Podcast Interview: How to Develop a Hit Flash Game in Under 10 Hours, The Story of Swinefighter

Immad, founder of HeyZap, talks about developing the hit game SwineFighter in under 10 hours without ever having made a game…or used Flash…

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/swinefighter-podcast.mp3

Or listen to it here…

Interviewer: Hi. Welcome to the Indie Game Development Podcast Show. With me today is a special guest. How about you introduce yourself?

Immad: I’m Immad Akhund. I’m one of the co-founders of Heyzap and one of the creators of Swine Fighter along with Jude Gomila.

Interviewer: Can you talk about Swine Fighter? I guess it was in Time Magazine, and it’s been a very popular media model. What’s it about?

Immad: Swine Fighter has been going crazy the last two weeks, I think. Basically, it’s a little Flash game you can find on swinefighter.com. We knocked it up in, basically, one night, and it’s an easy, kind of fun Flash game where you can vaccinate flying pigs who have swine flu. You get a high score in about 30 seconds, and you can share in Twitter, Facebook and things like that. It’s been going great.

We launched it not this week, last week on Tuesday. Ever since then we’ve had, I think – I haven’t done the calculation recently – it must be about four million game plays since then. So it’s just been insane.

Interviewer: Congratulations on taking the initiative to release this game really quickly, so that’s great. When you thought of the idea, what inspired you to actually go through with it? I know a lot of developers will be like, “Hey, that’s a good idea”, but then they’ll be like, well, they are just kind of too busy with their own work to focus on it.

What inspired you guys to get it done?

Immad: Basically, we were on Heyzap so we don’t actually make games generally. This is actually the first game we made. We’re always thinking about gaming, so one day we were just reading in the news about swine flu. My partner actually had the idea, “Why don’t we make a game?” I was like, “You can’t be serious”.

We’re quite creative, and we didn’t spend too much time on it. The idea was to make a very simple, kind of easy to play game. So, I think overall we started at about 8 P.M. and we got it done pretty much by 6 A.M., including the website and things like that. It was crazy to spend the whole night and do it, and it was very adrenalin fueled. We thought we could make it work.

Interviewer: Sure.

Immad: The concept itself is hard to deal with because swine flu obviously is a very bad thing, especially at the time where there was a lot of fear around, whether that’s going to spread, a pandemic or anything like that. The first half an hour or something we discussed the game concept and how do we make it not stupid. We thought we could make a playful one. We thought we could execute something that people would actually laugh about and not get all worked up about it, and I think we did that well.

Interviewer: Yeah. And so, through the few hours that it took to develop this, how long did you spend on design and how long did you spend on development and what other steps did you have to take during that night to actually get this game out?

Immad: So, obviously, there were many aspects to it. We didn’t just make the game. We also made the whole Swine Fighter website. I would say most of the time was probably spent on the graphical side of things. We used an existing game engine which made it a bit easier, obviously, to get it up and running. We basically just customized it and changed the game play a bit but not dramatically in terms of the steps.

This was actually my first kind of Flash development as well. I was trying to learn all the things at the same time, but the steps were really like get the game and start customizing it and figure out how to customize the graphics. Then once we had the game looking good enough, we knocked up the web page and did the top design and stuff like that.

Actually, one of the things that made that a lot easier was I have friends who work at Heruku, which is basically a web deployment platform for Rails. I basically just put it on there and sent them an email saying that this might get a lot of traffic. Make sure you increase the server capacity without paying anything. So, they’ve been pretty amazed about it because I think on the first day we got to the front page of Digg.

Interviewer: How nice.

Immad: And straight away from the first day we were pretty much going crazy. I don’t know how many Tweets; it was, at least, 20 Tweets every 15 minutes, probably more. I think Digg and Twitter were basically the biggest things for us.

Interviewer: Yeah. I noticed in the game there is an option to post a Facebook or a Twitter. Was that something that you pre-made or did you also have to design that viral flow while you were there doing it that one night?

Immad: We designed on the fly. This is actually a friend of mine’s idea. We were just going to put the “share this” button. He was like, “Oh, you have to put these buttons in there”, and it worked out really well. It’s actually quite easy to do. Like, if someone sends me an email, I can show them how. Yes, we designed that. It worked really well. The biggest one was Twitter. We kind of thought Facebook would be the biggest one just because everyone is still using Facebook, the users.

Interviewer: Yeah, exactly.

Immad: But, Twitter, it’s more of a sharing place, I think, than Facebook. Twitter is all about sharing things whereas Facebook has got photos and friends and things like that.

Interviewer: So, was the number of Tweets increasing exponentially as the time went on, or was it a constant number of Tweets that were being sent out via that option on the game?

Immad: That’s a good question. There’s not a great way to answer that. I would say from just looking anecdotally it was definitely increasing. I think it’s pretty proportional to game plays, so our game plays definitely grew very fast. So, from the first to the second to the third day it was fairly exponential. And then it kept growing a bit, and then it leveled off. And I think the Tweets probably represented that pretty closely.

Interviewer: What did you think about when you first released it? I’m just in awe because if you think about it your game has had more play than many triple A titles which is awesome because you just started learning Flash and you just did it in one night. You had the right theme and the right topic and the right morality which is awesome, so I’m just fascinated about the whole game.

Were there any other surprises as you were developing this or designing this or once you released it?

Immad: Obviously, we had aspirations that it might do well, but we didn’t quite expect it to do this well. We basically told – in terms of what we did for press because I knew a couple of people, we got Tech Crunch and Manchu beads [?] partly because I had their email addresses. So, I sent them an email and said, “Oh, it’s doing really well”.

Then, from that point on, I would say most of our coverage so we were in the end – we had a mention in The New York Times. We had top CNets, Guardian, Telegraph. If you go on the website, all of them are on there and there’s a bunch more. And also, I think we were in the biggest newspaper in Mexico as well. It had a ton of game plays in Mexico as well.

Most of that was completely people emailing us or I’d say at least 50 percent was probably people knowing and talking to us and just writing about us which I wasn’t expecting because I thought with everything we’d have to work to get at that kind of stuff, but it just literally such a good concept and the media really liked it.

Interviewer: In terms of monetization, did you put ads on the site or did you use it to promote Heyzap, or was there anything else involved there?

Immad: Yeah, I mean, we actively didn’t do any advertising because of the nature of the topic. We had CDC information at the bottom to tell people how to take care of themselves. We had a Red Cross link at the top to get people to donate to Red Cross. We were very much not trying to kind of monetize the concept very aggressively because, obviously, it’s a sensitive issue.

We could have, maybe, made a little bit of money, but it wouldn’t have been earth-shattering so that was kind of our feeling on it, so yeah.

Interviewer: Now that you’ve released a hit game, what’s next in store then in terms of future games to do?

Immad: It was definitely one of the things to do to teach us what it takes to distribute a game, so obviously we at Heyzap basically distribute games to websites, but we’ve not seen it from the game developer’s perspective as strongly since Swine Fighter. I think we’ve learned a lot because of that, so our focuses really go back to Swine Fighter and go back to Heyzap and see how can we improve Heyzap so it works better as game developers.

Ideally, we want to just make it so for the game developer, Heyzap, would be so good that they would choose to distribute all of their games from Heyzap instead of from anything else. That’s definitely one thing.

Interviewer: Let’s talk about Heyzap. What’s it exactly about, and what inspired you to start the company?

Immad: The story of Heyzap is basically we were originally going to make a destination website, so make a website where you can find games. We wanted to improve recommendations of these games as well because there are thousands of them out there right now. There’s no easy way to find new games at all, like I like this game therefore… What’s another game like it, that kind of thing?

We started off like that, and then we had the idea: why not get the game – instead of making a separate new website, why not make it so any other website could embed this content. Then, we went more and more into that space and realized if I run a blog or if I run even a really big website, even something like CBS or Wired, there is no very easy way to just go, “OK, I want games content” in the same way you can do with video. Like with YouTube, you can always just go to YouTube and get that video content. You just can’t do that with games.

We thought we could make that really simple and easy and basically make up better games there for the user and make it better for the game developers because they can get out to websites that don’t normally have games. It was a win-win situation.

That’s kind of how we started, and we got a bit of seed funding from Wycombinator. They’ve funded quite a few companies, people like Scribd and “I’m in Like with You” which is their gaming company. So, yeah, that’s how we got started, basically, in September and we launched in January.

Interviewer: What’s been the response, and what’s next in store then for Heyzap in terms of ways to distribute games?

Immad: The response has been great. Heyzap itself has increased like in order of magnitude because of Swine Fighter, so we used his app to distribute Swine Fighter a lot.

The next in store for Heyzap, we have a bunch of exciting things. I would say the biggest and coolest stuff is we’re, basically, going to make it even easier to get Heyzap anywhere. So, we’re going to make apps in the right platforms so you can Heyzap on MySpace, Facebook and things like that and also on blogs. So, we are really attacking this idea, just spreading it everywhere and as easy as possible for users.

Interviewer: Are you going to focus then on certain types of games that you distribute because you look at Swine Fighter, that’s kind of a political game or more of a news oriented game? I don’t know if that’s something that you were doing initially, or if it’s something that maybe that’s the best way to distribute, or if that’s the types of games you should focus on? What’s in store for that?

Immad: We distribute a wide range of games as possible. We have about 8,000 games on our database now, and the idea for us is really like the ability of publishers to get whatever type of game works for their website. So, if you run a political website like Huffington Post and you want to get political games, then you can do that really easily. If you run a sports website and you want to get sports games, you can do that really easily.

So, we try to keep the widest games possible. We build tagging and other kind of category information to make it easy for the publishers to get the right games for the audience. If anything, we go more general rather than niche.

Interviewer: Are you focusing on single player games or multi-player games?

Immad: We have a selection of both. Probably some of the best Flash games right now are still single player, but there’s definitely a trend towards more and more multi-player games. Ideally, every game would be single player and multi-player so we’re going to go with what the audience wants.

Interviewer: Are there specific types of games that a lot of people seem to like to play or any specific genre that seems to be really huge?

Immad: So, it’s interesting, I mean, so like target defense games. That’s a big genre which is fairly – not unique to casual games but it’s definitely more in casual games than in normal. Other normal genres that work quite well, like shooting games, are quite popular.

Things that are easy to get into, so it depends. There’s a trend for the audience to these kinds of casual games. There’s the male, 15 to 25-year-old audience and then there’s the female audience, like kind of soccer moms or things like that. There’s many websites that cater to just for one or just for the other audience.

For female games, there’s a bunch of games out there, like dressing games and cooking games, not that I’m trying to generalize what all women like to do and also games like Balloons work for both audiences.

Interviewer: And so, for indie game developers, can they submit games to your site, or what would be the best use of Heyzap for them?

Immad: We’ve got a developer section where you can submit games. If we already have your game which is reasonably likely because we pull games from a bunch of sources, then you can claim your game from us as well. If you submit it or just send us an email, we will find it and link it to you, and then you can see what game plays your game is getting. And we can add ability to see where your game is being played on our network and things like that as well.

Interviewer: OK. Any last words then for game developers or aspiring game developers or people looking to start up their own company and games?

Immad: Flash games are good. I think simple concepts work really well. Just have fun and do it. You’re probably better game developers than us, so show us how it’s done.

Interviewer: Great. So, we’re talking with one of the creators of Swine Fighter. Thanks again for your time. Take care.

Immad: Thank you for your time.

Interviewer: Bye.

Immad: Bye-bye.