It has been quiet for a while now, regarding the development of Castaway Paradise, but fear not! We are still busy coding, designing and adding new features and graphics to the game. For example, take a look at this neat medieval set our designers made:
Here you can see cool new decorations you can buy for your house, like the medieval fireplace, to keep your house nice and warm. Also, you can buy the medieval outfits at the Stuff2go, the main store on the island, so you can even dress like Robin Hood! And on top of this, check out the new medieval hairstyles. If you ask Marcèl nicely, he will cut your hair to complete your freshly achieved medieval look.
Speaking of Marcèl, please let me introduce this fabulous hairdresser to you: Marcèl (a.k.a. Mr. Fabulous) is the fashion director on the island. In need of a new haircut? He is your go-to-llama!
Marcèl loves to make people a lot prettier by dressing them and cutting their hair. Also, Mr. Fabulous likes to chat with his clients. A lot. He has got many stories to tell and is more than happy to share them with you.
Marcèl is just one of the many characters you can encounter on the island. In the upcoming posts we will introduce some more characters living on the island, and show you new graphics, designs, and keep you up to date in general on the development of Castaway Paradise.
Meanwhile, if you haven’t already, please take a look at the Castaway Paradise trailer!
We’re proud to announce an all-new Green Light Bundle available on February 1st. The bundle will feature 9 great games for just $5. The developers are offering their games in the bundle to get extra votes for their Steam Greenlight campaign.
Early 2011, everyone at Stolen Couch Games was still in school developing our exam year project Kids vs Goblins. Jay van Hutten, a fellow year mate, was developing a game of his own called Ichi. It was a elegant puzzle game that utilized a one-button mechanic in a way that didn’t feel gimmicky. The goal of the game was to guide a ball past a number of rings on the screen. By touching the screen you rotate bumpers, which caused the ball to change in direction. You could also hold your finger down to draw a line, once the ball hit the line it would travel back in the direction it came from.
About a half year later we spoke to Jay at a congress were he was demoing his game. I (Eric) shared my interesting in redeveloping Ichi for multiple platforms and making it a really great commercial product. Jay loved the idea and the day we finished Kids vs Goblins we were working together to make a bigger and better version of Ichi.
No developers were harmed during the making of this game
Redeveloping a game is nothing new to us. Stolen Couch Games actually started in 2010 when we got an assignment from Zoë Mode to create a multiplayer version of their hit game Chime. The multiplayer demo we made eventually led Zoë Mode to develop Chime Super Deluxe, which featured some nice multiplayer modes. While the programmers were re-creating Ichi in Unity, Jay and I were designing new features to add to the game. Because the core of Ichi was so sound, it wasn’t hard to come up with dozens of new puzzle ideas to make the game better. The final product had teleporters, splitters to create multiple balls, objects that could disappear and a few more things. Nothing too fancy, but it all worked great. The best thing we added was the level editor that allowed players to create their own levels and share them online. Since then, 11,000 levels have been shared, quite a bit more than the 50 levels we originally included with the game. Ichi launched in June, after 3 months of development, which went mostly smoothly. The actual problems started right after we launched the game.
Getting featured
We knew that many people would consider Ichi as just another puzzle game, so we had to let people know how special the game really is. We spent about a week contacting the press about our game and we got a nice amount of coverage. But press alone won’t make your game a hit. If you read any guide on marketing for mobile games you always get to the point were the importance of getting a feature by Apple/Amazon/Google is expressed. We already got a feature on the Mac app store for our first game, but our published arranged that. We didn’t have a direct contact within Apple, so we had to come up with a way to contact them.
Luckily we had a few device IDs that belonged to Apple employees on our Testflight account. So we found out the matching email addresses and we send separate emails to every one of them. 2 of them, responsible for the iOS AppStore, loved the game and showed the game to the rest of the team. Our contact from the Mac AppStore was in love with the game. We Skyped for a few hours and everything was set.
Ichi was Apple’s Editor’s Choice for a week on the Mac AppStore and on iOS we were bumped to the new and noteworthy category and we got a small banner in the games section.
Ichi was Apple’s Editor’s Choice for a week on the Mac AppStore and on iOS we were bumped to the new and noteworthy category and we got a small banner in the games section.
We’ve seen developers doing no marketing at all for their games because they believe they’re games will sell themselves. This is mentality is wrong. Just look at the top grossing games on iOS. Almost all of them spend enormous amount of time and money on marketing. Only by spending time and money, will you actually earn money.
Mayday, mayday!
The launch of Ichi went great. We were selling thousands of units a day and those numbers were actually increasing the days after the launch. But than something went wrong. Suddenly the game would crash once it has launched. This had never happened in any of our tests before. Why did the game crash all of a sudden? It turned out that the firewall at our server provider, which hosted the user created levels, was malfunctioning. Since we had never encountered this before we weren’t prepared for this. As you can imagine we were pissed off, but the gamers were even more pissed off. The 1-star ratings were poring in, so we had to work quickly. Within a day we made a quick patch that made the game run again. We submitted it and Apple was kind enough to approve it in record time. But the harm was done. The sales momentum the game had was gone. Sales plummeted because of the bad reviews. Instead of getting thousands of sales at $4.99 a piece we were down to hundreds.
The lessons we learned from this is that you should be prepared for something you can’t predict or test. We expected our server to send just numbers to the game, instead it was sending lines of random code. For our next games we’re making sure that the game handles these rare cases the correct way. One day of extra development time is better than losing thousands of dollars in revenue.
Monetizing
We wanted to use in-app purchases in the game to earn some extra revenue post-launch. We were thinking of putting an in-app purchase on the level editor. So if you wanted to make your own levels you had to pay a dollar extra. But we opted against this because the editor would generate content for the game. Content is important so we couldn’t make the overall package weaker to earn some money. Instead we asked for an in-app purchase when the player played more than 10 user-created levels. We guessed that only 5% of the players might create a level and 70% would play user created levels. More people means more revenue. Unfortunately this tactic didn’t work.
We launched the game with 50 built-in levels and player could play 10 user created levels for free. At the end of 2012 only 300 people out of 400.000 bought the in app purchase, an insanely low percentage. Why did almost no-one buy the in app purchase? We think it’s because people were done with Ichi after playing 50 build in levels. Nobody is going to play 10.000 user created levels, let alone 100. Ichi’s retention wasn’t high enough.
Getting a lot of players, quickly
A few months after the release of Ichi sales were basically dead. We were making about $15 a day, which didn’t get us one step closer to world domination anytime soon. So we had to do something. Instead of letting our game die we looked at “free app of the day” deals. The first free app of the day deal we did was Free App A Day (FAAD). In one day Ichi was downloaded 130.000 times. We were blown away by this number. After this we contacted Amazon USA if they could feature us. They loved Ichi and featured it as their free app of the day. After that, Amazon Europe featured Ichi as well. AppEvent did the same, resulting in another 30.000 downloads from mostly the Netherlands
Ichi featured in the Amazon AppStore
Free app of the day promotions are great. Unfortunately it is unlikely that your app will become super popular once the promotion is over. We earned only $80 from the days after the FAAD promotion. But still it is better than nothing. One good tactic might be to get a lot of downloads using these promotions and then switch to a freemium model. You will have hundreds of thousands of players who will generate revenue though ads and/or in app purchases.
Critically, Ichi is a great success. We’ve gotten wonderful reviews and players seem to love the game. But commercially the game hasn’t done that well. We barely broke even on the development costs. Most of the revenue came from the Mac version, mainly due to the feature by Apple. iOS came in second, revenue-wise. The Android, PC and Linux versions didn’t make more than a few hundred dollars. Despite all of this we feel that Ichi was worth our time, it was great developing it and we delivered something we’re proud of.
It seems like ages ago when we launched Kids vs Goblins, but in reality it has only been 9 months. The months leading up to the release of Kids vs Goblins have now been captured in a post mortem for Gamesauce.org.
Stolen Couch Games is a young Dutch game studio formed by six alumni from the Utrecht School of Arts who decided to continue working together after their college projects. A part of the team came together to make a multiplayer prototype for XBLA and PSN title Chime made by developer Zoe Mode in collaboration with the One Big Game initiative. Stolen Couch Games then reformed and expanded the core team with an extra programmer and artist. Their first big title fresh out of the Utrecht School of Arts was Kids vs Goblins.
Building Kids vs Goblins
The Kids vs Goblins team from left to right: Bart Delissen, Casper van Beuzekom, Arthur Koopmans, Daan Boon, Eric Diepeveen, Selma Oors and Bjorn Spies. Not featured in this image, but equally important, is sound designer Rutger Muller.
When we initially started out Stolen Couch Games, we wanted to make something that would appeal to a large audience and show our potential as a start-up game studio. It was important for us to use our first product as a kick start into full time game development. After a prototype and concept phase, we formed the core idea for Kids vs Goblins. We decided to go all in on it, and for eleven months we poured our time, energy, and above all love, into this project. We strive for high quality in all our projects, but this one was particularly important for the team. Unfortunately, attaining perfection is impossible. Sometimes things went right and sometimes things went wrong, and then sometimes things just went completely awful. We would gladly like to share some of these moments with you.
Our team has had plenty of experience with designing and developing videogames, from concept to completion. Most of this experience took place in a learning environment where many mistakes and blunders were accepted as a normal part of an educational project. Transitioning to the real world was hard, as commercial game development can be very harsh and unforgiving. Our team had experience with Unity 3D before starting the Kids vs Goblins project and the Unity engine was a logical first choice that fit our requirements neatly. We also worked with software such as Photoshop, 3DS Max, and SVN along with a free A* pathfinding plugin as well as a series of commercial plugins by Prime 31, such as the StoreKit, iCloud and Etcetera plugins. We worked on Kids vs Goblins for slightly more than eleven months in total. Pre-production, or the design period, lasted about one month.
A Light and Casual RPG is born
Kids vs Goblins is a bite-sized lite RPG action adventure game for iOS devices, but optimized for the iPad2. The story of the game revolves around a trio of young heroes that are in search of their kidnapped little brother. During a storm at sea they get stranded on a magical island. During the night their little brother is kidnapped by two goblins that take him to the evil goblin king. While the children are planning their attack they find a magical stone that transforms them into three powerful heroes. With magical spells and different tactics the player takes on the battle against all kinds of enemies in various surroundings.
The player controls the three characters with simple finger movements while attacking the enemies. Dragging spells on the enemies will give the player total tactical control over the combat situation. The goal of the game is to defeat the waves of enemies and surviving the different level conditions. For example the Roulette mode is a variant in which you get random spells which you need to use to win the game. But do not use too many because for each spell you use you pay a couple of stones (the in-game currency). You can use the stones you gather during the game to buy spells and thus customize your characters and define the strategy for the next battle. The RPG elements in Kids vs Goblins are very light and casual. With over 60 spells and 6 different levels and 30 missions, Kids vs Goblins gives the player at least 3 hours of gameplay.
Now head over to Gamesauce.org and read the rest of the story.
A few months ago Steam launched Greenlight. A community driven approval process to get games onto the Steam store. We’ve been one of the first developers to be on Greenlight with our two games Ichi and Castaway Paradise. Besides that we created the Green Light Bundle, a bundle website where you can try out games that are on Greenlight. It gives developers a chance to show their games to the consumers, get some money and votes in the process. Today I’d like to share some info about how Ichi, Castaway Paradise and the Green Light Bundle are doing.
Let’s start with the Green Light Bundle. We have released two big bundles with 9 games each and we’re now experimenting with highlighting just a single game at a time. You can purchase each bundle as a Pay What You Want sale. The first Green Light Bundle got a decent amount of exposure from the press. We sold more than 2000 bundles worth more than $10.000 in revenue. Almost all the revenue went to the developers, of course. The second bundle sold a little bit less but the average price was a bit higher, around $5.50USD. After these two big bundle we launched two small “bundles” which just one game each. These two games, Out There Somewhere and Aeon Command, skyrocketed on the Greenlight charts despite less than expected sales.
Right now we’re working on another big bundle with great games. It might take some time since it’s increasingly difficult to find great games between the hundreds of less than stellar games on Greenlight. If you know a great game that would be perfect for our bundle do not hesitate to email us at [email protected]
Now on to the performance of our own games. Let’s start with Castaway Paradise. Even-though the game isn’t done we’re getting a lot of traffic on our Greenlight page. Right now we’re nearing 36.000 visitors and our little game has been favorited by almost 1.500 awesome gamers. We’re oblivious to how many upvotes we’ve gotten since Steam doesn’t disclose this information. But since we’re #81 out of hundreds of games, I think we’re doing pretty well. We’re not in the top 10 yet, so if you can spare a vote you can click on the banner below .
Ichi on the other hand is not doing so great. The steam community is pretty hardcore and a simplistic looking puzzle game don’t mix very well. Ichi is “71% on it’s way to the top 100 games” on Greenlight. Whatever that means. With almost 20.000 visitors and over 700 favorites, Ichi is about half as popular as Castaway Paradise. Since Ichi has been downloaded almost 400.000 times and Castaway Paradise is twice as popular, I can calculate a asweomely bright future for our island simulator
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