Joakim @ Work

New design, tech and metrics

Tabletop prototyping of digital games

In my previous startup, we didn't notice that we should have done lots of paper, Lego or board game prototypes, before proceding to code the game. If you start coding a game prototype, it will take much more effort to make changes to rules and the setting, when compared to simple tabletop game prototypes.

I wanted to collect a few of links to various gaming prototype articles:

Paper Prototyping: 5 Facts for Designing in Low-Tech
http://www.gamecareerguide.com/features/622/paper_prototyping_5_facts_for_.php

Creating paper prototypes of digital games
http://blog.unthinkmedia.com/2011/02/07/creating-paper-prototypes-for-digital...

Killer game loops in social games (slideset has lots of prototyping going on there)
http://www.gameschangedmylife.com/killer-game-loops-in-social-games

Tabletop roleplaying games' mechanics can be used as prototypes for all kinds of games
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Role-playing_game

Then I bumped into Kloonigames, which had a few articles on prototyping:
http://www.kloonigames.com/blog/general/articles-about-rapid-game-prototyping
http://www.kloonigames.com/blog/general/another-bunch-of-articles-about-rapid...

Seriously, please build physical, paper or what-have-you prototypes, before coding anything!

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Bye Bye Ironstar

Photo_6

It's time to say goodbye to Ironstar Helsinki, the company I founded back in 2005. It's been a great journey, with two online games developed, launched and got to do a lot of things, raised two angel rounds and was the CEO of a company for several years.

Our first game was MoiPal, a mobile virtual world where you'd have this small character living in your phone, and you could send him or her on adventures into Pal City. The game was quite successful in Finland, attracting some users, although we never got it to become an international success.

Then we made the switch, after developing MoiPal for almost four years, to Facebook games, and launched Disco Empire in the spring of 2010. That game was much ahead of MoiPal in terms of possibilities to succeed, and we did organically grow the game to over 300.000 monthly active users in November 2010, making well over 20.000 euros a month in revenues. After that the game started it's stady decline. We can only blame ourselves for this, since we mostly focused on monetization first, retention second. New features were aimed at paying users and less at the masses. Soon we had a game that didn't monetize that well anymore.

After a failed acquisition and failing to raise more funding during spring 2011, we started to shut down the company in June. I am pleased to see that everyone got new jobs in the gaming industry quite soon.

I myself am happy to announce that I have just joined gaming startup Supercell as Director of Analytics. You should check out Supercell's game Gunshine on Facebook.

There's a lot of lessons that I've learned and the most important one is that you need to try new things out. Never stop trying new things out.

You can follow my new adventures on Twitter, I'm there as @joakim_a

Unexpected Development of Social Games

Making social games is perceived as a linear process by a developer who is doing it for the first time. In reality, the developer needs to be prepared to all sorts of changes and unexpected events that change the post-launch development timeline. If the team is regularly being bombarded with changes coming from the outside of the team, it can be challenging for a first timer team. Changes that we had to adapt to in our development of our Disco Empire social game were:
 
Huge traffic from sudden free promotion - This has happened to all of our games at some point. The game suddenly gets 100x the regular amount of traffic, and the team wasn't prepared for this amount of traffic. When this happened to us for the first few times in Ironstar, we sort of had to figure scaling issues quickly and get more servers up and running to cope with all the new users in the game. In our latest game, we had gotten Rightscale to help us to bring up new servers on Amazon's cloud in just a few minutes.
 
Platform owner asks you to change something in 48 hours - We had alcoholic drinks in our Disco Empire game and we never thought that we'd have a problem with under age players, since it was virtual drinks. But we did receive this message from Facebook and had to act quickly.
Notice_of_violation
 
What we did was we quickly drew about 20 new non-alcoholic beverages and made an age check for the players, if the player was under age in the country they lived in, they'd be shown only the non-alcoholic ones. Facebook replied the following day that everything was okay. Next time we'll do our home work better.
You can never be prepared for everything, so if you have any kind of similar experiences, it would be cool to hear about them in the comments.