I wrote a blog entry last year which I’ve since enjoyed reading for sentimental reasons. I’d like to make it a tradition to post such a thing every year, so here I am now, thinking about what to write.
2011 was a great year for Team Phobic. We celebrated our company’s four year anniversary recently, and I can hardly believe it has been that long. As a growing company, there are many things to worry about, especially the need to be able to reproduce success. It’s sinking in that doing this has become sustainable, and that this year, our company has become secure. The economy has been rough this year, so to be able to create something that provides jobs to those who want to express their creativity is something for which I’m very thankful.
Like last year, we’ve had both successes and failures, so let’s get to it and talk about each one!
Undead Island Ocean
Undead Ocean was our attempt to create a new platformer IP, and make a game we really wanted to make. It’s a pretty silly game with a ninja who fights zombies. We were originally going to give the player the choice between a ninja and a pirate, but for simplicity, we launched with just the ninja.
Original concept art for the ninja and pirate!
We are always very ambitious at the start of all our projects. We cut a lot of our desired features very early on and focused on the gameplay. We figured if the game hit the app store, well, we could go back and add all the features later as we did with Bounce On and Bounce On 2. Unfortunately, the launch wasn’t as good as we were hoping.
The game launched during GDC. We always have fun launching during conventions because we get to celebrate with a bunch of other developers. The downside to this is that A LOT of stuff gets released around the same time, so it’s easy to get drowned out. We got some great reviews of the game, but with the limited content and niche target it didn’t get very high in the charts. We were a little discouraged, but already had plans for a free prequel of the game. I think we got the idea to call it a “freequel” from @arnoldkim.
Right after the launch of the game, we got an unfortunate e-mail threatening that our name of “Undead Island” was infringing on their trademark. We had some talks with our lawyers, and while we think we had a case against it, the price of getting into a lawsuite just wasn’t worth it. We figured we could use the name change and the launch of the freequel to get a little more publicity towards it, and launched the freequal along with the name change in early April.
Undead Ocean Dojo was a lot more then just a ‘lite’ version of the game. We created a whole intro story with unique art, boss fights and levels separate from the full version of the game. Bounce On Lite is one of our most popular games and we wanted to put a lot more effort into the free version to make it feel more like a complete game than just a cut down version of the full version.
Undead Ocean Dojo app store ranks
As you can see, it didn’t do all that well. There’s a few things we could have done to make it a bit more successful.
- Better cross promotion – I should have reached out to more developers for ad exchanges. We got a ton of impressions from Bounce On Lite, and we don’t use enough of them.
- Paid Advertising – We did this with Bounce On 2 Lite, and it worked pretty well for the launch. We had too much hope on the game growing organically, on its own.
- No Updates – We moved to our next project too quickly. When we released Bounce On we started working on the first update the day after we shipped it. The biggest problem with Undead Ocean was its lack of content, and we should have shown our customers we were dedicated to update it.
I think the last issue is the biggest problem. We spent a lot of time on the game, and we kind of just let it die. We did have an update planned, and finally got it out 8 months later, right before Christmas, but by then it was too late.
Overall, the game did not cover its development costs, which is always frustrating, but I like to think positively about all our projects, and think we learned from it. What did we learn? Stop targeting niche demographics and go for a more casual appeal. We had two strikes with GravBot and now Undead Ocean, so we needed to do a safer project.
New Office
I’m going to keep this pretty short, because I’ve already written about it. We moved out of our house and into a real office, which was great! It’s almost been a year now, and it’s starting to get a little cramped since we added a few more employees(I’ll get into that later). I think we made the move at the right time, and it set us up in an excellent position for our company’s growth.
DragonVale
Oh DragonVale! I’d been wanting to get into the freemium model for quite some time but we knew it would be a pretty large project and we weren’t sure we would have the distribution to pull it off. Luckily for us, we had a great relationship with Backflip Studios, another game developer in Boulder with great developers and a very large distribution network. They wanted to do a project with us so we pitched them a game and we collaborated and refined it and 6 months later they released the game with huge ginormous success.
DragonVale has been in the top 10 grossing apps since launch
It was quite a different experience to work so closely on a project with another team, and it was a larger team than we were used to, as well. I’m privileged to be working with this team, and will be continuing to do so on future projects. One of the best aspects of working with Backflip Studios has been their understanding of our team remaining independent.
Only about half our team – our programers – worked on DragonVale. All of the DragonVale art was made by Backflip, so this meant our artists needed something to do. Our artists started with an Undead Ocean update, but only got so far before programmers were needed. We didn’t have the time to take developers off of DragonVale, so we hired a contractor to work on a game with our artists.
MissileChase Unannounced Game
We always have code names for our projects that end up not being used. Missile Chase was a game our contractor pitched to us and that we moved forward on. It was originally supposed to take two months to develop, and now we are on month six, and the game has changed so many times I can’t even count. We realized how crucial it is to have developers in house rather than contracting, especially if they are using our own engine. All that said, the game is looking great and we’ve taken the time to make it everything we want it to be.
MissileChase theme song: song1.m4a Isn’t it catchy?
Future PC Game
When we started Team Phobic it was all about making some pretty big, ambitious projects. In high school, we were working on a project called Capture The Flag(CTF), which was really the start of the Phobic Engine. We still use some of this code in our projects, today!
After high school, when we were in college, we got a little more realistic, and came out with Electropy. It was a much smaller project, and we saw it the whole way through. It didn’t really make any money, but we were proud to have finished something. So, we were pretty disappointed to not even get an IGF nomination in the student competition. We were in a great position to get into iOS games at the time and had a lot of early success on the store, but it’s still always been our passion to make some bigger games.
Early concept art for PCGame
With the success of DragonVale we now have the opportunity to follow our passion. I’m delighted to announce that we have begun working on a Windows/Mac/Linux game. We’ve been growing the team, designing and prototyping for the past month or two, and are getting ready to make a more formal announcement.
We’ll be at GDC this year, and would love to meet up with any developers who’ve been on Steam, The Humble Indie Bundle, XBLA, etc. If you’d like to meet up please e-mail me!
Conclusion
2011 was even better than 2010, and I can’t wait to see what happens in 2012! We’ve brought our company up to 10 people, and have had another huge success in the app store. We moved from a cramped office in our home to a new office which we’re already starting to outgrow. Starting this year, we can finally offer our employees health insurance(yay!). It’s a much different feeling than a year ago. We aren’t a startup any more, and there is much more certainty that we’ll be making games for a long time to come!
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