Post-Assembly disassembly

False advertising, we admit. The pizza was a lie.

Hello people of the Internet! We are sorry to have sneaked on vacation without announcing it properly, but we now are back, refreshed and running. This is Niklas, bringing you a few words on the process on Interplanetary and some more on my trip to the Assembly Summer '13 with the rest of the KAMK crew.

Before the well earned holiday we worked Interplanetary to the point where we could start working on in-team alpha testing. Some bugs and gameplay issues popped up immediately as usually happens with tests like this, so we will now focus on making things better. After that, it's time to start dragging in test users outside the team. If you're interested in being one of them, drop us a line and there's a good chance we will include you! Notice that unless you have a friend to play hotseat with, you may need a VPN client and end up playing against one of us.

This is what it's all about to many of us.

Now then, Assembly Summer '13. I will take the liberty to write from more personal perspective as I was the only member of TJR to travel this time. We originally intended to bring a two-man strike team, but Jukka succumbed to a nasty stomach bug prior the trip. But I still had a chance to take part, thanks to the very generous people at KAMK. The event itself was of course awesome as always, but this time I didn't quite manage to get the best out of it.

Here's what lacked, so you can do better!

We did not enter the game compo. This was a decision we made pretty early on. Interplanetary is not the sort of game that fits very well in a compo like this. It takes at least half an hour to really get into the game, and that's simply too long, we thought. However, games are presented to the audience in a game trailer form, which would have been doable for us and the compo is really good publicity. M.A.D, a KAMK game we had running at the stand got a lot of attention, and many people mentioned they had found it through the compo.

We did not bring a game demo with us. This is something we actually planned on doing. The demo wouldn't have been exactly Interplanetary, but instead a modified version of the early proof-of-concept version you can download from right there on the right hand side. We planned on having the game run on a touch screen we had on the stand and have people compete for small prizes. The modifications didn't make it in time though, as we prioritized finishing the alpha. In hindsight, the demo version would've been a better choice.

We did not direct our marketing to the players. I was seeking out professional contacts as usual, even though there weren't many around. This is something we should have considered earlier: Assembly might be one of the best places to reach the target audience directly when you are making a game for fairly hard core PC audience.

We didn't prepare well enough. The event was too fast upon us, and we had decided some time ago to have our vacation right before the trip. Because of simple mistakes like this, we didn't have enough time to think through what would be our goals, prepare marketing material etc.

I neglected social media. Like mentioned in the guide I made earlier, events like these provide excellent content for social media, and it's also a good chance to communicate with people who are either present or just interested in what's going on on site. Unlike Nordic Game Conference and Free Your Play, this time there really wasn't  a good reason behind as we had both working wifi and native 3G to work with.

I brought those awful shoes I had at NGC again. Ouch.

Nevertheless I still consider the Assembly trip well worth the time. I met new people and got to spend good time with some fellow nerdy people. Next year TJR will be there again in one form or another, and we will make the best out of it. See you there!

No matter what the locals say, Pasila can be quite pretty. Next year again!

Free Your Play 13, thanks Supercell!

At this point we realized the event was a bit bigger than we had expected.

Hello again! Finnish Midsummer festivities made us drop out of our regular blogging schedule, but we're back now with a little description of the excellent Free Your Play-event.

We had a chance to travel with unusually large portion of our team this time. Supercell was generous enough to provide four of us with tickets, and that's everyone who applied. We considered the possibility of traveling by train, but eventually decided a road trip would be the way to go, and that turned out beautifully.

The crowd gathers and the event is about to start.

The event started in the early afternoon, so we had plenty of time to check out, eat breakfast and even do a little bit of shopping before heading to the event site at tapahtumakeskus Telakka. There was even a free buss transportation from Kiasma, which made things a little bit easier for us non-locals.

Ben Cousins, about to present his theory on the future of gaming.

The official program of Free Your Play consisted of a couple of keynotes, interviews and a panel discussion. A recording of the program is available as a webcast here, but feel free to take a look at my nutshell'd version.

Sadly Peter Molyneux couldn't make it to the event, but Ben Cousins covered his former boss very well with his own presentation.  In short, Ben introduced us the idea that game industry seems to be following the cyclic pattern of disruptive innovation, and it helps us to predict the future direction of development. 

After Ben Cousins we had a chance to listen to an interview of Daisuke Yamamoto from GungHo, the creators of tremendously successful Puzzle & Dragons. Turns out GungHo does many things in a more traditional way and even by the feel instead of collecting metrics and trusting them blindly. 

The next part was a panel talk with some hot names working with F2P model, like Lassi Leppinen (Producer of Clash of Clans), Tom Putzki (Director of Communications, Wargaming.net), Tommy Palm (King.com) and Daisuke Yamamoto as previously mentioned. There was way too much good stuff to cover in this blog post, but the general feeling seemed to be full of anticipation and there's still a lot more room for growth for F2P as a monetization model. Is it going to be the only one in the future? Probably not.

Official program is over, time to mingle!

As usual, the most important part of the event started when the official program ended. The guys at Supercell seem to know this very well, and they provided a very good environment for socializing. The food was good, the bands were great and yes, there were free drinks. Again we had the opportunity to meet a great number of interesting people and make new connections. 

It appears that the event website is not accessible anymore, but in addition to the webcast linked above, there is more info and pictures available at the Free Your Play event page at Facebook. Once again thanks to Supercell for hosting this awesome event. Let's hope we can be there next year as well!

What news from the south?

This week was an interesting one! We traveled to Helsinki with some fellow Kavio game developers in the beginning of the week and got a change to present the very early prototype of Interplanetary to some game industry professionals. Thanks again Frozenbyte for having us!

Needless to say, we got some very good feedback. While there are still some problems with the proto, we we're happy to notice we are moving to the right direction and the main parts of the game work as intended. It's also very encouraging to notice that nearly all of the issues that came up were something we had already acknowledged.

The Interplanetary proto is now officially finished. Though we didn't have enough time to try out all the features we wanted, we now have a good idea of the final game design and we are ready to start working on the final version.

This week's blog post was delayed a bit by busy busy business and a thunderstorm, sorry about that.