Shark Punch Devlog

Transatlantic company working on http://matchmade.tv/. Matchmade is a platform that helps brands find influencers with the right audience.

[sharkpunchhq]

When you’re knee-deep building a product, it’s easy to lose sight of progress made over a longer period of time. Because of this, I try to wrap up every year with an email to the whole team, summarizing everything that happened during the year. We’re big believers in transparency, so we decided to share it (with some bits removed due to contractual reasons :/). - Jiri

Hi gang!

End of the year is a time for traditions, and this “year review” mail is quickly becoming one. So without further ado, here’s a look at some of the things that happened at Shark Punch during the last year.

Halloween happened.

TEAM

In 2014, we roughly doubled in size, from three to seven full time team members total. In 2015, we’ve kept the pace, and are now a nice round dozen. Welcome again to Nicolau, Tuomas, Mirza, Erno, Mirka and Tan!

We’ve also had a bunch of people who don’t fit the definition of a “full time team member” helping us out. Shoutout to Kisko Labs and Kati for all the awesome work! Also thanks to the board for making sure there’s at least some logic and structure behind the things I do. ;)

As we all know, one of the original co-founders of the company is no longer part of the team. While this is a big change, it’s something we mutually agreed on & I think everyone understands the reasons. And on the positive side, we can now all look forward to whatever crazy indie game they’re going to make next. Best of luck!

Finally, I’d like to give two special shoutouts: big thanks to Samu for successfully shipping The Masterplan, based on the crappy codebase started by yours truly originally as a fun little experiment, and then jumping on to something completely different and quickly delivering awesome prototypes of the Playfield client app. And a big round of applause to Alex for being the backbone of the Playfield development team. 2164 commits - that’s more than one commit for every working hour of the year.

Sportsing day. We don’t usually look like this, I swear.

COMPANY

At the end of last year, we were sitting in a small aquarium at Hub13. Well, mostly - I spent most of my time in SF. We were self-funded and hoping to close our seed investment round soon.

In February, we successfully closed the $1.2M investment round led by London Venture Partners, and moved to the new office at Kalevankatu 9. This was roughly when we started resembling a real company, in the sense that finally we had a real office, and all the full-time employees were actually getting paid a salary…

In 2016, we’ll be raising our second investment round. Slush was a good indicator of serious investor interest in what we’re doing - now it’s up to us to show some results in order to have that interest turn into money in the bank and awesome products people love.

After the round has been closed, we’ll need to rethink the office situation - I think we all agree the current office doesn’t really have space for doubling our headcount again…

COMMUNITY

2015 was another busy year for events. We attended Casual Connect Amsterdam, GDC, PAX East, A MAZE Berlin, Gamescom, Casual Connect SF, NYME, MGF Seattle, Indiecade, Slush, a bunch of PGC events, and probably a bunch of others that I forgot. In 2016 we’ll be pickier, but invest more in the events that we do participate in.

We only had one show-don’t-tell event this year, mostly because everyone was so damn busy. In 2016, we should be more active in arranging events that make the indie game dev community stronger and help spread information around.

The highpoint of the year for me was our sponsorship of the Indie Arena booth at Gamescom. We were showing an early version of The Masterplan at Indie Arena in 2014, and it was an important moment for the company. Giving back was the right thing to do - and of course it also resulted in a tremendous amount of goodwill towards us, as well as some pretty serious traffic to the site. So, a massive win for everyone involved. Plus it was great to see how happy the guys behind Awakening of Heroes, Blackhole, and Switchcars were to be able to show their games at Gamescom. However, Tero is no longer allowed to be in charge of ordering beers at company events…

THE MASTERPLAN

A year ago, TMP had been in early access for two and a half months, and had been played by roughly around 12k people. The game came out of early access on the 4th of June.

On the 29th, TMP had grossed a total of $292,759.67. That means it might hit $300k this year. Fingers crossed! Big thanks to the tens of thousands of people who have bought it.

Of course, in the world of PC gaming, units sold doesn’t strictly correlate with popularity. Per Google Analytics, during this year:

The game has been played 279,884 times

By 237,286 different users (a lot more than we have paying customers...)

In 177 different countries (hi to both of our fans in Burkina Faso)

…accounting for more than 53 thousand hours spent pulling off virtual heists

Finally, we were nominated for Best Narrative at CC Amsterdam. Unfortunately we didn’t win (hey, there really wasn’t any narrative at that point…), but later in the year we took home the Best Game Design trophy at CC SF. Score!

PLAYFIELD

Playfield launched to beta (that we’re now more commonly referring to as an alpha…) in the end of February. That version was based on a quick prototype I started in the fall of 2014. Of course, since then we’ve basically revamped… everything.

At Slush, we launched the new and improved Playfield. The launch is something to be proud of - we had very few technical difficulties, no major downtime, and generally the site performed like a champ.

Of course, we’ve always been about transparency, so we’ve done all our testing out in the open. Closed betas are for wimps. ;) Here’s some numbers:

Over a 100k individual users have used the site

We’ve done nearly a million pageviews (real number is probably a lot higher since how we track this has changed a few times)

All in all, we already account for more than 7000 hours spent enjoying what’s cool in gaming

Most importantly, since the launch of the new version, our 30d active user count has climbed a massive 353% in under two months - let’s keep it going!

This year has mostly been about laying down a solid foundation for what’s next. We’ve proven that:

We can get users and developers to sign up to our service

We can pull in data and content from various other services

We can build user experiences that are more pleasant and streamlined than the competitions’

We can do ecommerce transactions reliably

In 2016, we need to really start delivering on the things we’ve been talking about for a while now - discovery and communities.

To me, this is about the fact that gaming, and the communities and social activity around it, are just too massive nowadays for anyone to follow. With Playfield, we should strive to answer the question:

“What’s relevant in gaming for me now?”

...whether that’s in the form of better personalized recommendations and discovery, surfacing gaming-related content that’s relevant to me, helping me build new connections, or helping people participate in the community.

All the data - and the interest in what we’re doing - is out there. Time to get serious about pulling all it together and doing something awesome!

2015 was a massive year for us. Let’s have an even bigger 2016. Happy new year!

[sharkpunchhq]

Open development

Releasing a public prototype

Making a game and showing it to everyone from the get-go has been on our minds for a long time. The Masterplan was available on early access with just a handful of levels and core functions implemented. Being open about the state of the game also meant our customers were satisfied even though the most visible public opinions of early access were negative.

When your game has moments of enjoyment and lots of sparks that might ignite the imagination, the time has come to show it off. So show it off we will.

What on earth are we building?

Starting a new game is like launching a slightly DIY rocket without a proper guidance system, but rather a set of magic poking sticks correcting it’s trajectory to whichever direction gains most thrust. (For us at least :D )

That is not to say we don’t have an end goal in mind, rather that the end goal is an abstract set of requirements that need to be met. How we get there is based on our skill and intuition, guided by magic pokes.

Showing off the game early will keep our sensors adjusted to make sure our intention and the perception for a new player are aligned.

“The character designs were a result of quick brainstorms by whoever felt like it and then interpreted by the mighty pixel pen.”

There is no try?

Sorry Yoda, but we’re going to be doing a lot of trying. There’s a point where speculation on a feature is fruitless and trying it out is far more efficient. Trying and scrapping leads us to footholds on which we can understand our direction better. This in conjunction with having the build live will let us make a playground of things that may or may not work and people will find their favorites (and possibly new funny methods of utilising features in unintended ways). There’s already been numerous findings of things that feel really nice, even though there was no grand design for it, especially in small details that make game interactions tangible.

“Scifi doors are always fun, also easier than swingy doors to implement :D”

Analysis on why a feature works well is often an afterthought with a “oh-that’s-how-it-was-supposed-to-be” accompanied by a smirk.

A side effect of trying a lot is of course the possibility of work ending up being scrapped. To minimise this, it’s good to focus on basic functions such as movement and interactions that have a high chance of surviving even large pivots in design.

You can see that previous scrapped features are all external to main character functions on our previous post: Prototyping Cyberjackers

Next steps

To get the most out of our prototype, we’ll be coming up with ways to maximise the ways in which people can poke it to a good, high-thrust, maximum fun direction.

Our plan is to release a barely functional imagination teaser (also known as a protoype) on playfield in the near future, so look forward to it!

Follow us on our Playfield page or the cyber-kitten “C@” gets some shock treatment!!

[sharkpunchhq]

Prototyping Cyberjackers

Last time, Aarne went through some game ideas that we’ve been going through to find the best idea for our next game. While Aarne was doing mock-ups of the concepts, I was starting to prototype.

Picking the crowd favourite

Initially, our favourite idea was “Mansion of Mürha”, a top-down shooter in the spirit of a classic Smash-TV. The player would go from room to room and kill the enemies / solve the puzzles before moving on to another room.

We brainstormed lot of cool ideas, especially using small multiplayer aspects sort of in the way Dark Souls and Watch Dogs had used, so you wouldn’t know you’ve been paired with another player until you enconter them. 

The ideas were cool, but after taking a bit of a poll with everyone at the office and a few outsiders, the Boat Of Interest was steering towards the cyberpunk concept, Cyberjackers.

Cyberjackers is a local multiplayer game where each player controls a hacker in a dystopian cyberpunkish world. Each hacker has been given the same job, to infiltrate a target corporation and steal as much data as possible.

So, on to prototyping!

Version 1

The first idea was, that players would find these “terminals” inside the building which they could activate. Each terminal would hold a “mini-game” that would be shown on that terminals screen in the game’s world. And whoever won the mini-game, would get data(points).

There would also be a timer on top of the screen that would indicate how much time players would have infiltrating the building. Before that time would go up, players had to escape the building, otherwise risking of losing all the data they had gathered.

This is boring...

The first version was boring. We realised that when players were just standing next to a terminal, playing a mini-game, it looked boring and it felt boring. We wanted something that would look more exciting to the players and spectators alike. This was a couch multiplayer after all.

Version 2

We added a split-screen and each player would get their own on-screen display, that would be used for the mini-games, this would allow us to do more complex mini-games and it would almost feel like there’s multiple multiplayer games inside a multiplayer game(Now, that’s a sale’s pitch!).

Where’s the action?

After few playtesting sessions, we still felt it was lacking the action we wanted. It felt like there was not enough interaction between the players and the mini-games were still a bit too slow-paced and boring to watch.

Version 3

Screw the mini-games! We had a short brainstorming and came up with an idea to replace the mini-games with a “cyberspace”.

So, when the hackers would go and use a terminal, they would enter this parallel cyber space, where they could control a fast and a furious cyberspace alter-ego that could go and collect data, hack into systems, such as security doors and cameras, and so on.

"Where’s everyone? Can you guys add punching other players?”

After playtesting we really felt this was the right direction to go. The game was still lacking on player to player interaction and the split screen was also causing players to not even know where others were in the building. We could’ve added some kind of mini-map or indicators to show where others were, but since there was already a screen split in to 4 views, the UI space would’ve been cluttered.

Version 4

Screw the split-screen! We went back into having a single screen for all the players. We’re using pixel art and we really wan’t it to be pixel perfect. This causes issues with zooming. Basically, you can’t have a dynamic zooming. So we changed the idea of having procedurally generated rooms after rooms, to a single screen-sized area, that would be played thoroughly before advancing to the “next floor”.

Each level would still have a timer, and you would collect as much data as you could and then escape to the elevator. When all players were in the elevator, the game would load the “next floor”. After certain amount of floors, the game would end and show the final score.

Without the split-screen, we bumped into an issue of the visualisation of the cyber space. When all players were sharing the view, it meant that if one player was in the cyber space, and others were not, we had to somehow show the physical world and the cyber space simultaneously.

I came up with a solution of using a stencil shader to create areas where cyber space would be drawn on top of the physical world based on the locations of the players.

The end result was cool, but when playtesting, it felt too intrusive and chaotic to be enjoyed. Sometimes an area would be blocked by the other world’s view and it would make planning your movements really hard. So, eventually we just decided to go on drawing them on top of each other and make the cyber space’s graphics to be transparent and less obtrusive.

“Can’t see sh*t, captain.”

Show those pixels! Since we had to show a large area on the screen, all the gorgeous pixel art made by Aarne would be too small on the screen to be enjoyed. Also, when we would test the initial version again, we felt that when the camera was closer, the action and movement feels better and has more impact.

We decided to do some major changes to the gameplay, but more on that next time! Meanwhile, you can see all the latest screens/gifs on our Playfield page.

[sharkpunchhq]

The next game idea

Coming up with a new game

The time has come.... to start developing a new game to follow up on our previous project “The Masterplan”. A blank slate can be scary, but we do have a battle plan. Equipped with our knowledge of getting our first game out on Steam, we have some pretty clear cornerstones for what we need to do next.

Initial requirements

Working on and releasing The Masterplan charged us with some factoids that will definitely help a game gain an audience. Including fans in development early on (during early access) has shaped the game to be something far better than what we could’ve made inside our own bubble. Also going out into the wild to see people play our game in person (at conventions) made us consider ease of access and the people watching you play. Somehow a controller attached to a game pulls people far better than just a lonesome laptop.

These things in mind, here are the requirements:

Developed with and for a community

Easy to pick up and play with a controller

Presentable and fun to just watch

Re-playable

It’s good to carry some part of your previous game to a new one so you have a solid, grounded footing when exploring the new idea (also makes your blank slate not so blank). In this case, The Masterplan is retro, top-down, stealing, shooting etc.

Brainstorming

You could do it by the book, use logic, reason and other things that don’t sound fun at all, or you could try to picture funky feelings in your mind and then build an idea around that feeling. Thus was born the wall of funny feels:

Free-for-all draw-on-wall for the whole company

The idea was for everyone to vomit out anything and everything so we could just pick the interesting chunky parts and start fiddling with them.

Picking ideas for visual mockups

Out of the pool of awesome, some ideas aligned with more people than others, thus we picked good candidates for further exploration.

Mansion of the Mürha:

Interestingly our previous game is optimally played without killing too much and you’re the criminal, so here we’re focusing on maximising the amount of murder. Not just you killing, but you getting killed in a variety of highly punctuated ways. (feeling: horrendously murderous)

Spaceship scavenger:

The idea was to play as someone who is in a secondary role in the large scheme of things. So here you’re playing as a scavenger, looting on the remains of space battlefields, making a buck out of the battles of two factions. (feeling: mischievous adventurous)

Cyberjackers:

Future of the 80s, that is reason enough to explore it. (feeling: racing to jack-in)

Developing with a community

For the initial ideas the community is our company. We looked at the pictures and had a yelling match on which one is the funniest.

Moving forward from here we’re slowly expanding the community to include whoever might like our ideas and encourage everyone to point fingers and shout out which part of our new thing makes them tickle in the funny places.

For this purpose, we’re going to be using and developing playfield to help players make fun out of the development while also making the final product as awesome as possible.

Peace out devs and players _o/

[sharkpunchhq]

Why are game icons terrible for discovery?

Once you go past the obvious crushes and clashes, it is actually very difficult to find new interesting games on the app stores. It’s becoming a common complaint even for casual gamers: I always keep stumbling upon the same top games. Finding good games that are a little off the beaten path takes too much work and often leads to disappointments. 

One of the game discovery challenges that we are trying to solve with Playfield is the lack of direct access to visual game content in the stores. Icons are still the main way that games are represented. Yes, once you click on an icon you get to see some screenshots (and maybe a video with lots of cinematics and 3 seconds of gameplay), but that’s a lot of work just to get a first impression.

Game icons are made with the only goal in mind: maximizing clicks. They are shiny eye candy. They are not a useful way to discover a game. At the very best they are an abstract artistic representation of the game. More often than not, they are misleading. What you want to see when you are looking for a good game is real gameplay. Screenshots and video of actual gameplay are the best way to communicate how a game looks, works and feels when you actually play it.

At Playfield we are trying to make visual gameplay content the primary discovery mechanism. We put screenshots and videos front and center so you can decide at a glance which games look interesting and which not. We think this is the most natural way to discover new and upcoming games.

To their credit, Google, Apple and some of the other app stores have started to give some prominence to screenshots and video content of games. However, all these visual content it still mostly hidden away behind icons. Icons are a arguably a decent way of representing apps that you already know and use frequently. However,  they have no place as the discovery mechanism for games in the app stores. This is by no means a new problem. Just think of game icons as the new cover art from game packaging.

Direct access to game content as a way to find new games is just one of the things we are trying at Playfield. We believe game discovery hasn't changed in many years and needs to be shaken up. If you are tired of the same games, we invite you to subscribe to the Playfield newsletter. We are are working on a few exciting ideas.

[sharkpunchhq]

Shark Punch @ Slush '14

Another long pause in the devlog updates. We could say we've been busy (and we have), but then, who isn't. Maybe it's more that since the Early Access began, communication has spread out more, with us being active on the Steam Forum and on Twitter. Regardless, the devlog is now back with our experiences from Slush 2014.

So, this week Shark Punch went to Slush. In case you're unfamiliar with Slush, here's a brief introduction from their press info:

Slush is the focal point for Eurasian startups and tech talent to meet with top-tier international influencers, investors and media. The two-day event takes place every fall in wintery Scandinavia amidst one of the most dynamic tech ecosystems on the planet.

In the past three years, Slush has grown from a local, 300-person event to become one of the leading tech and startup events in the world, reaching 7000 attendees from 68 countries in 2013.

In short, Slush is a huge, startup focused get-together, with tons of stands, presentations and other events to keep you occupied. While not a games event as such, indie games commonly are developed by startup companies, so Slush has a lot to offer. With all this happening pretty much on our backyard, we had to attend. Additionally, we got a chance to set up a small stand for The Masterplan, so naturally we were quite excited to participate.

Visibility: The Masterplan stand

Tuesday was the first day of the main event, and also the day for The Masterplan stand. We arrived early and claimed our spot in the row next to 24 other gaming stands. We had hoped to run the normal single player and our experimental multiplayer build of the game, but due to space constraints ended up with just the 'multiplayer with controllers' version. We hoped to get feedback and see the visitors reactions to this multiplayer build we had put together.

We chose Minimart to be the demo map due to its compact size, relative simplicity, and a host of cool key points (e.g. safe behind a locked door, shopkeeper's shotgun, access to a grey key, video cameras) that allowed us to show off the features nicely.

The overall reception was excited and positive, much like the atmosphere at Slush in general. In addition to the compliments and suggestions, we also learned a lot by observing how people reacted and played the game. Noticing problems was particularly easy - after getting stuck in explaining how the inventory system works for the Nth time, it became obvious that it needs a revamp.

While it's always cool to present the game to visitors, many of whom were developers themselves, and to talk about the game in general, we also had a more business-orientated goal in mind. While we are currently completely focused on creating the PC/Mac/Linux version of The Masterplan, we were happy to hear there was some interest in bringing the game to other platforms as well.

Activity: Investors, presentation

While part of the team was busy talking about The Masterplan, our COO Harri went out to give his talk "From Disney to Indie: Embracing Community and Open Development" to the audience. This of course also gave us extra visibility and a chance to promote our product.

In addition to the talk, Harri and Jiri both were busy setting up and taking part in meetings, making the most of the time when everyone was in town. The opportunity to meet up with numerous investors and publishers in such a short period of time cannot be underestimated, and it can really give you a great view of where you are with your project, and what the future should look like. It's also the perfect opportunity to test the waters, and raise interest for any new projects, such as )http://playfield.io/ ... More on that later!

Conclusion

Overall, Slush has become something amazing. We would've participated as visitors regardless, but getting a chance to show off the game and give a talk was even better. Connections were made, future plans were laid and many things were learned.

With The Masterplan, we got great user experience with the multiplayer experiment, and it was cool to hear people asking about its availability on consoles/mobile/etc. Plenty of good advice was also shared and received with other indie developers, proving the benefits of belonging to a community.

Finally, one must remember that making an excellent game is not enough to be successful; you will also need to be able to sell it. Events like Slush can play a key role in making the necessary connections, impressing the right people, and making the dream come true. So, see you there next year!

[sharkpunchhq]

Get it now on Steam Early Access!

Great news, everyone!

You can now head to themasterplangame.com and buy the early access version of the game!

You can also get it directly from Steam, but please get it through the Humble Widget on our website if possible - we get a bigger piece of the profit that way...

[sharkpunchhq]

Early Access Release Date

ANNOUNCEMENT: The Masterplan will be available for Early Access on September 15th, 2014.

We’re extremely excited and looking forward to developing the game with the support of our fans and community!

We're hiring - join us!

We are also hiring! Check out our open positions on our job page and come build cool stuff with us!

[sharkpunchhq]

Sailing through Steam Greenlight in 9 days

Gosh. It's been two and a half months since we did one of these "behind the scenes" blog posts - guess time flies when you're trying to get a game Greenlit on Steam.

As you might know, our game The Masterplan was included in the latest Steam Greenlight batch, along with 74 other games. Here's how it happened.

Expectations

After reading a bunch of articles about Steam Greenlight, we had some expectations:

We would need to actively engage with the community, through the Discussions and Comments tabs

Doing a Greenlight campaign during a Steam sale would make things really hard

We would need to leverage the press and social media heavily to drive more people to our Greenlight page after the initial Steam traffic tapered off

The game would need to be included in several Steam collections

The plan

Our plan was fairly simple.

We would have a pretty intense icon for the game, a trailer that showed a good variety of different gameplay situations, and a few screenshots from the latest demo level.

We would wait a couple of days to see how the campaign took off. If the initial results looked promising, we would first tell our fans on Facebook, Twitter, etc. about the campaign. Then after a week or so - once the initial traffic from Steam would have slowed down significantly - we would start emailing the game demo to members of the press and YouTube "let's players", in hope of attracting more people to vote.

Hopefully this would be enough to make it to top 75 eventually.

The reality

On the afternoon of June 17th (Finnish time), we made our Greenlight page public and started hectically refreshing the stats page. After a few hours it was obvious things were going rather well - 70% of the votes were yes votes, whereas the average for top 50 was only 46%!

We had almost 10,000 new people visit our Greenlight page in the first few days, but we also noticed that the amount of new visitors per day was dropping quite fast. Since the ratio of yes votes looked promising, we posted about the Greenlight campaign on our blog, Facebook, Twitter and TIGForums on the 19th. Looking at the data, the visitors from these sources probably didn't have much impact on the end result, but of course you have to take care of your fans. (Thanks for voting!)

By June 22nd, we had reached the Top 100 and were pretty convinced that the game would reach top 75 pretty soon. On June 23rd, Rock Paper Shotgun published a great piece about our new trailer and the Greenlight campaign. Unfortunately it's hard to gauge how many new visitors this brought us, since most people probably use Greenlight inside the Steam client instead of the Steam website, so we can't get referral information in Google Analytics.

By June 25th (Finnish time) we had reached top 30, but also noticed that traffic had slowed down quite a lot (3507 new visitors on the 17th versus 904 on the 24th.) We figured this would be a great time to do a PR blitz and see if we can push the game to Greenlight top 10.

So, we emailed a bunch of gaming journalists with a link to a playable demo and the Greenlight campaign, and waited. An hour later, before hearing back from any of the journalists, we received this email from Steam:

"Congratulations, The Masterplan has been Greenlit!"

Theories

We do have a few theories on what happened, but unfortunately they're mostly based on gut feeling since it's hard to get any concrete data from Greenlight.

If you have a high % of yes votes, Steam will push the game to more people. We had several people warn us that traffic drops drastically after a couple of days. It did, but nowhere close to zero - and then stayed pretty stable.

A really engaging icon helps in getting traffic. Our "promo guy" has worked well this far, and we think adding animated cigarette smoke to the icon really helped it pop out even more.

Showing a lot of interesting gameplay scenarios in the trailer is crucial. We wanted to give people a good idea of all the things you can do in the finished game, and we think the trailer really succeeded in this.

You should have an interesting theme / subject. "Would you play a game about bank robberies in the 70s?" Maybe or maybe not, but we think many people vote for originality even though they might not actually end up buying the game.

Summer sales might actually have helped. We have no way of verifying this, but we think the Steam summer sales might actually have helped us, by making much more people open the Steam client than usually.

Be in the Action category. Anecdotal evidence from many people familiar with Greenlight strongly indicates that being included in the Action category is a very good idea if you want to get a lot of visitors.

Onwards!

From here, our journey continues towards Early Access. Remember to follow us on Facebook, Twitter and subscribe to the Mailing list to stay in the loop.

Thanks for voting!

-Jiri

[sharkpunchhq]

The Masterplan has been Greenlit!

Incredible news! After just a week on Steam Greenlight, The Masterplan was just Greenlit, which means we'll be able to offer the game through Steam.

Huge thanks to everyone who voted for us! You can check out the other games that got Greenlit in this batch here.

[sharkpunchhq]

We're on Greenlight!

This post will be brief, but has a very important message: Go vote for The Masterplan on Steam Greenlight! Then tell your friends to do the same.

We're already 50% of the way to the top 100, and the game has been live on Greenlight for less than two days. Let's push this through!

[sharkpunchhq]

Welcome to our latest crew member, Harri!

The goal of The Masterplan is to "put together the right crew, get the right equipment, and finally plan and execute the biggest heist ever."

Our goals as a company are similar, though our funding situation hasn't gotten desperate enough for us to consider heists as a viable source of funding. We have however just taken a great step forward in building the best game development company in the world.

On behalf of the whole Shark Punch team, I'd like to welcome Harri Manninen to the crew.

Harri is a long-time entrepreneur in games media and games, and one of our dearest colleagues from Rocket Pack. We have worked together as a team for years, and in many ways this feels like getting the old band back together.

Harri will be in charge of business development, as well as a lot of heavy lifting on the operations side. Say hi!

-Jiri

[sharkpunchhq]

First video showcasing the new visual style of the game. What do you think?

[sharkpunchhq]

We recorded a short video of the current level creation workflow for The Masterplan. The video shows how we use a popular open source map editing tool, Tiled, to create levels. It also shows how the current level and it's graphics are updated while the game is running. We think that it's necessary to have a workflow that's as frictionless as possible when you are editing or creating content for a game. As you can see from the video, there's a lot of good stuff about our workflow but there's also lots of things that we could still improve.

What would you do to improve the workflow?

[sharkpunchhq]

Two new concepts shots for the first mission, and an in-game comic book lighting shader test.

[sharkpunchhq]

Screenshot Saturday!

New goons, and two different concept pictures for the new art style of the game. Which one do you prefer?

[sharkpunchhq]

On technical debt, writer's block, cats, and canaries

TL;DR: To deal with technical debt and get out of a "writer's block", we made a cat game. You can get it for iOS and Android for free.

A week ago, we made an April Fools' joke about pivoting to cat games. It's probably best to start this post with an admission: we were only half-joking - the cat game is real. To better understand the whats and whys, we'll need to talk a bit more about GDC Play.

Breaking things

After GDC Play, when the whole team was still physically in the same location, we assessed our situation. It was obvious we had three major issues (in addition to a thousand smaller ones):

There was game in our engine, and engine in our game. In the crunch to get a playable build for GDC, the boundary between game engine and game had become blurry. This happens to the best of us - Unreal Engine 3 shipped to customers with quite a lot of code specific to Gears of War - but we agreed things would only get worse down the road if we didn't deal with this now.

Our multi-platform engine no longer worked on mobile platforms. At GDC, we showed the game on OSX. As the deadline got closer, we stopped testing on iOS and Android, the end result being that you couldn't even boot the engine on mobile platforms anymore. Since we really hope to see The Masterplan on tablets one day, we wanted to make sure there were no big technical risks hiding here.

We needed a new visual direction. People loved the way The Masterplan looks in motion, but the online reaction to screenshots has been less than enthusiastic. We needed to freshen up the visual style so that it would stand out more.

After a few beers, the solution was obvious: we would make a mobile game that wouldn't play or look anything like The Masterplan.

The game plan

The details of how we ended up building an infinite runner with a pixelated cat are a bit fuzzy, but the plan met all of our goals:

Since the gameplay was very different to The Masterplan, we would have to again separate engine code from Masterplan code

Since the game only targeted mobile, we would get the engine working on mobile platforms again

Since the art style was "cheerful pixel art", this would help us reset from working on The Masterplan and come up with fresh ideas for that game

...and since April 1st was right around the corner, we figured we could also have a bit of fun.

We didn't originally plan to release the game, but after a few days of working on it we were actually having a good time playing it, plus there were other potential benefits to releasing it as well.

The cat-canary

When the game was "done", we realized there was one clear benefit to releasing it: it could act as a canary. We could use the game to ensure our engine worked with a wide variety of different platform/device combinations - and more importantly, that it would keep working as the platforms and our underlying technologies received updates.

Thanks to this exercise, we've already identified some issues with GC stutter on iOS and audio lag on Android. As more people play the game, we're sure we'll unearth more problems that we can fix on the engine level.

And finally, making a game about bank robbers can get awfully serious sometimes. Next time staring at dudes with mustaches all day starts wearing us down, we can crank out a couple of new rainbow-colored levels for our pixel cat.