Llama in your Face
Check out "Llama in your Face", a cute little Flash game I finished together with Peter Sperl in 2012. Play it on Newgrounds, a good place for Flash games. This blog post documents the making of the game.
Development started at an inofficial Austria Game Jam at the SAE institute Vienna that took place from June 17-19, 2011. A game jam is an event where lots of people gather with their computers and try to make a game in 48 hours or less. In a first "brainstorming" phase, people were assigned with a general theme and had to develop game ideas out of it. The themes at this particular game jam came from a random phrase generator. Peter received the phrase "Everybody loves the Llama in Busytown", so he came up with a game idea where you control a Llama in a zoo that fends off obnoxious zoo visitors by spitting on them. I developed a different idea, which I don't remember anymore, but the Llama thing was very intriguing, so I joined a team of five people that formed around Peter's idea. Let's give a short bio of the peoplpe involved.
Peter Sperl, the one with the idea. This was his first game jam ever and his plan was to contribute pixel graphics. He is a big fan of the Zelda games and has a lot of experience creating pixel graphics in PaintShop Pro.
Christian Feldbacher, just about to finish his studies at FH Hagenberg. His plan after studying was to create and sell a game engine for mobile games. I think he wanted to gather some experience creating games and meet some interesting people. Turns out he was serious about the game engine thing, it's called V-Play Game Engine.
Simon Wallner, one of the organizers of the game jam. He knows a lot of people from the gamedev scene in Vienna and is still part of the organizing team for Austria Game Jam. His plan at the jam was to create experimental music using Pure Data. He also brought a small synth he connected to his computer.
Peter Neubauer, a good friend of mine. We have attended a couple of gamejams in the past and we have done some unfinished projects together. He was also with me at the first Austria Game Jam ever, in 2009.
We quickly decided that Peter Sperl would handle graphics, Simon Wallner music, and the rest of the team the programming. Picking a programming language is always hard with different people involved. We ended up with FlashDevelop and using the Flixel framework, a perfect match for quick 2D prototyping.
At the end we had an almost complete game, where you could actually spit on zoo visitors. We didn't receive a prize or anything since there was no jury or ranking, but the success was still very visible.
A classic phenomenon after a game jam is that people are very excited about the game, and motivated to do more with the product. It's part of seeing results so quickly, and seeing your awesome gamedev skills in action. So Christian suggested that we should take the game to the next level and we held a meeting at his place. We discussed some possible improvements to the game, but soon after the meeting his interest faded.
A couple of months later Peter, Peter and I met at Peter Sperl's place. Peter Sperl was still very excited about the game and wanted to push it further. I could see some potential as well, and my big dream was to see our game on top Flash gaming websites like Newgrounds or Kongregate, maybe even make some money through advertising.
Looking at the game in a more sober state, weeks after the game jam, some parts were seriously lacking quality. The graphics were not polished enough, Simon Wallner's experimental music was just horrible and the gameplay consisted of just one endless mode with score being the only motivator.
A good lesson to learn here is that while quick results achieved at a game jam are usually very exciting, making a polished game game out of it, that is enjoyable for a general audience, is a lot more work. We spent weekend after weekend improving the gameplay and making new graphics and assets. I took the role of a project manager/coder, while Peter Sperl was mainly doing graphics and game design. Peter Neubauer worked on the code, too.
The first serious problem arised when Peter Neubauer and me got into a fight about how to do particular things in the code. His code often interfered with my changes and vice versa, and looking back at the situation, trouble was inevitable. We didn't handle it very well back then, Peter Neubauer quit the project after some weeks where we tried to work out the problems. I imagine it was very frustrating for him as he is not very strong in conflict situations, and I think that was also a major factor for him to bury his dream of becoming a game developer.
Peter Sperl and me continued developing the game, however, and it really started to take shape. After some discussions, I convinced Peter that it would be better to commission the music to an actual artist instead of making them sourselves. We both have had some experience making music, but with the game getting better and better it seemed not appropriate anymore. Browsing for talented people on the internet turned out to be a lot of fun, and we ended up picking Ken Snyder, a very talented musician with some demoscene background. Ken's music was absolutely fantastic (you can still hear it in the game), in retrospect one of the best decisions we made. He was also very responsive and managed to adapt the music exactly to our liking.
In January 2012 we were ready to release the game. I opened an account at FGL, in an attempt to sell the game to potential sponsors. We got some crappy offers from small sponsors, but also a big one from someone at AddictingGames/Nickelodeon. I was on vacation at the time, but got too excited to not answer the offer right away. This was a very poor decision, since after initial negotiations with the people at AddictingGames we got an even better offer from Bigdino, and being away from home I had neither the time nor calmness required to make a sensible decision. I ended up picking the second offer without actually giving the AddictingGames people the chance to make a counter offer, which seriously pissed them off. That was a big learning moment for me that continued to haunt me in my sleep for some time thereafter.
Martijn Kunst from Bigdino was very excited about our game, but suggested adding more content. We were still only featuring an improved endless game mode, with more content, powerups and an improved combo system. He also suggested creating an upgrade shop, something a lot people expect from a good Flash game.
After agreeing to Martijn's offer and suggestions, we continued improving the game. The outlook to a substantial amount of fame and money also motivated Peter again, who had already been at the end of his patience with the game back in January.
It turns out that really perfecting and polishing a game takes even more effort than getting to the 99% mark. It's the last 1% that usually requires changes that are really hard to implement. Every shortcut you previously took during development, you have to go back and make it right. We ended up spending several months improving the game even further, implementing a shop with dozens of upgrades, making a story mode with hand-crafted levels, adding a very cool credits sequence and making the game work with the ad provider required by Bigdino.
Martijn got out of his way to provide us with experienced game testers. Every time we finished another beta version we got detailed bug reports and improvement requests, which helped a lot improving the game. Finally, at July 1st, 2012 the game went live on bigdino.com. We made some last-minute changes during the first couple of weeks to help the viral effect of the game; provided promotional stuff, modified the difficulty in the first couple of levels based on collected statistics and made a version without ads for some sites that didn't want them. After that, the game quickly was featured on hundreds of websites including famous notdoppler.com and nitrome.com. As it was common practice back then, Chinese game portals cracked our sitelock protection within a day and released re-branded versions of our game.
But, our Llama's journey wasn't over then.
- On July 10th, 2012 we released the game on Nickelodeon's AddictingGames, the same people I offended back in February by declining their offer. I managed to sell them a non-exclusive license of the game.
- On July 12th, 2012 we released the game on Newgrounds, with added achievements.
- On July 13th, 2012 we released the game on Kongregate
- On March 1st, 2013 we put the game into the Mochimedia distribution after they expressed interest in the game. We had to make slight modifications for Mochi ads and achievements. They featured the game on their front page for one full week.
- After some negotiations in February 2013, we spent three weeks implementing a branded version with additional premium upgrades for kizi.com. We managed to release this version of the game on March 28th, 2013.
Compared to blockbuster games like Robot Unicorn Attack or Burrito Bison Revenge, our game did poorly. We got only positive reviews, though, and even some Let's Play videos on YouTube. The ad revenue contract we made with Kizi never got us any money since we didn't pass the minimum required for pay out. We received compensation for the non-exclusive license, however.
To this day, I believe the game has been played ~2 Million times. Accurate numbers are hard to get, since it is featured on so many different websites, some of which don't allow tracking statistics from our side.
I hope this was an interesting read. In conclusion, it's always worth to pursue a project to the end if possible. Compared to the hours spent on making this game, we received relatively little money, but we got the confidence that we can finish something, if we really want to. Also, there are still people playing the game, more than one year after it was released.