On the mountains and valleys of Freeplay 2011

(Hold on to your hats, it's a long post!)

It hurts me to say this but... I didn't actually go to Freeplay 2011. There are reasons for this. One of them being that airfares from the Gold Coast were over $200 one way. The other being that I had no time. The trailer that you could see at the event had its final edit around 4:00am in the morning and was uploaded to google docs because our server was down. (The result can be found here).

Then there was my wife. She works six days and so couldn't come with me but didn't want me to go as the time we can spend together is so minimal these days. Apparently when you work for a start up game company, 12 - 16 hour days are pretty standard. You forget what you used to do outside of work and the nights are spent staring at the computer screen. So Sunday's are hugely important around here.

Due to this, I pushed the responsibility on to my boss to write about it (because he went) but he's busy. Remember those 12 - 16 hour days? Yep, he has those too.

But I want to do something on Freeplay because it was important for our company and because it's a pretty major event for the independent Australian gaming world. So I'm going to write about the after effects for our company and what they meant for us. I'm going to focus on the positive effects of the conference first (credit's due where credit's due) and then briefly touch on what I thought was a little disappointing for us.

A few months ago we met Tony from GDAA when we first started up and he gave us lots of great advice, including (paraphrased) "Get your game playtested. You must playtest.". We'd been doing our internal play testing with friends and family and they'd really like it. But development time was tight so when we took it to Freeplay it was our first public test. For our game design, this was the best thing we could have ever done.

Benefits for Game Development 


I spent all day bouncing around the house waiting for the call to tell me how it went. I waited, waited and then waited until 7:00pm when the phone finally rang and the news was.... positive.Well, 80% positive. You see, we didn't want to waste this opportunity to find out if our game held up to public scrutiny or to find out what people thought could be improved so we brought a comments sheet for players to fill out. Best idea ever.

My boss probably talked to over 200 people in the course of those days but probably remembered 10 or 20 comments. Worse, he remembered the comments that made an impact to him. So some things were highlighted and other important factors were forgotten until we sat down and preformed an analysis on the comments sheet. We got 65 comments over all,  which is pretty good. (Not a lot of people want to write comments down apparently). And they were on the whole, really, really good. People loved our art style, they loved the gameplay mechanic, they liked the idea. A few people wanted to buy it.

More importantly, however, we were able to isolate issues with the game that were of the most concern to players. We were able to tweak the controls just a little bit better, stop the screen rotating and adjust the difficulty of the levels. Also, we figured out how to create an engaging tutorial for the player because the comments (and observation) reflected players generally didn't read tutorials at all. At all. It had to be an in-game action or you can kiss it goodbye.

I talk about isolation because that's important. Through analysis of what we had (not what we imagined) we could avoid focussing on the comments stuck in our mind. For example, a player commented on it being too adult for children yet we had children play it (with their parents in tow) and wrote down that they "Liked it.". (Always trust a kid over an adult's perception of what kids should play any day). We had one who said the girlfriend was "childlike" and the hero "too old". It stuck in my boss' mind and he wanted to change some artwork but when we did an analysis, it was an extremity.

If we had not taken the comments nor done the analysis then we would have spent time re-working the art instead of the gameplay. We would have wasted all those people's opinions because of our own filter. Strangely I was told that we were the only ones with a comments sheet. Here's hoping that wasn't the case.

Benefits for Game Marketing

The comments sheet provided us with additional subsidiary benefits:

1. Confidence in our product
2. Testimonials

We liked our product going into the conference but we needed to know if it had a broad appeal. If it was fun. If our trailer held up. We wanted people to like it. We believed they would like it but we did not know. Coming out of the show, we knew they would. We had hard evidence that this was a truth. Most people liked the artwork, most people enjoyed the game when they played it. We could be confident in our product when marketing it. That's a great feeling. 

We also got a slew of great testimonials. All through the play testing phase I had my family give the game several play overs, I never received the ringing endorsements everyone says family gives. They were our harshest critics, yanking the product in every direction. However, the perception of reviewers is that family do not count as independent voices. So you need a public opinion. An unbiased (and sometimes completely biased competitor's opinion) to woo them. Obtaining these comments really helped. I could prove to a third party that people, random people, really liked our game and it was at a recognized event in Australia. That was really good. 

We also got tweeted about by @lisadempster. (Thanks!) That's very encouraging. 

Benefits for Networking

In addition my boss meet Stephen Heller from MMGN at the event. He is an excellent a game journalist / reviewer and has really got behind our company with coverage and support. (We're still waiting on tender hooks for the final review but it should be out this week , fingers crossed it's positive) :). 

The boss also meet with Chris Watts from Play-Bit Entertainment, and talked with some passionate game developers and colleges / professors really trying to build the game industry such as Hellen from RMIT and Labtrobe. I hope that we'll get to know them more and more over the upcoming years because they sound like great people and I'm really keen to meet them.  

The Dark Tunnel of Psychological Spectacles

Removed due to editorial control

Summary

Freeplay 2011 was great. We meet wonderful people and were really able to network with some amazing individuals. We were able to put our game through the fires of public testing, get some additional marketing material and make our product even better.  Really looking forward to it next year and I hope to be able to actually attend and hawk our product on the stand. :)

Oh, by the way, if you'd like to have a look at the finished product, our game can be found here. It's only $0.99 (AUD) So, we'd love it if you supported us and brought it. Cause y'know, the Freeplay attendees thought it was pretty rad. :)

徒等藩

On iOS advertising copy

The standard phrase goes "You are what you eat." but I think you could easily change that to "You are what you study." One of the reasons I say this is because my majors were advertising and management at Uni and I desperately tried to run away from them with admin and teaching jobs. Yet, no matter where I went I could not escape analyzing management practices at work nor contemplating advertising copy whilst waiting for my wife in a shopping centre. It was as if my brain had an automatic sub-routine hardwired into it that would naturally kick in the moment a marketer or sales person started to engage in a meaningful discussion about what products I truly 'needed'.

Having been an advertising enthusiast and then an actually marketing / sales practitioner at my last job, I was sure that I had already been scared by the worst of advertising out there. Then I started browsing the app store on itunes to assess the competition. I was glad that I was sitting down at the time.

For this post, I'll list just four of the things that I found odd about the way products were marketed.

#1 in Finland, Zimbabwe and another country you may have never been to. 

Being #1 is a big thing and a great marketing tool. We've all seen ads on TV where they mention how this product has been huge in another market and therefore will be huge in yours. This is basic marketing by association and is a solid idea, the problem occurs when the association makes no sense. For example, an ad might say "#1 in America" when advertising in Australia and that's understandable, Australians listen to and like a lot of American music. Therefore when you say that, I might think "Oh, I'll probably like this then."

However, what if the same ad said "#1 in Casablanca." A disconnect happens. In fact, it might damage the product because the viewer starts to consciously process the comment. Firstly, they don't know a lot about Casablanca and they probably don't even know if they've listened to any music from there. Suddenly, you're asking them to take a risk. "I might not like Casablanca music" their mind might argue "I would waste my money. Perhaps I should try it first on youtube?"

Secondly, and even worse, they could become suspicious. "Why only Casablanca? Isn't it popular anywhere else? How big is Casablanca's music market?" They become aware that it's an advertising ploy, that you are trying to manipulate their decision. The best copy is never registered as advertising, it's absorbed and acted upon through impulse. You have probably lost a customer and worse, encouraged them to share how ridiculous your product is (without even trying it).

New great features.... Coming soon (On product release)!

If the previous one was bad (but based on a sound principal), this is just plain horrible. I'm not even sure what crosses their mind when they write these sorts of things. I assume their argument goes like this "People will know we're behind the product 100% and we will reward their purchase with additional content."

There are many implied and immediate problems with this, so I'll break it down piece by piece.

The product is not complete. - This is the biggest statement you are making. You released the product early because your budget ran out and / or your deadline occurred. If it sells well, then you can add additional functionality which should have been in there in the first place. This is quite demeaning because you are admitting that you made a mistake somewhere in development and expect the customer to be ignorant or gullible enough to help you fix it. Not a good start.

Does not reward early adopters - Early adopters are the ones who take the biggest risk. They spend their own money and time on an unknown product to see if it's any good. These customers are the ones that should be more rewarded than the late adopters. Yet, you're rewarding procrastinators. This secondary group of people will hear about the product from the adopters and be able to buy it for the same price but get even more functionality. They take less risk yet get additional benefits. In fact, they might even get the social reward of sharing something new with the early adopter because of a new game mode, decreasing the benefits an early adopter gains from the risk taken.

Encourages late purchases - There's a Dilbert strip which depicts a sales rep coming back from a meeting with a prominent vendor and telling Dilbert "I just told one of our vendors about all the great features our upgrade would have and they got really excited. Now they don't want to buy our current version, but the upgrade. How long it will take to get ready?", Dilbert replies "Two years." (Paraphrased)

Perhaps the time periods have changed but the issues are the same. What benefit can you gain from promoting a product that's even better than the one you have? Why would they want the current one? Worse, you've just told all your competitors what you think would make great additions to that type of game and they implement those in their games too. (Maybe even faster).

To bring the example down to earth, let's look at what would happen if we applied this logic to a physical retail product. Say we went to JB-Hi Fi and wanted to buy the new version of Office. It's been out for 2 months and you're quite excited about all the new features it has. When you get there, the helpful retailer starts discussing its great features but then adds "Well, it's good. But I've heard that in six months, they're going to release a premium edition. It's for the same price but also has database management software, a financial accounting program and instant voice recognition."

What would happen to sales of the current version? What do you think is happening to the sales of your current version? You've may have spent weeks on marketing your new version just to undermine the value of your product at the checkout.

The mile long read

This is the most common and although it's not the worst, it's still pretty bad as these things go. I believe the reason for this stems back to who studies advertising and writes copy for it. At Uni, I met a lot of story tellers, people who wanted to be writers but did an advertising major because it's difficult to achieve success as a published author.  (Yes, I was one of those too. Can't you tell from the size of these posts? :) ) For me, this was a huge issue at Uni. I would write so many words on the copy that you could barely see the poster. I truly believed that my copy was great and that by including all this information I was assisting the customer. They were well informed.

Fortunately, my lecturers took my notes and mutilated all the pretty words until there was nothing left except what the customer wanted to read. Eventually I learned (very slowly and painfully) that I had to shrink everything till it was easy to understand and quick to read. Then review, review, review. Then shrink again.

Now imagine if I hadn't had that experience but landed a writing gig at a small gaming / publishing company? Of course my job is going to include ad copy and press released but I'm still in explanation mode. I think features and value are the same thing and so type away quite happily believing that I'm doing the customer a favour.

Reality is vastly different. People are always busy and even if they're empirically not, they will tell you they are.  (How else do forums about games magically fill up when everyone's at work or school?) Plus, they only want the information they believe they need. Nothing else. So the idea is to be as short as humanly possible and for it to be as simple as possible. They don't want an essay, they want something that assists them.

On the iphone / ipod this is even more important because the screen is so small. A 100 words can feel like a trek through a 1,000 word review on a computer. It's also why Twitter is so popular. Short, immediate and powerful.

So there's no excuse in today's world. Yet the copy I read for some games on the store is long, tedious and over complicated. It tells you everything and I mean everything about the game. It tells you about its 63 features (even though people probably only want to know about the top 3 - 4) and how to play (despite it being explained during play) or sometimes embarks on a quest to tell you about how you'll help revolutionize the industry.

Let's use a metaphor. Imagine I told you everything about a movie. The story, the cast, the behind the scenes activities, the uniqueness of its feel and the emotions you should feel during key scenes. Why would you see the movie? More importantly, I've just stripped away all your ability to 'self discover' these things. So there's no mystery left when watching said movie. Nothing to find for yourself. I've actually removed some of the experiences you can obtain from the movie.

They don't do it for movies, music or art. Don't do it for your games.

Today's final - Support local independent game developers


I saw this a few days ago and then had a 'grumpy ad man session' in which I ranted to everyone within earshot (my cat) about how dumb this is. This is not a feature or benefit. It may be a selling point but only to those who actively and aggressively do not purchase mainstream titles but prefer their titles from smaller and more independent companies. That market, however, is normally quite small.

For this section I'm going to assume that you would like your game to sell well and have no (real) intention of staying a small developer over the long term. When you write those words, you are writing them to try and increase sales for your game by appealing to the positive cultural value of 'helping the little guy'. Question: If you do achieve a strong commercial success, will you still care about these supporters? Think about it because your brand (and the perception the community at large has of it) can hinge around what you do after achieving success.

Anyways, one of the problems with this approach is that it takes away from your game. You're putting the emphasis on 'helping independent developers' as the reason to buy the game instead of 'its an incredible experience and you'll love it!'. Say someone purchases your game because of this reason, would they say: "Oh, this game is incredible?" or "It's pretty good for an independent developer."

You see the difference? One statement says that it's good, period. The other states, it's automatically not as good as a published company. If that mindset starts to seep in, you can never get rid of it. Your games (no matter how good they are) will always be second class in the customer's mind. They are buying them to 'do you a favour' instead of buying them because 'they want to'.

When money gets tight or time limited, your games will end up being ignored simply because they believe that they've 'helped you enough'. Also, consumer's can start to believe that they should have control over your company. After all, you exist only because of them (true) and their generosity (not true). Make what I want / charge what I want or I will stop supporting you.

No matter how big or small you are, we're all competing on the same playing field as much larger / smaller companies. Your game has to be equal or better than what is on the market. Saying "I've only got 1 programmer and two cats, that's why it looks suspicious." is not an answer consumers will wear (yes, even for free games).
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Well, those are four of my pet gripes about ad copy on the iOS store. I'll probably have more in the future as Ahasai Designs continues and I'll let you know what they are. But from one marketer to another, see you next ad break!

徒羅藩

P.S: You can follow us on Twitter @AhasaiDesigns

Enduring the bug infestation

When it comes to small companies, (even ones you sort of partially own), I'm never sure if I love or hate them. Firstly, there's the complete lack of ignorance you have when it comes to the finances. You know the finances, you know much money is in the coffers, you know when you're the red lights are flashing and it's 'give me sales or give me centrelink' time. I always imagine it must be nice to work for a large company where all you do is work until one day, BAM, you're redundant because there's no money left. Total ignorance. No constant fear for this month's salary, just raw expectation. 

Having worked in three small companies now, I've also noticed one other consistent theme, you get to do everything. Everything. A word than encompasses everything you previously thought of and then even more. Designing new games? Check. Understanding programming? Check. Sales? Check. Social marketing? Check. Making websites, trailers, bug testing? Of course. 

Which brings me to this post. Bug testing. How I loathe thee so. Having worked on basic database projects for school and University, I knew that games would not work as well as expected when they were reviewed, but, I never imagined they could be such abominations. I'll never forget the first demo level I saw with place holders. Pink placeholders. I almost curled up and cried for a day. This was not the spectacularly funny and hilarious images that I imagined. They were pink! And the game crashed! Regularly. In fact, it felt that you only broke it when you played it. Best to just stare and enjoy the loading screen. 

Overtime though, that became the easy part. Bugs were clearly obvious because it was 'X should do Y but does Z and T', gameplay balance became the new thing. How do you know what's fair? 15% faster? 20% faster? Should the save points be closer? Further? Levels longer? Shorter? Is it too difficult or am I just mediocre? Does it need to run in real time? Game time? Relative time? Isn't time and space the same thing?

Plus the infamous programmer's question 'tell me exactly what you were doing'. Exactly? What do you mean exactly? I was sipping a caffeinated beverage and playing the game when it crashed. I was playing it as you, the programmer, intended; with two hands, three toes and a nose! The thing, on the other thing did not show up. 

Yet it doesn't end there, oh no. Once they fix the bug, the send you the game again and ask you to rinse and repeat. To do it over and over again. Until you've seen the same section of a level three hundred times that you notice if they move anything by a pixel. And then you start to hate that pixel movement because the game now feels as if you're playing an entirely different experience. Your brain starts suggesting that they should move it back, except, maybe they did it for the customers? Surely it wasn't a random pixel movement? There must be some logic behind it? Why else would they put you through this pain? Don't they understand how you feel about that pixel?

*Cough* *Cough* 

Anyways, that's one of the good and bad things about working for a small company. I've never play tested before (or used Twitter for that matter) and if I just 'lucked out' and started working for a larger game company, I might never have. I would have no comprehension of what it takes to play test and the frustrations that goes along with the job. So, I gain an enormously diversified set of skills that can be applied almost anywhere, on the downside, I have to be prepared to do anything. One time I had to sell trips to China for a previous company with zero advertising dollars because, y'know, it had become my job. Great for the resume (eventually), possibly hazardous to my short term health. 

Oh, and about that big company thing. I worked for one of those. A year and a half later it went bankrupt. Good times. Good times. 

徒羅藩

P.S: We went to Freeplay last week. My boss, 海奴陸, will have more details later on this week. 

The joys of startup - Part 1

I was talking with a friend of ours in the Australian gaming industry and we got talking about game design / production. During the conversation he described a popular iphone game and it's enormous success despite the fact that it had only taken two weeks from idea to completion. As this appealed to me, I made a couple of comments about the idea being repeatable. Almost as soon as it came out of my mouth,  I received a strong reprimand, "This is very uncommon. It just does not happen like that." Then he took a drink of his beer and we continued on.

Afterwards, I mentally filed it under the category of 'naive optimism' along with other such classics as 'I'll just finish this level and go to bed' and 'I'll study four hours of Japanese today'. Yet as the weeks went by from that discussion my mind kept saying, Why can't you?. What's wrong with a two week development cycle?

Well, there's a lot wrong with it. Firstly, the odds of the game being very good are low. Secondly, it's a rush job. If you're putting the emphasis on time instead of quality then it's doomed to have a dozen or so corners cut. Secondly, well, it's not what the experts suggest. Yet, I still couldn't get over it. I kept thinking of the games on the mobile platform and the value ratio of gameplay to customer.

This part got my marketing mind working. I started looking at really popular games that were on the 25th version and thought about what made them popular before they had 3000 levels. About what a consumer would want from an experience for a $.99. I started thinking about my wife and how she used games.

Here was a woman who completed the Angry Birds demo three times without prompting but played the full Angry Birds for 10 minutes before never wanting to play it again. This led to me contemplating about how I even found the number of  Angry Birds' levels to be too much. How I enjoyed the sensation of 'completion' to be more satisfying than 'more of the same'. How I wanted to experience many things (especially only for a dollar) and how too many levels was, literally, removing the completion of the game experience from me and also blocking my ability to purchase more titles because I haven't 'finished' Angry Birds yet.

Then my mind spun to more traditional mediums such as Japanese serial manga (One Piece for example) and on-line comics. Japanese serial manga is addictive and I've read Slam Dunk probably four times from vol. 1 to vol. 31 but stopped reading Naruto because it got too much. Too many comics, too much to read. I wanted to move on to a new experience but was not satisfied with my last one. Yet, the idea of continuing the story to infinity because it had a strong fan base was commercially sound.

Were these companies (and authors) creating endless sequels because they benefited the reader or because they benefited the publishing company? Who was the main beneficiary of the 'endless story / game'?

With these experiences in mind, I started to contemplate about games again. $.99. A can of coke in Australia goes for more than that. ($1.20 at the best). So, were people looking for the game with more and more features or were they looking for something that gave them value for $.99? I kept coming back to the marketing concept of value for money. It's not about getting the 'best' or the 'most', it's about obtaining something that represents the 'value' of $.99 to the person purchasing it.

So, I opened my notebook and started writing about what could be worth $1.00 value. If an in-game hat could be worth that much money then perhaps a smaller and more complete experience could. If it wasn't about the length of time the game could be played but rather the overall perceived value of the 'package' then perhaps, just, perhaps 1 - 2 week development cycles could achieved.

With this powerful inspiration, I decided to ask my boss permission to think up five ideas that could be done in a week. He kindly agreed to this ridiculous notion and I was super amped. I had a whole day to come up with five ideas for games that could be developed in a fortnight project cycle. The only thing needed now was actual game ideas.

How hard, I thought, could that be?

Griping Undone by Interaction (G.U.I)

One of the good (and intimidating) things about working for any small company is the diverse number of tasks you will be required to work on. For example, when I was employed by Ahasai Designs, I was primarily hired as a writer for their upcoming title. However, that role has expanded into being a Game Designer, Administration Officer, Finance Officer and Marketing Officer. 

I should complain, except most of it's pretty enjoyable. Eventually, however, you run into a wall. My wall was G.U.Is. Simply put, I've never had to give them much though before. Sure, Mass Effect 1's G.U.I was a little clunky and I struggled with The Witcher and Deus Ex's as well but on the whole they looked professional and I could eventually figure them out. 

For mobile apps it's a little different, they are insanely user friendly.  You can almost instantly make the connection between the icon and its function. You don't even notice that they exist because you've got so used to them being there. 

Due to this naivete; when my boss, Keidrych, phoned up and said "Trahern, can you create a rough sketch of the GUI?", I was mostly confident that I could. "Sure." I replied. "I'll get to that."

Firstly, I sat down and decided on my priorities. I wanted it to be different. I wanted to 'stand out' from the crowd and avoid the 'three box' approach which occurs in more games than I could count. I also wanted it to blend into the story, to make people feel connected with their objectives and have a sense of what the game was about. 

Plus, just in case all of the above was far too easy, it had to be intuitive. It should utilize the touch screen capacity of the ipod / iphone as much as possible. Users really enjoyed 'flicking' between screens (not just point and clicking) so it had to have that kind of functionality as well. 

In my mind, that's what a good user interface did, which meant that I had to create that for our game. Now that I knew what I wanted in style / design, I needed to know what functionality I had to build in. I started by writing a list of all the things the users should be able to do now and in the future, level select, type of gameplay select, turning sound on and off, sound controls etc. After all this work, I had two lists and less hours in the day but was still no closer to having a draft GUI. 

I changed tract, I created a series of rectangles on a piece of A4 paper which resembled the size of the screen the game would be playable on. This would give a good sense of what would 'fit' on the screen and be easily usable / view-able. After all that planning and preparation, I was certain that I was ready. I found a pencil (under three unread books) and started drawing on the rectangle. Or more precisely, I held my pencil in my hand and thought really hard about how to create a visually entertaining GUI. 

10 minutes passed and all I had to show for it were horrible squiggles and a growing sense of frustration. So, I did what all good creative types do, I turned on my ipod and started up a competitor's product. I guess I was suppossed to analyse the product but instead I ended up playing a few levels, exiting out and then started to stare at my one squiggle filled rectangle again. Erasing everything, I re-commenced and ended up with even more squiggles which led me to declare "It's Cola time." and dashed out for a can. 

Although I tried to stretch this break into as long as possible by having a 'creativity team building session' with my wife, I eventually had to come back to my mostly white piece of paper. This time, however, I tried something different. I took three deep breaths and opened up my ipod but this in this cycle: really analysed a few competitors' products and contemplated what was good about them. I also looked at the way apple (which is really good at this stuff) had created their GUI. 

On my piece of paper, I started to break down what should appear on each screen under the bottom of their respective rectangles and finally focused on what functionality should be there. Basically, I had to get back to basics. What needed to be on the screen, what needed to be located somewhere else, what would feel natural. I think competitors' products are really great for this because they highlight the industry standard and also what users are used to. If it's too innovative, users are going to find it difficult to use because they have to re-learn everything which may be better in the long term but is sure going to frustrate them today. 

Anyways, completing this task, I was able to get creative. The icons and text in the GUI needed to relate to the game world. Now that I knew what was going to be in the menus, I could focus on how to make them different. I was able to create icons from important in-game objects. It also created a more holistic world experience and kept the player in the Universe we had designed. 

Another thing that was important was playing with the ipod itself. Originally, I was going to add a volume control to the options menu but I quickly realised that I was out of space for that sort of idea because the screen was so small. However, when I played with the ipod / iphone, I found out that there was already a volume control on the side which I had not noticed before. (I had noticed it for playing music but never made the connection of using it with games.) In addition, I took the power of the apple square button more seriously. I had included an 'exit game' option in the main menu but that was really redundant, the square button always exited. To not keep this standard would have been a huge problem for iphone / ipod gamers. 

Eventually, I was able to plan out a GUI which (hopefully) the community could embrace and accept. There were a few things that I learned from this experience which was significantly important:

1. Create a GUI early in the process. It's the first thing people see and it takes a while to understand what it should and should not have. 
2. Plan your GUI to have all the functions for this game and future expansions. If you are thinking (as we are) of expanding the game to have updates, think about how to put those on your existing GUI. You can always add them later unless you've already used the screen space with your first GUI. 
3. If possible, use the layout, not text, to inform the player what the icons will do. Do words like 'Play' or 'Start' really add value to the experience? Do you think players cannot figure out that the biggest button on the screen does?
4. Create icons from in-game assets. Nothing is more important than having a flowing experience which a gamer can subtly appreciate later. It shows you've thought this through instead of rushing it out the door. 
5. Send it to the programmer and artist early. This is probably the most important thing. Everything in creating a game is a team effort. They need to see what you want to create so that they can plan their time lines and also advise if what you are suggesting is possible. Sometimes an idea can be incredibly amazing but it can also take a lot of work, too much work for a game with a turnaround time of 2 - 3 months. 

The Zero Sum Trap

One of the most challenging difficulties for us to overcome when we started Ahasai Designs was not a technical problem but rather a cultural perception of competitiveness. When we started to conduct research into the app-store; we discovered that there were thousands of independent studios and game developers already in there trying to sell their products. Although the consumer base was large, hundreds of millions units sold, the idea that we had to compete against all of them was intimidating. 

How do you even know if your game or game mechanic is unique and interesting when confronted with a vast ocean of applications? It would have been impossible to try them all and create something from those trials which was completely unique. Yet, my cultural bias kept pushing itself into my brain. "To succeed you must be the best. To succeed you must be a top seller. To be noticed it has to be more amazing than any other products."

This idea of being #1 was / is incredibly stifling. How do you start when someone else has already been there? So, I had to sit down and figure out what I wanted from my product. What outcome was I / we looking for? Well, Ahasai Designs wanted to pay its staff, wanted to generate enough income that we could pay our bills and make more amazing games. Then I calculated that to a set, realistic figure and realised we only need .01% of the user base to purchase just one of our products. One time. 

That's an incredibly small number and even better than that once I got the past the intimidation of the number of developers out there, I saw that there were developers who I had never heard of making good money. Not sensational Angry Birds cash but good enough to grow their portfolio and keep themselves paid. 

Yet major difficulty was accepting that these developers were not competitors. Just because someone purchased their product did not mean that they would not purchase mine. In fact, the price point was so low that it encouraged multiple purchases of a variety of products. The risk for the consumer had almost become negligible. 

Most of my life, I've been taught through advertising and word of mouth that the best rise to the top of mountain. That the only reason these people / companies are such incredible successes is because they are better than their competitors. Therefore to become a success, I have to become the best. Plus, I have to believe that my product is better than others. My product makes your product inferior. 

I haven't agreed with that assessment since I was 18. But it's culturally ingrained. 'I have to be better than my neighbours, own a bigger car, earn more money' etc. Even though I make a conscious decision to believe differently, years of indoctrination pound away when confronted with the reality of owning your business. 

I understand why it's encouraged by the current successful companies of today. To instill the idea into people that success is quality and quality is success is a great way of establishing a psychological barrier to new entrants. It discourages risk taking "I don't know this company, will it be good?" and encourages repeat purchases "I trust this company, I know of them." It builds repeat customers and perceived value of products which allows you to charge more. 

So even though I dislike the 'good, better, best' mantra, I still struggled with it. I had to accept that someone purchasing a RPG from a video game store could still purchase an Ahasai Designs' game. That I was not competing against Blizzard or Chillingo, rather we could work with them to expand their game player's entertainment experience. 

For us it was a revolution because we good focus on creating good games instead of 'the best game' and tailor our entire company philosophy towards that. Instead of trying to think we were better than our 'competitors' we could realise that we were equal with our 'team mates' who are constantly trying to lift your digital experience.