Lessons Learned From Two Game Launches

A little over a year ago I wrote a rather depressing blog post about Political Animals' launch. You can read it in full if you like, but the bottom line is the launch was a major flop despite the fact that it was featured on Steam's front page. Indiepocalypse aside, a front page feature should still have assured us a enough views to break even. It didn't. Academia : School Simulator, on the other hand, did well enough to ensure that we could continue development into the foreseeable future. In fact, despite not receiving any features from Steam, Academia : School Simulator sold almost 3 times as much as Political Animals in the same time period.

Why was that? Since we're talking about first day sales, I posit that it cannot be the actual quality of the games that mattered. Because if Political Animals was simply a bad game, what we should have seen was a flood of purchases based on that front page feature and then a subsequent amount of bad reviews, returns, and refunds. Instead, what we saw was people finding our steam page and then immediately deciding “nah, I'll pass”.

I realize now it's the months leading up to launch day that matters most.  I'm going to describe and differentiate what we did for Political Animals and Academia : School Simulator with the hopes that you can use the lessons we learned for your own game launches.

Social Media

Political Animals:

This was a social media failure. While we had a Website, Blog, Twitter and Facebook accounts where we would post sporadic updates, we weren't showing anything that the players could engage with. This was our fault. Cliff from Positech would push us to do video devlogs, but we would demur from lack of ability/time. This shot us in the foot at launch, as we had not built up the requisite trust and awareness from our target market for a good launch.

Academia : School Simulator

We did a MUCH better job this time around. We decided from the beginning that we would do youtube devlogs. So as soon as we had a primitive prototype that we could show off, we started doing devlogs. They were really bad at the start, but you can see the improvement in the devlogs and the game as time moved on. We had a very strict once a month devlog rule, even when we had little to show for the month aside from polishing the game for launch. While we didn't get hundreds of thousands of views, we had an active community that was asking questions and sending suggestions, excited for every month's update.

For every devlog, we posted it on Twitter, Youtube, and our Mailing List. There was a great feedback loop where at the end of every month we would see our Mailing List numbers increase.

We've been a bit negligent on the Youtube side since launch, something I'm going to rectify at the end of the month. The honest reason is that these videos are exhausting and take up a huge chunk of time to work on. So at the end of an exhausting dev month, the last thing any of us wanted to do was to make a video of our progress. But they're the touchstone of our outreach to players, so we need to get back on it.

Conclusion

It's important to have a good, consistent media plan and follow through on it. Start as soon as you can, especially if you know you have to build up trust and create a community around your game.

Steam Store Page

This was a fail for both launches. Aside from filling up the requisite store information (which by the way takes a hell of a lot of time) we essentially did not do anything with the store pages before launch. This is a huge mistake. Like it or not, many gamers are treating Steam as a one-stop shop for their gaming information these days. So there will be a lot of people ending up on your Steam Store page that will never have heard of you before or seen your Twitter, Facebook, or Youtube account. So if they end up at your store page and there have been no updates since yo made the store page live, it will look empty, and emptiness breeds mistrust.

This is even more important for Early Access games. Because so many people have been burned by Early Access games before there is a huge hurdle of trust that you have to overcome with skeptical players. In fact, some people on our Steam discussion boards for Academia wrote saying they initially thought we were scammers because of the similarity to Prison Architect and the fact that there were no updates. The worst thing is we only saw this comment days later, making us look even more suspicious! It took us a few days to gain players' trust by sharing all of the devlogs that we had previously made on Youtube and establishing a track record of development.

Conclusion

The lesson here is that once you publish your Steam page you have to start treating it as another social network that you have to manage, if not the most important social network. An active Steam store page assures players that developers are legit and communicating with the playerbase, which gives them more confidence in the game

Conventions

Political Animals

For Political Animals we went to quite a few conventions, the most important of which were PAX West and EGX in the UK. We got some good press out of it, with Eurogamer even giving us a small writeup as one of their “Best of EGX”. We met some cool players who were super into the game, and it gave us hope that we were on the right track. Sadly, it turns out that this was not the case. We spent a lot of time and energy going to conventions around the world, but I think that money was essentially wasted, especially since for Academia we didn't even go to a single one.

Academia : School Simulator

Aside from our disappointment with the results from Political Animals, the easy answer for why we didn't go to any conventions is simply because we had nothing to show yet. We were way too early in the dev process to be showing it off.

We did go to a convention, but only to a local one in the Philippines called ESGS. While ESGS is one of the biggest gaming conventions in the Philippines, it pales in comparison to PAX and EGX. We also went there post-launch, meaning we already had a game we were selling and could sell to attendees at a significant discount. We also had a free booth courtesy of indiearena, and we wanted to support the local game industry and meet our peers while we were there.

As with Political Animals, it was great to meet the players of our games, and we even picked up some local press. We also found out later on that we'd been nominated for a local industry awards, and even ended up taking home best game! So there's certainly a lot of emotional value to be gained from doing conventions, but don't go there expecting to boost your sales.

Conclusion

There are many reasons to attend conventions. Meeting players and fellow devs, getting feedback from them, and just enjoying the experience of seeing the other games. PAX was a whole lot of fun when we didn't have to man the booth. But our experience is that they are not very good value for money.

For ourselves, I think we will only go to conventions if we can get a subsidized spot, like with the Indie Megabooth, or even a free booth as with ESGS or Busan Indie Connect. We'll only go if we already have something to sell, so that we can subsidize the cost of travel. While some devs may find value in the cons, there are many devs that completely avoid them as a policy (Rimworld's Tynan Sylvester and Zachtronics for example) but are still successful studios. That's the model we want to emulate moving forward.

Streamers and Press

Political Animals

We reached out to streamers and press a week or so (memory fails me) before launch. I think we gave press a headstart just because it takes them a little longer to write an article, but that was the gist of it. We got some pretty big streamers on board, the biggest of which was TotalBiscuit. It was amazing watching him stream the game. Unfortunately I think it was a mistake to share the game a week early. By the time the actual launch rolled around, interest in the game had dissipated. Every second between the initial impression and clicking to buy a game is crucial. Bigger studios can rely on marketing right before the game's launch to help cover for this, but for a small studio it can be the kiss of death.

Academia : School Simulator

This time around we were adamant that we wanted to close the gap between first impression and game purchase. We released keys to press and streamers a few days before launch with a loose NDA that basically said “We are releasing this to you early so you can familiarize yourselves with the game, but please release your content only after the game is available for purchase. Otherwise you will receive a long, heartfelt email full of disappointment from me.” There were one or two outliers, but for the most part people stuck to the NDA.

Just to tie this back to social media, one advantage of doing those early youtube videos and spreading the word early was that we got youtubers emailing us asking for access even after our first devlog. So they were primed and pretty pumped to share the game by the time we finally released the keys.

For Academia we used a combination of both Keymailer and Woovit, so people could choose what they felt most comfortable with. Email or Twitter was a last resort, but we would ask for some verification before we would give out the keys to avoid the inevitable scammers.

Conclusion

I realize now that I didn't really write too much about press. That's because for the most part, press outlets hold much lesser sway now than then used to. I would suggest picking out the most important one for you and sending out a personal email, then crossing your fingers.

Build a marketing strategy that will inevitably attract Streamers and press to your game. Release as close to launch as you can to maximize day one sales. Cross all fingers and toes.

Timing

Political Animals

We launched Political Animals on November 2.  This was awful timing because A) It was a terribly fatiguing election (The US election in 2016) and people were sick of it and B) November is a very heavy month for launches, and we were sandwiched between some really big attention grabbers.  We had no choice with this as we could not have launched any earlier, and launching AFTER the US elections might have been even worse.

Academia : School Simulator

We consciously went for a September launch.  Our actual target was August but we needed just a tiny bit more time so we settled on September 8.  There was less of a crowd when we launched, and I think we came out the better for it.  We also had the benefit of three successive sales (Halloween, Autumn, and Winter) coming one after the other, where people are primed to buy new games.  We carefully set the discount to 10% so as to be part of the sale but not undercut the value of our new game's release.

Conclusion

The general rule for indies is to try to launch around February or August because those are the quietest months of the year for launches.  Given the number of games coming out every day on Steam this rule is rapidly losing currency, but I would still advise you to never try to launch in the October to December window because you will be facing up against studios with huge marketing budgets that will drown you out.

Final Thoughts

We learned from the mistakes we made with Political Animals and applied them to Academia : School Simulator. While it wasn't the best launch in the world and I'm sure we could have done better, we did do well enough to keep the lights on. In these dark days of the Indiepocalypse, that's already quite a feat.

Thanks for reading, and hope you found this useful! If you're interested, you can buy the game now! If you're not ready to buy, please sign up for our mailing list, join the Facebook group, follow us on Twitter, or subscribe to our Youtube channel and help us spread the word!

Meet Squeaky Wheel's Lead Designer Tristan Angeles!

In the most recent Academia Devlog, you guys got a chance to meet our awesome game designer, Tristan Angeles (Pssst...if you wanna know what he looks like, watch the first 30 seconds of the video).  In this blog post we asked him a few questions so we can all get to know him better and learn how he became a game designer.

What was the first video game you remember playing? 

I think we're a computer game playing family. My aunt on my dad's side played Mario 1 and 3. My uncle introduced us to Warcraft, Doom, and Heretic. My dad and I played through a lot of the levels of Battle City, and we devised tactics for each level.

I faintly remember my dad bringing home the Casio MSX one night when I was 4 or 5 years old I. The first video game I remember playing was called Monkey Academy. In the game, the player played a monkey and had to solve math problems by getting the missing part of the equation on top of the screen while avoiding enemies. We had another game for the MSX, but I forgot the title(Car Fighter?). In the game you played a car, and you needed to avoid other cars chasing you, and you could blow smoke on them to stun them for a while.

I played with bootleg copies of games as a kid, we had no idea that it was illegal. Me and my brother would go to a computer shop that had copies of games put into diskettes, and we'd play it in my dad's office during weekends. Some of the games I'd play were: Commander Keen (Carmack,Romero) , Prince of Persia (Jordan Mechner), I didn't know the guys who made these games were well known game developers, I just really enjoyed the games.-

 What was the first board game you ever played?

The first boardgame I played was probably Snake and Ladders or Chess. I think these two games are one of the first games introduced to children. Excluding those two games, the first game I played would be the Mad Magazine boardgame. It was like Monopoly, except the players needed to do funny things based on the cards drawn in the game.

We were interested in Warhammer, but since we didn't have money to buy models, we wrote to Games Workshop in the U.K. and they sent us their catalog along with the basic rules of Warhammer Fantasy. We cut out the pictures of the miniatures and pasted them on cardboard to play with them.

One day a friend of my dad brought a board game he designed to playtest it with us. The game was called 'Success', and I remember that it was a business themed game. The goal of the game was to become the richest player in the game. I can't remember the mechanics anymore.

This isn’t exactly about board games, but my favorite movies as a kid were Candy Man and Congo. I made up a variation of the game tag based on those movies and played it with my friends in our backyard. Weeks later we find out that other kids in the neighborhood were playing tag with our rules.

Candy Man Rules:

In the movie, the protagonists had to destroy Candy Man's mirror to destroy him, so in our game "The Candy Man" hides a piece of stone or broken glass in the play area before the game starts. After the glass is hidden, the other players shout 'candy man' three times to start the game. Once the game starts, the Candy Man player chases the other players around the area trying to 'kill' them(tag them) before they find the hidden piece of glass.

Congo Rules:

Congo plays like Candy Man except the players are divided into two groups, the explorers and the guardians (ape men) of Zinj. The guardians would hide diamonds in the play area for the explorers to find. The guardians win if they tag all of the explorers before the explorers find all the hidden diamonds. A special rule of the game is that the explorers had a 'camp'(guarded by perimeter guns in our heads) in which they could be safe.

Did you always want to be a game designer? If not, what did you want to be?

No but I remember I always made up games growing up. I say made up rather than design, because some of the rules of the games I made were not really thought out, just what I thought would be fun. Anyways, I made games but I didn't really think that game design was an actual job. I mentioned earlier that a friend of my dad’s had made a board game, and that was the first time that I thought making a game was possible for 'normal' people. After that me and my brother started making our own boardgames.

I think a lot of my friends back then would know boardgames but were only exposed to the common ones like Monopoly, Snake and Ladders, Checkers, etc. We had an old copy of this magazine at home called Games Magazine, and there were reviews of boardgames inside. So I guess I was exposed early on to the wider world of board games.

I was in grade 6 when I got acquainted with Dungeons and Dragons through a photocopy of the 2nd Edition Dungeon Masters Guide hidden in our classroom. At first I had no idea how to play D&D since we only had the DMs guide, but luckily I learned that a kid from the lower grade levels had the the D&D Basic Set Players Handbook. I bought it from him for 50 pesos. My love affair with D&D had begun. I actually loved D&D so much that instead of grounding me my dad would hide my D&D rulebooks.

Still, it’s not as if game design or development was a well known career path at the time.  My dad was a lawyer, so it kind of made sense to take up law.  . I took a course called Development Communication as a pre-law course. I spent less time playing pen and paper roleplaying games as I began focusing more on Taekwondo and earning my black belt. 

So how did you end up in game design?

In my last year of college I decided to do my thesis on using Pen and Paper Roleplaying for Teaching History. I was partly inspired by my professor’s research on using Democracy 2 and partly lazy because it was so natural to me already.

One day after I’d graduated I saw a game design contest in GameCareerGuide challenging people to think of a game idea based on a theme. I entered it and then weeks later I found my idea in website as one of the top picks. I joined again a few weeks later and once again my idea was featured. I then joined a contest on Gameful (a website started by Jane Mcgonigal) and won 500$. I joined another contest which had prize money and a chance to talk with Asi Burak, Co Founder of Games For Change. I entered the contest with the game "In The Court of the Spider King" and won another 500$. I bought my very first laptop using the combined prize money and felt like maybe there was something to this whole game design thing.

Me and a few of my college friends joked about it and talked about starting a game company together. Problem was nobody knew how to make games.  I think I took that joke too seriously. When I entered my first job at a call center company as an agent, the trainer asked us to stand in front of the room and tell the class where we saw ourselves in 5 years. I remember saying "I see myself as a game designer travelling the world showing my games to conventions." Around this time I was learning how to program in Python, asking people in the IGDA(including my now team mate Marnielle) how to do stuff.

I eventually left the call center company and applied as a game designer for two local game companies. I got rejected by both and realized that this was because I had nothing to show them in terms of game design work.  So instead I applied as a Quality Assurance Tester. While doing QA, I learned Actionscript and started making games with my brother. I also joined game jams like Ludum Dare and the Global Game Jam. I got an award in Manila Global Game Jam, and a month later I receive an email from Casual Connect that they wanted to feature one of our game jam games at Indie Prize.

Being pressured by time( I gave myself one year to become a game designer or else I'd take law), and thinking I now have some credentials to design game I left the company I was working for as QA and got a game design position at Gameloft.

Who is your favorite game designer? What is your favorite game in terms of game design?

Hard question. I don't really have a favorite game designer I think, because when I say that I like a game designer I'm probably talking about the games they designed. If that's the case my favorited designer would be Gary Gygax(for creating D&D). AD&D(2nd ed) is probably my most favorite game of all time. When I first learned about AD&D my first reaction was like "really? a game that you can play only with your imagination." There are other better designed games than AD&D out there but AD&D is the only game(in my experience) that makes your friends talk about "killing that dragon" years later after playing and make strangers look at them as if they were crazy.

In terms of game design philosophy I'm trying to integrate some of Sid Meier's thinking into my own.  I've listened to all of the Sid Meier interviews on Designer Notes, and the ones on youtube. What I've taken from these interviews is something like, to give the most
importance to the player's fantasy i.e. being pirate, building a civilization, and do whatever it takes to let the player play out
that fantasy in the game. I took this to mean that how a game is designed is less important than the output(meeting the player fantasy).

An example of this is when I'm designing a mechanic of the game, and I design this complicated system trying to make it look 'intelligent'. So as a designer I think we feel the pressure to make 'intelligent' designs, or look for answers in obscure places when the simple solutions may be enough to create that player fantasy. It's easy enough to say this of course, but really hard to actually pull off. I'm still trying to make sense of all of those interviews.

Offhand, my favorite boardgame is Pillars of the Earth because is one of the prettiest boardgames I've ever seen, one of the reasons that kept me from selling the game when I've started selling my boardgames(I had 20+ boardgames once) when I moved to Makati. I like the game because the theme works well with the mechanics. It's a very easy game to play and easy to teach because the steps of the game is already laid out on the board.

My favorite Video/PC game is The Last Express.  I really like how they executed this game. Storytelling with time moving forward. The setting was great( One of my dreams is seeing or even getting a chance to ride the Orient Express after I read the Agatha Christie novel).

What do you in your spare time aside from playing video games?

Actually, I'd like to spend a lot more time 'seriously' playing games. I can count with my fingers the games that really made me sit down in the years since I started designing games professionally. My spare time is split between reading books, learning Japanese, going to the gym,practicing Taekwondo, and learning programming . Recently I think I've started to have an itch for travel, and I've been wanting to travel more. The team recently talked about taking up new hobbies to get our minds off the project once in a while and I've been considering taking up either MMA or Kendo. I also attend meetings of the Philippine Historical Boardgames once in a while, and recently got started playing Advanced Squad Leader.

What are you most proud of in your work as a game designer?

Political Animals. Seriously and not just because it's a Squeaky Wheel game. The game might not have been financially successful but:

- It was my first PC game on Steam where it has "mostly positive" reviews.

- It's my first game to get into EGX,PAX, and Tokyo Game Show.

- It's been introduced by a former teacher of mine to students and teachers as a tool for learning about Philippine politics.

Aside from what I've stated above, another reason it means a lot to me is that it's a full blown game and a project I was involved in from the very beginning. This game will be like a battle scar I'd be telling younger game designers in the years to come (assuming I stay in the industry that long).

Thanks for reading! You can read more of Tristan's thoughts on his old game design blog (which he unfortunately no longer updates) If you're interested in learning about our latest game, Academia : School Simulator, please sign up for our mailing list, join the Facebook group, follow us on Twitter, or subscribe to our Youtube channel! !

Learning and Using GOAP (Goal Oriented Action Planning) For Squeaky Wheel's Next Game

Ryan: We've been working on a new game the past couple of months and this is the first time we're going to be talking about it.  You can find out more about the game by watching the video above, and then geek out over the AI by reading Marnielle's post below.

I’m excited that we’re making a builder type of game in the likes of Prison Architect Banished, and Rimworld. I love playing such games. Our’s is a school management game where you can design classrooms, offices, hire teachers, design curriculum, and guide students to their educational success.

For every new game, it’s always my aim to try to implement a new algorithm or system and learn something new. I’ve always been fascinated with an AI planning system called Goal Oriented Action Planning or GOAP. If you’re not familiar with it, here’s a simple tutorial. I haven’t developed such system myself as the games that I’ve made so far have no use for it. I think it’s the perfect AI system for builder games. I hope I’m right!

Why GOAP?

The primary reason is I’m lazy. I don’t want to wire and connect stuff like you do with Finite State Machines and Behaviour Trees. I just want to provide a new action and my agents will use it when needed. Another main reason is I’ve reckoned that there’s going to be a lot of action order combinations in the game. I don’t want to enumerate all of those combinations. I want the game agents to just discover them and surprise the player.

Another important reason is the AI system itself is an aide for development. There’s going to be lots of objects in the game that the agents may interact with. While I’m adding them one by one, I’ll just add the actions that can be done with the object and the agents will do the rest. I don’t have to reconfigure them much every time there’s a new action available. Just add the action and it’s done.

Tweaking The System

While making the system, I had some ideas that would make the generic GOAP system better. They sure have paid off.

Multiple Sequenced Actions

Per GOAP action, instead of doing only one action, our custom GOAP action contains a set of modular atomic actions. Each atomic action is executed in sequence. This is what it looks like in editor:

By doing it this way, I can make reusable atomic actions that can be used by any agent. A GOAP action then is just a named object that contains preconditions, effects, and a set of atomic actions.

GoapResult

I incorporated the concept of action results like how it is in Behaviour Trees. An atomic action execution returns either SUCCESS, FAILED, or RUNNING. This is what the atomic action base class looks like:

public abstract class GoapAtomAction {

    public virtual void ResetForPlanning(GoapAgent agent) {
    }

    public virtual bool CanExecute(GoapAgent agent) {
        return true;
    }

    public virtual GoapResult Start(GoapAgent agent) {
        return GoapResult.SUCCESS;
    }

    public virtual GoapResult Update(GoapAgent agent) {
        return GoapResult.SUCCESS;
    }

    public virtual void OnFail(GoapAgent agent) {
    }

}

When an atom action returns FAILED, the whole current plan fails and the agent will plan again. A RUNNING result means that the current action is still running, thus also means that the current plan is still ongoing. A SUCCESS result means that the action has done its execution and can proceed to the next atomic action. When all of the atomic actions returned SUCCESS, the whole GOAP action is a success and the next GOAP action in the plan will be executed.

This concept makes it easy for me to add failure conditions while an action is being executed. Whenever one action fails, the agent automatically replans and proceeds to execute its new set of actions.

Condition Resolver

Condition Resolvers are objects that can query current world conditions which you need during planning. I implemented this as another base class in our system. The concrete classes can then be selectable in the editor. This is what the base class looks like:

public abstract class ConditionResolver {

    private bool resolved;
    private bool conditionMet;

    public ConditionResolver() {
        Reset();
    }

    public void Reset() {
        this.resolved = false;
        this.conditionMet = false;
    }

    public bool IsMet(GoapAgent agent) {
        if(!this.resolved) {
            // Not yet resolved
            this.conditionMet = Resolve(agent);
            this.resolved = true;
        }

        return this.conditionMet;
    }

    protected abstract bool Resolve(GoapAgent agent);

}

Note here that it has logic such that Resolve() will only be invoked once. Concrete subclasses need to only override this method. Such method may execute complex calculations so we need to make sure that it’s only called once when needed during planning.

This is what it looks like in editor:

All conditions default to false unless they have a resolver which is used to query the actual state of the condition.

Usage

Once the conditions, resolvers, and actions have been set up, all that’s left to do is to add goal conditions and invoke Replan().

void Start() {
    this.agent = GetComponent();
    Assertion.AssertNotNull(this.agent);

    // Start the AI
    this.agent.ClearGoals();
    this.agent.AddGoal("StudentBehaviour", true);
    this.agent.Replan();
}

If there are new goals to satisfy, the same calls can be invoked to change the goal(s) for a new plan to be executed.

So Far So Good

Our custom GOAP system is working well for us… for now. I now have working worker agents and student agents. More will be added later on, including cooks, janitors etc. Here’s hoping that we don’t need to revamp the system as we’re already so deep with it.

Thanks for reading! If you'd like to be updated on the latest Squeaky Wheel news, please sign up for our mailing list, join our Facebook group, follow us on Twitter, or subscribe to our Youtube channel! Please let us know if this is something you would be interested in supporting via Early Access!  Any feedback on that would be most appreciated!

Squeaky Wheel's 2016 Year in Review

This is the first year of Squeaky Wheel’s life as a company, and I thought it would be appropriate to set down some thoughts at the start of the 2017.  We started 2016 with high expectations.  We had just gotten a publishing deal with Positech and we were gonna start rolling on Political Animals full time. A lot has happened since then, and there were some lessons learned. Here are some of them, in no particular order.

We launched a game!  

We launched Political Animals on November 2, a week before the US presidential elections.  As discussed previously, the timing of the launch was pretty terrible.  We had also started the year as one of very few explicitly political games, but once we launched we had been joined by quite a few games of varying quality.  Our niche market was now relatively less niche.
All of this means that Political Animals has struggled since launch.  We have some plans that we think will help keep the game in people’s minds, and elections will always be happening around the world, so we’re betting on a long tail.

While the game has essentially failed financially, we did get some recognition.  We were featured in Rappler's Year in Tech : Games to Forget 2016 By and honored by Haogaamer as Most Original Game of 2016.  

The marketplace is changing

Steam is still the biggest marketplace in town and while getting a game onto Steam still confers a little gamedev “cred” it no longer ensures that your game will be financially viable.  For better or worse, Steam has become a much more open marketplace.  This means a larger variety of games to cater to every kind of gamer, but also a lot more competition.  We knew this going in, which is why we partnered with a publisher that had credibility in the indie space, but it still wasn’t quite enough.

The demographics of Steam are also changing.  The US market is still the barometer of success on Steam.  If you do well there, gamers in other countries will inevitably follow suit.  This is why despite being a studio based in the Philippines, we courted the US market deliberately, featuring the US-inspired Autumn Island on the title screen and setting our launch to coincide with the US elections.  When that didn’t pan out, we were caught flatfooted.

We should have noticed that countries like China and Russia were now powerhouses when it comes to buying games on Steam.  These are also markets that generally do not have a large English speaking population, and will skip on a game unless it’s super popular and worth figuring out.  We’re in the process of sorting that out now (something I’ll discuss in a future blogpost), but I wonder how much of an impact the Chinese and Russian market might have had when we launched and had front page status on Steam?

Are game conventions worth it?

We presented Political Animals at PAX West, EGX, BICFest, and TGS this year.  While BICFest and TGS were relatively low cost for a variety of reasons (geography being one key reason) there were some substantial costs for presenting at PAX and EGX.  Whether or not the cost spent was worth it or not has been something that I’ve been musing over for a while.  
Almost all the feedback we got from PAX and EGX was positive.  Everyone thought it was a GREAT idea to launch during the US elections, and we came home exhausted but happy that what we thought was a niche market seemed much larger than we thought.  Hell, we were even one of the “games of show” for EGX 2016, which is ironic considering the Eurogamer (organizers of EGX) didn’t even do a review of Political Animals when it came out.  

While game conventions are great for meeting fans, networking, and meeting your gamedev heroes, our experience was that they had very little effect on our bottom line.  If we manage to secure funding for another game, I think we’ll be very picky about which conventions we’ll be attending.  

What’s happening in 2017

2016 was rough for me personally.  I’m not inherently entrepreneurial, so starting a gamedev business was well outside the venn diagram of my skillset.  I was thoroughly set on closing up shop if Political Animals was a financial failure.  The emotional stress wasn’t worth it, and if I couldn’t even have the luxury of wiping away my tears with hundred dollar bills (or even 10 dollar bills), what was the point? 

The point is we made a good game.  One that didn’t exist a year ago.  We contributed a cultural artifact to society, and helped to expand the kinds of games our medium is allowed to create.  It sucks that we didn’t make enough money to break even (and beyond), but we still have a little money and a couple of months to work on and pitch a new game.  We’ve gotten this far, so we might as well keep going.

Oh, the new game?  Well, we’re still keeping a lot of it under wraps, but here’s a very early work in progress UI flow in GIF format…

I hope we’ll get to make it!

Positech Games + Squeaky Wheel = Political Animals

We are very excited and proud to finally announce that Positech Games is working with Squeaky Wheel to publish Political Animals.  We definitely will have more details about this in the near future, but for now please check out politicalanimalsgame.com to learn more about the game, and sign up for our mailing list if you want to be the first to hear news about the game.  It's been a crazy ride so far, and we hope you'll join us as we make this crazy game!

How to Playtest Your Game

In this post, Tristan talks about our playtesting method.

The game has finally reached a point where we're ready to show it to the world! Well not yet exactly, but we did show it to a few friends. As any self respecting game designer would know, play-testing a game is one of the more important parts of the game design process. In fact, if there are any doubts about a game mechanic, play-testing it is the way to go. In this article, I talk about how we conducted preliminary play tests for the game, and some of the interesting things we learned during the play-tests.

The Play-testers

First let me talk about the play-testers. Our very first play-testers are a few friends from the game industry who we lured with our charms, err, the promise of free food, and those unlucky enough to sit by our table during the recent Manila Game Jam held at the Ateneo De Manila University(ADMU). Seriously guys we really appreciate you taking the time to sit through the game and answer our questions. Speaking of questions, what play-test would be complete without a play-test questionnaire?

The Play-test Questionnaire

For our first play tests we decided to go for a more general questionnaire, since our primary goal in doing these play-tests is to gauge where the game is in terms of fun, and to see if any problems will arise. As we iterate on the game based on preliminary feedback,  we'll also iterate on the questions, refining them until we're ready to test the game with more people.

Our questionnaire consists of two parts: Pre-game, and Post-game:

Pre Game Questions

The first part of the questionnaire deals mainly with knowing who the play tester is. This is important because answers to the questions will mostly be opinions of the player towards the game. Knowing the play tester will help us later on when deciding how much weight to put on his suggestions/feedback later on. Here are some of our Pre-game questions:

1) Do you consider yourself as a strategy gamer?

2) Please list down at least three strategy games that you have played.

3) Rate your skill as a strategy gamer.(1 lowest,5 highest)

4) Rate your interest in a game about politics. (1 lowest, 5 highest)

5) Rate how clean a campaign you will run.(1 dirty, 5 clean)

Questions 1,2, and 3 allows us to know what the play testers game preferences are which may shed some light on some of his/her Post Game answers later on.  Question 5 is of interest because it tells us how the player plans to play the game ( good or evil) at the start, and later on we compare it to his actual play style.

Tester Plays the Game

After answering the Pre Game questions, the play tester is given a short introduction to the game, the goals of the player, and basic mechanics by yours truly. Afterwards, the player is let loose in the districts of Summer Island to test his political mettle against the opposing candidate. During the course of the game, the play-tester is allowed to comment and ask questions about the game, while we take notes.

Post Game Questions

When winner of the Summer Island elections have been revealed, it's now time for the play-tester to answer the Post Game questions. The Post Game questions deal mainly about the play-testers feelings towards the game. Some of the questions:

1)  How fun was the game? (1 lowest, 5 highest)

2) Which part of the game did you enjoy the most?

3) Which part of the game did you find the most difficult?

4) How difficult is the game? ( 1 lowest, 5 highest)

5) How corrupt were you in the game? ( 1 lowest, 5 highest)

Remember during the Pre Game questions we asked how clean a campaign the player could run? In the Post game questions we ask how corrupt the player's candidate was during the campaign. It was quite surprising and fun( insert evil laugh here) to see that most players ended up being more corrupt than they thought they would be.  But the best feedback was one tester that insisted they would be super corrupt but ended up only being moderately corrupt (wouldn't it be wonderful if more of ouir politicians were like that?)

Play-test Results

First a disclaimer before we present our results. Since we just play-tested with a very small pool of players, results from the play-test are not accurate at all, and should be used merely to present a different perspective on the game. Also, a majority of the play-testers are game industry professionals who have insight into the game development process which may or may not have coloured their reaction towards the game.

The play-testers had an average of 2.78 (skill as a strategy gamer), 3.33 (interest in politics), 2.89 (running a clean campaign), 3.22( corruption), 3.5( had fun), 3.44( game difficulty), 4.17( accurate to political theme).

Aside from the values above, we also received qualitative feedback from the play tests.

Things Players Did Not Enjoy

Too Many Stats to Track

These were game feedback which had keywords like info, and stats  attached to words like Too much or Too many. These feedback seems to deal with the playing having a hard time processing game information hindering them from making decisions during the game.

AI Turn is too Fast

These were game feedback which mentioned keywords like AI, Fast and Quick. These feedback seems to deal with the player having a hard time knowing what the opponent is doing.

Things the Player Enjoyed

Being Corrupt

These were game feedback which mentioned the keywords dirty, bribery, and scandals. The feedback seems to show that the player enjoyed doing bad things in the game.

Dominating Districts

These were game feedback which mentioned the keywords domination, and winning.  These feedback seems to show that the player enjoyed seeing his territory expand visually in the game through the borders of districts he has captured.

Looking Forward To More Play-tests

If you're looking to do a similar process during your own play-tests here's a few things to keep in mind:

• Quantitative data is not useful with a very small pool of play-testers because results won't be reliable. Try using open ended questions in your questionnaire.

• Ask follow up questions. The play-tester rated fun as 4.5? Ask him what kept him from giving the game the full 5 points.

• Always clarify if the play-tester's answer is vague. The play-tester might not mean what you think he means. (at the same team be careful not lead the tester to conclusions)

• Observe which questions the player isn't asking. If there's a mechanic important enough to the game and the player is not asking questions about it, don't assume that the mechanic is clear to the player.

Thanks for reading.  Here's a copy of our playtest feedback questions for your reference.  If you'd like to be updated on the latest Party Animals, please sign up for our mailing list!