he wasn't comfortable with in that so um we switched uh yeah we worked on so this was one of the pain points of the project the UI we started working on the UI with the 3D components and because by then Unity GUI wasn't live and then halfway through when Unity GUI came we were like okay we have to use this because it's going to make it much better uh we had we lost about a month's work because we had to undo everything and then put everything back in and this two and thr that we did with the UI made a lot of stuff really difficult to debug and like it was one of the two major sources of bugs in the game so yeah if if we had the chance we would not do this again uh also um we had to write our own custom physics because like actual real physics was just too real for the game like the ball would lose momentum or Jitter when there was a gap between tiles and stuff like that so it does use physics despite its many many many many

limitations and bugs that it caused because every time you update it just went completely crazy but anyway it was still great to have these tools uh the original game used the a tweet Shar plugin which was for um C but uh that plugin doesn't work in unity so we had to look for a new plugin we spent a lot of time trying to do something ourselves but then we found prime 31's social networking plug which worked quite well it was paid but was not super expensive so we went with it if someone's planning to do something with Twitter I think it's a good solution at least for IOS and Android their Windows Phone plugin is not up to the mark yet I think uh we structured the code in a way that it would have a lot of usable components and like um we had uh we tried to do multiplatform code but now then that we are pting or when we try TR to look at voting the game to any other device you realize that I'm not so sure

multiplatform code exists in real life like you know it's it's a myth but yes it's also it helps but in the end there's still so much work to do every time you try to Port a game so we are in that phase right now we're just trying to see if we can bring it to PC or Android or Windows phone or something like that but yeah it's a lot of Works um we so one of the things we learned when we were doing all of this is that we have to implement all the systems before we start polishing uh all of them so this is something we did wrong in hubric well not wrong but in hubric we would at at every every step we would try and like you know perfect the system and then add a new one and I think uh this is something we handle better with social because we added all of the systems in and then we started like polishing everything through um so the mechanic of the game actually came from the Twitter idea so

it was a 10x 10 grid uh tiles and uh each tile denotes is denoted by a letter in a Twitter stream and that's what the initial idea was so you could just replace a tile with an empty spot or a different letter which would mean a different TI would show up there so it was a super simple idea to share stuff on Twitter where it would just lead it to a garbage like string on your twit account which you you don't want uh which is a problem we tackle later we started using screenshot shots and we embedded that string data inside the uh but the mechanics of the game came from the style based idea so it was like kind of unique because we we usually tend to think of the mechanics first but this one started with the uh social feature first the art as I um said was uh originally all 2D and made with inscape but then we were shifting to 3D so we used um three 3D softwares um in the game design so our major objective with the game was since we

were redoing all the physics we could add new mechanics uh the original game the original prototype had only one ball per level and this game would allow us to have multiple balls which meant that we had to redo all the levels make new levels and things like that also since it was a touchbased interface um we had new controls and new challenges to deal with on that since the original game was Mouse control okay um so one of the things that we are like super um uh we Advocate heavily is play testing and uh how we do play testing is something that even the panel spoke about a bit before is that you don't ask people what they want because they don't know but you let them play and you watch them so we always like whenever we made levels we give it to people and we just watch them play or we just you know um so some things we found out from these play test so that people kind of liked the ball doing like weird things so just

like going around in unexpected ways this was something we knew we predicted that this would this would happen uh but the good surprise was like people were happy to experiment with tiles and just see what they do like oh I'm going to try this tile and see what that does and know I'm going to try the other trial here and see so that made uh our job really easier because that meant that we didn't really have to have tutorials like we wanted people to experiment the level and learn for themselves so that was like a big plus for us um this was really cool this allowed us to make really cool levels in the game because when there are multiple balls uh people like to see how they interact with each other and what fun things they could do with each other like uh there are some levels where one ball controls the actions of the other or the parts of the other and linking these parts together that that was quite fun uh again this was something we learned in hubric as well like you have to make levels that are visually appealing uh I mean even in the solved or in the unsolved State they should look interesting it they might be challenging but if they don't look

interesting nobody's going to be interested in playing that um yeah make uh as I said like uh the ball interactions were quite interesting so people like to see weird stuff and sometimes this looks intimidating like who what the hell is going to happen here but you know when you see the ball go through these weird winding paths people felt some kind of gratification so that helped the game so yeah this was the other thing where the ball kind of the the ball on the left controls the path that the ball on the right can take uh again with hubric we had made like 400 levels uh by hand and uh we spent a lot of time on that and this time we're like okay we can't spend that much time but the good part part of shal was that uh it did have uh user uh scope for user generated content but our prepackaged levels were much simpler than HRI because we got so many people telling sux was so hard like please make something a little easier so we tried to

keep it a little simpler this time and uh while getting the game out we had this mutual agreement that we would never do something that both parties were not completely 100% sold out so I called it approval process for approval and I would run everything by him uh about uh operation decisions or you know price points or whatever um another thing we had set aside was that we won't release the game till both of us are satisfied um but that also meant that we not going to put in that much time to make 500 levels so there's only 60 levels in the game right uh we had a level editor with u uh which was poorly designed and uh so we eventually took it out from the game but it was there it was a tool we used to make the make the game levels but I think it was not good enough for user ended um creation but but with social ball that was something we focused on like the game play and how

you create the levels should be exactly the same and uh you know so we made sure that how you create levels in Social B is just like playing the game in Social B we did everything the same with hubrick hubrick work well for us so here we did everything the same we spent a lot more time on deciding the first screenshot and the icon which is something that I would suggest to everyone like spend even if it it takes months spend enough time to make sure that your first screenshot and your Ion is brilliant and now also the preview video because iTunes allows you to upload the video that's the decision maker for people that's what's going to sell your game um we were always active from day one on forums like Touch Arcade and uh asking people for feedback on having polls about color schemes and asking other Developers for freedback this helped us in a way that the community knows you exist and what you're doing and sometimes it's also means that the people who are uh behind the editorial

teams of the stores they are also watching these spaces they know you exist they know you have the right kind of mentality so I would suggest being active on social and forums things like that uh and one thing we learned from uh not huric but the game before that is don't release on holiday season if you're a small guy with not much marketing budget do not release in the holiday season and that's what we did we launched in on January 15th uh and we just hope for from Apple feature and we got it um we were featured in US UK Canada Island China not in India as usual uh we got another mentioned by the photonica indd Showcase uh on on the iTunes front page that was like our second bump in sales uh we already have about 220 levels that are tweeted uh these are levels that are going to stay in the game forever so if someone tweets a level and we retweeted it stays in the game forever um we have about 4.6 4.7 store ratings and 79 on

Metacritic uh we have sold about um we have made about $10,000 $111,000 in Revenue so far it's not much as you can see uh but it's just two of us and it's 6 months so it's okay we can live in India on this much we can make another game or Port it to another platform so we happy with that and uh yeah so this is something I believe is we do every time we end a project we take inventory of all the stuff we've lost because there's something wrong with our studio we always end up losing a lot of stuff in every project we had to change four isps lost the PC um one GPU and a hard disk and other stuff that I lost in amdam ask about it and this is uh all the other stats stats about the G and if anyone has any questions please feel free to ask them can we have time for

questions all right questions I don't any questions right was it are you are you feel that quiet and sleepy I'll get you jumping up and down if you don't ask me question so I mean I'm going ask because you you obviously you did the game p thing uh and you're one of the more International um in developers I know fromia but generally you you try to be everywhere yeah how much benefit do you think you get by being out and about meeting all those different people from different teams how does that affect your ability to be a developer I think it's more for me it's more like a emotional thing like U uh I I didn't get any money raised from any of the gate Founders or any of the other trips but it just feels good to be part of a community like when I go and see all these other developers who are also having the same issues as us no matter where in the world they are and most of them have so much knowledge and they willing to share it so freely it's uh it's actually a really nice feeling and

uh apart from that it's always good to be in touch with everybody and I think if I didn't travel as much as I did so far I wouldn't have met like uh many many influential people who who helped me uh they may not have given me money or you know something up front but you know uh they have helped me a lot so yeah I would suggest going to as many conferences as you can and I like think I know a lot of people but they always know you which is great I I I the reason I asked that question was really because I think one thing we we don't pay attention to is the importance of networking uh and the ability that you know that that will open up the door at some point whether it's not necessarily money I think so yeah it's so I yeah I agree with that I think you shouldn't like just go up and say hey I need money because you know that's maybe not mostly not not not a lot of people in this business have money so don't ask for money just ask for just just be cool ands make friends not not contacts and

it makes a great industry thank you very much for that doing great stuff oh we have a question right question and uh the major difference is hubric we did a lot more offline tests like we sent the game off and we were tracking a lot of data in terms of how long the people took to solve levels and things like that because we just simply didn't have enough uh time and uh options to do inh housee play test with social B we did more inhouse plest like we went to bars and cafes and like even brought people to our studio and just handed out the game and got people to play them and just watch them play so I mean uh these were the question okay so uh yeah you you said something about the offline test like the second time you went to bar but the first time we did it was yeah so with cuc we did a lot of online tests like we just sent out the game uh link uh to people and we tracked data so it was

more data driven in terms of not really like metrics but more like game difficulty kind of stuff uh with social ball it was more like in in uh like we could watch them play so it was more hands on that you find some sort of preference I think it's much better to watch people play than uh to uh you know just uh data because when you watch people play you see where they get stuck or what part of the UI they're not getting or you know they don't get that you have to drag this style here it's worth being aware though there is a potential risk for that which is that if you're seen observing something that behavior does change yes that's true that's a real that you got to be really careful so I think balance between the two is yeah I think we have to call it quit there thank you so much um so thank you so what I want to talk about is that in making a fre to play game apart from the game there are a lot of other stuff which I feel as indeed we generally have no idea about sh has talked about play

testing about building the game taking it to the market but more than that what what we felt was very very tough to handle was which tools do we use so that you know the game is good for scaling up is it light on our pockets how do we take care of everything how do we collect data how do we iterate iterating is not a joke I mean you need to test on let's say 5 to 8,000 people and again uh get the data and change it and test it again so you need the right set of tools and all these big guys have a huge set of In-House and ouse tools that they use uh to do everything right so this Beast of free to play uh is not only about the game but a whole set of back end that that goes along with it so and one guy just wrote all the crash tools available actually he's my friend I hope he's not here but yeah but so the problem is that there there's there's problem in everything like criticism U ndk SDK is paid uh an indie wants something free to start with everything has their own

issues and it's very very specific to each engine so I thought why not cover this so that you know whatever we tried out all the tools shed out some uh maybe it can help other guys so let's start with the back end back end I mean you know trying to save user data sying user data and all the FP login I think F stands out completely here uh it's something to back up on it's the most stable thing and it has easy indiction for all the things and it has an official Unity plugin too and the costing is pretty good it's according to API calls so if if you've not crossed I think 500k to 1 Mill users you would be in the free range and that's good enough for us for now let's see how it goes after that and analytics is again a major thing and for us it was really really important because our soft launch went for like 3 months because when we launched it we saw what was happening in let's say 1 to 2,000 users and then we Chang a lot of stuff we saw that uh people in different regions were

expecting localized languages and we've seen a huge uh increase in rtion once we localize the game in 10 languages so analytics tools are are obviously really important and uh flurry doesn't do everything so even though flurry is free and it's like the most reliable one and I would still suggest to have flurry just there I think one more analytic tool like either localytics or mix panel is important and localytics is pretty good it has other things too which I'll cover again so 10K users St it's free so it was good enough for us soft lunch uh but after that we had to again go back to flurry uh then we didn't need that detailed uh analysis on each user user segmentation uh is something that that really uh that not many Indies try to do but if you you seen GL PL comes in ninja uh whenever you need whenever you I mean trying to gauge specific patterns they give you these offers and it converts a lot and I

think a free topl game you know you need to make sales inside the game so user segmentation and trying to Target specific set of users and making sales might help uh in inaps a lot and most of the companies have their own inubs tools and they don't let it out so nudge is a new Tool uh which is really good but it's pretty costly I don't think Indies can use there's something called fuse box they change their name to fuse part uh they have both an ad mediation as well as a user I mean you can Target specific users not show ads to them uh Target specific users for specific sales and all that it's it's pretty decent it's very new uh so it's a little buggy we tried it but uh we we avoided in our iOS launch for sure because uh they were trying to fix those bus but with in the Android launch we using them and as a disclaimer I'm not invol with any of these parties are not making any safe uh ad networks I think everyone

is pretty clear about ad networks as was a casual game so we needed enough ad Network because casual games tend to have both revenue from ads and other alternate monage models more than Ines so uh definitely CH Bo in movi uh nativex 50k I put it there because they have this scheme going on where they giving 50k for Indies as a starting package if your retention and everything is good you guys can try that uh Unity ads has really high F rates good job on that so we we didn't try in the first run in in our first uh soft launch but you know when everyone just said that you should go to Unity and we did that and really high field rates at col still has really good high ecpm I would say uh wangal surprisingly they do they have good field rates in um other parts of country like in India where not many people monetize Wang seems to have enough ads there uh poet we trying for our Android uh lot of already Indian

game studios are trying that and it's pretty pretty decent I would say um now we also trying I just get to that so now we're trying uh not above we trying ad mediation platforms because F each integration and trying to put a logic as to which video ad do we show so if Unity Adat is gone show an ad Colony uh that that was getting a little tedious and there was not no point integrating so many um uh IND individually and making individual calls so we went with ad mediation and that's what we we went with haap haap is good very good in fact uh their their integration is very smooth and haab has their own network too and the good point about this is that app advertisement I mean especially the video ones they they also show ads of other uh not only game ads but others apps and everything so uh they tend to I mean it's ebms are pretty good there too uh fuse boox again as I said it's an admition platform and also they have their own ad Network it's

pretty new but good enough I would say uh Veno is a nice uh admin platform we going to try that in our Android and uh other games that we are focusing on India V is good they have good fieldes in India they're most specific in India it's a I think uh it's an X EA guys startup uh it's doing pretty so after after ad networks and I U we also thought on other alternate modation models that can that can you know take place without without I mean without disturbing the user much there are lot of off walls which look very shitty we didn't want it to happen because CET one was a decently good looking game so we tried to see which was looking okay okay and uh we tried B7 in our Android launch right now and B7 is this network by outfit 7 which owns Tom Talking Tom and all that so it's good they have some good uh starting uh what do you say offers to make they're making some good free installs in the

start they're promoting games in talking to which otherwise would be very costly to do I think this is this is good even for user acquisition as well as for you to uh for games to earn enough money uh E7 is good I would definely suggest that if you specifically focusing for India pocket of oall is decent enough it looks a little not not that good on the U but uh I think that's one of the only um we also maybe looked at Cross promotional um tools apart from just sto because St is very very open and you send someone a message they they rarely reply it's it's becoming I mean as as huge as it grows it's it's very difficult to make deals there so uh line takes up I think someone from line here line line API it's closed they select specifically and uh we keep getting these mails from a lot of Chinese local stores and U I think that's okay to to get uh easy installed fast uh mostly

open you just need to do some stuff for Android and it's good uh this is new thing KY F they they're fairly open by by yoan so uh they have a lot of other alternate modation models inside K Ecom and everything I think we didn't try that on first hand but we we want to yes definitely uh but I think I mean game design wise also you need to put them in specific good places so that it really spoil the user experience and another thing that we felt is that if the user experience is good and the and the ads are majorly user initiated actions as as in rewarded ecpm start going higher and that's a very important point so that the user keeps watching Those ads again and again they don't skip it much the more the more they like it the more these guys increase the acpm the more you know you get get money I like but actually it's interesting CU a lot of the time I I spend is actually and I'm not going to be you know we've got the oran I'm not going to be bypassing about

it but we spend a lot of time talking about how you think about ad placement as a design mechanic uh and this idea of realizing that you actually want them to look at the you want them to click on it yes and then I how do you approach that I mean do you spend time thinking about why someone wants to click yeah I mean uh it's like I we we feel that watching an ad should be an alternative to some users who do not want to do not want to don't have the ability to pay in app purchases so basically it's like okay I I'll watch an ad I'll watch something cool enough and 30 seconds I can just spend on it instead of paying $1 so let's do that that's where we put it so we put it at specific places where user would want more coins out of it we definitely know that he's craving for something more in this game so that's how we do it so the whole Loop uh we put it at places specifically with good enough UI and ux and not at all including not at all throwing it onto the SP that's that's how we do it I also think it's in part of of Designing any of that purchase I mean there been some

interesting research looking at how particularly optimized ads can actually help sell more content or at least not cannibalize yeah uh I mean do you have any experience with that have you seen the impact of people being able to access something through watching an ad defecting whether they're more willing to spend or so you're asking if more people are able to access more content in the game yeah actually we have this u i mean lot of our system because it's a casual pretty clear that in purchases won't be on the higher end taking the general things into consideration so for any kind of shortterm recharges or anything in the game we had an alternate option of always watching an ad or a revive or anything like that and that that's definitely working on good for us any other questions we're just going to car on talking no no I'm going to say thank you very much round Applause thank you and what we do is invite the panel to come and join me uh my name is Colin I teach game design at

dsk sub info game in pun and I've been in pun for seven seven or eight years now and previously I was working at a company called Zed where I was creative director hi I'm shales I'm the founder and game designer at yellow monkey Studios uh we've been making games for 8 years at y now and than while so I mean to the point so is there an indie thing you know we obvious hear this a lot particularly I think on steeve uh rather than necessarily on mobile but we see a look um I mean for me the archetype which to be honest BS me is the 2D well it's a sort 2D pixel art sidew scrolling thing um and I got bored of uh platform games in 1985 um you know and you with Manic Miners and and the and Chucky eggs I don't see I didn't get Nintendo why are

we focusing on these things that we could have done 30 years ago or are we not am I what do you think um I think it's um it could be seen in different ways I guess I I guess there's a section which is treating it like a genre and which is like okay you know this is what an indie game should look like it should be pixelated it should have this and that and then there's another section who's like okay this is what I can do I'm going to do that because uh lot of sometimes there's a 2d artist on board and they're like okay I I can't make 3D models so I don't want to make a 3D game you're going to make a 2d game and you don't want to make uh curse of the Monkey Island or something you have to make hand painted drawings because that's going to take like 2 years to complete if you're a two three man team so then many of many time you fall back to something like pixel art and stuff so I think it's more manageable and in the end games are about gameplay and the experience that they give so if it if it's able to give an experience with that Graphics a lot of compies get away

with it so I think there's like two sides so it sounds like you're almost saying that it's not about philosophy there it's actually about practicality is that fair for me it's always been that way so if you've seen urick and social they both are minimal and that's only because we don't have an artist on board uh so we always try to make something that we can give a good experience with it's still polished it's still good to look at but it's not hard intensive yeah I think biolog it's a factor of the team limitation so you do end up with program on a lot of production U however and I think in particular it's it's basically making a virtue of the limitations is that yeah it can be but sometimes it's also about style right I think uh like the other side is like some people treat it as a style as an AS aage to old school games or retro or playing

the uh Nostalgia value so I think that's also another yes so I mean it's why is the stound just such an important part games I I I I I speak to somebody who's been through every reiteration of it in my professional capacity in personal and I was playing online games in 1985 uh I was playing you know Elites and M Bros I was you know and then when I went to to mobile first time around we saw all those kind of games back we saw all those kind of games coming back again and then we were Facebook and they told all those games come back again and on mobile again it's all those have we got no imagination um well I mean we we have to talk about crossy roads now I guess oh yeah I uh I love this game U I used to play I mean frogo was one of the first games I played on PC but I think uh cross your road has has value and uh in this day and age well I I I should know

we p a lot of money but um I mean the key thing is though for me well resp my feeling about about cross in particular is that what they did is they transcended the Retro so they went here's this game mechanic which we know everyone loves we know these other influences like the end affect that and we're going to realize not what um froger was but what we imagined froger could have been is that is that fair and introduce yourself as well sorry for being late um I was supposed to have a talk this morning apparently it was rescheduled I'm like okay whenever go back and somebody is like go to the shower get out oh by the way you're on this panel I'm like oh so this is not cancel it changed so I just came on here I'm very sorry for me um so I love crossy Road I love what they did I love the fact that Matt Hall one of the better halves of of of uh hipst was

actually here at NDC in 2012 it was still just a oneman army click talk and I I followed his his his development as a as an independent game developer closely from there on um crossy for me is just the embodiment of Effectiveness in in terms of design but also in terms of execution and monetization um I think it's a cination of what you just described combined with Chemistry Between developers and just great timing they are an amazing and and like you said like I think I think we can look at the Flappy phenomenon in two ways you look at all the clones and then you can look at the people that be kind of got the formula you got why Flappy Bird was so viral and successful took those po like took that philosophy that they still and then reapplied it to a

game experience that I think we haven't properly played in almost a decade on mobile devices I find it really interesting because I was lucky I got M to sort of U session I was supposed to be doing about MF and we were just doing conversation about design which is fantastically fun um but the key thing about it was is not his first ride on the road yet is an experience long-term experien developer and that that whole team is and in fact if you look at the the soal Indie titles that we've seen there's a huge amount of com people who have huge amounts of experience in terms of console or other platforms so I mean is is this whole IND thing basically kind of facade is it is it a joke I you know are we are we pretending that it's Indie when actually what we've got is experience people at the height of their I mean I think um there's different

types right like there are people who start off fresh and like make great games but I think uh it's experience always helps my my idea would be that I think it always helps to have some knowledge already uh because otherwise you're making mistakes and learning on your own time and it's probably better to do it on someone's time has the m so I I believe it it showcases that it's actually a spirit and that even uh experience seasoned Dev that're used to turning out really polished products uh they Endeavor to sometimes go back to roots and pay um the other thing I found interesting is that epic tutorials for the for the editor is is a FL yeah I think that's a great thing isn't it I mean even on an I'm not going to be you know hard to stand on it friends People Help kill

me um but yeah that that's they want to play around but they want to show the kind of emotional so me moving on to that so experience matters thinking about the business game seems to matter that to be slightly we talked about earlier this idea that I've got to be and I'm going to share it but also the idea that anybody can do it I mean we're really in this world of democratizing gameel is obviously us gener you know is there still an opportunity to start now and learn I'm a huge fan and I think that's why it's cool to be here in India I'm a huge fan of game companies that use the work for higher model to stay stable and like you said learn over other people's backs J um and then take those

fundamentals and apply them to what is that's a safe bet not everyone is Matt Hall and the from not everyone can aspire to be that not everyone is Roby is is from fler not everyone is is C like has those comms are as capable that principles I think that what comes with experience is the ability to distill and this was a great talk by Alexander BR that I think touched a lot of people that I spoke to here as well remove the luck element and we need to still the cor principles that came down to what defined success for particular titles do your research I think that the powerful thing about being Indie now is not so much being your own boss and having and whatnot but having the liberty of extensively analyzing everything that's out there distilling those formulas that comes once you're experienced it's easier for you to see those patterns if you're not that

experienced you just have to put more research into it but I talked to Indies I talked to developers and I asked them okay how much market research have you actually done how how you your competitors or your sources of inspiration like cross you right right and it's increasing the number of people that are telling me well you know we've looked at 20 25 games we mapped them out that that that acknowledgement that marketing starts from day one and the acknowledgement that you need to to understand how monetization is going to be part of the overall experience that's become an integral part of the design process the design Philosophy from the first day and that's I think what the most powerful element is with Indies now that can still allow them to succeed even though they just got started so I largely agree with that but there's a really interesting comment made yesterday that the Indian development Market isn't hasn't got the baggage because we're dealing with in a marketplace where everyone fresh relatively fresh with touch scen so you have to teach yourself so you have to

analyze and do that research and and and if you do that you can surpass even the most veteran of Veteran individuals that because let's be honest uh you know up until a couple of years ago I think when when nascom mapped the Indian game industry in 2012 they mapped out 200 companies they were all console focused right nowadays you can make a game in a month and if you just design it properly it can explode so what does that tell me like those those cons people will not be able to make that job as quickly as a young naive individual that just crunches reads the Articles reads the coverage look comes to these talks and applies those principl so you're dealing with Academia as well AR you uh so you know how much of that preparation you think the S generation of the getting it's one of the first things we do when when they Jo they go through a massive chunk of video game

history so that their their Inspirations are more long drawn they don't look to clone like last success they can look back at really longlasting successes educate themselves that's really what I think I was um talking to uh Talan last week and um jury from Rio is talking about how it's as much safer better to take an existing freeto playay game reskin it and launch that than anything else and it D strikes me that's a fundamentally bad idea because it's a lower diminishing return shouldn't we be looking for the right way to say and try to find way reimagining the uh potential for the game play first and then apply the business I've I've incidentally I I used to clone games I me not not it wasn't my decision it was part of the the Mandate

but so but inevitably bad it's cloning inevitably bad is the question really if you're starting off here I mean if it's just 100% CL yeah exactly what is what is a clone is the other question that's that's that's that take this entire I wouldn't go into that you only mic by sorry that that covers that could cover this entire panel I wouldn't go into that I'll keep it super short I just spent a year in Finland which gave me a very different perspective on being because their the amount of social support that you have from the government added with the amount of giant ass taxes that you pay means that you can take any risk and you will end up most likely getting 75% of your salary for the 6 months and that follows if your company goes backr so there's a very different mentality and the definition of risk is completely different from what you guys have to face here in India um that said um the

company that I worked for put en Force entertainment I left back in February so I can't disclose too much about what's going on there but when I was there um one of the main things I had to fix was the reputation that the company had that we had cloned Counter Strike on mobile that's not true Counterstrike is a 1.5 gig execu executable file for PCs the game that force made was the 60 like the Meg file that had the same kind of game experience with different controls and whatnot so that's that's where I draw the line with cloning is like you can take a concept and reimagine it on a different platform and then it really comes down to the to the basics but if you if you can bring a new element of experience to a new audience then the Clone is Justified in my perspective because you're reaching something that maybe the original Creator never had but it's it's such it's that's not even let stop the discussion right there suggest because it's a complet well we'll see if the audience think that I mean let's go let's go a little bit further I think it's worth going

into this because I mean I think there's drawing a dose of realism when you look at the average revenue G gets at the moment particular an iio with something like $5,300 or something but when you look at the median Revenue it's around $400 for the lifetime of a game so you know obviously there's the games that get into the higher make Lally bus but the middle game is making about $400 and the average cost of making a game something like $25,000 $30,000 so are you basically subsidizing the by your what you think yeah I mean um everyone's trying to make the billion dollar game right so in a way yes you are subsidizing the success of the billion billions uh I mean but the advantage I see that we in India have is that as I said with our game like we made about $111,000 uh that's enough for a two man team to live for a few months so I think

it's still okay for us to we can take we should be more risky is what I'm saying like we have the Liberty to be more risky obviously yes we don't have the Social Security that life is talking about but we have the advantage of being able to live at much cheaper so we can try we can try out of things we should the cost of living is a major factor for being an unreach that kind of yeah are you saying the same thing is that is it is there enough of incentive risk people understand the risk I so I I can't speak about the risk uh however I think if you're going to go down that road you you need to dedicate time and uh your thought process like from the onset should be geared towards Market uh if you're not thinking that way uh why are you

doing me always having a vision yeah but it's having a vision and having an A and using your creativity to to too I mean your creative expression so there's two sides to this to to follow up on what was just said uh in terms of risk so I spent the last year in all right the company was bootstrapped um we did a total startup turnaround I sacrific my salary from March onward in ter for Equity of the company um and um I lived in the office I had no rent I lived off of €200 a month total right for personal expenses and groceries so there's a lot of examples like this like our good friends Stefan at at at Forest in Denmark they they spent 9 months or no they spent up to nine I think seven or eight months uh

living in the uh class in the classroom at their University that apparently wasn't used they slept there with the entire team they saved thousands upon thousands of do of Euros or dollars on uh on rent for that time and that's that's what got there you know um but to add to what was just said um yeah I mean that that you just have to kind of like be prepared for the consequences I would say and and have a supportive Network I'm actually going to be talking about that at my quickly just ping like I'm replacing Vladimir from to cof schedule so one plat replaces the other but I'll I'll be talking about that more detail in my talk as well because uh you know I think it's with the marketing part nowadays people are designing games for PewDiePie that's what I mean like from the day one marketing you're designing it to be enjoyed by YouTube because that's a marketing channel that's a bu plan right there it's like a one- sentence business plan design your game to be fun for YouTubers and then

try to aim for getting at least 5 million YouTube views if you have a 1% conversion rate that means that you're guaranteed to have 50,000 copies sold on Steam well I mean that's direct your record the whole strategy of getting all your friends toy to check out made his dog G that's pretty cool anyway so let's have some questions got a couple of minutes left and we any questions first anyone bre one that uh hello uh my name is s and I'm a student studying game design and got some game so uh my question focuses on the general aspect of game design how to maintain a balance between fun and frustration level of a game let's say for an example uh Slappy bir how to maintain a balance between fun and frustration levels in on a

game play test play test test test test test test test test test test but it's also isn't it a little bit to do with what is the emotion you're trying to thread and I think you know the difference between a Flappy Bird and some of the other games is the deliberate focus on frustration and the recognition that people have a natural uh learning curve and that their reactions will respond to that so having starting out knowing that that's how people respond to a physical based you know um technique allows you to then frame the tests that you're going to take where if you think about you know or H that's a different kind of emotional response how much time did you spend on testing testing um Fe testing for almost from day one till almost launch hours man hours man hour sweet and we had five people testing it for like 12

months let's imagine 1 hour a day that's 365 hours a person times 5 that's a lot of hours okay so there you go my tip um if you make a game that is feasible for YouTubers go for the guys that have only 100 subscribers and send them an early Bill and you will see their reaction on video if they use a camera and you see their face you can exactly see how they react to specific points of and show it to people here I've play tested over 20 games the last 24 hours here and you will get insulted on this feedback for which you will not get from using every as well um you know things at one Epic night they were telling us that they couldn't find particular because they were doing the game playay recording and that the face of the guy they manag to find a b and they all sudden knew why the guy was having a struggle and they find it yeah all that kind of stuff's great does that answer the question yes any more

any more questions time for just one more you're all looking shy this morning it sounds like probably needed coffee or something like that so what we're going to do is we're going to got literally 2 minutes of the coffee break left um so grab yourself a coffee or or a quick break come back here for 12 uh or hang around and we'll kick off with the next speaker so uh thanks very much to the panel uh I think it's been a really hope you guys