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ROOM OF DISASTER. maybe not a disaster at all! a newbie game dev perspective Presented by Oscar Kurniawan, co-founder of Tanoshii Creative Studio , member of Indonesian Game Developer Community (gamedev-id) oz@tanoshiistudio.com. Who and What. Tanoshii Creative Studio
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ROOM OF DISASTER maybe not a disaster at all! a newbie game dev perspective Presented by Oscar Kurniawan, co-founder of Tanoshii Creative Studio, member of Indonesian Game Developer Community (gamedev-id) oz@tanoshiistudio.com
Who and What • Tanoshii Creative Studio • A indie game studio startup founded a year ago • Based in Depok City, West Java, Indonesia • As a result of merging 2 independent student development teams named Disastroo and The Electric • Works is continued by Tanoshii • Room of Disaster • An interactive and educative games intended for children • Works was initiated by Team Disastroo for campus based competition, Nokia’s Tap That App. • Works is continued by Tanoshii
Room of Disaster • A matchmaking games • Objective: to match an item to a box within unspecified rule within a timeframe • Education motive: to teach children for cleaning up the rooms in an interactive way also allows them to learn about numbers, shapes, and colours • Has Adventure mode & Free play mode (can be unlocked after completing Adventure one) • It is a newbie attempt to create a good game
Disaster Development • If it wasn’t disaster, but sure it is a hectic one • 1 month only time frame with a new learnt framework (Qt) • No prior experience of game development • Developing a recipe to win the competition as the main objective: Simple + Great Graphics + Agile as possible • The game ideas is heavily inspired by our dorm room back in the university which (sometimes) messy and needs to be cleaned up.
Disaster Development Continues • Drafting game objects took a most time • Matchmaking engine development • A simple approach by using naming convention we defined and then let the engine do the magic works to confirm if the two objects is matched or not under specific rule • The naming convention is a categorization tag, each game object’s image is named with with tags allowing the code to read the name and make match validation afterward
All Messy Went Life • After spending time of polishing, RoD went life! (for free since required by the competition) • Trying the cheapest method to get as much as possible of downloads. WORD of MOUTH MARKETING • How we did it? • Guerrilla way to enter any review blogs/forums related to Nokia apps and kindly ask them to review and post to the article about it. • We did manage to raise 75000 downloads two months later
Reviews • Playing the game can get bored over time even for kids • Too simple gameplay is not good • Post Contest: we did an experiment for this game on Nokia Store • We tried to put price on it and see if someone would buy the game. • The sales went poor, but we learnt valuable information that people pays attention to the screenshots, logo, and well attractive description • Also, we should decide which business model of the game to be applied on our game from the very first time
Porting Experience • We tried to broadened the reach of our games • It depends on availability of Qt in other platforms • When Nokia switches to WP, BlackBerry just gave us information about Qt adoption into its “BBX” platform which renamed later as BlackBerry 10. • We tried to port it and it runs without any code modification, only... • The graphics need to be resized • Reposition of game objects need to be done, since it was an absolute position (hard coded). The game isn’t designed to be ported hasle-free. • It is good for detailing (pixel perfect) but not it is absolutely not flexible
Conclusion! • Always challenging the idea to make the game grows by itself: key is to be always having an open mind • Pick the right business model from the very first time, to allow the game to have a proper direction • Portability is needed to broadened the reach. Now, we are trying to leverage multi platform framework/sdk such cocos2d-x and HaxeNME. • Move on!