Where be we

Just a general update today, as I was reminded that it’s been a while since our last post.

So, where are we at.

Well after the rip roaring success (HA) of Viral, we have since released a “lite” version of that game which has been doing ok, around the average we could expect.

We also released Bloove, which in three days eclipsed all our other downloads combined, the current tally of which stands at 879. I’d be happy about this but we released it for free under the “ad supported” pricing model, so our revenue from that is so diminutive that it challenges Alex’s height for smallness.

I’m obviously not serious. Included in Bloove is adverts for Viral and Moojooce, and the fact that 879 people have taken the time to download something that we created is amazing. We are getting as much feedback as we can then we may consider doing a much more in depth sequel, which we’d probably retail for either 59p or £1.20

Back to more current affairs and we are just tying up the loose ends on Moojooce. We’re going to submit it to the app store tomorrow evening, but this time we’re dictating the release date. This is tricky, as apple’s vetting process seems to be performed by the least drunk chimp they can find on the day, and as such it is impossible to accurately predict when the app will reach the store. For example, Viral went through in seven days, whilst Viral Lite, which was released after its mother game and was the exact same game but stopped play after 12 in-game hours, took THIRTEEN DAYS.

So we’re going to gamble, and set Moojooce’s release day for a week on Friday (11/03/11) this way we can set about promoting it with an actual release date, and hopefully garner some hype around the product.

I’m genuinely more proud of Moojooce than anything else we’ve done so far. The art in the game looks extremely characterized, professional and individual, and was obviously created by an extremely handsome man among men. It is addictive to play, whilst being simple enough to be played by all ages.

Hot on the heels of Moojooce will be Moojooce lite, obviously free, and Moojooce arcade, which will be a paid for game, and take the core mechanics of the original game, but differentiate enough to provide a good deal of value for money for the player. Honest.

Next up after that is a secret game, which you can’t know about. So instead I’m going to mention some keywords that might give us a higher viewing from people accidentally stumbling on our awesome blog, and a picture of my cat. Skyrim GDC Sonic Mario Nintendo xbox PS3 Justinbieber.

The joys of iAds

Our lite version of Viral is out and downloadable on the App store, finally. It took 14 days to approve, we've no idea why but nevermind because all is now well.

Or we thought so anyway, the keen edge of the learning curve struck me again as I realised that none of our ads were displaying. The reason for this was of course that I hadn't added support for them in our Unity project. Naively I thought that Apple would handle all the displaying of ads and effectively just overlay them onto our game, this is not the case.

I quickly went online and tried to see how to code them into a Unity project. I couldn't really find any clear explanations but I did find a link to a company's site which sold plugins for Unity, one of those plugins was for iAd support. I weighed up the cost of buying the plugin vs my time in learning how to do it. The plugin won hands down so we bought it, installed it and now our iAds are working perfectly. I highly recommend it, the company is Prime31.

We've submitted the new version of Viral Lite and are as ever, waiting on Apple :)

In the meantime, check out the current version of Viral Lite on the app store ->
http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/viral-lite/id418329387?mt=8

In other news, we've submitted our next game to Apple. Its called Bloove and there will be more details coming soon on here when it gets approved!

Noisy Badger Not Noisy Enough

After releasing Viral a few weeks ago now, poor sales have forced a new approach to how we make, release, and promote our games.

The excitement of having created and actually put out there a game of our own was quickly eroded by what we saw as much less than adequate sales. I’m not going to go into specific numbers exactly, but day one sales were only 25% of what were projected. Drop off in sales per day was, ironically enough, exactly as I had projected in our business plan, so at least I was right on that, but without that initial starting volume, Viral as a product was making nowhere near enough money.

So the Noisy Badger hive mind (Alex and I) held crisis talks. It was more than evident that we had done not nearly enough promotion for the project, so that was our starting point. I arranged an online targeted search, keyword relevant marketing campaign, which simply means that if anyone googled relevant search terms that I had chosen, an advert for Viral would show up alongside the search results. From this we achieved a click through rate of around 5%, which is a fantastic result as the best a campaign can usually achieve is 2%. However, it affected our sales in no way whatsoever.

Our second component of the marketing campaign was to give out press releases to as many sites as we could, which then got reposted on other blogs all over the world, which gave us some expansive coverage but only within the core gaming community.

Thirdly, we created a “lite” version of the game. Results from the success of this facet of the campaign are yet to be seen however as after a thirteen day wait, apple still have not processed the app. I’ve emailed to ask what’s going on, but am yet to receive a reply.

Finally, I sent a number of free codes with a nice letter to a number of review sites, however with such a large volume of games being submitted for review the chances of ours getting picked for review are slim.

Not to be disheartened, We began work on two more games immediately, one of which is complete and has been submitted, the second we are in the process of wrapping up currently.

The first game, Bloove, is a simple puzzle game, the core mechanic of which centres around tilting the iOS device to move rectangular blocks around a board in order to slide them into randomly spawning catches.

However, we realised early in development that this title was not strong enough to justify charging even the minimum we could on the app store (59p) and were going to forget the project, when we realised we could still benefit from it by finishing it and releasing it for free, with ad support. My personal thinking on any sort of ad support in games is pretty simple, if I paid for it I don’t want to see ads, but if I get something for free in return for seeing an advertisers’ logo or whatever I’m happy.

Assuming my thinking is similar to most peoples, I was ok with the structure of release, as was Alex. We also put in two of our own adverts at the start of the game as splash screens, which show an advert for Viral, and our upcoming release, MooJooce!

Here’s the ads-

So we await the results of this latest endeavour. Suppose I should talk a little about MooJooce!

MooJooce (it does have an exclamation mark at the end of the title but I’m sick of typing and the word following the exclamation mark autocorrecting! To! Have! A! Capital! Letter! At! The! Beginning) Is a puzzle game in which the player is charged with correctly putting the right colour lids onto bottles of milk as they come off a production line. The challenge lies in the fact that they have to match together three of the same lidded bottles each time to progress, by lining up the bottles correctly in front of three conveyor belts which randomly generate different coloured lids.

AAAAND breathe. Ok it honestly makes sense in game, and its a hell of a lot simpler than I’ve made it sound there, buy it, you’ll see :D. Really should clean up that description before I start sending out press releases.

That’s all for this post people, think the next one I’ll do will be on the dramatic shift between job roles that happens post release, from Games Designer to Marketing Executive.

Cheers,

Olly

Viral is released!

Our first app, Viral, has been released and is for sale on the app store now!

Have a look -> http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/viral/id416581114?mt=8

So what have we been upto since we released?

Well, we've begun work on a new game, it's a 3D block based puzzler which makes extensive use of the Unity physics system. With the lessons we've learned from our last game, the production process on this one is proving to be much smoother and faster. We hope to be ready for submission by Friday next week at the very latest.

As well as our new project, I've spent some time creating a lite version of Viral, this will be a free app which places restrictions on the user, the main one being limiting their playtime to 12 game-hours. They will also be unable to save/load or access their highscores and there will be iAds included.

We hope this free app will boost the sales of the full version of Viral and also provide us with some much needed publicity.

More information coming up on our new game so keep checking back!

If you are a games reviewer and would be interested in reviewing Viral, please contact us at either oliver.harris@noisybadger.com or alex.bowes@noisybadger.com. Cheers.

Viral - Post Development Analysis

Its 4.44pm on Monday the 24^th of January, and Noisy Badger is bang on target for submitting its first game at 6pm. Excitement doesn’t cover it.

With Alex finalising some last minute tweaks I’m going to take a chance to go over some of the more obvious development peaks and troughs I encountered on the design side of things, in a similar way to Alex’s last post.

POLY COUNT. I have no idea what I was thinking on my first build of the earth in this game, but I ended up spending possibly two weeks building a detailed, 3d map of the earth, following the outline of the countries as accurately as possible. I then bevelled the edges of each of the countries to provide a nice little “groove” where all the borders met, further upping the poly count. It ended up containing about 80,000 polygons, the on-screen limit for an iPhone being 10,000.

So to break it down financially, as a self-employed/freelancer type, a general rule of thumb when you’re starting out is to charge around £25 an hour for your services. If I apply that figure to the ten working days I spent on this world map, working eight hours a day, I basically cost Noisy Badger £2000 through my own idiocy. And that figure doesn’t take into account the other work that I could have been getting done in that time, or a multitude of other factors that I really don’t want to think of. That’s the first time I’ve worked out that figure, and I just told Alex. He shot me a look that said “I’m not angry, I’m just disappointed.”

It’s not realistically that much of a financial disaster obviously, but it goes to show how easy it is to mess up. We knew this being our first release that there would be plenty of errors as we tried as fast as we could to establish good communication between ourselves, learning new tools, and getting our development pipelines in order. I’d still say that we’re not bang on in any of these areas, and I don’t think that anyone ever could be. It’s a constantly changing industry and as such our flexibility to adapt to anything new that comes our way is the greatest asset we have, not necessarily an intricate knowledge of every new piece of software that comes our way.

Edit – The game has now been uploaded to the app store and is awaiting apple’s quality assurance stuff. I’m currently wearing out my blackberry from constantly checking to see if it’s been ok’d J

So close to release!

It’s been about two months in the making, but Noisy Badger’s first game is on the precipice of release! As I type, Alex is in the process of porting everything onto the mac, from where we will be able to test on actual hardware and iron out any technical niggles. We (I) finally had to pay out for the apple developers license and the unity iOS license yesterday, which amounted to around £400 in total for the year, which, as far as absolute must-have business start-up expenses isn’t so bad.

So I suppose now is the time to give out a little information on the game itself. It’s called “Viral” and it is a kind of strategy/management game. At the beginning of each game the player spends points to develop a virus, and then chooses a major symptom. They are then taken to a 3D world, with the earth’s countries split up into about thirty different regions. They are able to view each region individually, where they will be shown the regions’ ability to fight an infectious virus via a collection of different criteria, including civil unrest, healthcare efficiency, and many others.

The player must then decide which region they have the best chance of launching their virus, with the intention being that they can spread their virus from the first country to the rest of the world, before the regions can respond to the threat and cure it. The player acquires points as they eliminate a certain number of the population (the number hasn’t been finalised yet, it’s a balancing issue) which they can then spend to upgrade their virus to meet different region’s ability to fight back. The game is won when the player has eliminated the world’s human population, or lost when the virus is eliminated globally.

Developing the game has been a lot of fun, but in coming to the end of the development cycle (almost) I think it’s a great time to put some commentary on the ups and downs of its development.

We decided straight from the off that we needed a good idea on which to cut our teeth. We wanted to make a fun, addictive, game, but we knew that being as it was our first time working together on a project such as this there would be plenty of problems when it came down to development pipelines and such.

Financially as well, we needed to get a game out of the door as soon as possible to start generating an income for ourselves. What all this was tantamount to was us choosing to throw ourselves into development with as much enthusiasm as possible, with me designing on the fly as Alex coded everything as I gave it to him. The problem that kept arising with this method of working, however, was that without me having a window of time to purely design before handing over to Alex, silly problems would arise that would cost us extra time.

For example, one of the regions attributes, when affected by the virus, was very obviously meant to provide a negative impact on the region and strengthen the virus’ influence. However whether through poor, rushed communication on my part, or just a straight mix up on Alex’s part, this particular attribute actually had the opposite effect. It wasn’t until long into development that we noticed the error, and while not disastrous it was something that could easily have been avoided.

Coming to the end of this cycle has been amazingly refreshing purely for the fact that this week has entailed very little work on “Viral” for me. Alex has been to focusing on porting it over, which has allowed me to flesh out in the smallest detail the mechanics for the next game. The war room at Noisy Badger HQ is covered in printouts of spread-sheets, going in depth on exactly which entities do what in the game, so when Alex needs to know something, it’s there awaiting him. This allows me to focus on art and asset creation, which will, in turn hopefully offer up a really good looking, visually engaging game.

This has been a good learning experience for me. Whilst what Alex does is as alien to me as what my cat must dream about, I’ve learnt to hone my designs around such coding rules as “object orientated programming”, which make the entire process smoother for us both.

For the game music, I got in touch with a very talented and helpful guy I lived next door to in my first year of uni, Mike Calvert. He very generously let Noisy Badger use a loop from his track “Humidity” as the background soundtrack for the game. Not only that, he was extremely helpful and willing to change any aspect of the track to suit our needs. I really look forward to working with him on future projects, and his portfolio (is it called a portfolio when its music?) can be found here:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Michael-Calverts-Tracks/352863993971?v=app_2405167945&ref=ts

And here:

http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.reverbnation.com%2Fmain%2Fglobal_search%3Fq%3Djames%2Balexander%26commit%3DGO%23!%2Fmichaelcalvert&h=9b6e7r_hRFK4re1ejzrWoyF4GKw

I think that’s about it for this post, hope our readers had a good Christmas and New Year, and here’s to a fantastic 2011.

Olly.

We live………..AGAIN!!!

It’s been a while! So much has happened since our last post, and I’ll try to cover it as best I can.

Me cheesily sat on our first day of work. Yes that is a bottle of ketchup behind me.

I’ve now relocated to West Yorkshire, to Alex’s hometown. I’ve actually moved in next door to him and his girlfriend. My living room is basically our office with a sofa in, and it’s here that we spend our days, 10-6 Monday to Friday, toiling away.

Alex hard at work in the office

There’s so much involved in something like this this it’s unreal. We have to deal with both making the games and the nuts and bolts of making ourselves into a legitimate business. Add to that all the different stuff involved in moving house and its no wonder that sleep is a distant memory to me.

Only kidding, I’m loving every minute of it. Being creative lead in my own company gives me more freedom and flexibility than I could imagine. It’s a big responsibility, as Alex’s job necessitates that he’s told what to do by me, even though we have an equal ownership of the business. The guy’s a coding god, but ask him to make a creative decision and you’d have more luck asking a dog with a bucket on its head.

Our first game is in early alpha now, we have it in engine and are currently tweaking it to perfection before we enter the beta stage where we’ll begin playtesting. More on the game itself in an upcoming post.

We’ve used Unity to create the game, an excellent engine that we’ve found really easy to use. It has fantastic support in the shape of Unity Script Reference, its online resource centre, and we will be using it for most if not all of our upcoming projects. I am interested in switching to UDK now that Epic are integrating native iOS compatibility, but the pricing structure is not as appealing as using Unity.

Now that we are set up and with a somewhat reliable internet connection, I’m intending to fulfil my aim of providing at least weekly updates to the blog…….promise!

Merry Christmas Everybody!

Olly

A costly mistake.

So I've recently had a major problem which has halted our progress slightly. I claim some responsiblity for not doing my research properly, but I think Apple could have made things slightly more clear.

Now, I don't know if I'm alone in this, but I always associated the PowerMac (the big, professional looking one) with serious things like software development. So, with this in mind I bought one to work on our iOS titles, unfortunately for me I bought one that was a few years old which caused me some unexpected problems.

I downloaded a copy of XCode (Apple's development environment) and the iPhone SDK. No problems so far.

The issue came when trying to install the above software. The installer package had a list of components that could be installed, puzzlingly for me all the iPhone options were greyed out.

I went online to find out what was going on. It turns out that the iPhone SDK requires an Intel based processor. The PowerMac I'd bought runs on PowerPC architecture as it was made before 2006.

There is a way to work around this problem, but it involves a lot of fiddling with config files and there isn't a guarantee that the app you compile will actually even run on the iPhone hardware. You may recall from my earlier blog post "What are we using?" that the whole reason I was buying a Mac was to avoid complexity that I didn't need, so much for that.

In conclusion, the Mac I bought is completely unsuitable for our needs, so I'm having to resell it and buy a Mac with an Intel processor. If there's anything I've learned from this somewhat costly mistake it's to do proper research on the hardware you're buying before you invest.

What are we using?

With the company's purchase of a Mac yesterday, I thought it might be of interest to some people to briefly outline the technology we're using.

On the coding side I'm using a PC built around the AMD Athlon64 X2 5600 (~2.8GHz) processor, 4GB DDR2 RAM and an nVidia GeForce 8800GTS graphics card.

I built it mid-2007 and its definitely starting to show it's age now. Having said that, it still performs well on code compilation and doesn't slow me down in any development work I'm doing. Unfortunately it does mean that playing the latest releases at a decent framerate is difficult.

Oliver doesn't suffer from framerate performance with new games because he took the phrase 'future-proof' and ran with it when building his PC last year. He built it (well he bought the parts and I built it, because he is technologically inferior to me) around an Intel I5 quad core (~2.4GHz) processor, 4GB DDR2 RAM and an nVidia Geforce GTX 295 graphics card. He uses this mighty machine for various design tasks, from 3D modelling to image manipulation.

Our newest addition to the family is a PowerMac, this had to be bought as Apple's iPhone SDK can only be run on an Apple. Well, there are ways to emulate a Mac on a PC but it requires an Intel processor, which I don't have, and a lot of messing around which I quite frankly couldn't be bothered with. The end result would also run a lot slower than on actual Apple hardware so the decision was made to bite the bullet and buy one.

The machine is a PowerMac G5 with a 2GHz dual core processor, 2GB RAM (considering upping to 4) and an ATI Radeon 9600 graphics card. It's quite an old machine, but we considered the merits of buying a brand new one and we simply don't need the extra speed. The iPhone/iPad hardware is still inferior to the Mac we bought, so we won't have a problem with the iPhone simulator running slowly.

You now have an insight into the hardware that we're working with, in future posts I'll discuss the many software packages we use. I'll also keep you updated with any programming related news while Oliver keeps you up to date on the design side.

Hello World :D

Ok so with Noisy Badger, mine and my business partner Alex's new games development studio being well into the setup period, I figured it was about time to start putting together some form of web presence. Obviously we'll have a full on website in the near future but in the meantime I'm going to keep anyone who may be interested in us informed via this blog.

So, what is the Noisy Badger? We started out while still at uni, doing freelance work that wasn't necessarily games, but allowed Alex and I to use our relevant skills and get a taste for the business side of things. We both did computer games relevant degrees, me on the design side of things, he on the coding, and we decided that putting together our own studio would really make sense.

Our studio is going to initially make games for the iPod touch, iPhone and iPad, and so since graduating we've been hard at work developing games design documents, business plans, and we've even got a functioning engine ready to go. We're now looking towards sourcing some start up capital, which is proving to be a bit of a nightmare. In our business a large part of any investment we'll be asking for will go on our salaries, as we have pretty much everything we need to start work, except for a means to live while we develop our first game. We've only actually set ourselves the minimum wage for this, but its still unappealing to investors.

The princes trust would have been ideal in this situation, but I got an email from them saying that as we are graduates, we have to wait at least 6 months from the date of our graduation before they can help us. You read that right, our degrees are actually hindering us. Idiots.

Anyway, rant over. As you can tell, this blog is going to be pretty casual, i'm not going to fill it with hyperbole on how awesome we are (we are pretty awesome though) but just try to provide an insight into Noisy Badger as a studio. I intend to update weekly, and please get in touch with your questions, comments, insults, whatever.

Follow me on twitter- http://twitter.com/#!/themightyodog

And follow alex too- http://twitter.com/#!/Amlach

Righty then, I'm off to write up a competitor comparison analysis. The FUN. It never ends.