ROSKA Post Mortem

Greetings from SIEIDI Ltd. We are around two months old game and gamification company from central Finland, Jyväskylä. We decided to start up a company of our own because of our strong vision to games and the possibilities in where games can be used. We run co-work projects with other companies and offer them our specialities as a service. At the same time we try to reserve time for projects of our own. Today (Sunday 27th of July, 2014) we are releasing our very first game for Android. Here are our thoughts of the short, but intensive project we had.

Design and planning:

When we established the company, we wanted to start working with our own first game project as fast as possible. This was mostly because of the need of training we need as a team. We had never worked with games together before and we found that it’s crucial to start doing co-work with the development straight away. So we pretty much skipped the bigger scale design and jumped straight to development part. This was on some cases pretty bad idea because of not having the clear goal what kind of game we are developing. The good part was that we managed to create prototype, beta version and finally the release version in really short period of time.

We are running customer projects in our company at the same time, so we needed to take that on note when planning the development schedule. Thinking of there are only three of us (marketing, art and programming) in the company we needed to plan days which we would use for ROSKA. In the end, we used hour or two per day for the game, sometimes we managed to reserve day or two during the weeks.

Firstly we were thinking of creating a good old “speed test button” -game with juicy effects and such. But after completing the very first prototype, we thought that this isn’t enough and found out that we can actually use a little more of our imagination to add stuff into this kind of gameplay mechanic. It was Joni who dropped down the idea of adding a sidescroller character who would jump every time you press the lighted button. We decided to add the character, but keep the old mechanics in place. So if you press the wrong button, you lose, if you hit an obstacle, you lose, if you don’t press the buttons fast enough, you lose. So yeah, we found out that this may be a little hard for casual gamers and started making the game more easy to approach.

The more we made the game easier, the feedback started to turn positive. In our opinion, we pretty much found the golden line between making the game too easy and too hard to handle. Right now you need to train yourself and focus to get good points, but still you can do some failures without dying. With the randomly created levels, the lifetime of the game is also a little more longer.

PR:

The time we used for marketing was mostly for getting known of the possibilities we want to (and can) use with the budget we have. This kind of research will absolutely help us in the future projects as well, so time well spent! In ROSKA we decided to reserve some amount of money for the marketing, but at the same time we felt that because the game is created in such a short period of time, we should not invest a lot for it. The ROSKA lifetime for a casual gamer is pretty low, but it do have potential to start growing because of the world high score boards. This is more of an issue in which we can not affect that much. We created a fun and new gameplay mechanic for players to explore. If it ends up not being that great, it’s as valuable information for us as would the high rated and downloaded game be as well.

We prepared ourselves for the release day pretty carefully and made clear to-do lists for ourselves to work as effectively as possible once the game is out there. And yes, this post mortem is one of the things we wanted to put out on our release day not only because of to make you download the game, but also to give the fresh feelings of the development process we had. Within the next month or so we’ll be publishing the results of ROSKA. So for us and hopefully for someone else these two articles will give ideas and tools to work with.

ROSKA will be using pretty standard and traditional marketing ways for the release day. This is mainly because of the scale of the project and the budget we have. There are three of us conquering the social media channels on Sunday for (approximately) eight hours straight. We try to get as high download spike for the release day as possible and see what happens. Review sites and other related companies are not on duty on Sunday, so when (or if) we get the review sites to write article of us, those will start dropping during the week which will hopefully affect the downloads by spreading them all over the first week or two.

What went wrong:

Even how we wanted to start developing our first game as fast as possible, we should have used a little more time for the design part. The game itself found out to be pretty fun, but the monetization model and PR plans should have been carried along with the project, not thinking of them AFTER the development. I’ve heard that this is pretty common mistake for most of the game studios. By not planning and designing the game that much, we encountered a lot of dead end situations which caused some extra work for programming and graphics. In this kind of small game project, it didn’t affect that much for the development time, but in bigger size project some situations we encountered would have been fatal mistakes.

Conclusion:

The development was fast, intensive and more importantly: fun! It left a feeling, that we created a polished product in a really short amount of time which is more of an great achievement if thinking of our experience as a team. The part which include making money out of this turned out to be the weakest link of this project. Our motive is to create games which are fun for the players to play and compete in, but at the same time the hard truth is that we need to find the ways to fund our business. The project was an perfect learning experience for all of us and with this knowledge we are more than excited to start working with new projects. Oh yes, we do have planned couple of ideas and designs for our next creations, one to mention includes squishy and slimy octopuses, your finger and a touch screen.

Data Box

Developer: SIEIDI Ltd.

Publisher: SIEIDI Ltd.

Release Date: July 27, 2014

Platforms: Android

Team Size at the Beginning of the Project: 3

Team Size at the End of the Project: 3

Length of Development: 1 month (full work days)

Lines of Code: 2658

Development Tools: Unity3D, C#, GiMP, Blender, Visual Studio