Jimmy Pataya: beyond the launch

Posted on: April 19, 2010

As you know, recently the Paladin team built an iPhone game in two weeks. It includes fun gameplay, nice graphics, music, sound and character voice, and highscores that can be shared on Twitter. In this post, I want to look back on what happened after we submitted the game to Apple on Friday April 2nd.

Wait for it…

The long Easter weekend afterwards, we all took some time off to rest. We had been working hard to meet the deadline, and quite frankly, it was exhausting. Plus there wasn’t much to do anyway but wait for the game to be reviewed and approved. On Tuesday we sat down and discussed what to do next. It made sense to start marketing the game.

Our great artists Niels, Lars and Thomas made a sharp website, which coder Tijmen implemented. Check it out here. Derk wrote a press release, with a focus on the two week-development sprint. And Lukas and I made a big list of iPhone game review sites, which we started sending requests for reviews to.

It’s alive!

On Tuesday evening / Wednesday morning, Jimmy Pataya v1.0 was approved by Apple! Of course, we were very happy about this and many hands were shaken during that day. We quickly became addicted to checking sales numbers every five minutes, and quickly stumbled upon the cold hard truth about selling in the App Store: it’s pretty tough.

This is what our sales figures looked like in the first week:

On the Y axis, you see the number of units sold. The peak was 72 copies, which resulted in roughly  € 35 / $ 44. Even though we had spent only 2 weeks on development, you can imagine that those kinds of numbers won’t pay the bills. At all.

Spotlight

So while we were busy contacting even more review websites, something magical happened: I received a mail from Apple, notifying us that we would be featured in the ‘New and Noteworthy’ category in the US, Canadian and Mexican App Stores. Lo and behold! It actually happened the very same day! Effectively, it means that anyone in those countries checking out the Games section in iTunes will see Jimmy Pataya!

So, truth be told, the fact that Apple took our little game and put it up there for all  to see was pretty exciting already. But the real question was, of course: would this have any effect on sales? The simple answer: yes.

We, the People

Driven by this phenomenal boost, we decided this project wasn’t over yet. We’re on a roll now, and more importantly – in under two weeks, we suddenly gained over 2,600 customers. Jimmy Pataya is now a real product, and we better treat it that way!

The best thing about having customers (except maybe for earning money) is getting feedback. Fortunately, it’s mostly positive. Many love the game and seem to be playing it over and over again. A few quotes:

“Wicked game. Great for fans of doodlejump type games. Buy it.”

“This is one of those games I can play for hours on end. Gameplay is almost completely smooth on my iPhone 3G. Patayaaaaa!”

“Love it!!!!!! – Best game ever!!”

“Papayaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!! – Just frickin awesome dude it’s an adrenaline rush”

Of course, there were a few bad and ugly comments as well:

“It’s nothing special and it’s not worth the price. Unless you have money to spare, avoid it.”

“very DUMB game!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! – THIS GAME WAS FUN FOR ABOUT 3 MINUTES AND THAN I DELETED IT OFF MY PHONE TOTAL GARBAGE DO NOT BUY THIS JUNK WISH I COULD GET A REFUND THE CREATOR SHOULD BE ASHAMED TO SELL THIS FOR .99 SHOULD BE FREE AND EVEN THEN DONT GET IT”

As a team, we dealt with criticism before. Rather than be personally offended or hurt, we ask ourselves how we can improve the game so even more people will enjoy it. Three things came to mind immediately: OpenFeint, iPad and extended gameplay.

From here and beyond

I actually submitted update 1.1 to Apple just two hours ago. It includes full OpenFeint support, meaning Leaderboards and Achievements. Players will now be able to check global highscores and see how their friends are doing. Achievements such as Rookie, Spin Doctor and One More Time will add extra reasons for replaying the game.

We actually have hires graphics for the iPad version ready too, but ran into an issue combining Unity, iPad and OpenFeint. Producing games is all about making tough choices and about making it work. There will be future updates, so for now, we’re not supporting iPad just yet.

And finally, we have lots of ideas for enhanced gameplay. Many of our testers and players came up with great additions too: power-ups, animations, time-trial, stunts… the list goes on. Tomorrow we’ll sit down and discuss what the next update will be. Jimmy is alive and kicking!

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Japan plus Youtube is succes

Posted on: April 11, 2010

Lets start with a little about me: I usually go to bed around 10.30 pm.

As some of you might know, Jimmy Pataya started out as a research project for us. Since it got a little bit out of hand and we became more serious about it we all had our own expectations. One thing we all had in common was that it would be cool if it was picked up massively. We even wrote down some optimistic numbers, I believe I said something like “Gimme 12.5k downloads!”. You could say those numbers were our definition of succes.  Succes can be defined in different ways actually. On the App Store is usually defined as: “Getting as high as posible gross profit” While that may be true, thats just the business side. 

I have a second definition of succes, this time its personal, not business. Succes for me, as a human, not a company, is seeing people enjoying your game. You can’t really measure this but I check a few things to get a feeling. I often just Google with “Jimmy Pataya” and check the results. Did you know it’s also some infamous tourist isle in Thailand? Another great source is Twitter, checking how much people Twitter about it or posting their scores.

The ultimate place for succes is Youtube! People playing your game and then take the effort of recording and uploading a movie of them playing it is just awesome. Well I am very proud to say: it happened! Even better, it happened all the way down in Japan! We don’t even have the game description translated into Japanese nor we contacted any Japanese review sites. They picked it up themself, wrote a review of it, took some screenshots, made a movie and actually gave it a good recommandation. FREAKIN’ AWESOME! 

I can’t hold it back any longer so here it is.
(and use this for a translated one)

And you know what, its 0.15 am right now and I am still awake because of it. That has got to say something :-)

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Random coolness from the past two weeks

Posted on: April 7, 2010

In the development of Jimmy Pataya, a lot of things were new to us. And I noticed several things:

iPod v1 > iPhone 3G

When ever you develop for a platform, you need to work within it’s limitations and specifications. For both the iPod and iPhone these specs can be easily found. Whenever you read them, you think: “Ey, iPod has less Mhz than the iPhone, so it must be slower.” Wrong! We actually had to put a lot of effort in making Jimmy Pataya run smoothly on the iPhone. The main problem is that there are several background processes while running the game. The iPhone obviously checks for incoming calls, but also runs other stuff like the 3G connection and email.

Unity..

.. just keeps amazing me every time.
This time it was with music and sound effects. It. Just. Works.
In Jimmy Pataya it makes no difference whether you are listening to your own music or not. Whenever you play your own music, Unity knows it and it disables the game’s background music. But, it doesn’t disable the game sound effects! If you want no sounds, you can just hit our mute button. This cool because we didn’t write a single line of code for it and now you only have to have one mute button, which works for both music and sound.

Hidden Talents

Speaking of music and sound effects, Paladin has the most well-hidden skills team ever! :-) I have been working at Paladin for about 3 years and only just now some team members revealed their unique skills.

Derk, normally CEO, and usually busy running the company, has made a great and very addicting soundtrack.
Dylan, normally sales guy and also busy running the company, did some great voice acting. Starting the game with a “Here we GOOO!” shout makes me smile over and over again. Next time he will do Keanu Reeves.

I asure you, you’ll love both the music and voice overs.

I should not forget to mention our team member Tijmen, normally our web dude. It was his first project doing 100% Unity and was responsible for atleast 50% of the programming. He did a great job!

(although he was scratching his chin quite often)

Our two interns also did a great job while there was the big time pressure. Didn’t bother them really as they made a fantastic gui, character and in-game art assets.

Last but not least is Niels, who was the project leader which wasn’t easy considering the time we had and all the choices we had to make.

Oh and lets not forget about me, I have never done any blogging in my life and here I am writing several posts about Jimmy Pataya ;-)

Attention!

Something very different, but also way too cool, was all the (media) attention! A dutch game dev magazine featured us two times on their website, Dutch Game Garden wants us to give a presention about Jimmy Pataya on the INDIGO festival and if all goes well we will be featured on several iPod and iPhone game websites. Then there are all the people dropping by at our office or sending us messages on Twitter. Like Boris would say: “It’s nice!”

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Break or be broken

Posted on: April 4, 2010

This isn’t about breaking physical stuff nor it is about trying to break software. No, it’s about getting broken mentally.

As Nick said before, creating a game in 2 weeks changes game development, a lot. As Jimmy Pataya was my first as a game designer I had little experience in this area. Every time you do something new, you jump right into it. In my case I landed unexpectedly early, head first.

The first week of game development was a tough one. We had democratically chosen something with skydiving, my job then was to work that out to get a game design. I did exactly that. Then I presented the game design, it was all about falling down without control of the movement, passing rings and match the color, heavily relying on a Japanese themed graphics style. Some team members were positive, others disagreed big time. So big that the concept wasn’t going to make it. The concept was taken back and after a lot of discussion we ended up dropping the Japanese stuff and adding character controls.

To be honest, it broke my heart and was thinking, “This was not how I imagined the game to be”. A good night sleep does fix your mind most of the time. Especially when you don’t have the time to cry like a little girl.

Some days later, it happened again. Most of the testers found the color matching too difficult or couldn’t control the color matching and character movement at the same time. We choose to drop the color matching. In my heart I wanted to keep that mechanic because it was coolests thing but my head told me to go with movement as the testers liked it and the team wanted it. You could say I’m a wuzz but then I would say team motivation is more important than my own ego.

The point I am getting to is that as a game designer, there is a big chance you will get broken, mentally. You can strengthen yourself and the process though. Instead of breaking, you now might only get bend.

In my case it was all about expectations.
Some team members expected a skydiving game to be like a base jump game in which you have a start at a ridge and an end, landing on your feet.
I expected the color matching mechanic to be a strong and simple gameplay element.
The testers expected, well I’m not really sure what they expected but the first version we sent was definitely not it :-)

Who knows how bendy I can become with some exercise?

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iPhone game: deadline is closing in

Posted on: March 31, 2010

When we decided that we would try to build an iPhone game in two weeks, we knew it would be tough. We knew it would involve doing a lot of technical research, creating a lot of designs and making a lot of tough decisions. Lukas already talked about a big cut we made, which resulted in a more focused game experience. Today we sat down to review our progress, painfully aware of the impending deadline in just two days.

The good news is that we are well on our way. The central gameplay mechanic, dodging blades by tilting the iDevice, works nicely. In fact, both our own team members and outside testers enjoy the thrill of falling down and dashing sideways to avoid serious injury. We’ve been experimenting with speed and blade spawning frequency. We’re testing all these different stages, and keep those that work best. The latest incarnations are actually quite demanding – average playtime is now 30 to 60 seconds, which is exactly what we’re aiming for.

Regarding visuals, the team is producing a lot of great assets. We are lucky to get a bit of outside help from Bang Phan, a veteran concept artist. He’s working on the background image and cloud textures.

We’re also gathering a small group of dedicated testers, which is fantastic. It’s so rewarding to get honest and constructive feedback. Personally I am looking forward to improving our quality assurance and user testing efforts in the upcoming months. It makes sense to have an external focus: we want to make games people want to play.

The not so good news is,  time is really running out. We have so many wonderful ideas but not enough manpower to get it in. While we have solid artwork,  implementation into the game takes longer than expected. For the past few days, we’ve been playing a promise. Even if we did manage to work more hours, every new feature and every new asset potentially introduces bugs. Adding new mechanics means we’ll have to test everything again from scratch, as we basically have a whole new game.

That’s why today has been about cutting stuff from an already lean design. It’s about making things work, dumping excess bagage where-ever possible. We won’t have power-ups, we’ll keep sounds to a minimum, we’ll have to be strict about animations.

On the other hand, we’re still definitely ambitious. We do want exciting gameplay, we do want Twitter support, we would love to give Jimmy a voice. With two days left on the clock, we’ll do whatever it takes to make our Friday deadline. And that’s not even the end of the road yet: we’ll have to submit the game to Apple, get it reviewed, and hopefully approved. If all goes well, we’ll have an iPhone game in the App Store sometime next week!

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