Developing The Game… Bumble Tales

Billy, from Perfect Dork Studios, talks about the development of Bumble Tales

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/agdc-bumble-tales-interview.mp3

Or listen to it here…

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Show Notes:
Interviewer: I’m here at the Austin Game Developers Conference and with me today is a special guest. How about you introduce yourself?

Hi, I’m Billy Garretson. I’m the head of Perfect Dork Studios.

Interviewer: So, you guys have released a game recently called Bumble Tales. What’s that about?

Billy: Well, Bumble Tales is a co-development between my studio, Perfect Dork Studios and Tandem Games. And it is a match three puzzler for the PC and for the iPhone, and very shortly it will be available for the Mac.

It’s your typical match three game similar to Bejeweled, but there’s a town building aspect to it so the blocks all pertain to different resources that you are collecting. Eventually, you build your town up. You have an empty kind of playing field, and you build new buildings and each building gives you new power and you unlock little characters that inhabit the town.

So, it’s kind of like… It’s not too sims city like but what you are doing, you are really building up a little town, a little world while playing match three. So, it’s actually highly addictive, like any match three game can be.

Interviewer: And what were the challenges you guys faced as you were working on the game?

Billy: Well, I’m trying to think. Since the last time I talked about the game, we were just about to go to San Francisco GDC. At that point we had the game where we thought to be the 80-90 percent mark as far as completion. I mean, we were ready to push the game out the door by the end of May.

But what happened is at GDC a lot of people really enjoyed the game, and they really saw what we were trying to do. But a lot of them had feedback on how to make the game deeper and more enjoyable and just kind of provide something even more unique than your standard Bejeweled match three game.

So, what we had to do is after GDC we took this game that we could have very easily pushed out of the door as it was, but we really wanted to put out a quality product to make sure that… Sometimes, you only have one chance to do a game right, and so we wanted to take the extra time to put in a special sauce to make it even better so that both casual fans and more hard core and dedicated players could both get something out of.

So, rather than put the game out by the end of May, we ended up putting it out right now at the beginning of September. So, how many months is that? It’s an additional four or five months of development. We’ll see if the numbers, if it pays off, but those were where a lot of the challenges were.

Interviewer: And what were some of the specific feedback changes that they inspired you to do?

Billy: Well, the way our purchasing system worked was like in the game, let’s say there’s red blocks, green blocks, brown blocks. The green blocks equal leaves. The red blocks equal bricks et cetera. And you’re trying to collect enough of each of the resources in order to be able to finish levels.

So, like let’s say, level one starts and your requirement is you need to bring 50 brick and 40 gold et cetera, and then when you beat the level what we did is we gave you what we call the wish. So, basically, it’s a unit, a star, a unit of currency to which you can then open up the town shop. It was a very one-to-one thing. By beating one level I get one star, and I can apply one star to one purchase.

A lot of people felt that, you know, what they would rather have is have the game board actually apply more directly, so rather than I spend a star on a building they would rather that I spend bricks on a building because that makes sense, right? You build a building of bricks, so that was part of the feedback, it’s trying to balance the design to where not only were you completing levels by collecting resources you were actually making purchases with those resources.

So rather than go out and buy the town hall for one star or two stars or three stars or any number of units, single units, I went out and I go and I spend 50 brick, 40 brown, so basically you’re not just collecting pieces arbitrarily, you’re actually collecting units of your buildings that you are eventually going to be building.

So, that doesn’t sound like a huge design change, but it completely changed the pacing of the game so we spent a good couple of months just balancing that in particular; on an asset creation side, the decision to go full voice over on the story because I mentioned that there are characters that you can unlock. You unlock buildings and you unlock characters to inhabit the buildings. Each character has a unique story, and each story is actually in text and illustration form in a scrapbook that you keep on the side.

Well, when you go to the scrapbook now it’s fully voiced over. So, you have the main character of the game basically reading you the story, and the reason why we wanted to do that is for families with children who were old enough to read. They could sit back and enjoy the story without needing to read.

So, we kept it in mind that the game was going to be for all ages, but by just going through the process of all those… There’s three hours of audio in the game, and it just takes a long time to perfect and kind of polish it up.

Interviewer: Can you talk about the user testing then since you were gearing this toward a family and for a wide age range? How did the user testing go, and what was the feedback you got?

Billy: OK, well, our wives were great testers on the game. We knew that we struck the right chord when, for instance, my wife, she would get on and we’re talking alpha stage, beta stage type stuff, sit there for hours on end where there’s no motivation, there’s no purchases to be made. It was just basically the match three with some powers, and she would just play it endlessly.

You know, it’s kind of funny because she’s played the game a bazillion times now. She tested the iPhone version, right? So, day one the iPhone version comes out. She buys the thing, and then the other night she was up until she fell asleep and trying to get to the level 100 in one sitting.

Interviewer: Wow.

Billy: She had to stop because her iPhone light ran out of batteries. So, we got good feedback just from that reaction, but, you know, we did do a little play testing with children but not too much. It’s one of those things where the biggest feedback that we listened to was from the downloadable portals, like Big Fish games and Oberon Media who is a second party distributor for us and helped us get on iWin, MSN Games, Daewoo Rules of the Game, and they would tell us the kind of things that tied up and the things to fix.

Interviewer: Were there any major things that you had to fix at the end? I mean, what were some of the challenges that you ran into?

Billy: How do I forget this? Oh yeah, there was a huge one. Basically, there was no tutorial system in our game. OK, so we had help screens and kind of walk through type stuff as far as still images. What they kept asking us to do was interactive tutorials, so like basically learning how to play the game by playing the game.

That sounds like it would be easy to do, but it wasn’t. When you are at the very end and everything is almost done, trying to shoe horn in an interactive tutorial is actually really challenging because it could potentially break a lot of stuff.

There’s a lot of things as far as we locked off certain purchases early on so you wouldn’t get too far down one route. We wanted to basically sprinkle out little pieces of the game so that you learn how to buy a building. You learn how to buy a character, and you learn how to go to the scrapbook. You know what I mean?

Interviewer: Yeah.

Billy: But when it’s interactive, it’s weird because we had to create a linear aspect to a non-linear game is what I’m saying.

Interviewer: So, when you say interactive at the start, you’re talking about when they play the first level. Maybe, after a couple of tries, it’ll say, “Good job” and then buy this or whatever. That kind of leads them in a linear way through this non-linear space.

Billy: Absolutely. You hit the nail on the head.

Interviewer: How did implementing that actually help or improve the game? Did you notice any differences?

Billy: Yeah, for the end user it was totally worth the effort because there were people that, you know, would play the game that only played the match three portion had no idea that the town building portion existed until they played through this interactive tutorial. And they’re like, oh that’s how you do that, oh OK.

And so, like for us making the game is really hard because you make it in a bubble. You designed the game so you know how it’s all supposed to come out, and so it really takes watching someone who you don’t know, who has no affiliation with you to play it. And there’s some brutal honesty.

We came back from San Francisco GDC with some people totally bashing the game saying, “Oh, it’s kiddy stuff. It’s really stupid. I’m not going to play that game. The game plays bad. Oh, I don’t even know how to play this”, you know what I mean?

So, those are the kind of feedback. If you don’t get too defensive about it, you can kind of internalize it and be like, “Whoa, I know the solution to that problem”. The reason why they were frustrated is because they did not feel the connection between the game board and the purchasing. Why is that important? Well, that’s the identity of the game. Your reward isn’t like Bejeweled where I’m trying to get points.

Interviewer: Yeah, exactly.

Billy: Even though late in the game we added a mode called Arcade Mode which is basically Bejeweled. It’s a timer and you earn points, and you try to get your high score because of the pressure because people wanted that. People say I want something different, but at the same time it needs to be kind of familiar in order for them to, you know, feel comfortable trying something out.

Interviewer: Where there any other challenges as you tried to get it out the door because it seems like you get endless feedback? So, when do you draw the line and say, “OK, now it’s time to get it out?”

Billy: Well, what really ended up being the thing that drew the line is really just the firm release date. We got a firm release date of September 9th that the game was going to come out. So, if the game was going to come out by September 9th, and we knew that it was going to take, at least, two to three weeks to get the DRM completed through the various sites we knew well, this game has to be done week one August.

So, it was just a hard deadline. That’s when we said, you know, we no longer can make changes to the game. We, basically, have to finish the game. So, working without a deadline is a lot different. It hurts a lot more than it helps you.

But I’m trying to think of any additional challenges with getting it out the door at the very last minute, just the marketing assets, creating marketing assets. Basically, at one point I really felt like I had finished all the art assets for the game, and then I get loaded with all of these new assets that I had to create for each website, you know. We’re talking custom screen shots, custom icons, custom little web banners and pop ups, custom trailers.

Like one website, we couldn’t advertise the iPhone game. I wanted to make it all in one trailer that marketed the PC, Mac and iPhone versions of the game. But one of the portals are like, “Well, we’re not distributing the iPhone version, so we can’t put that on our website”. So, it’s cutting a new version of the trailer, all these last minute things that ends up being really stressful because Bumble Tales is not the only project that I’ve been working on.

Interviewer: Well, what about marketing challenges? How are you marketing this game? Are you doing anything different, or is it mainly through the portals and then through the iPhone App Store?

Billy: OK, so it’s mainly we’re letting the portals handle a lot of the marketing, and that’s why teaming up with a company like Oberon Media has been really helpful because that’s how they get their cut. They put in a lot of the time and effort to get the game out on different portals and make sure that the web banners are on different portals and that they’re being seen.

A lot of times, you know, a lot of people might take for granted, just knowing the market we haven’t taken a lot of time to try and advertise on like IGN or like 1UP or Game Stop or Game Spot just because that’s a more hard core market. Instead, Aaron has been talking to Parenting Magazine and a lot of mommy sites because this is the kind of game…

The whole philosophy behind Tandem Games is family friendly games that you can play with your children. Aaron founded his company on those kind of standards like, you know, I don’t want to make games where you go around killing people. I make wholesome entertaining yet, maybe, even learning games. So, you have to target that audience.

Where do you target it? Well, believe it or not, we don’t even target on the Apple Store because mommies have iPhones, but it’s other mommies that are going to tell them about the games, right? They’re not out there getting the same kind of marketing as the people who play Halo good, right? So, we’ve been trying to hit that market in a different way, a lot of grass roots, too.

Interviewer: Sure.

Billy: We’ve been giving out a lot of free copies of the game because we know that once you get hooked you love it. It’s one of those really polarizing games.

Interviewer: And so, you mentioned other projects. What other projects are you working on, and how are they going? I know you were talking about Box Macabre.

Billy: Oh yeah, Box Macabre is our big flagship title for Perfect Dork Studios. We’ve been working on it for one year now, really to the day. It was last Austin GDC that we showed off the game for the first time live, but it was still a prototype. This show is actually the first true demo of the game.

Basically, it showed off about 80 percent actual game, like final game assets. It’s a snippet of the very beginning of the game, so for a year we’ve been prototyping, making sure we can make the Torque X 3D engine work for us. Now that we’ve got it wrangled down because there’s not a lot of people who can use the engine as well as we can because we just put in the effort to make sure that we just know the engine front and back.

It’s going really well. There’s a lot of people that recognize this from previous shows just because the character itself is really iconic. It’s this little cube with this skull face and, you know, it’s kind of like this quirky title. It’s really shaping up to be something that people are interested in.

In San Francisco I was talking to Sony. Sony was interested in it for the PSN but, you know, one of the hard things to part with is the IP which they would have to control. If they were going to publish it, they would want the IP. As an indie that’s all I have. I mean, I don’t have a lot of money. I don’t have a lot of clout yet, but what I do have is my intellectual property, my creation.

And I just don’t feel comfortable selling that to someone, but at this show I wasn’t really aggressively marketing the game because it’s still about nine months away from beingne. So, come next GDC in March we’ll be doing some big promotional stuff. I don’t care if we have to walk around the show wearing big box costumes and looking all funky, we’re going to do something big.

What I did get out of this show is I got to talk to a lot of potential distribution partners. That’s really the hardest thing for an indie, I think, just beyond completing the game is finding a home for the game when it’s done. To be honest with you, a lot of people can finish a game, but what’s really tough is once the game is done then what?

Sure, you can put together marketing assets, but where are people going to go buy it? Don’t make them buy it in the back alley of the Internet. Get them to go to Steam. Get them to go to Greenhouse Games. I talked to a guy from OnLive today. And OnLive potentially could be up and running by the end of the year, at the very latest they said that next GDC.

Well, if we can make a big announcement to say, “Hey, Box Macabre is going to be one of the collection titles for OnLive”. How great would that be, so we’ve got to be a really, really productive showing this year even though we weren’t aggressively marketing the game.

Interviewer: Sure. Where can people find out more information about your games and try out Bumble Tales or something like that?

Billy: For Bumble Tales I highly recommend people going to bumbletales.com. That’s b-u-m-b-l-e-t-a-l-e-s .com. There’s a free flash version that people can play. It’s a really, really fun trailer, but you can find out more information on that game. It’s on the iPhone for 99 cents, day one 99 cents. It’s always going to be 99 cents.

We believe in trying to get the word out there and not really tax the pocketbook. You can get the game on PC for $6.99, if you’re a member, on Big Fish Games or $9.99, if you’re not a member or go directly to tandemgames.com, t-a-n-d-e-m-g-a-m-e-s .com.

If people want more information on Perfect Dork Studios projects and Box Macabre, I guess the easiest one is boxmacabre.com, b-o-x-m-a-c-a-b-r-e .com, perfectdorkstudios.com. It’s just as it sounds. I’m not going to spell that one out.

We have a pretty frequently updated development blog, and we’re trying to keep people in the loop without the developments going and not just Box Macabre but other things. On the horizon Aaron and I have been talking about collaborating again on something. It really depends on how the numbers for Bumble Tales do, how they do for us to…

We have a lot of ideas for a sequel. We don’t know if we’re going to do that right away, though, and Aaron’s got a lot of stuff on his plate right now. He’s promoting Domain of Heroes, his online MMO. I know that they’re doing some iPhone stuff, so let’s hope that comes out really soon.Yeah, I imagine you’ll continue to hear news from our groups, whether independently or together.

Interviewer: Thank you very much.