Privacy Policy for games published by Springloaded
(Including Desert Island Fishing, Tiny Dice Dungeon, The Legend of Evil and The Last Vikings)
This privacy policy has been compiled to better serve those who are concerned with how their
‘Personally identifiable information’ (PII) is being used online. PII, as used in US privacy law and
information security, is information that can be used on its own or with other information to identify,
contact, or locate a single person, or to identify an individual in context. Please read our privacy
policy carefully to get a clear understanding of how we collect, use, protect or otherwise handle
your Personally Identifiable Information in accordance with our website.
What personal information do we collect from the people that visit our blog, website or app?
When ordering or registering on our site, as appropriate, you may be asked to enter your name,
email address or other details to help you with your experience.
When do we collect information?
We collect information from you when you install our game or enter information on our site.
How do we use your information?
We may use the information we collect from you when you register, make a purchase, sign up for
our newsletter, respond to a survey or marketing communication, surf the website, or use certain
other site features in the following ways:
• To administer a contest, promotion, survey or other site feature.
How do we protect visitor information?
Our website is scanned on a regular basis for security holes and known vulnerabilities in order to
make your visit to our site as safe as possible.
We use regular Malware Scanning.
Your personal information is contained behind secured networks and is only accessible by a limited
number of persons who have special access rights to such systems, and are required to keep the
information confidential. In addition, all sensitive/credit information you supply is encrypted via
Secure Socket Layer (SSL) technology.
We implement a variety of security measures when a user places an order enters, submits, or
accesses their information to maintain the safety of your personal information.
All transactions are processed through a gateway provider and are not stored or processed on our
servers.
Do we use ‘cookies’?
We do not use cookies in our games for tracking purposes.
You can choose to have your computer warn you each time a cookie is being sent, or you can
choose to turn off all cookies. You do this through your browser (like Internet Explorer) settings.
Each browser is a little different, so look at your browser’s Help menu to learn the correct way to
modify your cookies.
Third Party Disclosure
We do not sell, trade, or otherwise transfer to outside parties your personally identifiable
information.
Third party links
Occasionally, at our discretion, we may include or offer third party products or services on our
website. These third party sites have separate and independent privacy policies. We therefore
have no responsibility or liability for the content and activities of these linked sites. Nonetheless, we
seek to protect the integrity of our site and welcome any feedback about these sites.
Google
Google’s advertising requirements can be summed up by Google’s Advertising Principles. They are
put in place to provide a positive experience for users.
https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/1316548?hl=en
We have not enabled Google AdSense on our site but we may do so in the future.
California Online Privacy Protection Act
CalOPPA is the first state law in the nation to require commercial websites and online services to
post a privacy policy. The law’s reach stretches well beyond California to require a person or
company in the United States (and conceivably the world) that operates websites collecting
personally identifiable information from California consumers to post a conspicuous privacy policy
on its website stating exactly the information being collected and those individuals with whom it is
being shared, and to comply with this policy.
– See more at: http://consumercal.org/california-online-privacy-protection-
actcaloppa/#sthash.0FdRbT51.dpuf
According to CalOPPA we agree to the following:
Users can visit our site/ play our game anonymously
Once this privacy policy is created, we will add a link to it on our home page, or as a minimum on
the first significant page after entering our website.
Our Privacy Policy link includes the word ‘Privacy’, and can be easily be found on the page
specified above.
Users will be notified of any privacy policy changes:
• On our Privacy Policy Page
Users are able to change their personal information:
• By calling us
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How does our site handle do not track signals?
We honor do not track signals and do not track, plant cookies, or use advertising when a Do Not
Track (DNT) browser mechanism is in place.
Does our site allow third party behavioral tracking?
It’s also important to note that we do not allow third party behavioral tracking
COPPA (Children Online Privacy Protection Act)
When it comes to the collection of personal information from children under 13, the Children’s
Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) puts parents in control. The Federal Trade Commission,
the nation’s consumer protection agency, enforces the COPPA Rule, which spells out what
operators of websites and online services must do to protect children’s privacy and safety online.
We do not specifically market to children under 13.
Fair Information Practices
The Fair Information Practices Principles form the backbone of privacy law in the United States and
the concepts they include have played a significant role in the development of data protection laws
around the globe. Understanding the Fair Information Practice Principles and how they should be
implemented is critical to comply with the various privacy laws that protect personal information.
In order to be in line with Fair Information Practices we will take the following responsive
action, should a data breach occur:
We will notify the users via email
• Within 7 business days
We also agree to the individual redress principle, which requires that individuals have a right to
pursue legally enforceable rights against data collectors and processors who fail to adhere to the
law. This principle requires not only that individuals have enforceable rights against data users, but
also that individuals have recourse to courts or a government agency to investigate and/or
prosecute non- compliance by data processors.
CAN SPAM Act
The CAN-SPAM Act is a law that sets the rules for commercial email, establishes requirements for
commercial messages, gives recipients the right to have emails stopped from being sent to them,
and spells out tough penalties for violations.
We collect your email address in order to:
• Process orders and to send information and updates pertaining to orders
To be in accordance with CANSPAM we agree to the following:
• NOT use false, or misleading subjects or email addresses
• Identify the message as an advertisement in some reasonable way
• Include the physical address of our business or site headquarters
• Monitor third party email marketing services for compliance, if one is used. • Honor opt-out/
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• Allow users to unsubscribe by using the link at the bottom of each email
If at any time you would like to unsubscribe from receiving future emails,
I took a short break from deadly deadly crunch to do something different:
So I did a talk at an IGDA event in Singapore back in December, it is now that I finally got around to trying to recreate it for other people to witness! gasp…
Anyway, it’s all a bit gloom and doom….but yes, the game players will kill the games they love because they won’t realise that their choices of money/convenience will impact the business of development. We usually think that business models are separated from the purity of entertainment, but sadly they are not. People have controlled what we like for as long as there has been media, or people in charge of curating anything – although this is as much about ourselves as it is big corporations destroying stuff.
So, I talked about Nintendo in a documentary. It was a lot of fun, fun is an important word…because I used the word “cool” where I should have used the word “fun”….the documentary starts with me saying something along the lines of “Nintendo Changed the videogame industry, because they made games cool” I think I meant fun….Later in the documentary I even say that mario isnt cool, unlike Sonic…so I contradict myself pretty effectively in the brief period that I feature.
It could be a lot worse, in fact, it isnt all that bad. But, I can’t shake that feeling of impostor syndrome…why am I the one talking about Nintendo? I guess I made some games on their platform (well a lot of games), but I still feel ill equipped to say too much. Still, hopefully what I said is interesting, watching it back there were a couple of weird moments where I thought “oh yeah, thats true…I never though of it quite like that” even though I was watching myself speak….yes…that sounds like I have some kind of mental disorder….perhaps I do?
For the time being, you can watch the documentary here:
Look at my face…I look old and stuff:
So, I am live streaming a lot of garbage on twitch. Essentially the idea that my screen is recorded on the internet for anyone to see probably makes me work a bit harder.
I am really not sure how long I can do it…It seems like a very boring thing for anyone to watch – and tomorrow, will I really have it running when everyone else is at work? Too weird…I guess the hope is that its just a way of proving to the world that we are doing stuff…we aren’t hiding under a rock, code is getting written every day!
You can always appear and hassle me, and say “James, fix that bug in the last vikings” or whatever.
On top of that now I have the essentials needed for a very low quality stream, I can make youtube videos a lot easier….here is the first.
Somewhat shockingly, I can see that I first posted a screenshot of this game on October 10, 2015! wow….the game has taken over a year…but I really havent been working on it for over a year…
Before the end of the year, I hope to do a 48 hour twitch stream of a new game called GORSD, its a multiplayer only arcade game, I am just making it because it wounds super cool fun in my mind, so keep an eye out for that. The usual twitch stream is just plain rubbish, so if I were you, I wouldn’t watch it. You can however add it to your list of blocked/blacklisted web addresses by using this: https://www.twitch.tv/springloadedsoftware
Hopefully this is the start of being more approachable, and sharing what we are doing with the people who care.
So, I have been thinking about trying to make a Vlog or two, and seeing how that goes. Funny thing is they probably take longer to make than writing a post for wordpress! but I think as a medium, video is way cooler, I get to directly talk at people, and show our games in action!
Expect something over the next couple of weeks. For now, this stream is like a vlog, but a it’s a particularly good vlog, because I didn’t make it.
I went to the Philippines recently for ESGS, and decided to show two new games for the first time publicly. so here they are in action for the first time ever! The two guys interviewing me were super pro, and partially inspired me to get to making videos of my own. If I can just stop making games for long enough to do the editing!
Well it’s been a crazy couple of days!
1 – Campaign clicker Steam:
The imminent end of the USA elections meant we really needed to launch Campaign Clicker on steam….so late on Wednesday night, we finally had it uploaded and ready to launch.
Launching a game is always quite a bit of craziness, so it’s good to do it during a quiet period….this is not a quiet period!
Anyway, when I woke up in the morning I was hit with a mostly negative reviews rating, and a reasonable volume of complaining…I went to work and saw everyone’s sad faces. I think releasing a free to play game with in app purchases on steam is a fairly risky thing to do. Not only to the some of the more vocal steam users really hate F2P/IAP, they also have some pride over their platform, and so feel personal offended when we tarnish it with a game that doesn’t sit alongside the latest block buster or indie hit.
We had bets in the office of how many people would download the game in the first 7 days, and that ranged from 1 – 15K…
It’s heart breaking, we knew this was a risk, but that feeling that you made the wrong choice and crushed everyone’s morale is a little disheartening.
I was in the middle of fixing a pile of issues for the game when I got a call reminding me that I had a corporate lunch with some game developers and government folks that I had totally forgotten about. So I left and ran there while still feeling a bit dejected.
2 – Upwards
At lunch we talked about games, and just as I started to leave I glanced at my phone….and GASP!! My friend had sent a message telling me that we had a “what we are playing” front page feature on the iOS appstore for the last Vikings (USA App Store!)…suddenly my day was feeling a lot better, I stepped out of the lunch, and glanced again at my phone to see that the steam reviews had been bumped up to a “mixed”…so yeah everything is good!
3 – Further upwards
I got back to the office and finished up the update, which Jeff / Cindy / Shuyun all helped out on and got uploaded. My excitement for the last Vikings could barely be contained, because I also had a message mentioning that we were destined for a global feature this week….So yes more epic than I could take!
4 – Weirder upwards
After spending a lot more time fixing campaign clicker steam bugs and dealing with the slowly de-toxifying community, I woke up to find a potential offer for my band to release a new record! Yes a new album of punk rock after not having made one in 5 years….while it’s super awesome to be making games, I also really love making loud music. And knowing someone out there likes that loud music enough to want to release some of it made everything even more exciting!
5 – And back down…
So on Monday I have to send a demo to Nintendo of our latest game….being frank it’s not in a good place, I spent the whole day trying to get something working and failed quite spectacularly. Now there are only 2 days left, and its making me feel sad! Balancing that with Campaign Clicker, and the Last Vikings is proving tricky! But wow….from an early hours of Thursday morning steam launch to Friday, that was a pretty exciting bunch of events!
Anyway, if you are going to be in Manilla at the end of this month we will be showing Netherrealms (a game for Nintendo/mobile/steam), and our fishing game, this will be the first time either of these games have been shown….and being frank they probably arent ready! so….the stress train will keep on rolling for a little while!
Let’s write about music. With the forthcoming trip across the globe to my home country of the Un-United States of England I am super ecstatic to be picking up a guitar and entering a swearathon all in the name of rock n roll.
So I wanted to press a new record but I simply haven’t had the time, life is all about priorities, and mine are all fucked up. Well not exactly, but you know how this stuff is, I think that always having ideas for new games and things to create just gets a bit tiring after a while, because it’s an eternity of frustration. You want to do a million things, but you will be dead long before you can do even 2% of them. So balancing life becomes tricky, which is why playing music again is so damned exciting.
When I was in the UK, I could not imagine a week or two going by without playing some very loud music and screaming my lungs out, these days years can go by. It’s like something that defined who I am, or something I thought defined who I was has been pushed aside and forgotten! It’s partially because there is no place in Singapore where I think I could stand on stage and swear at everyone without getting told to stop within minutes, but it’s probably mainly because work has taken over.
Anyway, excitement aside, I think this happens with a lot of things! Take relationships, if you are so obsessed with making games that it takes over your conscious and subconscious mind, it can be hard to really exist in the moment.
I know there are many people like me, who always think they will find the time to relax and live a normal life after milestone X is reached….thing is I know that after milestone X, milestone XX will appear, I have almost stopped lying to myself now about it, and I just accept that one day I need to find a balance, and eventually I need to stop putting that off until next year.
So yeah, I think most of my life is accelerating, and I can’t decide if I need to focus more on having fun, or making games, whichever way I go, I will regret not doing the other. I used to only have long term relationships, and as I accelerate in to the selfish tunnel of videogame obsession, my relationships seem to get shorter with it. I could go in to the depths of personal life things here, but suffice to say it’s a constant struggle, and it’s probably harder for the people I am with than it is for me. I wrote a song about it a while ago, and have finally decided to upload it.
So, in my life there are at least a few times where things didn’t reach their full potential;
Pokemon Go is pretty popular (at this moment, it is more popular than twitter, and some reports are even saying it’s getting used more than facebook). When I first heard about the game, and even its predecessor (Ingress, Niantic’s previous game), I thought “that’s cool…but hey that’s like my game”….
Before I go on, I want to make it clear that I am not in anyway trying to say “I had this idea first, I am grumpy because I should be rich” or “I had this idea first therefore I am great”, not by any stretch, I am sure I wasn’t the first to have an idea like Pokemon Go, I (like many other people) just didn’t build it.
Colonies:
First let’s look at the game I wanted to make, it will be a long story, that starts way back in 2010 (it may have even been 2009) when I started designing the game. While working at Lucasarts I saw the farmville craze and couldn’t understand why our company wasn’t taking advantage of this kind of market on both facebook and mobile. So I came up with a game pitch in my own time (it was called “Star Wars: colonies”) that you could play on Facebook and on your phone, and depending on how you started your game you could either play in any of three game styles, pick a Farmer to play Farmville, bounty hunter to play something more akin to Xcom, or a Pilot to play a space RTS/Logistics/Trading game. While all three felt like different games they were actually the same game with three entry points. your character choice simply dictated the section of the game you would be exposed to first.
It was also multiplayer, so a one player could enlist the help of another and pay them for their time. For example. my farm might come under attack from another player who is fulfilling a randomly generated mission (steal 3 Banthas or whatever). not wanting to lose those Banthas I woud have a short period of time to put up a ransom for other players to help defend my farm (along with the auto turrets and things I had already built to protect myself). If someone wanted to earn the ransom for helping protect my farm, that player would come in and play a multiplayer game of XCom in my level…so two players I have never met fighting in my farm…which is still a pretty cool idea…On top of that there was a space trading game, you could build fleets of spaceships and run deliveries for the farmers, or fly bounty hunters around the galaxy (or maybe you see a planet with an order for 3 Banthas, so you would then generate the mission above by offering a job for bounty random hunters).
If you didn’t get the bounty hunter to the right space in time, or failed to deliver the blue milk before it expired you wouldn’t get paid for the job. You could also set up pirate fleets to add to the AI pirates, and leave them stationed on popular space routes. What was also cool was that a farmer could buy a spaceship, build up a band of bounty hunter friends, in just the same way that a Pilot could save their money and buy a small farm…eventually you could in theory run all three career paths yourself…but that would probably be pretty hard core. I still think it’s a cool as shit game design…but the scope of it is kind of big! and without the Star Wars franchise it might be a hard sell.
Further Developments at the Corporation:
What made this interesting was that Paul Meegan became our new president at some point after I had pitched this design to my boss in Singapore. Paul was in the USA planning the future for the company, while we were filling our time with various things a lot of which were bundled under the title of “training”. When the plan was eventually unveiled to us, it was interestingly similar to what I had already designed, a space trading game, an FPS, a strategy game, and a Farmville game…all separate titles on different platforms that would somehow link together. In no way had my design influenced him, I am sure he had no idea who I was, and certainly didn’t appear to have much interest in the input of people like me (in his defence it was a big company, so it would probably be impossible to give everyone a voice – as it would slow down an already slow and very very expensive process).
The colonies concept was lost/ignored, and Lucasarts Singapore may or “may not” have got started on the Farmville portion of the above (See I am tryin to stick to my NDA). I was not involved in this project, (Kotaku Reveals Outpost).
There was a problem in that the details of how the games were going to link together were never really figured out, and the fact that their launch dates would be so important to each other meant that each game became a dependency to the other, as schedules went all over the place the games eventually broke off, and the idea of them being interlinked also got cut.
I was working on all kinds of other things, but did try to pitch a version of the strategy game, which was kind of a fun challenge to design…how to make an RTS based on what was happening in an FPS, I think the high level was that you were supposed to manage the battlefield from your phone and help the players in the FPS, but that made it feel like a companion app, I was more interested in making it a game…so you would have your squads, which would be small representations of parties from the FPS, you could select parties and favourite them, so this was a bit like building a deck in a card battle game – you would try to build your squads from the worlds best players….these squads would then fight other squads (really very slowly) and the kill death ratios in the FPS would determine which squads won and lost in the RTS. There were some little design things to make it so it wouldn’t stop working when players weren’t playing. Because the games had to feed into each other if you were being used in squads in the RTS, you got extra XP and stuff…but that was hard to figure out because the FPS didn’t really have it’s meta-game systems figured out at that point.
So yeah, getting back to the point! I carried on with the space trading design, and updated it (still in 2010) to become a standalone 4X game, with a GPS feature, looking back at my design doc it says “This is the Killer Feature!” directly above the description for what is essentially Pokemon go / Ingress.
So you would earn resources to build your space fleet (either in the single player game or from holding real world Galaxies). You would then walk around and go to Dimensional portals, here you would send your spaceships through to do battle…you wouldn’t know what was on the other side, you would just know who owned that galaxy. If your fleet was stronger they would be defeated and you would take the galaxy, otherwise you might just damage them.
owning a galaxy earns resources, if you are attacked you get a push notifications and can reinforce the galaxy. Every time a galaxy changes owners its resource generation output would be increased, making huge hot spots that people want to fight over….I remember speaking to my boss and mentioning that special spots like “McDonalds” and “Starbucks” could become sponsored galaxies, and would automatically have higher values than other galaxies around them, cause people to come to their stores! (just like McDonalds an Pokemon Go) finally I had the plan for AR, but it seemed tricky, because I wanted to hold my phone up in McDonalds and see peoples fleets flying though the sky and entering the battle…getting peoples real world positions (so things spawn from their hands) would be super hard, and probably not worth the effort, so rather than do something half baked I thought we should probably leave the AR bit for later. (I think the AR in pokemon is little more than a gimmick). While my design doesn’t have collecting, it had research trees instead, and more co-operative elements which promotes deeper social play (something missing in the current version of Pokemon Go). It also had star wars as a franchise…and a few other cool innovations here and there. So I never imagined it would be super huge, but I thought it would have been a fun and innovative game. Like so many things at big companies, it was just brushed aside and left under a pile of virtual files to collect dust.
And then…
So what is my point in this post? I think ideas are not the core of everything, acting on them is a lot more important, I am sure 1000 people have had the same idea, maybe they even had a go at making it! Niantic had the funding, and the brand to make pokemon go a success. The execution of their game is actually not all that great, and they are missing a lot of core features that would make it substantially better. I don’t really understand how it cost 30 million to build their company and publish 3 products, it seems like something that could be done for a fraction of the cost…but still a high cost none the less.
So in short, I missed out on making my own Pokemon Go, because of many factors, none of which I could reasonably expected to have overcome. I could never have made that game because I never had the opportunity, people or the funding, and as I have learned from running my own company, chasing funding takes so much time, I may as well just not do it and just get on with making things appear on screen. Does the success of Pokemon Go it piss me off? not at all, it makes me feel more confident in my other ideas. I had long ago given up on making that game, (despite redesigning it under a new name and new theme), it was just another title in the backlog of “things I will make one day”. Much like I would happily go back and make the farmville/spacetrader/bountyhunter game one of these days!
I could get more stuck up my own ass by talking about the “Kenner Star Wars” pitch/prototype that I developed over a year before skylanders and 3 years before Disney Infinity. A project with a toys to life spin that was stopped after gaining a lot of momentum. At an important meeting on the road to greenlight any hopes of making it were crushed by a person who said something along the lines of “I don’t really get it, I never played with toys growing up, so I don’t understand why people collect toys”. I wish I could share the video of that game…it was the most killer pitch I ever put together (I don’t have it).
So, I guess the only thing that scares me is that our game “Pixona” is probably the best idea I have had for a game…and just like Pokemon Go, or even the Toys-To-Life genre, I am sure many people out there have had the same idea! we have been sitting on Pixona for 3 years, we even own the US trademark! The problem is, we never get our heads high enough above water to make it. Let’s hope that our next game, get’s us the breathing room to step back and make Pixona, something we believe can have a real impact on the people who play it, and give them a new way of playing games. (even if someone else makes it, I guess our execution will be very unique and special…but still I don’t want to be in a secondary position)
After that maybe I will get round to the other crazy ideas I have like fixing the record industry with a new media format, or making a platform for crowd sourcing/game dev unlike anything else out there…I guess it’s good to aim big, but if you don’t ever get to try these things it can lead to a life of disappointment.
So we have something worth celebrating! Campaign clicker has been downloaded over quarter of a million times! Which means that collectively our games have been downloaded over 5 million times!
That’s a very big number, I can skim through some other things:
RATINGS:
All our games are rated above 4, (Campaign clicker is currently rocking a 4.2 daily average votes, although its overall is only 4.0 on google play…so hopefully it will go up over time, but, it is my lowest rated game). So in general people like our games which is nice.
WEB
Excluded from these figures: Tiny Dice Dungeon has 453,577 plays on Kongregate.com, which is pretty cool.
STEAM
Steam wasn’t counted, but Hiragana Pixel Party has been purchased 380 times, with code activations bringing it up to 594 units. Which is low, but being frank I never expected much action from steam, our future products should be more mainstream.
KICKSTARTER
Yes remember we tried one? – it failed badly.
NINTENDO
We released 2 games on 3DS, we can’t share the figures….its a lot more than steam, but a lot less than we might hope for.
XBOX ONE
I heard a rumour that we were the first developer in Singapore to get dev kits! and what have we done with them!? we got Hiragana Pixel Party up and running….but haven’t taken it over the finish line….
PLAYSTATION
We finished Space Lift on the Vita, it just needs achievements and a bit of balancing. I want to finish it, but we don’t currently have any dev kits.
GAMES:
Off the top of my head I can think of 11 games that have been made as prototypes, or are currently in development! which is way too many, so we have decided to focus on finishing some in the near future!
Hopefully we will carry on making things that make people happy.
As we close in on having more players than the entire population of Singapore, I guess I need a new target. 64 million players….the entire population of the UK! – which seems totally impossible to me at the moment. However, if you had asked me 3 years ago to pick an impossible number for my games, I would have said that getting enough downloads for the entire population of Singapore would be kind of impossible.
So let’s think about the next 59 Million! – if we never get them, that’s fine! As really making games is all that actually matters!
To waste your lives and mine, we will try to illustrate what 5 million people looks like…to help us here is a person from “Space Lift Danger Panic!”:
And here are 10,000 “Space Lift Danger Panic!”people:
I could paste that image 100 times to reach 1 million…but I wont. Instead imagine all of those people in the above image somehow come together and create one huge naked person:
The 10,000 Man-Man:
So then to reach 5 million, we need 500 10,000 Man-Men
Amazingly it doesn’t look lie as many people as I thought it would! still, I know that if I walk through Singapore, and try to look at every person I see, I can carry on walking forever and still wont see every person. 5 Million people is a lot. I am very happy they played our games, and I am even more excited about what we can do in the future. I am proud of the fact that we back fill our adverts with good causes, and that the text I write in our games isn’t all just dumb garbage, most is, but some of the things I say I think are important, our next game has is set after an apocalypse brought on by global warming, but most people probably won’t notice….but out of the people that do, maybe one or two will think twice about taking a plastic fork instead of washing and reusing a metal one. (something I should do more of!). First and foremost I just want to make great games, and if they become even at all preachy then I will be failing at that. It’s just amazing to think the volume of people that see our stuff, and to not to want to try and do something with that.
- The State of things
So, we are still doing our thing, making some magic happen here and there! It’s been a tough few months, the Last Vikings did not make back its investment which kind of sucks. Hopefully over its lifetime it will finally get there, as we continue to get payments each month from it. The studio cost around 300K to run last year, and while we released some other games on 3DS during that period, their profits were pretty low, so I just throw all our dev costs at TLV to keep things easy to envision in my mind!
Equally this year, we have spent 1-2 months updating the Last Vikings, and those costs will be put against our newer games. It’s a super simplistic way of doing accounting, and isn’t in the least bit accurate, If we had some production muscle than I would actually start tracking people against projects and working our costs correctly, instead doing it this way is super basic, but helps give us some idea where we are going while not detracting from important development time.
This year we released Hiragana Pixel Party on Steam, while I expected to sell 18 copies (really that was my internal estimate) I hoped I would learn something from the experience. In general our experience with Steam was pretty good, it’s simple to do everything, and things are mostly under your control, which puts the experience from a publishing side somewhere between Android and Apple, but closer to publishing on the Google. How many did we sell? Well I think we are up to around 300 units, which made me pretty happy. Obviously this is barely profitable, if at all, but I see it as a fun experience, and a preparation for releasing The Last Vikings on the platform.
So all of that sounds doom and gloom, but it isn’t so bad, at least things are still bringing in money, and we still have our doors open. So what’s next!?
- Fishing Game:
Well remember our fishing game? Well that’s kind of ongoing, whenever there is nothing to do, the art team just start drawing things for it. I am not actively writing code for it, but I know one day I will jump in there and finish it up! Its super cool already, it just need that free to play model that will make it work.
- Civilization Clicker:
That isn’t its real name, but in January we started building an idle game to destroy all others! Its got a vast volume of art, and we are really happy with it. We got really far with it, and now it sits around 70% complete. We wont release it for a few more months…due to the next title:
- Campaign Clicker:
So I was walking home from teaching, and trying to think of a good name for “Civilization Clicker” and was just thinking of random words starting with C, and “Campaign Clicker” popped into my mind. I thought that’s cool, but it sounds more like an election game, wow…we should make an election game. So I suggested it to the team, and we said “yeah let’s make it in a week” which seemed all feasible and stuff. That was 5 weeks ago! But, on the plus side its very nearly done now. It’s super innovative, the design just came from the name really, and how epic the whole thing is over in the USA right now. So it’s a modified version of Civilization clicker, in Civilization clicker you take on jobs, so Campaign Clicker is essentially a whole game made from just one of those jobs.
What makes it interesting though is that it features live tweets from the candidates, and players can get their tweets into the game too, making it full of dynamic and current content. I don’t think anyone has done anything quite like that before so I am kind of excited about it. Also if you do well in the game your progress goes on to the online scoreboards, so people playing as Democrats can try to beat all the people playing as Republicans, which adds extra fun to the proceedings.
I like the fact that we are taking tweets and current events and showing them to people in the context of a game, I think some of the things people say come across as really hilarious when seen in isolation. So my hope is people will become more informed about the state of the political situation in the USA from playing this game. Also I hope we reach some players who might just be following the opinions of their peers, and not taking the time to understand for themselves the main points of each of the candidates.
Obviously I am English, USA politics is not something I can comment on. In fact, I don’t feel right commenting on politics anywhere, I don’t feel like I have enough information to have a valid opinion on any current affairs, sure ask me about tax for games companies and I can say something, but even in that instance I feel I don’t understand the tax of the industrial sector as a whole, so I can only say “Yeah it’s hard to make money, don’t tax me” which is very self-centred and myopic.
What I do love about politics is the show, it’s all about who can get everyone’s emotions running the highest, and reach into the heart of the voter rather than the mind. Why else would we have campaign songs, or focal memes, the fact that Bernie sanders can seem more appealing because a bird landed on his podium is just so far from the point of what it’s actually all about. But I can’t help but be affected, the picture of an friendly old guy who is loved by the animals, and seems like as estranged grandfather I never had is just lovely, but what has it got to do with his message? Very little! So, my hope is that the game helps distance people ever so slightly from the show, and brings their focus to the messages and intentions of the candidates and parties they intend to support.
So when is Campaign clicker out? Hopefully very soon on iOS and Android
Expect an update soon on some other projects we have going on!
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