May 19, 2020
On The Importance of Brand Consistency

Don’t judge a book by its cover – or, perhaps, you should.

 

You can tell a lot from a business from its consistency of branding. It’s more than quality pictures, games and text, it’s about style and how that carries on through the company from the game itself to the artwork.

For us at Glowing Eye Games, we love attention to detail and we love the little things. They are those subtle little morsels you might not even notice – and that’s the best part. Most of the time, you’re not meant to notice each that playing card is tailored to the theme of the game or how the load screen images have their own take on our logo. It’s just part of the overall experience and allows the game to be seamlessly immersive. You’d definitely notice if the background wasn’t quite right or if the sounds were discordant to the images.

These delightful details are handmade at the point of the game’s origin. Halloween Tripeaks has Dracula as the King, the Witch as the Queen and Frankenstein’s Monster as the Jack, whereas Magic Towers has a regal King, majestic Queen and princely Jack. Our most popular card game, Pyramid Solitaire: Ancient Egypt is entirely Egyptian themed with appropriate cards, font and background. It’s all about building the scene and creating an atmosphere our customers want to spend time in. This level of detail reflects the consistency to our brand and within our company, as each game is completed to the highest level of quality.

But it’s not just about logos and artwork, it’s about our players and respecting their own individuality. You may have noticed by now some of our games are the same game, just in different coats. Let’s take Tri-Peaks solitaire for example. Halloween, Magic Towers, Christmas and classic are all versions of Tri-Peaks with the same principles and same gameplay, however the key difference is that they target different types of people. We want everyone to enjoy the game and we don’t want anyone to feel they have to conform, bear flashy themes they don’t want or experience the game in any other way than how they would want to play it. We respect those who love the simplicity of our classic version of Tri-Peaks solitaire, just as much as our customers who love Christmas and jump on the chance to have a festive theme. It’s lovely that people still play it during the summer months! Similarly the same goes for Halloween, with ghoulish backgrounds and spooky sounds, and Magic Towers, which is the most calming of the four with an animated sky of passing clouds and twittering birds. Whichever game our customers prefer, they can guarantee they’ll be getting the same attention to detail and consistency of brand, as they would with any of our other games.

The point here is this: customers love to be immersed and they can tell immediately if something is made with care. If you’re a game developer or even a marketer, remember to pay attention to the little things, because, after all, they make up the whole. If you look after those details, they can help make your game an overall success.

October 3, 2018
The Mistake of Mahjong Seasons

As a small indie games developer, business mistakes can be deeply painful. Here we share our biggest mistake with the game Mahjong Seasons. We wanted it to be beautiful, brilliant and big. We wanted it to be perfect! We threw time, effort and money at creating the best Mahjong game out there to try and be the PopCap of Mahjong.

Oh, how we failed…

2014 was a heady time for the tech industry, which thought tablets would rule the world and replace PCs. It was also the year we released Mahjong Seasons. We loved the form factor. We knew our games were best experienced on the iPad (this was back when we only supported iOS). We wouldn’t compromise on quality and make a weaker mobile version; it was to be iPad only. The decision alone meant that it was unavailable to the huge number of potential iPhone players. Worse still, mobile phones got bigger and better, making our decision to ignore their furtherment short sighted. Tablets are still important as great consumer devices, but they didn’t and won’t take over the world.

Our perfectionist attitude to the game’s development meant we had massive, long-winded debates over things like the level select. That bloody level select! We developed a massively time-consuming streaming code, which would allow players to scroll through levels. This was visually redesigned several times. Heck, even the way a player scrolled through the levels was debated and refined a multitude of times. And you know what? It didn’t matter. We put so much focus on this area that we increased the development time by months! We should’ve gone with a simpler design, knowing now that most players really wouldn’t have minded. No one in the company voiced that we should be spending our time on other things, we just had to do it right.

The mistakes don’t end here. We created a poor combination of revenue generation with a badly thought-out balance of advertising and purchased level packs. Instead of maximising revenue per player, we reduced it. We could have a created a game that had randomly selected levels that would be played more often, but our problem was that our game was level based. This limited the amount of time any player would take enjoying the game, reducing the advertising revenue. In fact, this business model, married with our design, conspired to create a game where we ended up with an average revenue per player of $0.22. This is worst revenue per player from any of our games.

The artwork was redone several times. We created beautiful effects as the player enjoyed the game, delicate animations and delightful particle effects, all of which required a significant amount of coding. Each little item stacked up: the time, cost and debates on whether it was good enough. Each tweak and rework eventually sapped the morale of the team.

After almost a year, it was ready. It looked good, it felt good and we were proud, too. We unleashed it with the most expensive advertising campaign that this little company had ever done and then –

It flopped.

The hope was that the advertising would get it noticed and give it traction. The reality was that, after the advertising campaign, it became one of the least downloaded games we have ever made.

But we weren’t even done there. We knew the game would never make any money, that the amount of people finding it and enjoying it would be miniscule. But out of pride and loyalty to the few players we had, we made one more level pack. Something for the tiny number of loyal players. It was a nice thing to do for players, if not a little delusional, benefiting maybe a few hundred of them, but it increased the cost of making the game upward again. Really, why? Why spend another penny on something that had so obviously been ignored by the casual gaming public? In retrospect there was no proper business-minded justification for this extra effort, only a desire to be a supportive game developer who really valued their loyal players.

The game failed to make back even 5% of its developing and marketing cost, and everyone’s confidence plummeted. After a year, this was the final nail in the coffin and it was hard to face.

After its one update, we let it stay on the App Store, picking up the occasional download in the hope it would quietly accrue the final few cents of revenue. By 2017, it was taken unceremoniously off the App Store.

I wish I could say there was an upside in going through this project, but much of it was heartache and headache. We learned from our mistakes and developed some technology, although we didn’t reuse most of it. We lost so much time doing it that it’s horrible to write about even to this day.

But why should you make the same mistakes we did? Here’s our take home advice to avoid this kind of wasted effort.

  1. Don’t overdesign and over scope your game. We should have limited our main efforts to the actual playing experience rather than elements, like the level select screen.
  2. Know when to give in. When a game looks like it won’t bring you any additional revenue, that is the time to cut your loyalty to your players. Our efforts to bring an additional level pack lost additional money and time for us.
  3. Think about your business model. An advertising-based game thrives on re-playability. A game with in game level purchases thrives on people wanting new content. Our game failed on both counts by incorrectly combining both.
  4. Support as many platforms as is feasible. Our mistake was supporting tablet only. We should’ve made it compatible with mobile phones, even if that reduced player enjoyment a little.
  5. Advertising. Advertising can give a game traction, but if it looks like it is failing even with a solid advertising campaign then it’s time to cut it off.

 

Good luck!

 

Mark

April 24, 2018
Evolving Pyramid Solitaire Mummy’s Curse

As a professional game developer, you must accept the game you create isn’t the finished article and never will be! Audience tastes change, your team develops, technology moves on, and we grow. The first version of a game tests the water, and subsequent versions build upon that, until you have a game closest to your audience and your current ideal. Perfection is not a destination, but the pursuit of it is worth the challenge.

A perfect example of this is the revamping of our characters in Pyramid Solitaire: Mummy’s Curse, Cleopatra and The Mummy.

Visuals are paramount to enticing a customer. Even a catchy name or an eloquent description won’t grab them as quickly as an image will. When you only have someone’s attention for a short time, even if it’s just as a second as they scroll past, they must desire what they see. Those images are the hook in your customers’ hearts.The first design of Cleopatra and her deceased compatriot, The Mummy, were detailed and extravagant, with rich colours and intense expressions. Our version of Pyramid Solitaire, however, is meant to be relaxing and approachable. An overtly sexualised Cleopatra did not suit the game as a whole, although we did have a few queries when we changed it! The Mummy could barely be seen in his sarcophagus, which made his character insignificant.The second variation made these characters cute and cartoonish. Cleopatra bore a friendly smile and The Mummy was made to be delightfully goofy, with knobbly knees and simple posing. Although more approachable, they missed our audience again. These seemed better for children, whereas our target are adults. Although children are sometimes introduced to our games by their grandparents or parents, the majority of our downloaders are adults and it makes sense to focus on one audience rather than multiples.The third iteration merges the detail of the first design with the approachability of the second. Cleopatra, clad in white, has a far more individual and assertive personality, which is in keeping with her status as pharaoh. The Mummy has taken elements of classic horror, maintaining details which make him seem intriguing and eerie.

As a pair, Cleopatra and The Mummy give character to the game, allowing the customer to fully connect before they know all the details. They evoke a sense of wonder, achievement and intrigue, and that is all before the game has begun. As well as readdressing our characters, we regularly update our game graphics and functions to keep the experience as fluid as possible. That way our best work is always out there.

Although this is a small example for one of our games, we use the same thinking to improve and upgrade all our games over time.

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