Archive for the ‘Postmortems’ Category

Atomik Kaos Mechanic Post Mortem

Original AK Logo

This is really weird to write… because… Atomik Kaos, the original, was a bit of an accident. The whole design was ad-hoc without any kind of formalism. Each token was designed as it was needed.

So what worked and what didn’t mechanics wise?

Worked

1. The twist to the chain reaction genre: let’s face it, it’s a genre where A LOT can be done. Most games are about either angles or position of the game tokens. Atomik Kaos picked up in both angles and position. Angles by putting that variable attached to each token type; position by randomizing each token in the level.

2. Variety: here’s something that often lacks to these games. As far as I can remember only Starshine offers some variety. A bunch of special tokens were created for this game. They couldn’t be played directly but rather activated by the chains.

3. Goals: Each level had a different goal. Either destroying everything, destroying part of something, not destroying more than an amount and others. Sometimes it was just a matter of words and the rules underneath were the same.

Didn’t work

1. Black Holes are special atoms that suck up chain reaction particles. People just hated it and my guess is that it was not for the negative impact, as there are more negative tokens, but because it was not absolutely obvious how the black holes were sucking the particles.

2. Randomness and luck factor: I don’t believe that Atomik Kaos is a luck based game, quite the opposite. Problem is I’m not my audience and I played it a lot, something most if not all players won’t do. So the random factor of the game became a luck factor for the players and this worked as a downside of the game since on one hand it was frustrating, on the other hand it made the game too easy.

Tech Wars Postmortem

Tech Wars

Tech Wars was our first flash game and taught us a lot of lessons. Our objective with it was to step in the flash game market showing attitude and quality and do we have a story to tell.

What went right…

We had no technology, no reusable code, no past experience in flash. Only our previous game development experience, an idea and the will so several things went right!

• Tech Wars was finished in about 8 weeks from nothing to completion which was a very interesting timing for a first project.
• From a project point of view it was a very rewarding experience since it showed that our workflow was adaptable to this new development environment.
• We closed our first sponsorship deal with it which, from a pure business point of view is great since it was our first game.

What went wrong…

Our expectations regarding the ins and outs of the flash market really took a beating with Tech Wars. We are convinced that reputation as a lot to do with this business and Tech Wars, when compared to the our most recent games proves exactly that.

Not only that, but our view design wise was flawed and that “injured” the game from a commercial and design perspective.

• Sponsorship deal was way lower than we expected but also presented us the opportunity to get in touch with a very hard working site owner that passed us a lot of useful information.
• The game is just too fast. Laser acts as a instant damage weapon and missiles, when fully upgraded are just too fast and go too far for a fire-and-forget weapon. Both weapons remove the aim and fire mechanic. From the three weapons available, only the rockets are the “typical” video game weapon.
• The game spread not for the quality of it but by the effort of the sponsor. Naturally we prefer to see our games spreading by merit and not by someone else’s effort.

What we learnt…

We learnt that no matter who you think you are, how good you think you are, a new market is always a challenge. We had (and have) to compete with the most imaginative game designers that exist: creative young people with a lot to win and little to loose.

We also learnt that new mechanics are not good until proven and we let it out before it was proven.

Last but not least, we learnt that a good game -and we do believe that Tech Wars is a good game and a good IP regardless of the difficulties- may not be a good entertainment product and that’s what computer games are today: not funny products but entertainment products.