Cradle of Rome 2 is a big disappointment for me. Maybe I would enjoy it more if I haven’t played Cradle of Rome 1, but I have, and CoR 2 was nothing new to me. Also, matching mechanic seemed aged.

Bejeweled 3 looks pretty nice and has few new twists. I enjoyed it much more than CoR 2. I also noticed all the hard work PopCap put into promoting B3, giving out netbooks for best photo of your jewels is one example of that. Because of that it was funny to see that PopCap was late to deliver B3 download on their own site. GameHouse and iWin (maybe other sites too) offered the game on Dec 7th, but PopCap was late for some reason and delivered download links a day later.

Playrix launched their newest match-3, Farmscapes, exclusively on their own site. Initially I was disappointed that I had to go through another “I want to be a HOG but I am match-3″ scene, but luckily it was short and part after that was a bit more of point and click adventure than HOG. Still, it was surprise that I had to wait so long to play regular match-3 mechanic, but overall I liked the game, probably the most out of 3 mentioned titles.

The world has a lot of holidays and you can’t keep the track of each of them, but it’s good to know at least the most common one (for the world) or the most money squeezing ones.

Black Friday is the day following Thanksgiving Day in the United States, traditionally the beginning of the Christmas shopping season. Basically, people go out to retail stores and malls to buy things. Cyber Monday is online world reaction Black Friday. People spent their money from home.

It’s good to have the list of those holidays and make your marketing up to date. We indie’s don’t need to follow big companies, but at least we can try to get best examples of them. It’s also good to know about holidays because they may get in face of your game launch. I started the launch of Dress-Up Pups last week. I was about to send press release about it until I realized that it’s Thanksgiving day and either nobody is at work or gives a damn about my games. If I sent my PR that day it would probably got lost in dozens of emails by Monday morning when everybody gets to work.

That said, today is Cyber Morning, if you want you can take advantage of it and save 25% on your order of Anawiki Games :D

I typed “casual games recession” in google and one of the articles that appeared on the list: Real Games executive tells how the recession will affect casual games. It’s old article from February 11th, 2009, but at least there’s a possibility to check whether it was true or false.

One thing that I noted I wanted to repeat is this line:

“The market has the opportunity to be ten times the size it is today,” Barbour stressed. “Why don’t we do something to build the bigger market?”

That’s the words of John Barbour, CEO of Real Games (at least of the time of writing mentioned article). Mister Barbour, what can we do to make it bigger?

So we’re certainly not 10 times bigger today. I hear that most portals noticed a drop in revenues, not only we’re not in bigger market, but  we’re in smaller. I make more money from my games than I did, but I don’t feel like market in general is growing. There are places dedicated to casual games that please me with their revenues and places that make me disappointed.

I just hope that we, as casual game industry, stopped price wars, and prices will eventually rise.

Let me say few words about the game. Soccer Cup Solitaire is a card game with soccer theme. Some say it’s not solitaire, because you just match similar cards like two Jacks or two 8’s. The mechanics are similar to Heartwild Solitaire and some bonus features are inspired by Fairway Solitaire (thanks to Orchid Games and Big Fish Games for creating those two great games).

We knew Soccer Cup Solitaire won’t be a top seller game, but we wanted to develop it anyway, to take a break from GabCab development. GabCab has been in development for second year and we had iddle moments from time to time that we wanted to spend creatively.

What went right:

• short development time – the game from start to finish took 4 months – it could be shorter, but we haven’t been pleased with the art assets from the first art team.
• smooth integration of soccer theme into solitaire game.
• great music – it was a tough decision – we knew that the theme will probably kill interest of female audience, so we at least wanted to please male audience as much as possible. Rock songs from Saint of Silence did awesome job when it comes to adding tension to the game.
• not wasting time on prototyping and place holder art – we had natural deadline (World Cup 2010) so we decided that there’s no time to prototype things. We also had top priority project in development (GabCab), so we decided that we will work on SCS only when we get final art. It shortened development time very much.
• constant passion for the project – working with final art during short period of time kept motivation and efficiency of development on very high levels.
• we signed deals with new portals – Alawar and GameHouse. RealArcade was very picky about games they launch and I thought that after the merge with GameHouse it will be the same at GameHouse, so I was pleased that the game was accepted for distribution.
• development of SCS prevented possible burnout for GabCab.
• SCS has great CR (but that’s probably because of low download ratio)

What went wrong:

• not enough time to play test the game – Sport events and Holidays are strict deadlines, if you release the game after them you lose a lot of possible interest in your game.
• we missed the deadline by few days, but at least World Cup lasts 30 days, not one day like xmas or Halloween.
• we had to cut some nice features to be able to release “on time”.
• not enough downloads, which leads to…
• though it wasn’t expected to be a top seller, it sells below expectations.

Overall I was happy with the project. It proved to us (again) that short development times are necessary to keep high motivation and passion for the project and that switching between projects increases development efficiency while “delaying” release of each project just a bit.

Recently I found interesting post on BFG forums. Picman050967 tried to explain why BFG decided to have CE (picman is not just regular forum mod, he is most probably a man from BFG headquaters):

Why we offer Collector’s Editions

The nice thing is that this is totally optional, you have a trial version, it does not count as the New Game when it is released and you always get the normal game like before. Having a collector’s edition allows the budgets for future games to almost double. One of the big benefits is early access. The bonus features are there to reward folks who purchase for early access.

People complain a lot about how short games are lately. This is a way to allow the avid gamers to pay for early access and some extras to increase budgets without hurting those who are on tight budgets. These CE purchasers now help fund half the budget of future games so they can be longer and higher quality. Then in turn, the folks that wait for the regular game actually benefit from the larger game budgets paid for by the CE purchasers.

So if you wait for the regular version, that is fine for you, but realize that those buying the CE are allowing developers to increase their development budgets without going bankrupt! This game was developed with a budget that assumed the additional revenue from the Collector’s Edition…without it, the game would have been shorter or of lower quality to make it for less costs.

If we simply raised prices (like to $7.99), not only would there be a customer revolt, but we would sell proportionally fewer games and thus the developer makes no more money. Also higher prices would also hit those that are in tough economic times to be able to play less games. While some may not like to wait, this does solve a very real problem for both developers and economically hard hit customers.

So if you can’t afford it or do not like it you should not buy it, but you should also respect those who do, as it benefits you!

Just trying to share BFG’s and developers’ perspectives.

Picman

I highlighted most of the interesting sections. You can find the whole discussion at this link.

I’d also want to quote a post from govegirl, as she made very interesting points too:

I do not know Playponds financial status but I do know that Big Fish is not in danger of going bankrupt and 2 of 3 CE’s monies are for Big Fish.

What I wonder is this- those that pay $20 for a Collectors Edition- do they still buy the same amount of $6.99 games or do they forego those games to save up for 1 or 2 more expensive games a month? The importance people are putting on 3 punches indicates to me they buy fewer games for the same result of a free game. I can see smaller developers games getting even further ignored whilst the already large and successful developers charge extra for their games.

Unless all games launch with a $20 edition first then it cannot be equally fair for all developers. Those that only charge $6.99 are not getting the money for further development so does that mean they have to continue to develop short and inferior games? It sounds to me unless we pay $20 originally then those developers cannot make better games. It has to apply to everyone – not just the developers who suits them to cry poor.

Collectors Editions may be the first step on the road to increase average game price. Some portals sell games on premium price with success. Hopefully we can see the trend of falling game prices reversed.

Anyway, if you haven’t noticed, Big Fish Games started to launch 2 games a day. Not every day (lucky we). But unfortunately our game was launched with another one – Virtual City. It’s hard enough for games to get noticed when you have to compete with all the top 10 games, yesterdays release and tomorrow’s release. Imagine that we had to compete with all that and another tomorrows release and a day later with another 2 releases. Too bad Big Fish doesn’t display all “Tomorrow’s Game Today” releases.

Our game was noticed probably only by hardcore forum readers (when your game is launched a dedicated forum for it created). It was very quiet there until next day when we moved to “Today’s release”. Still, we’ve been below Virtual City and as you could find out on forums not every one noticed that there are two games launched.

So I’m thrilled to check top 100 today, as that’s the first day we will be listed (hopefully). Keep your fingers crossed for me.  I hope your game won’t have so hard times during launch.

Airport Mania was made by Reflexive so I had to check if it’s just with their games or all games. Of course I don’t have the time to check all games so I downloaded just one more – Tales of Monkey Island.  And it has 80 minutes trial too.

Doesn’t it make your life harder? When everyone had 60m trials you could optimize that first 60 minutes and set a tipping point around 60 minute to get a better chance of getting a sale. Now you either leave it unchanged and let Reflexive customers get past that point or make two versions. Eh….

(BTW. No need to rush to Reflexive Game Center Solution – Tales of Monkey Island are not available to affiliates)

Two days ago Darek Rusin made a comment on my blog and because I haven’t heard from him for a while I went to his website to check out what he’s up to.  He started Orchid Games and released Heartwild Solitaire.  So far his website is dedicated to just this one game and that made it easier for me to spot the thing that made me mention his website. Right under the title he put Author’s Edition. That made me very interested and I immediately wanted to check out what is so special about this version. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to find any info about it. Too bad. It could help “steal” customers from portals.

When we worked on Runes of Avalon we had to remove very nice feature in my opinion – Amulet of Spells. We had to remove it because it didn’t work so great and we didn’t have time to find out how to fix it, but I really believed in Amulet of Spells (you don’t earn money by having great ideas, but by releasing games). This made me thinking about releasing developer’s version of Runes of Avalon. It never happened in the way we know it from movie industry. It was much better for us to release this version as Runes of Avalon 2, as we figured out that amount of changes is too big to make it “just” a special edition.

So you see, it’s worth commenting on blogs. You might get a link to your website for  free ;-)

It might be too early to tell, but my revenues (developer sales, not affiliate sales) are higher. Here are the numbers:

Revenue:
January 2009 – 100%
February 2009 – 250%

Sales:
January 2009 – 100%
February 2009 – 500%

Numbers for February could look better – it had only 28 days and new price point wasn’t announced until February 3rd or 4th. Still, I hope that the numbers will look similar in March (or better) comparing to January. One thing that you need to keep in mind is that I sell only one game on Reflexive at the moment and it is 7 or more months “old”. In this case new price point worked, but would it work for new releases? I hope to find out soon. Also, note that January may be not the best month for sales. Most people probably spent all their cash on Christmas presents.

I can’t comment on my affiliate sales. I didn’t do any promotion for new price point, I didn’t send newsletters at all in February and that really skews results. Lets see how it will look in March.

But if you are interested in others results, most developers says that their revenue dropped with new price point. Maupin is probably one of the few that can report increased revenue. His sales were 93% higher in Feb that in Jan and revenue increased by 6%. Yes, six %, not that much in comparison to sales growth. You can read more reports at Indiegamer Forums.

How did you start your game development adventure? How big is your studio now?

I knew I wanted to make games since high school. Soon I began learning C++ on my own and made a minesweeper clone and a simple top-down shooter. It was extremely hard to find info on making games though here in Thailand. About the time when I got to college, the internet explosion was just beginning, so with my top-end (at the time) US Robotics 33.6K modem I tried to find and learn everything I could about making games.

Fast forward 5 years later, I got bored with my enterprise software development job after a year and decided to resign and start a software company, thus ViquaSoft was born. At that time J2ME games on cell phones was supposed to be the next big thing, so we did a few games for that, but then I discovered the Dexterity forums and decided that developing casual downloadable games on PC was more exciting and might be more lucrative. So we started developing Tommy and the Magical Words and have focused on downloadable casual games ever since.

Right now we have 8 full-time people at our office here in Bangkok. We started with 3 in the beginning about 4 years ago and have been expanding continuously. Right now we’re expanding again and are looking for some more good programmers.

I am impressed by execution of themes in your game. You surely get maximum fun out of it. Who designs your games?

Thanks :)

The answer to that question is all of us. All 8 of us are the designers of our games.

The process goes like this:

First when we need to come up with a new game idea, we have everyone go back and try to come up with some and we meet and have everyone pitch their concepts. Then we kind of vote to choose the best one. But I still have the final say of course :)

Then when it comes to the actual designing, we do a lot of brainstorming together. We try to gather everyone’s ideas for the game and choose the best ones. This period consists of lots of meetings where we iteratively refine the details of the game design.

You could call this design-by-committee which some say is bad. I’d rather call it design-by-passionate-team :) From our experience if it is managed well then it leads to a well thought out design pretty quickly. With this method everyone in the team gets to exercise their creativity and build their game design skills. Just by listening to the more experienced team members discuss about the design issues, the less experienced team members learn a lot. Also each team member has a lot more personal investment in the game’s design and the game’s outcome. In any case, the producer (me) has the final say though.

Everyone understands the reasons behind every design decision which helps a lot, otherwise you have team members arguing and complaining to each other (and me) on design decisions all the time which makes everything go slower.

I believe that if you have programmers and artists just developing according to a designer’s vision without being able to give any input, they will feel like machines. Additionally the team members wouldn’t really be growing as “game developers” as design is a big part of game development. So the aim for me is to build everyone’s skill in game design so that together we can create better and better games more effortlessly.

And it is tons of fun discussing the game designs together, bouncing ideas off each other. During the design phase it really makes work feel like play and I sometimes feel guilty that I have a job that is so fun.

So how do you create a best seller game?

I’m definitely not an expert about this as I’m never 100% sure that any of our games will do well before releasing it. It’s been good to see though that we’re seeming to do better with each release. So hopefully that is proof that my strategy of incrementally building everyone’s game design skills with each game works :)

BTW, for our latest game Shop-n-Spree a lot of credit goes to BFG as they helped tons in adjusting our original design to better fit their target market.

Back on topic, I gave a talk at a local game developer conference recently where I listed the main attributes of a “good game” as:

1. FUN
2. Good production values
3. Accessible
4. No bugs
5. Appeals to a viable target market

Compared to Jake’s 10 secrets it looks like I’m missing a few :) But I guess mine are just a little broader and maybe are just the basics. But these really are the basics that you need to begin with. Each of them is only a few words, but I could go into the details of what I learned about each for pages.

I’ll talk a bit about FUN and addictiveness. I consider addictiveness as part of FUN in my list above. On this topic Jake mentioned meta-games .. for me I like to think of it as something – anything that keeps the player going. You have to have a reason for the player to continue playing beyond the current level at all times. They have to always have a reason in their head during the current level and at the end of the level as to why they want to keep playing beyond it. This is about setting short-term and long-term goals and spacing out the “rewards” in a game.

I read about WOW and MMORPG games and about the reason why they were addictive is that players always have something they are about to get if they play just a bit more. It could be a bit more experience to get the next level, or enough money for the new sword, or something else. There’s always something that feels like it is just a few minutes away.

You really have to apply this to your game. The spacing is the important thing. You don’t want to have players have to play too long before seeing the next new thing or even without knowing when or if they will get it. This has been discussed in the Indiegamer forums before but people still don’t do it properly. You really have to make it clear why they should keep on playing, what is waiting for them. Additionally it has to be something significant in the player’s mind. Many times you think you’re giving the player something new, but to them it is just ‘more of the same’.

One of the ways is by increasing and keeping high the frequency of introducing “new gameplay elements”. This way you keep the player interested because they know that by playing just a bit more they will see something new to play with in the game. Look at how World of Goo does it. Early on you notice how every few levels (or actually every level) there is something new .. new mechanics, elements and especially the new types of Goo balls. Each of the new types of Goo balls adds significant gameplay value. So it is not just cosmetic stuff. This is the true genius of the game. If an “amateur” (non-experienced game developer) came up with the idea of World of Goo, they’d believe that the core mechanic was fun enough and have only the standard type of Goo ball and invest a lot of time into making about 50 levels with maybe 5 different “background themes” hoping that would provide enough variety. People would get bored quickly since they’d feel they’ve seen everything .. “it’s just more levels” and the game wouldn’t sell anywhere nearly as well and people who didn’t know better would even say the idea sucked.

I could write pages more about these 5 topics, but I’ll stop here :)

OK, great news is that you don’t have to be an expert to create top selling games. Lets talk more about FUN. How do you find out what is fun for your audience? I consider this as a one of most challenging task for developers. They just seem to like different games than casual audience.

I guess this corresponds to my no.5 above “Appeals to a viable target market” which I think is the first thing you need to get right before you do anything else because if you make a game that “doesn’t appeal to a viable target market” then pretty much by definition, it won’t sell. No amount of polish will help it.

To make a game that appeals to your target market or in other words a game that is FUN for your target market, the key is to remember that just knowing who your target market is isn’t enough, you have to UNDERSTAND them. Only by understanding them can you make a game that is fun for them. The better you understand them, the more successful your game will be.

It is the same as in any business.

How do you understand your target market? The answer is to not be lazy about doing your market research :)

Do you prototype your ideas?

Yes, we start with prototypes. We don’t really think of them as prototypes, more like the first (internal) builds of the game.

We really follow the iterative/agile approach to development. If the game is not fun, we refine it. We try to get to the point of why it isn’t fun – I usually believe there is a reason that can be found and described in this case – and fix that and continue with this iterative approach for the whole game’s development.

The big thing that helps for us is everyone in the team is required to come up with ways to improve the game. So it’s not just me trying to come up with ideas to make the game more fun, it is all of us. This way it is very easy to improve the game as with all 8 of us, we’re always overflowing with ideas to improve the game and the only thing needed is to just pick the best ones which we do through brainstorming sessions.

This kinds of fits with my “everyone is a game designer” principle above in that during the development, everyone still does game design work.

That sounds very interesting. How much of development time you put into design sessions? Do you add new game play elements until very last moments?

For the first month of the project, it is half a day meetings everyday for about a week, then maybe a day or two a week as the prototype progresses. Then when we get into real production period, after each “iteration” which is usually about a month we have a period of maybe 2-3 days up to a week of evaluating the result of the last iteration and designing for the next iteration.

I’d say it is impossible to add new gameplay elements until the very last moments as we’d probably need another pretty large iteration to develop/test/tune/polish it. Gameplay elements are usually locked down earlier so that the final iterations can really be about polish. The final iterations’ lengths will be shorter such as 2 weeks and then 1 week per iteration then maybe 1 day (if you can call those iterations .. more like just “builds”). During those last iterations of a project there are definitely lots of significant improvements (other than bug-fixing) that we do, most of the time related to the UI, gfx, accessibility. Improvements that definitely make the game better so don’t really need too much further testing/balancing.

How do you plan to adjust to lowering average game prices?

Basically our plan is to branch out into new types of games in new markets and business models. We will continue to invest into developing higher quality downloadable casual games, but also invest into new/different markets.

I think in the current climate (and any climate actually) it is best to spread your risk and increase the variety of your revenue sources.

For us, the good thing is I think our experience in designing games for the demanding casual market will help us do better in other markets.

You sell a lot of affiliate games on your site? Doesn’t it hurt your own games sales?

Since most of our games are casual, the direct sales are just a fraction of portal sales so it doesn’t really affect us.

On the other hand affiliate income has been a nice bonus and it is always steady and increasing so I think it is worth it.

What do you do to promote your site?

The best thing you can do is release games on your site before you release it anywhere else. Send it over to review sites such as Gamezebo (if it is a casual game) and they will kindly link back to your site. This results in lots of traffic which you can hopefully turn some of them into repeat visitors / newsletter subscribers.

I don’t really have much knowledge when it comes to promotion for direct sales. Heck, you’re direct sales are tons better than mine!

Do you plan to become more portal independent?

As I said above, we are trying to branch out into different markets, so the answer is yes. It is only the smart thing to do. On the other hand, portals have been extremely good for us so we aren’t going to just stop using them either.

Any last words?

It’s like I’m some kind of expert to be giving this kind of interview, but actually I believe me and my team are still pretty new and still have tons to learn about all aspects of game development. The methods I described above are just what we found to work for us through trial and error and noticing what works and what doesn’t after developing 6 casual titles.

Finally I would like to use this opportunity to again thank all the good folks at the Indiegamer forums who have helped us during the years both directly and also indirectly by just creating so many damn interesting discussions :) And I have to give extra special thanks to svero (Steve Verrault) who has helped me a lot all these years. And last, BIG thanks to my team for doing such great work!

Thanks for your time.

Thank you too!