Developing an Indie Football MMO

Sam, from Italy, talks about making a casual football game MMO

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/engage-expo-football-mmo-interview.mp3

Or listen to it here…

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

Sam: I am Sam Reole [?] from Italy.

Interviewer: What virtual world have you worked on?

Sam: My background is working on core games with clients, all lines with clients, and so on, I decided to develop a really casual one. So, it’s web-based, a beautiful one. So in the last two years we have developed this platform that is for users. It’s very light and trustworthy because it’s web-based. It’s in Flash.

So, our focus now is to build this Flash platform, very easy for users. We developed the content in but it’s remaining a light content.

Interviewer: What were some of the challenges that you ran into as you were developing this virtual world?

Sam: You know, be simple and be light. It’s a bit of a logical challenge so, for example, for sure we check everything that’s already on the market like Club Penguin, all this kind of casual platforms. We decided to try to do better remaining in a small size application.

So, for example, we have not only chat rooms but our maps can scroll so give you more experience like the adventure of a game. You can climb in our platform. It’s not 3D but you can climb like 3D so we try to improve all these aspects to give a flavor to the application that is more naughty [?] but remaining very simple.

Interviewer: When you say light, does that mean that you have to make the file size small? Is that something that you even focused on?

Sam: Yeah, down time. For users it’s like a web page but it’s an airy and light application.

Interviewer: When you were developing, did you use user testing and what were some of the challenges or things that you learned while you were doing user testing?

Sam: You check this for different angles. So, you watch everything. So, for example, my experience in core gamers, if I can use an example is like when you have to produce a light drug, you take an example of the heavy one and try to do the best things. So, it’s not a very good example but we do that here.

So, you watch everything and try to… Basically, my opinion is we need to train people and give them a way to have fun for 10 minutes or two hours, but always have fun.

Interviewer: What’s the most, I guess, what’s the most popular feature of this?

Sam: Basically, it’s like a platform where you can make friends, and the choice to have football, is soccer for you but we are European and for us football is only football. And when you enter, you are supposed to be a football fan and you also have some immediate topic to discuss with people. You can talk about the weather or you talk about the last goal or last match. It’s a way to be in a nice atmosphere and to talk about the passion.

Interviewer: OK. Since you’re a smaller studio, how do you market this? I know football is really popular in Europe, so what are you doing?

Sam: We are lucky because we are only the developer, so we don’t have any publishing deal at the moment. So, we are yet to look for publishers, but we have a deal with Buksenora [?], the most important alpha book club in the world.

Interviewer: Sure.

Sam: So, we deal for them and their website.

Interviewer: Do you even really need a publisher now? It seems like a lot of these smaller MMOs are just going on their own and they’re developing stuff on their own. I’ve just recently talked with EVE online and they were mentioning that when they first had a publisher it was really rough. And then when they finally got their own thing it started working out, when they started doing their own marketing and publishing.

Sam: Yeah, it’s true but in any case now the market is pretty crowded and you need some unique money budget for marketing. Also, you do by yourself. Be really passionate about what we do, so ideally we would like to keep our money to keep developing new games and new features and so on.

So, when I mean publisher, it could also be your portal that is moving traffic so we can bring this project to the mass market.

Interviewer: What’s next in store then for the game?

Sam: We have every week something new. So, we try to have new features for people, for the users, for the maps, for the games. We try also, it’s a big challenge to develop mini games that have a full, long range of long life term. We challenge tournaments. It’s always something. It’s also our challenge also to build games that are simple but entertain people for a long time.

Interviewer: OK. Do you have real time games? Do you focus on real time games or asynchronous games or what?

Sam: With Flash it’s not so easy, so usually you use turn-based games, so it’s not easy to have real action to play the games, but we are trying to arrive close to the story.

Interviewer: For the back end, did you use SmartBox or ElectroServer?

Sam: Yeah, these kind of things, yes.

Interviewer: Did you run into any scalability issues as you were doing it.

Sam: At the moment, no but using this [?] is another standard so we make big test. We have now 150,000 users, so by the concurrent it could be 2,000, somethng like that. So, we still have not big numbers but we are confident and the way we’re building the system it is easy to draw and create.

Interviewer: Adding content every week, that seems to bring people back, right?

Sam: Yeah, you can imagine if you go to the movie and watch the same movie every day. You can like it, but after three times you look for a new movie.

Interviewer: Any last words then for other game developers out there who want to start their own little small studio or do their own small MMO which is about to become huge, you know?

Sam: It’s like the challenge and the lucky thing is to try and be successful with something you like. It’s not always necessary a project that works because you are not the only one that needs to love the project, but you need users. You have to work on these things, but if you are between these two aspects I think this could be a good key to success.

Interviewer: Thank you very much.