Superstar Session: How Company-wide Creativity Made us a Success PG Connects Digital #2

hi simon sorry about the delay with everything you know what it's a problem day five playstation five it launch event last night i feel like uh everyone's just getting themselves going again after all the excitement how are you though good good not getting as much sleep as i'd like the kids are going a bit stir crazy in lock down but i know tell me about it well not that i have kids but you know sometimes i feel like i'm not getting as much sleep as i'd like it's weird do you feel like we should be getting more we should be we should have the freedom to lie in but it's just not working out that way i know how bizarre is it but uh yeah so um anyway without any further ado because i know we're two minutes over i'm going to leave you to it but before i do i'm going to say to everyone if you've got any questions for simon please throw them into the q a we've obviously got the chat going on like always and um and yeah and i'll see you

in a bit for the for the q a session that's it thank you thank you very much thanks bye okay let's show up okay i'll wait until you've got it going and then i'm looking forward to this oh there we go beautiful great looking forward to it so we'll see you in a bit thank you thank you so hi everybody my name is simon platt and this is my talk on how company-wide creativity was the key to our success you can tell that title is a little over workshop there still not happy with it but essentially creativity good money good and for those who don't know kwali we're a games developer and publisher specializing in hyper-casual mobile games so as i said i'm simon platt i'm the head of development and the head of design here at kwali i've designed over 20 of quality's internal hits including jetpack jump and draw it and i manage both the prototype and full development of our internal game so from concept and

early prototype tests to reviews updates and then eventually global launch and i also used to be a professional wrestler which isn't relevant at all but there you go i am jumping around like an idiot and then i decided that developing mobile games was slightly more rewarding than constant knee and back so this talk will explore my history with kwali and focus on three aspects how we found ourselves in the then new market of hypercasual games the importance of a strong and positive studio culture and how creativity across the team was really the key to everything that we achieved over the last few years so i joined quality as head of qa i joined mainly due to the passion that our ceo david darling had in creating something unique and also the freedoms and trust that were given to his team in order to make that happen this is wave champions this is something that was in development when i first

started there like a mid-core racing game which had a really innovative track creation tool which is all about giving the layman the ability to make something really neat sort of turning something very intuitive and very simple into something that you could be really proud of and back end and it sort of that at its core is what david was trying to achieve something that was accessible but could be something that anyone could could um really dig into and and sort of become obsessed with it was mainly about creativity and doing something original so the games being developed world mid core they were focused on in-app purchase revenue and they were reliant on a devoted user base they wanted to develop games and he wanted to be innovative he was just trying to find the right space to do that without compromising and like with a lot of indie developers and also with old school gaming the logic that the company held was very field dreams it was if you build good games people will come and they will make money and this definitely works out in some cases like this is this is definitely a business model that works for people but

you have to be prepared to sink a lot of time and money in to finesse your product into something really sticky and finding that gap in the market is very tough but if you manage it you essentially have a license to print money but it wasn't it wasn't fast enough for us so we were frustrated by the long sprints that moved the needle only slightly and the slightly demoralizing grind that had us trying to convince an audience that clearly didn't want these games right now that they were worth their time so we realized the importance of analytics throughout this time working on games like this one right here this is trivia clash uh this is a competitive quiz game with a hundred percent user generated content it was ambitious and it was awesome and it taught us that to look as granularly as possible at every moving part of our games and as the amount of data that we were taking in grew but the kpis didn't at the same rate we realized that we were approaching the market in a way that just wouldn't work for quality and our

sensibilities but we wanted to preserve the freedom to try anything that we thought might be fun we just couldn't justify big development cycles on titles that players didn't respond to and that's when we started building a company structure all around failing fast and that's where our creative wednesdays was born so we were looking for a process that would allow us to be free to develop anything that might work we didn't want to find a genre and then stick with it we wanted to build and test whatever we thought might have merit sort of hedge our bets but also allow ourselves the opportunity to test something crazy simply because maybe it just might work we also appreciated that it doesn't take a superstar designer to come up with a hit hyper casual game we only hired creative people anyway and motivated people and this shift was a great opportunity for us to lean on that and lean on the individuals within our company that we trusted so we invited everybody to pitch their ideas to the company every single week and we still do to this day

the most important decision we made with this process was not to give the final decision to any one person or committee of people so we've fallen into that trap before it's the same mentality of we know better we decided to let everybody vote on the ideas and make what the company as a whole has faith in and this had so many benefits with it came a strong encouragement to the entire company to live and breathe hyper casual games learn what works learn what doesn't and essentially be a reliable voice when it comes to voting on what game we make next as a company and what we ended up with was over 200 games pitched in that first year from designers programmers qa artists recruitment marketing data analysts and an entire company who were taking a strong interest in hypercasual games people who wouldn't typically be playing hyper casual games and really sinking their teeth in so they could both intelligently pitch and sensibly judge on our creative wednesdays successful pitches would then be given the freedom to form a team and the time

to develop these ideas and ship them allowing decisions passed but so allowing decisions past that to be completely data-driven so this is the only time where we have say after that it's all down to what the data says and that dictates where we take it and this is a simple game that we made back in in 2018 in a few days little frog choosing which direction to hop in to race other people to eat these little bugs and it sort of shows that anyone with any wacky old idea if they can convince the company that they might be merit we can get this made so 40 day one retention became our benchmark at the start of this and this is a hangover from our mid-core targets it was the industry standard at the time and it was the best milestone that we had like it was the only bit of data that we actually had on what could make these things successful and we immediately started hiring up where it became obvious that we needed to excel so marketing and analytics were leading the the learning charge and we accepted early that we would be crippled until we collected enough data

fail fast became the most critical aspect of the business we started by throwing our beloved children to the slaughter knowing full well that they wouldn't be handled um with like the the campaigns wouldn't be handled efficiently the games wouldn't be handled efficiently and we wouldn't be looking at the right kpis to get a full picture of the potential success of these games but we were happy to make that necessary sacrifice as with every failure we learned an important lesson and because of the process that generated so much content so many ideas and our ability to to consistently learn from our failures we very very quickly adapted and became much more intelligent and dynamic in the way that we analyzed prototype data and this has allowed us to focus on the games players actually want and we now pride ourselves on our dynamic ability to use all of the data available not just retention to identify and then scale hyper casual hits thanks for the process uh and with a team of only 10 developers at the time we shipped hit games like tens spills skiddy car looper go fish police pursuit and plank

resulting over 100 million downloads worldwide one thing i can't preach enough um is the positive effect of a respectful and creative studio and this is something that that is very important to me through all aspects um in recruitment and also in the way that we handle ourselves day-to-day getting the smartest program in the world is fantastic but if they aren't going to be flexible keen to help others and open to compromise the natural speed at which we work and the dynamic nature of this space is going to turn that asset into a nightmare really fast what we have at quality is a team of over 30 developers with a strong respect for each other and also the process this incredible team have a drive for not only what we do but working efficiently and improving processes most importantly we have developers that we can trust to whether their juniors or leads help drive their project forward unblock people and flag issues quickly and we believe

that this attitude and enthusiasm should be rewarded so our profit sharing scheme which paid out over a million dollars last year to our team ensures that that is there along with a generous cut to everyone in the company the people who pitch the ideas rally behind them and then get those ideas made are the ones that are going to be rewarded the most for their hard work and by allowing everyone to not only see the process with full transparency but by giving them the power to green light great games and benefit from the success of those games the entire company became self-motivated to dive into hyper-casual and apparently played a lot of smash brothers as well that was an unexpected side effect we find that hyper casual development is at its best when it walks a line of controlled chaos we want to be able to turn on a dime switch priority or turn what we have into something completely different all as quickly as we as we can in the name of failing fast we want to be able to kick off projects with little more than a concept and general game flow

simply because we know there's something there there's something to this idea so let's just start making it with no fear of losing time just because we we know that we're smart enough to make those cuts at the right time due to this we need a lot of trust in our team so we train and motivate our programmers to make smart decisions to run with an idea and help make it into something glorious we need artists who understand the importance of iteration and in turn the importance of getting a concept across quickly to the stakeholders for feedback and the studio runs on communication and the trust in our developers to to both take ownership and stay vocal with everyone involved due to the transparency and the motivations given to the team we now have what we call all-rounders protecting both the process and the quality of our titles on a daily basis we've got programmers interested in making design decisions because they understand the core roots of what make our games work and that derived from a passion for these games which came from our

wednesday process we have artists who understand visual accessibility which is a huge thing in hyper casual to the point where they can be creative and start to break ground in hyper casual space and push the boundaries and try things that haven't been done so touching upon innovation a lot of hyper casual for those of you who know the space is slow evolution like this is undoubtable so taking what came before stepping it forward slowly with new takes and new twists on mechanics or ideas and we do a lot of that it's it's a consistently interesting and challenging design task but not to the detriment of looking for concepts that are exciting and dynamic interactions with games that haven't been accessible in this space and this approach breeds self-motivated happy teams who enjoy working together it leads to consistently exciting projects and prospects and it means that people feel completely free in making themselves sound like an idiot standing up there pitching a crazy game

because they know there's a room full of people who are looking for something that's just a little bit out there so let's take a look at this this game on the left here this is draw it so looking at the process of creating draw draw it shows a lot of this active creativity at work so it originated thanks to our cto coming to me with research he'd done into a neural network used to recognize people's drawings and he essentially dropped it on my desk and said you can make game and eventually i came up with something that i thought was pretty cool it was recognizing the drawings of players and awarding the money based on whether they produce what was asked for um but it failed miserably kpis were atrocious and usually we we've gotten pretty good at letting these things sort of wash over us obviously we we fail a lot because we we do so much that's part of the process but this one hurt because we thought we were onto something really clever but because of the visibility of both the pitch and the development process of the idea it wasn't long before one of our programmers came to me with some more ideas for the concept

we spent an afternoon workshopping the idea and came up with drawing and everyone involved from the designers who came up with it to the artists who created this awesome style for the prototype to the qa lead sharing the success these are the people who got this game off the ground and into the hands of players and if we don't have people rallying around the good ideas our process means that they stay on the cutting room floor there's a sense of ownership with the process that just elevates everything that we do so takeaways create the right culture and i know i'm preaching this a lot but i genuinely believe this this all feels very daytime tv everyone hold hands but it it makes such a difference it means going to work is an absolute joy and it means that people are solving their own problems hire creative people with good attitudes bad attitudes and bad work ethics lead to a toxic string of resentment and breakdown in communications i genuinely feel it's as important as the person's ability to do their job

give back to the team with creative freedom decision making and profit sharing and encourage people to try and fail in all aspects of their job ensuring that there's a supportive team around them to both protect them and help ensure progress is made and then watch as you naturally grow a team of self-motivated leaders foster creativity so one of the greatest things about hypercasual is that great ideas can come from anyone it it doesn't take a superstar designer to say what if a triple jumper had a jetpack on and yet jetpack jump has done extremely well listen to everyone and earn the respect of your peers by getting good at giving blunt but constructive feedback this is a hard thing to do i'm a naturally anxious person and i want to lift people i want to elevate people lift people up and i quickly learned that as long as you send people away with an understanding and with a message and as long as you give people the time of day it doesn't matter how blunt you are that being blunt is the thing that is necessary to make sure that things keep moving on

and create a platform that allows people to have a voice if they believe in an idea but doesn't waste everybody's time and as i said education is key with this involving as many people as you can in the thought processes and the techniques used to craft these games and ensuring people leave a conversation with more knowledge than they had going in and let the user this is an obvious one for anyone who's been doing anything close to what we're doing let the user decide if your idea is great um the hardest lesson to learn as a developer is to let go things are changing constantly and hyper casual always and the shifting trends and the consumer demands are moving all the time get something in front of players when it's good enough and not when it's perfect and learn to let go of the ideas that just aren't going to fit in the in the current climate working with the publisher helps in a big way with this obviously with reading data learning to fail fast and also learning which way to take development in this

tough market by working with our publishing department for example you would get access to not only the publishing and marketing expertise but also my entire development team like i'm i'm personally reviewing all of the submitted games with promising kpis that need feedback for coaching for design plans and then bear in mind i'm going through the exact same trials and tribulations as these publishing partners i'm just putting out prototypes that we strongly believe in only to then be a slave to the kpis um and i'm lucky to have such a talented team of data analysts and marketeers behind me to help turn the best of those ideas into charting hits and finally if you learn to let go and chase the next big idea you don't have to compromise on quality or innovation in order to be successful in in hyper casual the notion that hyper casualties just copycats is ridiculous you can be successful and be innovative in this space and that's it for me thank you very much i think we have time for questions

hi yes thank you simon uh we do have some time for questions i know everyone is quite often a little bit shy when it comes to the q a but luckily for me anyway since you guys are the you know one of our seasonal sponsors of the big indie pitch of which i do want to say to anyone watching like what you've said in your talk is not just bluster qualia really great at supporting indies and i see that every time we do a big indie pitch but i thought given that uh given the nature of your talk i could ask a few questions while we're waiting for anyone else to to see what's what so i mean one of the things you know you were talking about is is obviously pitching which you know obviously is near and dear and and making sure that you know you guys find the best developers but also work with them you know it's something that um you know i know you and your team have said is that like even if the numbers aren't sl quite there but are nearly there you

help you know you want to help them get over the line and stuff like that so one of the questions i wanted to ask is especially in the hyper casual space you know do you think there's any like key things that developers need to be aware of and also any key mistakes that developers might be making uh before approaching you in terms of making sure that their game is kind of optimized for that hyper casual market the biggest thing for me is to focus on that first milestone it's it's fine finding a good way to get your idea down into something that can be tested because it's very easy especially for very passionate developers to have a full understanding of what they want their game to be and they don't want anybody to touch it until it reaches that milestone and the problem with that is it makes it a lot harder to find the points where you should diverge one way or another and accessibility is sort of the name of the game so if you have a really strong idea of exactly what you want your game to be and you build it to be that it's very hard at that point to pluck out exactly what part of the game maybe doesn't work

so what i'd say is break your idea down to especially mechanically exactly what it needs to be figure out the cheapest way to make something and don't necessarily ship it but get it into the eyes of people like us because we can look at those things and and truly help get excited about what will work and what won't internally the second someone says something or shows me something that is um that is just inspiring i can't help myself like i'll jump into that conversation we'll spend two hours workshopping it and i'd love to see that we're we're inviting external developers to give us not only games now pitches ideas because yeah i want to see what's in i wish i could see what was in people's brains because then i could just jump on it and help like rollercoaster those ideas and figure out what's the bare minimum we can do to put it in front of someone see where the strength lie and then work with it to make sure that the art style the input the ux is all exactly on point yeah i mean and you can see now that the questions are rolling in which they always do when we

start the q a and i have to remind myself because i know a lot of the answers to these questions from working with you guys for for quite a while now but i'm going to put them to you because obviously the audience don't know the answers to these questions it's fine yeah yeah we could just have a chat so lee asks um how long is your cycle from pitch to publish on average pitch to publish so internally um it varies based on how ambitious the the title is we recently have been playing around with a lot of tech which um extends the the time it takes for us to make our prototypes we aim to get our first shippable from concept to prototype out from three to five days like it really is that small where we feel like we have something that's good enough for us to get into the hands of users yes the back of that we'll usually put between one and two weeks into another uh sprint to put the the extra bits and maybe a light meta where we think it needs it and then off the back of that another week to get it ready to global ship

we really want to be able to turn this stuff around um within a month from from concept to getting data to being able to go global and this was important to us because we wanted to be able to apply the exact same logic to our publishing deals we know that there's external people external teams that really want to get their ideas out quickly especially in hyper casual there's a fear of what if someone beats me to the punch like we're all thinking about these ideas we don't want copycats and we don't want people um coming up with this this great game and getting it to market before i do so we've we've worked very hard to make sure that our turnaround is you know a few weeks yeah okay uh thank you yeah i mean one of the other questions that's coming up which is kind of on the flip to like get in the game to launch is um is post launch retention something that's becoming important to hyper casual or is it always more effective to move to the next game now i know how long you guys work with the developers after launch but i suppose you can share that with the audience it's it's this is something i struggle

with every single day um because i i the games that go out and do well every part of me wants to just make them better and better and better and better and there's a resource struggle between that and they're coming up with new ideas um and so it's a balance with publishing it's a little bit different because we we know that our external teams want to spend more time on these games so we spend a lot of time helping them with their next film what's the next update what's the next update and we can give these games a much longer life um internally we try and balance that resource so we're always focusing mainly on new ideas and getting new stuff out a good game can live for years we we've we've got games tens is the first game that we ever really produce in this space and we have users who have played every day for two years straight like there are there are definitely games that can with the right attention have a really long tail um and do extremely well and when working with publishing partners that's what we're all about like if they are excited to keep working on these games then we are all for giving them the time of day to

figure out what updates and what um extra parts of this game can work out to a mix of um a b testing and also just feature updates yeah and it'd be remiss of me to not give a shameless plug obviously simon not you the other siren um and and hugo one of the developers you've worked with and myself all jumped onto a fireside chat on monday and um i think i believe those links will have been sent out to everyone so you know if you're also interested in getting deeper into that there's a five-sided chat there which does delve into a lot of that as well so be remiss of me not to promote yeah plug that um yes like the questions are rolling in so we'll see how many we can get through um next up though is um one of our attendees is asking is it possible to adapt games that were not hyper-casual at first but break it down in a way that it works for the hyper-casual market i think that's an interesting question absolutely and this is we love when people come to us with this when people come to us with games that are complete or um are sort of in

development and they've decided that they're they're just feature creeping a lot of times people will come to us and say we've made this thing we think it's cool but because of our traditional designer brains we we assumed it needed this and then we assumed it needed this and we assumed it needed this and and that's a fantastic thing for us to get because you already have the hyper casual necessities in there it's it's a is this game fun to play is it consistently um giving me that endorphin here is it something i want to come back to um and so i think it's it's the perfect opportunity to take something that was big and ambitious and really hard to mold into a successful mid-core game um and then break it down to its core pieces and turn it into a casual game we get a lot of this and it's it's one of the most exciting things that we see because we can immediately start talking about how do i feel when i play this game what do what do i want in this game um and if you just don't understand hyper casual then publishing you know deal with with quality is the perfect way to go where you can say we've made this cool thing

to help us turn it into something that fits that market yeah i mean on that point it's a sort of a similar related question but is would you say hyper casual is the easiest way for young teams to enter the games business that is interesting um i mean hype it's it's a it's a challenge like it's a it's a very saturated market hyper casual as as we know there's more and more people getting into this space and it's not because it's a super easy thing to do but it's a really it's a really easy thing to try and if you have a good mentality and mindset for i have an idea i want to get it out there okay move on to the next then i think it's perfect for you if you want if you really want a shotgun approach you don't want to get get um too sick and tired of any one idea and you want to be moving on to the next it's perfect because it allows you to do the bare minimum and then find out if it's worth your time so you think about game jams and people who get into programming and get into games via these two-day game

jams like if you enjoy that work then this is perfect for you because after two days you can end up with something that we could tell you this is going to be a hit game yeah i mean i know we we started a couple of minutes late so i'm still going to try and get a get through as many questions as possible one that's just coming from dash um is what are the most important lessons you've learned from games that didn't work rather than those that did ah i think accessibility is the biggest thing um especially with a team full of gamers of like all around gamers so people who a lot of people who play pc games a lot of people play console games mid core hardcore games on mobile it's very easy to try and weave in mechanics or nuances that you enjoy from these other games and the hardest thing is putting your mind into the mindset of the average hyper-casual user and to say and to say the average hyper-casual user even is like this is a broad market the whole hyper-casual spectrum only works because you're appealing to so many people

so figuring out how you can make your game intuitive enough and hand-holding enough for the people who aren't used to playing games but still accessible and not frustrating to the people who have played games their entire life is really really tough um and so the the way to think about it really is like clean accessibility like can you see seven different people in your life from grandma's to children seeing this game and thinking that okay there's something in there for me yeah great i mean we've got a few other questions but unfortunately we've we've hit the time so i'm going to say to everyone you know like we've been doing all week head over to the discord get involved in there we've obviously got the track uh tour um chat open you know we'll uh we'll be able to you know hopefully put some more questions out there and get some feedback from the people and if you've got a chance uh simon would love to see you in the discord and see if anyone's got any uh you know jump in and ask you more questions of course if anyone does want to pitch their games to carly you guys are our seasonal sponsors for the big indie pitch digital

so definitely go head over to big indypitch.com because uh you guys will be there with me and we'll be checking out all the latest cool games but thank you so much for sharing that i think there was a massive amount of uh actionable stuff for the people in the audience and obviously a great insight into not just you guys at quality but you know hyper casual and hyper casual publishing in general so you know definitely uh worthy of our opening and of our superstar session to open this indies track so thank you so much for being with us today thank you very much thank you it was a pleasure and it was an honor for me you know uh as someone with indy near and dear to my heart to open this track so thank you so much you