Mika Mobile

Latest news from Mika Mobile

2012-12-18T00:05:00.000-08:00

Since it's been quite a while, I figured I'd spend a little time talking about how things are going and what we've been up to with Battleheart's pseudo-sequel.

In general, Mika Mobile is doing well. We relocated our home and business recently, which was a pretty big distraction, but we're getting back into our comfort zone again. We recently released iPhone 5 resolution updates for our two most popular games (ZV2 and Battleheart) and Apple gave both games some nice featuring back in October as a result, which is always welcome and helps invigorate downloads. It amazes us how people are still discovering/downloading our games, often years after their initial release, and it definitely helps keep our spirits up between releases. In fact, as of this posting ZV2 is back in the top 100 apps again in the US, which is just crazy.

Battleheart "2" is our most ambitious project by a long shot, so its development has naturally been taking longer than any of our previous games. We've been on it close to a year now more or less, and it's definitely starting to feel like forever since we released something! Much like Battleheart before it, this is a big project, so we knew there would be a pretty large gap between releases this time - some of you might recall that OMG Pirates! and Battleheart were separated by more than a year too. There's still plenty left to do, but I'm very confident in where it's going.

Due to the fact that our games are frequent targets of cloning, I'm still not prepared to give a lot of fine detail about the design, and how it differs from the original Battleheart, but I can share a couple things. As I mentioned in a prior blog, we're trying to focus more on exploration, rather than the game simply being a series of static arenas. Towards this end, we decided early on to build the game in 3D, with more of an isometric camera perspective (Think Diablo, any RTS, or old Zelda games), and make this our first game which uses 3D polygonal art/animation so that we can have great variety in characters/animation without having to make a trillion sprites. This doesn't mean our art style has been abandoned - in fact, we've reproduced all of the baddies from Battleheart in glorious 3d and their charming designs made the transition nicely. The aesthetic is definitely different, but I think it's still quite appealing.

Another thing we're pretty stoked about is the new class system. I think one of the things that gave Battleheart a lot of replayability was the potential to try different classes, see what their spells/abilities were like and play with different party combinations. This time around, we wanted to allow more customization beyond simply picking between two mutually exclusive skills here and there. The current design (always subject to change, but its working so far) is to allow you to kinda create your own classes by drawing from a pool of active and passive skills that are designed to complement each other. There will be some requirements/restrictions for this or that, but there's a lot of potential for mixing and matching, ensuring that almost no two players will build their kit exactly the same (hopefully). Hypothetically, you could have a wizard who swings a claymore, or a rogue who can whip out a bow to do some ranged attacks when foes are out of dagger range.

Hopefully we'll be able to share more with you guys soon. In the mean time, enjoy the holidays!

Lessons from Diablo 3

2012-05-29T15:58:00.002-07:00

I've played a whole bunch of Diablo 3 since its release, which I partially legitimize as "research". There's a fair amount of gameplay overlap between what they're doing with Diablo, and what I'm hoping to pull off with Battleheart 2.

Like the original Battleheart, our next game is going to involve selecting from a pool of available powers to help you manage the battlefield. We're currently aiming to have nearly 100 different active abilities in Battleheart 2 (up from Battleheart's 50), many of which are coming over from the first game, with a whole slew of new ones too. These all provide different benefits like healing, single target damage, splash damage, defense, mobility, control, etc. Choosing your toolkit, and using that kit to stay alive is the heart of what makes Battleheart fun, and it's pretty much the same concept powering Diablo 3 as well. Across Diablo's five player classes exist an insane variety of powers and "runes" which modify those powers, sometimes into wholly different abilities. As you level up, you gain access to a broader and broader toolkit, and it's pretty fun to experiment with different combinations of offensive and defensive powers.

Where I think Diablo falls short is in it's difficulty curve, and the way it forces the player to use certain abilities and gear in a specific way. Around level 30 is the game's sweet spot - you have most of your toolkit available to you at that point, and you can freely use most of it without feeling obligated to play in any specific way. But afterwards, it steadily becomes more and more punishing as you approach it's hardest difficulty setting, "inferno" mode. Combat becomes so fast paced and brutal that you are forced to use several of your limited skill selections on defensive buttons and passive buffs. As a barbarian, for example, you simply have no hope of survival without relying on specific tactics - you MUST use a shield, you MUST use a defensive battle shout to raise your stats, and you MUST equip as much health and defense raising equipment as you can find, otherwise you'll be splattered like a fly on a windshield as soon as you run across your first foe.

To me, this totally pisses on what the whole game was building towards. I feel like I have very little freedom in how I build my character, because the enemies simply hit too hard and move too fast for any other tactical options to be available. It's really sad too, because earlier in the game the whole system is in full bloom, and you could freely experiment with different abilities and feel like you were refining your own unique playstyle. It works great, and then gets broken in an entirely avoidable way.

These observations haven't really changed how I'm approaching Battleheart 2, just reaffirmed what I've already been doing. Our combat is much slower than Diablo's, and you're never fighting huge unwieldy groups of 20+. This gives the player the time to parse what's actually happening and make decisions, rather than every engagement being over in the blink of an eye. We also don't have a ludicrous stat curve- in Diablo 3, you might start the game striking enemies for 10 damage, and be hitting for 100,000 damage by the end. A curve that steep will inevitably lead to rough patches where a little bad luck with loot drops will put you miserably far behind, or conversely, a little bit of good luck will trivialize hours of game play because you're doing twice the damage you're supposed to.

Overall, Diablo 3 has glimmers of greatness, where your gear level and the monsters difficulty meet at an ideal level, and your tactical options are at their peak, allowing you to feel powerful, challenged, and a little clever/creative with your character's build. I hope my next game captures some of that too. It just seems to me that Diablo is smothered by a few strange decisions, and held back a bit from its potential as a result.

Battleheart "2" (sort of)

2012-03-16T18:44:00.000-07:00

We've been working on a new game for a while - it began life in early 2010 as a sci-fi themed game, back before we started Battleheart, and was shelved after a couple months of pre-production. Now it's back, and it's changed quite a bit since then - while initially we thought we'd keep with the spaceships and laser guns (some folks might recall me tweeting about a space game earlier this year), as we got into it, we found ourselves just wanting to do more fantasy stuff. I love swords and magic and monsters, and the game is going to share a lot in common with Battleheart anyway, so why not just call it another entry in the series? A "spiritual successor" perhaps?

So that's what we've been going with for the last few weeks, and making big progress. It's still a long ways from release, so don't get too excited yet - the original Battleheart took almost a year to develop, and this game is likely to be bigger in every way. That said, we're getting better at this stuff all the time, so hopefully it will see release before we're old and grey.

Why have I hesitated to just call it "Battleheart 2" though? Well, it's going to share a lot of gameplay ideas with Battleheart, but a lot is changing too. I don't want to go into intense detail yet, but I can share some of our objectives. Battleheart was (as the name implies) all about combat - tricking out your party with a collection of powers and equipment that complement each other, using powers at the right time on the right bad guy... that's the core of the game, and we're keeping and building on that. But it lacked in two major areas - it had basically no plot, and no exploration. Our goal with this new game is to maintain the feel of Battleheart's combat, but take it from a simple series of arenas and put it in a more fully formed world to romp around. It's a little ambitious, but I feel like we're well on our way.

Our Future with Android

2012-03-09T11:10:00.002-08:00

Some folks recently sent us news that the 50mb limit of Google's market has been lifted. Here's the info straight from the horse's mouth:

http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2012/03/android-apps-break-50mb-barrier.html

Unfortunately, the same app size limit still exists. It's still going to require the same technique developers have been using to circumvent the limit for quite some time. The .apk will need to be under 50mb, but can download further data after the fact. The improvement here is that Google is now offering to host up to 4GB of extra data, and that any secondary download is more tightly integrated with the market itself. These are welcome improvements, but due to the way Battleheart is built, it would require a significant amount of time to implement.

As near as I can tell, a complete removal of any size limits is never going to happen due to the way the android market must download apps into a finite download cache (somewhere between 30-50mb depending on the device) which must exist on the device's internal storage. Many devices don't have much internal storage, and the exact amount can vary wildly, so if the cache has to stay, it would have been great to be optionally placed on the device's roomy SD card as needed, and its size greatly increased. This seems like a better solution to me, but I'm not privy to the inner workings of the Android market. I'm sure there are reasons why they chose the approach they did.

We could re-engineer how Battleheart accesses its data to work with this new system. This isn't an impossible task, but it doesn't make a lot of sense to dedicate resources to it. For one, we're in the middle of production on another game, and can't simply drop everything to implement this because Google finally delivered on a year-old promise. And secondly, as I mentioned on Twitter, our Android apps aren't making money. A few people took offense to the bluntness of this statement, so I'll clarify in more delicate terms. There's a big difference between generating revenue, and "making money" - It's not that they haven't generated income, but that income is offset by the additional support costs the platform has demanded. Where did your dollar go? We spent about 20% of our total man-hours last year dealing with Android in one way or another - porting, platform specific bug fixes, customer service, etc. I would have preferred spending that time on more content for you, but instead I was thanklessly modifying shaders and texture formats to work on different GPUs, or pushing out patches to support new devices without crashing, or walking someone through how to fix an installation that wouldn't go through. We spent thousands on various test hardware. These are the unsung necessities of offering our apps on Android. Meanwhile, Android sales amounted to around 5% of our revenue for the year, and continues to shrink. Needless to say, this ratio is unsustainable.

From a purely economic perspective, I can no longer legitimize spending time on Android apps, and the new features of the market do nothing to change this. While this news may be disappointing, I hope people can accept that we've done everything we can reasonably do to bring our apps to as many potential players as possible, despite the obstacles.

Thanks for reading, and for your understanding.

Edit: I'm seeing this post linked in various places, and I want to make one thing clear if you're arriving here from a blog having a slow news day: my comments here are simply my experience. It is not a condemnation of the android platform as a whole. It is not a proclamation that things will never improve. It is also not a weapon to be swung in the never-ending holy war between fans of one platform or another. This is simply a message to our players, who are wondering what we're up to. And if you feel the urge to criticize our decision, ask yourself: are you an authority on the value of our time? You don't have to like our decision, but you must accept that we are the only ones equipped to make it.

Depth vs. Accessibility

2012-02-24T14:30:00.000-08:00

I've been spending a lot of time thinking about this subject. It's the same thing the industry has been talking about for the last several years, only with different terms. The popular adjectives are "casual" and "core", which describe both games and gamers alike, but in very broad, unspecific terms. Casual is usually synonymous with Farmville, Bejeweled, and other mindless time-killers that require little skill or commitment from the player. Meanwhile, the other end of the spectrum demands twitch reflexes, and a high tolerance for violence, as most "core" games are male power fantasies that usually involve guns, cars, and you being a hero. In either case, most publishers and developers are thinking in terms of demographics: which subset of the gaming population are we trying to appeal to, what's the revenue potential of "A+B+C", etc.

If you ask me, too much energy is spent thinking about games and gamers in these broad terms, rather than getting to the heart of why people have these different tastes. It really comes down to accessibility. There are a lot of ingredients that collide to determine how accessible your game is. Is it stylistically grotesque, or cute? Is it incredibly complicated, or mindlessly easy? How long is a typical play session? It's no secret that most of the big hits on the App Store tend to be very simple - they take about 5 seconds to learn how to play, and very slowly ramp up their difficulty and mechanical complexity, they're usually pretty cute, and you can play them for as little or as much time as you like.

But its not necessary that every game has to be incredibly simple in order to lure people in successfully - depth and accessibility aren't mutually exclusive, because not everyone's taste falls perfectly into one category or another. I've seen my own tastes shift as I've gotten older - I used to forgive a lot of tedious bullshit that games would present me with, but I'd muscle through it. These days, I'm a lot less forgiving. The goal is to simply avoid putting unnecessary obstacles in the way of people's fun. Don't bombard them with information too fast, don't subject them to badly written soap opera cut-scenes or huge amounts of travel time, keep the visuals appealing, don't have ridiculous loading times, and keep your input super responsive. It seems obvious, but you still see these mistakes being made today by huge, multi-million dollar budget games.

There does come a point, however, when some players will get turned away by too little complexity. For lots of us, a game has to offer some resistance, or we don't feel like we're accomplishing anything. Some of my favorite games present challenges so overwhelming that they repel most people, but that in turn adds to the payoff if/when you surmount those challenges. There's also a certain joy to be had in simply exploring and learning about a game's rules from experience, rather than being handed all the information you need to succeed, but that's asking a greater level of mental commitment from the player.

So this is the real question for a developer - where does your game live on this spectrum? How much will your game suffer in terms of fun and depth if you choose to make it too accessible? When you omit something, are you compromising the product, or just trimming the fat?

I think I've walked this line with mixed success over the years, with Battleheart being the one I'm most proud of. I feel like it has a pretty good amount of tactical depth, without being overwhelming when you first start. It requires some decent reflexes, but it's no "Ninja Gaiden". You get to kill things and kick ass, but its still cute and kid-friendly. For my next game, I'm aiming to push things a little further towards the "depth" side of the spectrum and see how things go. Mobile app consumers represent a huge and diverse group of people, so there's no question that there's an appetite for something a little more involved and complex.

Amazon?

2011-11-28T16:47:00.000-08:00

I recently asked on Twitter what people's thoughts were about releasing an Android version of Zombieville 2 exclusively through Amazon's app store, rather than Google's android market.

The reason I was considering this is simple - the official android market is a hassle. I talked about this earlier this year, and it hasn't gotten any better. The market continues to be plagued by random technical problems, such as orders failing to execute, downloads failing for no reason, bogus error messages about insufficient space to install, or invalid package signing, and so on. I also have the pleasure of having to process refunds for people who want to transfer their purchase to a different google account, or had their phone stolen and misused, or had their 4-year-old buy a game accidentally, and so on.

As a small developer, I'd rather be spending my time making cool games, instead of explaining to the 1000th person that their order failed because of a bug in the google market. For most android users these issues never crop up - it only seems to represent a small percentage of our buyers, but its enough to generate a part time job's worth of e-mail.

Like Apple's store, Amazon handles all technical and billing issues, which made me think "hey, why not just release on Amazon, and punt that responsibility?" Well, there's a pretty serious downside to that proposition. To put it bluntly, Amazon App Store sales have thus far represented a meaningless percentage of our revenue - less than 1% of our income for this year. This is no doubt due to the fact that their store requires a separate download, isn't pre-installed on any devices besides the Kindle Fire (as far as I know), or available internationally. And the release of the Kindle Fire hasn't exactly... set our sales on fire? Since the introduction of the device, sales of Battleheart on Amazon haven't improved appreciably. Combine this with a great deal of "nooooo!" from Twitter and, well, it seems unlikely we'll go that route.

Cintiq 24HD

2011-10-28T17:30:00.000-07:00

I've been using Wacom tablets for many years. I started off with a first generation Intuos back in high school, and got acclimated to the unique style of drawing "remotely" that such things demand as I used it through college. In fact, the art for the original Zombieville USA was all done on the same ancient first generation Intuos I'd been hauling around for nearly a decade.

After the success of Zombieville, I decided it was time to upgrade, so I picked up a Cintiq 12wx. I firmly believe in the adage "it is a poor craftsman who blames his tools", but I really felt the speed and ease with which I could generate art for my games improve dramatically by being able to draw directly on screen. And honestly, if you look at OMG Pirates and Battleheart next to Zombieville USA... there's a stark improvement there, and partly that improvement is thanks to better tools.

After a couple years of squeezing the most out of the 12 inch model, I decided to upgrade yet again and get the beastly 24HD model which wacom just released. This thing is the Ferrari of graphics tablets. In fact, that's a perfect analogy, because like a Ferrari, its prohibitively expensive, and not necessarily all that practical at times. Here's the gist of it.

Display Quality
This was the main reason I was interested in the 24HD - the 12 inch model is great, but the LCD in it is not. The color leaves quite a bit to be desired, so I would often find myself doing hue/value touchups on my main monitor after doing a drawing on the 12. No amount of calibration can make it an acceptable monitor for checking final art.

The 24HD boasts a much improved display over the 21 cintiq (which is itself superior to the 12) and is finally up to the task of being a primary monitor. In fact, it's a damn good thing that's true, because the thing is roughly the size of an aircraft carrier. You may not fully grasp when you see it in pictures, but a 24 inch monitor with a HUGE bezel for extra buttons and room to lay your elbow is going to engulf just about any desk, leaving little room for another adjacent display. You really have to construct your entire workspace around the 24HD. But that's not to say this thing can't move, which brings me to...

Ergonomics
You might have seen the promo video Wacom released of this thing. The stand (which is built like a tank to counterweight the display) is designed to allow the display to be positioned in a variety of different ways. The highlight, for me, is being able to pull the thing down over the edge of my desk so that it's basically hanging in my lap. This is far and away the most comfortable drawing position I've used with any tablet - I'm used to curling up with the 12 inch model in my lap, but this really almost feels like cheating by comparison. If you prefer, it can be laid flat, or locked into just about any angle you can ask for.

The Little Things
A better display, larger size, and better ergonomics were not unexpected, but I've noticed a few other things which took me by surprise. I didn't realize just accustomed I'd become to the 12 inch models screwy pen behavior - it has diminished accuracy at the edges of the screen, so the center area is where you do all of your work. The 24 is rock solid all around, no cursor warble, every stroke is as steady as can be. Other details that stand out are a convenient on-screen keyboard, for quickly naming a layer or saving a file while the screen hovers in your lap and obscures your access to the keyboard.

Honestly, the 12 has been a great ally for the last couple years, but the 24 just makes it look like a toy by comparison.

Games I've been playing

2011-10-26T18:51:00.000-07:00

Since wrapping up Zombieville 2, I finally have a little free time to burn, and usually for me that means checking out some new games. Here's my thoughts on some stuff I've been playing lately.

Dark Souls
This game is astounding in many respects, and I have a ton of respect for its developers. For the uninitiated, its basically a brutally difficult action RPG that plays a bit like metroid - you slowly explore a large world which steadily unfolds as you defeat bosses and gain in power. It's decidedly "retro" in many ways, not the least of which being that it will kill you over and over again, like you're kid icarus, and medusa's on her period.

For me, one of the best feelings a game can evoke is a sense of discovery. I love the experience of finding a new interesting location, character, or power, and Dark Souls is both full of things to discover, and devoid of tutorials or in-game hints, so you really feel like you "earn" whatever successes you can scrape up. Exploring every nook and cranny of the game's world rewards you at every turn, and it's immensely satisfying to master the challenges it throws at you.

I don't think Dark Souls is for everyone - it's slow-paced, methodical, and downright frustrating at times, but it reminds me of the feelings that games used to give me as a kid. More than any game I've played in the last ten years, it conjures up feelings of horror, wonder, and accomplishment.

Battlefield 3
I was a big fan of Bad Company 2, the last entry in the Battlefield franchise. The environmental destruction was awesome, and the visual/audio experience was really quite incredible. Battlefield 3 ups the ante in the visual/audio department, and is truly a spectacle to behold. It also has "Call of Duty"-level production values in the campaign this time around, for those who like to have their game occasionally interrupted by canned cinematics, but mostly I've been spending time with the multiplayer.

So far, I'm not having as much fun with this entry as I did with Bad Company 2, and I think the core of the problem is the size of the maps. They've bumped the player count back up to 64, and the size of some of the maps is truly gargantuan to accommodate. The result is basically a clusterfuck - you typically spawn in somewhere, are disoriented for a few seconds as you try to figure out which direction you're facing, explosions kick up huge amounts of dust and debris, bullets whiz by... and then you die from some unseen foe in a bush somewhere. If you're lucky, you survive long enough to get your bearings, and maybe flank some poor fools on the other team before getting killed by some invisible person. Repeat until bored. I can usually manage a positive kill/death ratio, but at the end of a match, I don't feel like I've actually contributed to our success or failure in any meaningful way. It's just a mindless merry-go-round of death.

Zombieville 2 Details

2011-09-20T20:25:00.000-07:00

I haven't yet talked specifically about Zombieville 2's design until now. Since we're in the final stretch of production, I feel pretty safe talking about the major design differences between the sequel and the original, and how in many ways it's a very different game. But first... pretty pictures!

At their core, both Zombievilles have the same basic format - the sequel is still a game of survival, ammo management, and shooting for your best score. Here are the things we wanted to change about the original though:

1) Once you get pretty good at the original Zombieville, its not hard to stay alive for 30 minutes or longer when starting from level 1, and to an experienced player the early levels are simply dull. For the sequel, we wanted each session to be far shorter - less of a marathon, and more like a series of sprints. I think a great example of this kind of game style are titles like Flight Control, or the recent Jetpack Joyride. The sessions are only a couple minutes long, so you can play one very quickly, or a dozen in a row if you're so inclined. It shouldn't take 10 minutes of playing before an arcade game gets interesting.

2) The original Zombieville's weapons are simply a linear progression of power. When the game reaches its peak difficulty, most of the weapons are useless except for the laser and rockets. In Z2, we wanted to make weapons have greater variety, and allow them to serve some purpose no matter what level of difficulty you're playing at.

3) Once you've set a high score and seen all of the weapons, there's very little incentive to keep playing the original game. This time around, we wanted to ensure that there was a layer of persistence beyond each individual session, and lots of things to steadily unlock over the course of many hours of play.

With these goals in mind, we made the following major changes to the original game.

Something you'll notice right away is that the game is no longer completely flat - it controls more like OMG Pirates! or Battleheart, allowing you to move up and down as well as left and right via a virtual joystick. This was done for many reasons - to accomodate multiple players more easily, to introduce the ability to run around enemies, and to give zombies greater variety as well - some of them will shoot projectiles, or explode, and you need to have a means of dodging these threats. Along with this change is the elimination of hiding in houses - instead, you will find ammo and money hidden in destructible objects that pepper the landscape. We figured smashing a trashcan or busting open a parking meter was more fun than hiding behind a door for a few seconds.

Another major change is that the game doesn't simply go until you die - instead the game is broken up into smaller sessions or "missions". You have a time limit before your evacuation chopper arrives, and the goal is to get as many points as possible in that time limit. If you've played the "mercenaries" mode of Resident Evil, it's similar in a few ways - getting kills in rapid succession builds up a multiplier and improves your score, and skillful play will extend the amount of time you have remaining.

Further, the way you acquire weapons has changed. Rather than buying them temporarily each time you play, and then losing them when you die, instead you'll permanently unlock and upgrade weapons with money that you accumulate over the course of repeated missions.

The catch: you can only bring 3 weapons with you on each mission, and each weapon has pros and cons. The basic pistol may not seem impressive compared to the rocket launcher, but it has a very high ammo capacity. The flamethrower is still quite powerful, but slows your movement while its equipped. Some weapons are more effective at point blank, others at longer range, and some are defensive in nature, like flash grenades which stun all nearby zombies. The idea is that you don't simply equip the three "best" weapons - each weapon will excel at one thing or another, and it'll be up to the player to discover the most fun and versatile combinations, or figure out combinations that compliment your partner's choices in co-op. And the best part? Swapping between your 3 weapons is super simple - each weapon has its own fire button in the corner, so whipping out the right one for the job takes a split second. No more clumsily cycling through a list by tapping the top left corner.

In addition to your 3 weapons, you also will equip 3 "skills". These are similar to the bonuses that different characters got in the original Zombieville - increased movement speed, health, ammo, damage with specific types of weapons, and so on. Weapons and skills alike have 5 tiers of upgrades too, allowing you to increase their effectiveness, rate of fire, ammo capacity etc. Oh, and did I mention there are 15 player characters? 30 achievements? Unlocking all of this stuff should hopefully keep you busy for quite some time.

Hopefully this answers most questions about the game. It's very far along, and we expect to submit it to Apple around the middle of October.

Busy Bees

2011-07-09T16:36:00.000-07:00

This past month has been pretty insane for us, lots of nifty things that I can talk about and even more nifty things I can't! Here's some cool news though...

- Zombieville USA is now on Android devices. Whereas Battleheart was an effortless port (since we'd planned for it from the beginning), getting Zombieville up and running was a bit more involved because, frankly, two years ago I had no idea what I was doing. The code powering that game is a damn mess under the hood... seriously, it's hard for me to even look at today. But with some duct tape and elbow grease, we got it working, so now mobile gamers all over the world get a chance to prepare themselves properly for the real zombie apocalypse.

- The first content update to Battleheart is going to go live pretty soon. We decided that rather than keep sitting on completed stuff, we'd just go ahead and deliver half of what we're building now, and we'll give you the other half later, probably alongside Zombieville 2 for some cross promotional goodness. So in the next couple weeks, we hope to have the new Ranger and Paladin characters released into the wild. They're both pretty fun, and add some new flavor and strategic options to the game. We also made some fairly significant buffs to the Barbarian class, since I always felt like some of his powers were a little sucky.

- Zombieville 2 is also coming along nicely, and we're still planning to release this summer. The latest cool thing is the first of our music tracks coming online for it, which is always an exciting time in the project. Final music tracks really help the project feel more like a real game, and less like a pile of systems and art. We're planning to add some groovy dynamic music this time around, which increases in intensity as the chaos builds... a subtle effect, but its pretty cool.

That's it for now, back to the app mine.

Some more Android stats...

2011-06-22T14:23:00.000-07:00

Here's a couple little additional nuggets of information gathered from the last few days...

1) Being featured on the Android Market is similarly lucrative to being featured on iTunes: we saw almost a 300% sales increase this past weekend thanks to the feature on the store. We also got a little additional bump the day after thanks to my blog getting splattered all over the web.

2) We're currently #16 on the top paid list for android. Assuming the charts are based strictly on volume, the same volume of sales roughly equates to the top 80-100 on iTunes's iPhone chart. Not bad.

Android

2011-06-18T15:17:00.000-07:00

With Battleheart having been on sale for a few weeks, I feel I'm equipped to offer up some impressions of the android market from a developer's perspective.

The Good

The best part about releasing on Android is that there's no approval process. This means if I get reports of a bug or incompatibility, I can often fix it right away and push out an immediate update, rather than having to wait a week for a trivial bug fix to be approved.

I've also been fairly surprised by the revenue potential of the platform. While it's still a much smaller market than iOS, there's money to be made through paid apps. I don't know how it became so widely believed that free, ad-supported apps are the only way to make money on Android... I think you can thank Rovio's decision to go that route with Angry Birds. I feel like I've disproven that myth pretty thoroughly. Daily revenue from Battleheart on Android is fairly close, within 80%, of it's iOS counterpart at the moment. This statement needs a couple qualifications though...

1) Battleheart on Android is currently very high in the android charts (top 50 apps), whereas Battleheart for iOS is not even in the top 200 games anymore, and yet still outselling it. It's clear the overall size of the iOS app market is still significantly larger.

2) Battleheart on iOS had a MUCH stronger first couple of months due to prominent featuring by Apple, and since that initial rush has had a steady decline in sales. Battleheart on Android will likely see a similar decline as it spends more time on the market. If you compare launch months, then the iOS version outpaced the android version by a factor of 20.

Still, despite those disclaimers, Battleheart for Android has become a meaningful source of revenue, and has proven that the platform isn't a waste of time. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that a polished, high quality product is more likely to be embraced on Android than on iOS because the quality bar on the android market is so pathetically low. Here's some interesting data: on iOS, user reviews for Battleheart average 4.5 stars (4000 total ratings), which is quite good. On Android it's a stunning 4.8, with 1000 ratings. So not only is it reviewed more highly, it's also reviewed more often, with a huge percentage of android users taking the time to rate the app. I think the lack of competition makes quality apps really stand out, and generates a lot of enthusiasm from app-starved android users.

Our figures on Android are all the more impressive considering the app hasn't enjoyed any free marketing on the storefront, and we have done zero promotion for it besides a little blurb on twitter. The main reason Battleheart did so well on iOS is because it was featured prominently on the App Store, first in the "New and Noteworthy" list, and later as "Game of the Week". The android version's success appears to be entirely driven by word of mouth recommendations though.

Edit: It's come to my attention that Battleheart became a featured tablet app on the android market while I was writing this post, and saw a sales bump the following day as a result. The statement still stands though - it performed very well for several weeks before this free marketing took effect.

The Bad and/or Ugly

The technical side of supporting android isn't so bad, but it is a bit of a nuisance. 95% of the heavy lifting is handled by Unity, the game development engine we use to develop our apps. Actually porting the game only took about a day. Still, some devices don't handle our shaders in a consistent way, some devices just plain crash for no apparent reason. These kinds of issues are few and far between though - the main thing I had to concern myself with was simply making the game work properly at various screen sizes and aspect ratios, which I had been doing all along, so it was trivial to get it up and running.

The most frustrating part about developing for android is actually just dealing with the deluge of support e-mail, most of which is related to download and installation problems which have nothing to do with the app itself, and everything to do with the android OS and market having innate technical problems. Do some googling for "can't download apps from android market" or similar wording, and you'll see that this is a widespread chronic issue for all devices and all OS versions. There are numerous possible causes, and there's nothing I can really do about it as a developer, since its essentially just a problem with the market itself. Based on the amount of e-mails I get every day, download problems effect 1-2% of all buyers, or in more practical terms, somewhere between two and three shit-loads. I have an FAQ posted which offers solutions for the most common problems, but lots of people can't be troubled to read it before sending off an e-mail demanding a refund.

This brings me to another major complaint I have - google checkout. As an android app developer, you have to sign up as a vendor with google checkout, where all transactions take place. This means that you alone are responsible for resolving any billing concerns. We actually have a tiny handful of people getting refunds on our iOS games every day, but since all billing and possible refunds are handled by Apple, I don't have to deal with it. On Android, I do, and I really wish I didn't. I just want to make games, not listen to people whine about how their app won't install (due to user error 9 times out of 10) and they missed the 15 minute window to give themselves a refund, or didn't even know there was such a policy... even though its prominently featured on their order confirmation which is instantly sent to the device being held in their f***ing hand... Yea, my patience is low at this point. :)

There are days where I just want to pull the plug on the whole thing because I'm sick of 12 year olds (or people with comparable communication skills) trying to convince me they've been wronged and I should give them their 3 dollars back. I just remind myself that my user review average would indicate that it's a vocal minority that has these problems, and I shouldn't throw the baby out with the bath water.

It is a loud, obnoxious baby though.

Edit: Just to be clear (since I'm getting more traffic than expected), my experience with Android has been overwhelmingly positive, and I have every intention of continuing to support the platform. It's just that without the iTunes "shield" between myself and customer, I'm having to wear my customer service hat a lot more than I'm used to. I want everyone who plays my game to have a positive, consistent experience, and I leave no request for help unanswered, which is why it pisses me off royally that most of what I'm constantly addressing are things outside of my control. Third party mods, or the device's download cache, a corrupted temp file on the SD card, or the cached data of other apps interfering with normal download behavior is the root cause of 99% of the correspondence I get, and it's fairly tiresome.

Zombieville 2

2011-06-16T10:48:00.000-07:00

I've been talking about it here and there on Twitter, but I figured I would go ahead and compile everything I'm willing to say about Zombieville 2 right here. So without further ado...

What's new?

The project began shortly after Battleheart's release, with the original intention being "let's update Zombieville USA with shiny new art." It's easy to see when you look at Battleheart right next to Zombieville that our art style has become a lot more refined over the last couple years, especially when it comes to visual effects like explosions, fire and other such stuff. A visual facelift, along with some modernizations like multi-tasking support were all that we originally planned.

It quickly became clear as we spelunked through our old project files that there was a lot more we could do. Wireless, co-op zombie slaying has been the most requested feature since Zombieville launched, and since we were tearing up the ground anyway, we started looking at how we could build the game to support multiplayer via iOS's Game Center.

The further we got into multiplayer, the more we realized how weapon variety could be expanded and improved. In Zombieville USA, there wasn't really much strategy to what weapon to use - you just steadily progressed towards the more powerful stuff, until you were basically spewing laser beams all over the screen at all times. Weaker weapons quickly became obsolete as you progressed. So we started redesigning the flow of the game to encourage a balanced use of different weaponry that each have strengths and weaknesses, rather than one weapon simply being "better" than the previous one. Weapons will vary in more than just damage - ammo capacity, mobility, area of effect, and control will all factor into your choices. Some new additions include stun grenades, landmines, sniper rifles and my personal fave, the "Cryo Gun" which encases its victims in ice.

All of the above led to the somewhat difficult decision to extend the gameplay from a single axis onto a 2.5d plane, similar to OMG Pirates or Battleheart. With two players romping about, it was simply too crowded to have the entire game take place in a single straight line anymore. The addition of depth added all kinds of possibilities in enemy and weapon design, and a new layer of player skill, since "aim" is actually somewhat necessary, and its now possible to run past zombies who are trying to box you in.

We also realized that adding a selection of different characters with pros and cons to Zombieville USA was one of our most beloved updates, so we decided to ramp this up to the max. In Zombieville 2, you'll find a large selection of character skins to choose from... we expect at least 20 for launch. Further, instead of them having "built-in" pros and cons, such as changes to movement speed, damage, ammo capacity etc, those benefits will be in the form of perks which you'll select yourself. So you'll be free to mix and match character skins with different bonuses that you prefer, rather than being roped into always playing the ninja if you prefer melee weapons, for example.

So to sum up: we basically started off with the intention of painting a house, but instead tore it down and are building a mansion on it. Hope that gives you an idea of what to expect when we release, which is expected to be sometime this summer.

Installation/Download trouble?

2011-05-13T19:56:00.000-07:00

There are a couple issues that people run into very often on Android. One of them is the fact that many devices have their download cache restricted, either because they came that way from the factory (such as most Samsung's) or the user has installed some kind of third party modification, such as CM7. This can lead to downloads over a certain size failing for no apparent reason. If you're running CM7, check out their forums for a solution to this problem. If your device is stock and you can't download an app, then I recommend trying to download it from the Amazon App Store instead, which doesn't have the same app size restrictions as the android market.

Another possible issue can occur after the app successfully downloads, but then won't install. The following is a fix for this issue.

I discovered this little nugget of information on another developer's blog - Angry Mob Games, another cool group of folks who use Unity to develop apps. Word is these steps can help you install apps onto your SD card on certain phones that are a little picky otherwise. The following is quoted from their FAQ, and most likely applies to any installation issues you may be having with Battleheart.

On certain devices/Android OS versions, there's a problem when installing the game to the SD card. This is true especially if you're seeing the 'Unknown Error 18' when installing the game, or updating it. To fix it, there are two options: the hard way, which fixes this for good, and the easy way, which you have to do each time you install an app.

Hard way:

Connect your device to the computer via USB
Mount the device as a USB drive
Go to the '.android_secure' folder and delete the 'smdl2tmp1.asec' file
Unmount the device and try to install the game again

Easy way:

Uninstall Battleheart
Unmount the SD card
Clear the Marketplace cache and data in the Applications Manager
Install Battleheart again
Mount the SD card back
Move the game to the SD card, if you wish

Where are my updates?!

2011-04-16T16:01:00.000-07:00

To be honest, I've been on a long vacation since the last Battleheart patch. Kind of a sabbatical really, as I've been kicking around ideas for what to do next, prototyping, writing and sketching in between enjoying the sunshine whenever it peeks through. This is how I operate - after a year of development on Battleheart, it's difficult to just jump straight into the next production. Plus, I have the attention span of a gnat, and easily get distracted by new ideas, pieces of code I want to try, etc. So in short - new Mika Mobile stuff is coming, but exactly what/when I can't really promise. At the top of the list is more Battleheart content, and a complete hi-fidelity remake of Zombieville. I'll certainly spread the word when I feel confident that something is close-ish to release.

I'd like to think this is what gives Mika Mobile games part of their unique vibe - they're not the result of a production schedule and a sweatshop of indifferent employees cranking out content from their cubicles. Rather, they generally come from a lot of iteration, experimentation, and monkeying around with things that I'm genuinely excited about, and I think that excitement comes through in the final product. This leads to an erratic release schedule, but I think it's worth the trade.

Thoughts: Nintendo 3DS

2011-04-08T12:26:00.000-07:00

I got a 3DS when it launched last month, because I am a gaming junky and will play pretty much anything. Here's my thoughts on the hardware itself.

The 3D Effect

I think the 3D effect is pretty cool, and the least eye-straining 3D effect I've seen. I've been on 3D rides at Disneyland, I've been to 3D movies in the theater, I've seen 3D from broadcast television and Blu-Rays on brand new TV's, and they all kinda bother me in varying degrees. The 3DS on the other hand, when held at a typical distance and angle from your face, works really well and I don't generally get the sense that my brain is fighting the illusion. I personally found the effect to look its best when I turned the 3D slider on the device down to 50% or less though - when the effect is more pronounced it starts to get a little difficult to look at in some games.

All that said, some games don't mix well with the 3D. Street Fighter 4 is probably the worst offender, because it involves vigorously entering in a series of spastic attack commands in order to succeed. I found that it was fairly common for my button mashing to knock the angle of the device out of its 3d sweet spot in that game, though with others it was not an issue.

Is it a gimmick? Yes. Is it kinda cool? I think so. Does it enhance the gaming experience? Only superficially, but the same could be said of a lot of new hardware generations. Did adding more texture memory and polygon output to the PS3 make all PS3 games better than their PS2 counterparts? Of course not. Too much criticism of the device has been directed towards the frivolity of the 3D effect, which can be turned off if you really despise it. If you take it out of the equation, its really just a DS with more horsepower, which they could have released and called it a DS2 and people probably wouldn't have made a stink.

The Launch Lineup

Pretty weak overall. There are a few solid third party offerings, but nothing that's really a system seller, and all the heavy hitting 1st-party titles didn't make release. My favorite is likely to be a bit of a sleeper hit, Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars. Its kinda like Advance Wars or Fire Emblem - turn-based, grid based tactical warfare with some light RPG elements. I'm a sucker for those kinds of games and this one is competently done. And while its pretty much a top-down perspective, the 3D actually works really well with this one, creating the sensation that you're peering through a window into a tiny diorama. It'll hold me over until the inevitable Advance Wars: 3D at any rate.

Worrying Facts

I think the biggest issue the 3DS is going to face this year is its $250 MSRP. The DS has never been a state-of-the-art beast, but its also never carried a state-of-the-art price tag, which is partly why everyone under the age of 12 has one. To get the millions of players who already have a DS to upgrade at almost double the price is a tall order. It also has miserably poor battery life, clocking in at around 3 hours in my experience. And while it's graphical horsepower is a generational leap over the old DS, so is an etch-a-sketch. It's 2011 guys. An iPod Touch demolishes the 3DS in terms of sheer hardware capability, with an ever growing lineup of inexpensive, occasionally awesome games (*cough* Battleheart *cough*). And it manages this with a lower price, more than twice the battery life, while also being the best music player on the market, a pretty decent camera, a video calling device... etc. etc. I mean, I grew up on Nintendo games, and a totally buy into the belief that there's more to hardware than just "specs"... but this is getting pretty damn ridiculous.

Verdict

Don't buy one unless you're a gamer with disposable income who must have everything. Otherwise, wait until the inevitable "3DS lite".

"What'll it take to get you into a Dragon Age today?"

2011-03-13T14:29:00.000-07:00

With Battleheart out the door and having great success, I've been decompressing and playing some games lately.

Despite EA/Bioware's best efforts to enrage me, I recently played and enjoyed Dragon Age 2, and highly recommend it if you're an RPG fan. I'll start by talking about some of the things I think they did a great job with before getting to the enraging bit...

Compared to the first game, DA2 is a simplified, streamlined take on the genre. Depending on who you ask, it might be "dumbed down", but I think they did a pretty solid job of refining what was there, ramping up the action, and only cutting or simplifying the tedious or less interesting parts. From the story to the class mechanics, everything has a sharper focus. In particular, the three player classes are much better balanced and provide a lot of valid and interesting options for character builds. Compared to the first game, in which a good 80% of the abilities you had access to were either lackluster or just plain worthless, this is a massive improvement. Some players may bemoan the fact that it now feels more like Mass Effect than Baldur's Gate, and that's a fairly accurate assessment. Specific dialog options are now replaced with the "dialog wheel" from ME, and the feel of combat is much more action-y and less tactical. On it's default difficulty, you don't really need to wrangle your party very much, and can take a rambo-like approach to most encounters, only employing strategy and micro-management on the most difficult fights. Personally, I'm more interested in experiencing the story and building my character into a powerhouse, so "normal" was plenty fun for me. If you want something more brutal, the hard and nightmare difficulties are up to the challenge, and should satisfy even the most masochistic players who want to pause combat every half second to issue orders.

I've got a few quibbles about the gameplay here and there, but overall it's a fun experience. The only thing that really annoyed me was (yet again) the shitstorm of DLC and promotional gimmicks EA and Bioware have chosen to employ in the hopes of further monetizing their product. I pre-ordered the game through Steam, and found that I had 3 separate codes to enter on their website before I could have access to all of the content I'd paid for. First, I unlocked some in-game content by registering my game. Then I had some code I'd recieved for pre-ordering, which unlocked some items or a location or something. There was a third "entitlement" code which unlocked something else and was consumed in the process. Apparently if I had pre-ordered several months in advance, I would have also gotten access to a special character, but since I didn't, he (and his associated quests) would cost me $7 on top of the $60 I'd already paid to unlock it. They also had some extra garbage you could get if you pre-ordered from a specific retailer, or if you "liked" the game on Facebook. No, I'm not kidding. At this point even a complete fool can clearly see the carrot, the string, the stick, and the slimy executive holding it. In the end, all of these things aren't even valuable, they're just little bonus items that are pretty good equipment for the first couple hours of the game. But the goal is clear - to make the customer feel like they're missing out on something, that you only ever own 98% of the game unless you do this or that.

Why is all of this flailing about necessary? Is it really so hard to turn a profit on a multi-million dollar production like this, that you have to go to these lengths? If so, then maybe their business model is simply unsustainable. I know I'm not the only one who finds it obnoxious that I can't just buy the game and know I have the whole package - these gimmicks do little more than generate a nagging sense that I'm constantly missing out on some deal, or being suckered, neither of which makes me feel all warm and fuzzy about my purchase. The fact is, the game is pretty darn good and can stand on its own merits, there's no need for all of this rubbish. It may be paying off in cash at the moment, but it's already had (and will continue to have) an intangible price in their reputation and fan base down the road.

Appeal

2011-02-22T12:27:00.000-08:00

Some folks have recommended that I start a blog of some sort, so... here it is! Rather than talk about updates and Mika Mobile news, I figured I'd use this as a platform to blither about game design, the industry in general, and other stuff that may not be of much interest to most people. :)

I figured I'd start by talking a little bit about my game design philosophy. As you can probably tell from playing Mika Mobile games, animation is at the top of my priority list no matter the project. Animation had been my sole career focus up until a couple years ago - I was mentored during college by veteran animators at Pixar, and have worked as a character animator for several years on a handful of triple-A games since then. The animation industry has a very specific culture, and it has a way of beating some concepts into your brain through prolonged exposure. One of these core principles which translates not just to animation, but design in general, is the idea of appeal.

Appeal, from an animator's perspective, is a combination of posing, proportion, character design and motion that comes together and feels "right" somehow. If you've ever done figure drawing from a live model, you've probably heard the same idea - the goal isn't to just copy what you see, but to exaggerate/modify here and there to make an illustration that pleases the eye. What any given person finds pleasing may seem entirely subjective, but our brains are actually hard-wired to react positively or negatively to certain visual impulses, much the same way that we find certain audio patterns pleasing (or annoying). The more you draw, and the more you animate, the more you develop your eye for appeal.

So when it comes to games, I think the appeal of the characters from a purely visual standpoint is extremely important in order for the game to get its hooks into you. I spend a lot of energy when I work obsessing over the drawings of the characters, the thickness of their outlines, trying out player movement in a test environment, tweaking their movement speed and animation until the way they move around the screen just feels good. Little details such as the "bounce" the characters do in Battleheart when selected, or the way they "plop" themselves into place after moving to a designated spot may seem superficial, but it all helps to create an appealing visual experience which draws you in. If the game were comprised of different colored cubes that moved around the screen in a rigid, lifeless fashion, nobody would bother to play it, or get anywhere near as invested in their party even if the mechanics underneath were exactly the same.

This doesn't just apply to characters either, I think it extends into everything we interact with. What's so compelling about the iPhone anyway? The touch screen was unlike anything anyone had ever seen before. The act of tapping, swiping, and pinching, and the surprising responsiveness of the OS was groundbreaking when it first made its appearance. It's the little details, like the way your pages of apps animate when you swipe from left to right - its not linear, it actually has some deceleration that smooths it out. When you rearranged icons, they don't just pop from place to place, they slide around smoothly. It's all in the interest of making the experience more tactile and appealing. Other popular iPhone games have capitalized on these same concepts - I think Flight Control owes much of its success to a charming art style, the satisfying audio-visual response you get when tapping a plane, and the snappy, accurate, but slightly-auto-smoothed line drawing that results from your finger movement. Cut the Rope is another one that combines appealing art, sparse but effective audio queues, and a very tactile, responsive input mechanic into a masterpiece that is compelling to the human brain on a very primitive level, yet still satisfies your higher brain functions with smart puzzle design.

So in short, it's easy to forget when you're making a game that you're not just building a set of rules, or a pile of content. You're crafting an experience, and most players aren't willing to give your game a chance unless it grabs them somehow. Animation happens to be my weapon of choice to achieve this. Once I've got the player hooked with some initial visual polish, they'll stay with me while I go elsewhere, into more complex rules, strategies and RPG mechanics.