Momonga Monday: 8 Hard Lessons We Learned From Our Dev Blog

Posted on: June 25, 2012

A couple of months ago, we decided to start writing blog posts about the development of Momonga. We called it “Momonga Monday” so folks would know when to look for fresh updates.

After three months, the results are not bad at all. We have learned many invaluable lessons and I would like to share them with you.

1. Previews Are Okay

When is something a spoiler? You have seen the end boss, Kuton. You know his background, you know you will face him. You have not yet seen the final fight yourself – you have not played it yet. But is the fact that you know he’s there a good thing? Or is it spoiling your game experience?

Here is my humble guess.

First, nobody wants ANY spoilers for something they are totally into. Suppose Game Of Thrones would blog about the filming process for season 3. I would not want to read it because it will give away the plot.

The other side of this is the cold fact that hardly anybody knows this crazy pinball game we are building. If you don’t know that it exists, you can’t care about it.

My takeaway so far: Plenty of people have seen a picture of the Eiffel Tower. I did. Then I visited Paris, and it is still amazing to see it in real life. Pictures of the Eiffel Tower will not make people say “no thanks, I’ve seen it already”.

(Not the real thing)

I also believe that if you see the hard work that goes into making a game, you might want to taste the end result.

It’s a fine balance. No spoilers, but no secrecy either.

2. Some Posts Work Better Than Others

It is hard to blog about things. One post every week, on Monday. It works pretty well, but is it worth it? Are we giving away too much? Are the readers getting bored of the little snippets? Perhaps we should just make a big splash with a press release and new trailer and new screenshots, coming out of nothing?

For this question, let’s look at the stats:

There are huge differences between posts. The worst post ever was one where I apologized for missing the deadline. Maybe it’s a good thing that nobody read it ;-) And the best post of all-time was the week before that – on worldbuilding. Note that some of the blog posts have been running for quite a while now, and they all generate some hits after they have been first posted:

It is hard to conclude anything from this. Some posts work, others don’t. I know there is a small base of awesome people who check in regularly. Then there are some posts that have social media sex appeal (like the worldbuilding post). Then there are Google-friendly posts like the Unity Facebook tutorial and the 8-Step Guide to iPhone Interface Design.

What topics work best? Here’s what I have learned so far:

  1. Tutorials
  2. Stories
  3. Creative updates
  4. Curated content

Ideally, you want to mix them all. Tell people about this really awesome way you’re doing things. Give a peek behind the scenes to share the creative process. And then connect it to some other blogs / sites / games to give it context.

3. Your Blog Has A Purpose

It is important to think about why you want to blog. Do you want to post a weekly status update, get more traffic, or get feedback? You need to have the primary goal in mind.

We set a simple goal: To blog every Monday until the release of Momonga Pinball Adventures. We don’t have a clue what the effects are so we kept it within our own reach. I believe that if you are making consistent, predictable effort to create good blog posts, folks will start to follow you eventually.

This makes the blog a big experiment – like many of the things we do these days. We hope that people like it so much that they will actually buy the game when it comes out. But this is not the immediate goal of this Momonga Monday blog. The immediate goal is to share weekly progress updates.

Along the way, we get feedback, improve our Google ranking (search for Momonga and you will see us on page 1), and hopefully convert some poor souls into fanatic followers. ;-) but the goal is the same: A New Momonga Blog Post Every Monday.

A final takeaway from this is that you need to define your target audience. We have struggled with this, as we are building a game not for game developers but for gamers. And I don’t have an answer to that yet – I cannot seem to find a great way to connect with players directly with this blog. Perhaps in the future, but for now we are still looking for the magic bullet.

4. Plan Ahead

We had a week-by-week topic list from the start, and that has helped us greatly. It is hard to determine what you are going to write about when the deadline is TODAY. When you have a preset plan, you can start early and gather the information days or weeks ahead of the deadline.

These days I am a bit short on topics. The reason is that the deadline has been postponed. This means we have some extra weeks to fill. Some of the best posts have already been written, and now we need to think of other stuff. And you know what? That’s not a bad thing at all. The best performing posts were off-topic, and there’s more to come. We will ramp up the blog when we get closer to launch.

Still, it is not ideal to build “hype” (if you can call it that) too far in advance.

The takeaway is to plan ahead and drip the good stuff over time. Be sceptic about the schedule unless you are 200% sure you are going to make that deadline.

5. Read

I read game blogs and developer blogs. I read about writing. I read about content marketing. I subscribe to a handful of great bloggers. I read business books. I read books on game design. I read just about anything I can get my hands on.

Reading is important because it gets you inspired for the next step.

6. Write, Write, Write

Write as much as you can.

I am a busy guy, but I try to find the time and energy to write daily. It is important to keep your writing skills sharp. Even when you don’t have the job description for it, it is always good to improve your writing. I keep a personal journal, blog, and write whenever I get the opportunity.

You will need every inch of writing skill when you sit at your keyboard and you need to get the bloody blog post out the door.

7. Gather Feedback

I watch the stats of the site religiously. It is hard to get the nuggets of gold from the graphs, but the gold is there so I study them.

When the Worldbuilding post went up in Reddit, it was amazing to watch the visitor stats go up and up and up:

Woohoo! We got more than 2k visitors that day. But the interesting part came when I digged deeper: The bounce rate of Reddit traffic was 90% and the average visit lasted for 29 seconds. With nearly 4k visitors, only 10% really read the post and felt like they should check out another page on the site.

The stats don’t lie. Dig deep and learn.

Then there is the feedback from the other outlets. Facebook likes, retweets, responses on forums – this gives you a pretty good indication of the awesomeness of a topic. When we got 30 likes and 7 comments on Facebook, I knew it was a good post. The truth can be harsh (we had 0 likes and it hurts!) but that is the beauty of it.

The takeaway? Open Google Analytics. Watch. Learn.

8. It Works

All in all, blogging works. We have had some hits and overall, our site has gotten more and more traffic.

I will keep on writing!

Now it’s your turn. Are we on the right track? Does it suck? How’s your blog doing? Let me know in the comments!

Cheers,
Derk

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Momonga Monday: The Top 10 Craziest Pinball Games Ever

Posted on: June 18, 2012

Pinball is not the sexiest game a developer can choose to make – especially on iOS it is a bit old-fashioned and targeted towards a niche audience. Some programmers might consider it a simple mechanic, like Pong or Tetris – a nice hobby project, but not something to spend serious time on.

When we started the idea of “Pinball Forever” (the ugly prototype that later turned into Momonga Pinball Adventures), we honestly thought that there were not that many pinball games out there that gave the genre a twist.

We were right and wrong. Right, because on iOS there is only a handful of games that took a shot at it. Wrong, because there are dozens of examples on other platforms.

The more we talked to people about this idea, the more we were proven wrong. There is a whole history of amazing pinball games that go beyond simple cabinets. Almost everyone we talked to, refered to a game they remember from the good old days.

Most of these pinball games have been forgotten by the masses, but they are true gems. It is hard to create a good pinball game – the physics simulation is hard, the level design is hard, the balancing is hard.

Therefore – in honor of those games that came before us, out of respect for the innovators who have taken on the challenge to give pinball a twist, I present to you: Our top 10 list of the craziest flipper games ever.

Odama

Without a doubt, Odama (translated as “Big Rock”) is the craziest pinball game ever built. You wage war in feudal Japan. You control armies with voice commands while a huge rock is rolling over the battlefield, smashing friend and foe in its path. It was released in 2006 for the Gamecube and when I spoke about pinball games with some of the guys from Nintendo, they too had this in mind as one of the most intriguing pinball games ever.

Flipnic

If you are a pinball fanatic and looking for something weird, look no further. It does not get much weirder than Flipnic. Check out the video, I can’t find the words to describe the utter brilliance of this game. Released in 2005 for Playstation 2, I am amazed that this game doesn’t even have its own Wikipedia page.

Sonic Spinball

When people see Momonga Pinball Adventures, their #1 reference was Sonic Spinball. Originally released on the Mega Drive / Genesis, Spinball is an amazing game with some pretty difficult and insanely huge levels. I personally don’t like the iPhone release due to the flimsy control scheme. But still, an amazing game.

Mario Pinball Land

The Mario take on flippering has not much body, but the reason this game made it into the list is because of the huge junkyard-like device that squashes Mario into a ball. OUCH!

Also check out this dude’s video, he has been trying to beat the end boss Bowser for over 13 hours. I feel your pain, man.

Undead Pinball

This Gameboy Advance title is all about bashing zombies in a pinball level. The layout of the levels are true to the cabinet form, but with an added layer of moving enemies and interesting powerups. I like the visuals, and it has zombies. Therefore. In the list.

Also check out it’s cousin, Undead Attack on the iPhone. They use the Angry Birds font, but it has zombies. And it is one of the few good pinball games out there on iOS, definitely recommended!

Adventure Pinball Forgotten Island

Another open world pinball game, Forgotten Island brings an adventurous vibe to the game. Explore the jungle with your flippers. Like Sonic Spinball, this game is a huge cabinet with a fantasy theme. I love this Let’s Play, the guy playing it has some great comments.

Flipper Critters

Built by Zen Studios in 2005 for the DS, this game even has a flying mode in it! Looks just like Momonga. It is beautiful, but the game was not well received. I guess that this is partly due to the fact that there are all kinds of fancy cosmetic changes but not much innovation in the mechanics. And there were some complaints of motion sickness, which is not hard to imagine.

Kirby’s Pinball Land

When I first saw Kirby, I immediately loved this game – sweet and simple, and it really brings some nice innovations to the mechanics. The bossfights are well done. Even though this has been released in 1993, there is a ton of innovation and it seems very well polished.

Mile High Pinball

This game made the list because of the awesome name. It could simply be my frame of reference, but the game is interesting as well. Released in 2005 for the Nokia N-Gage, it received good reviews and I heard someone saying that it was the only decent N-Gage game he ever played. Kudos for that!

Pinball Quest

Mixing an RPG with pinball is a noble effort. The guys from Pinball Quest did an… interesting job at it. I love this play-through, mostly because I enjoy the pain of the reviewer.  ;)

…and many more

Sonic Pinball Party, Metroid Prime Pinball, Pokémon Pinball, Kirby’s Pinball Land, Frogger Pinball… it’s too much to handle.

So with all these games, how does Momonga fit in?

The first difference is that only two of the above games have been released for iOS. So it’s about time that there came a “fantasy” pinball game for Android / iPhone / iPad.

The other difference is that Momonga will have much smaller levels. Where one session in the games above can last for 15 minutes or more, Momonga will keep you pinballing for about 2-3 minutes per level. The reasoning behind this is that I want to play it in little snacks, anywhere and anytime I want. With smaller levels, that’s exactly what you’ll get.

Okay, for comparison and for the sake of shameless self-promotion, let’s throw in the trailer, just for the heck of it.

So what do you think? What’s your favorite game? Did we miss anything? Let us know in the comments! :)

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Momonga Monday: My Dirty Secret Of Worldbuilding

Posted on: June 11, 2012

This week for something different. You already know the main characters of Momonga: Momo, Panda, Fry and Kuton. These characters all have their backstory – they have a personal history, a family, traditions and struggles.

There is one thing they all share: The World.

We need to design this world, because without a setting for events, the story will not make sense. With a world you have cities, villages, people, cultures. With a world you have a backdrop for your storyline. It is a foundation on which you can create characters and plotlines. And sequels, and prequels, and in-betwequels. You get the point.

A good world has a couple of ingredients, each point leading to the next:

  1. Territory and resources
  2. People and cultures
  3. Conflict!

For the story, it is the people and their conflicts we are interested in. Because the conflict is the story.

The Grand Conflict

Conflict can result from cultural differences, power struggles, need for resources, or personal interests. The nations and cultures we describe in our world will each have their own history, interests, and abilities. The events in the story will occur because of conflicts that arise from these ingredients.

In the book “The Next 100 Years“, the author George Friedman looks at nations and their Grand Strategy. The theory of the Grand Strategy is that every nation has specific needs for a sense of security. Strategies are wildly different for each nation, mostly based on the geographic aspects of the nation’s territory. Which nations are next to it? Do they have power? Are you a naval nation or are you landlocked? Do you have the resources necessary for prosperity and security?

The role of grand strategy – higher strategy – is to co-ordinate and direct all the resources of a nation, or band of nations, towards the attainment of the political object of the war – the goal defined by fundamental policy.

This is mighty interesting for real-world analysis of geopolitical forecasting – but it is essential for worldbuilding. The different Grand Strategies of each nation serves as the basis for the Grand Conflict in the world.

As an example, in The Lord Of The Rings, there is a conflict between Sauron – who wants to get his ring back and conquer Middle Earth – and the rest of the world, who basically want Sauron to get out of the way and the ring destroyed. All petty squabbles aside, this is the major theme. The story ends when this conflict is resolved.

Mapping It Out

In the real world, the basis for the Grand Strategy – and therefore, the Grand Conflict – is always geography. Water, oil, oceans, impassable mountain ranges, harsh deserts, fertile river banks – our civilizations are formed by these terrain features.

I therefore like to get into geography fairly early in the process, because it is a solid basis for the world design and storyline.

Have a look at these two maps, of The Lord Of The Rings and Game Of Thrones:

Games of thrones map

 

We see continents, rivers, nations, cities, villages, and the obligatory lava fields, mountain ranges and archipelagos. The world map doesn’t need to cover the entire planet – just enough for the story to unfold.

For Momonga, I wanted to have me a shiny world map myself. Pretty soon I was struck with the hard reality that drawing a good map is very, very hard. Geography is fairly specific, and my first sketches were horrible. I’m not a cartographer and it shows. At this point I basically had two choices:

  1. Go abstract – draw circles and squares and work from there. Much like a mockup, or a wireframe.
  2. Use a generator – let the computer do the work for you.

Abstraction is nice, but also very abstract. Where’s the fun in circles and squares? It is hard to use your imagination staring at a flowchart for a worldmap.

I wanted something to tickle my imagination, and fill in the blanks from there. This is my dirty secret: I used a generator.

The Lazy Way

Ah, the joy of world generators. It’s lazy. It’s cheap. It’s super effective. It’s perfect.

The goal of The Lazy Way is to have a foundation for your map – not to have the final map with all its intricate details and sparks of genius presented to you. It is a rough outline, with a lot of blank spots. It’s up to you to fill in those blanks to make your world unique and alive.

Let’s get down to business: First I had a look at the Civ 5 map editor. It can churn out beautiful maps, like this one:

You can see all ingredients here: Mountain ranges, cities, rivers – and if you let the AI play around for a bit, you will even get a nations and conflicts for free. I highly recommend it.

But it turns out there is no Civ map editor on the Mac. Bummer. I only have a Mac at home, and I only have time for these creative indulgences during weekends. So I needed to find something else.

Worldcraft

I resorted to a somewhat less traditional world generator:

Minecraft.

Minecraft has an incredibly awesome world generator that creates quite unusual maps. You can walk around in them, which is a nice bonus. To render the map, there are several mods available. They render a png file of your map, ready for you to paint on. Onward, explorer! Find some nice spots!

Here is a snippet of the world that Minecraft generated for me, overlayed with some ideas of my own:

This was by no means complete, but it is a great reference point. Immediately it gave me a whole bunch of ideas for other areas and the storyline. And the level map, even though it’s different, still has some of the elements of the Minecraft map in it. There’s the mountain range of The Sanctuary, there’s an old city in ruins, there’s the Momonga village, and the owl capital in the distance.

In case you missed it, here is the level selection map:

Momonga Pinball Adventures - Level Selection Map

It looks nothing like the Minecraft map, and that’s perfectly okay. Remember, we needed something to shoot at – not a generated masterpiece, but something to get started.

Closing thoughts

Here are my takeaways from this adventure in world design:

  • Having a world design is a great starting point for your story and dialogue.
  • Using a generator like Civ5 or Minecraft can boost your imagination – it is a great way to jumpstart the world map. Of course you will need to take it from there – it’s your world, your story. It always requires manual labour.
  • You could also use existing real-world maps as a base layout.
  • Don’t follow the starting map to the pixel. You will need a different layout for your world. A mountain where there was a lake, an ocean where there was a desert. Let your imagination run wild.

What do you think of this approach? Is this a good way of building a world layout? Or is it just silly? Let us know in the comments!

Cheers,
Derk

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Jimmy Pataya 1.4 Now Available

Posted on: June 7, 2012

A brand new Jimmy Pataya has just gone live on the App Store! This is a pretty neat update:

  • Game Center support (finally!)
  • Retina support (finally!)
  • Better gameplay: better difficulty curve and more level variations
  • A whole bunch of small improvements and bugfixes


You can get the new version here. It’s free right now. I don’t know when we will get our sanity back, so grab it while you can.

Take care, and see you around :-)
-Derk

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Google Plays Its Monetization Card

Posted on: June 6, 2012

Mobile game developers have been breaking their heads over the lack of revenue on Android. Some developers even took drastic measures and quit developing for the platform entirely. But were they right in doing so? The scenery is changing and Google Play is starting to generate revenue. It’s still not close to the amount of money spent on iOS but every journey starts with a single step. And that step has been taken.

Google’s Ace

Google has played their next card and it is called carrier billing – a seamless method of payment, surpassing the ease of paying on iOS. Alas, I myself can’t use it yet. For now it’s only available in several countries and in those countries only for people who use certain providers. You can view the list of countries and providers here.

What is carrier billing?

Carrier billing is not even innovative. Before the dawn of the smartphones we now own I had a Sony Ericsson K700i. A great phone with which I was able to browse the internet at ridiculous prices and it also had a market where I could buy games and wallpapers. I paid for these using carrier billing. Meaning I would just select whatever I wanted to buy using some of those old fashioned keys you may remember, you know, with numbers on them and such. Thanks to carrier billing it just downloaded whatever I selected, not asking for a credit card number or anything. The purchase would just show up on my monthly phone bill. That’s carrier billing.

No credit card!

That’s right, no credit card! Finally! In Europe and Japan, credit cards aren’t quite as popular as in the USA and not owning one made the purchasing of games on Google Play complicated. I’m a 22 year old European. Why would I need a credit card? The only reason I can come up with is for Google Play. But not anymore. I can’t wait till carrier billing hits my country and my provider. I will clean out the Google Play store :-). I do realize though that this method is not ideal for everyone. Parents, for instance, may not be so thrilled about this. Specifically parents with children that are old enough to operate their father or mother’s smartphone and yet too young to realize the value of money. That might be problematic. For numerous other users though, it really lowers the threshold of paying. A lot.

“But developing for Android is hard and more expensive”

This is an argument my co-worker Yorick offered, showing me this TechCrunch article. A fair argument. I, however, read a different TechCrunch article stating that the problem is not that big of a problem at all. Sure, there’s a lot of Android devices. But most of them are hardly being used. “A subset of roughly 20 devices makes up about 80 percent of the volume for Android, so the problem is more manageable than one might suspect. Similarly, more than 90 percent of Android devices are addressed by supporting OS version 2.2 and later.” That’s what my TechCrunch article says. Sure, it’s not 100% and you’ll still piss some people off because they won’t be able to run your game. But this is only a small percentage of Android users. If these people happen to download your game just reimburse them (provided that they paid for your game). It’s as simple as that. I also introduced Yorick to this man, who raises a fair counterargument as well. So, stop whining and get cracking. There’s demand for high-end mobile games on Google Play as well. More on this in the next paragraph.

Talk is cheap

And right you are. How about some numbers then? There’s this brilliant blog post called ‘Treat Android as a first-class citizen… It’ll pay off!‘ by TinyCo. They developed a game called Tiny Village and shared their experiences about releasing it on 3 different app stores (iOS, Google Play and Amazon). Over all devices TinyCo made 65 cents on Google Play for every dollar they made on iTunes and they expect this gap to shrink.

In this article there’s another example of TripleTown that made 67 cents on Google Play for every dollar it made on iTunes. You may already have connected the dots: These are both freemium games. This isn’t surprising as 68 of the top 100 grossing UK Android apps are freemium games. Not only on Android though. Freemium games have been taking over in general for a while now. As you can see in the image below, it’s also become a more and more popular way of driving revenue on iOS.

Google Pay

It’s time we get rid of the outdated notion that Android-users are unwilling to pay for games. If you want to drive revenue on Google Play, get on board now! And the best way to do this is with a freemium game of high quality. Unfortunately Paladin’s new game, Momonga, is not going to be a freemium game. But I guess we’ll see how it will fare on the new and improved Google Play. It is to be expected that the gap between total revenue generated on iOS and the total revenue generated on Google Play will be shrinking. And you don’t want to be late to that party, do you?

What do you think? Are you jumping on the Android bandwagon or will you keep focusing on iOS?

Cheers!

- Peter

P.S. After having Yorick proofread this blog post he told me carrier billing was going to hit the Netherlands soon as well. He was right, on May 26th 1 provider announced they would soon allow carrier billing. And lucky me… that’s my provider :-).

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