A Dark Room iOS's twitter, an active, genuine indie dev, plus this Gamasutra article led to this interview. Head of State is simply a great evil time. The tutorial is welcoming, the art is great unique, the music is great too, and I got a strong sense of cognitive dissonance when playing (any game that evokes emotion is a great game in my book).
How old are you? What's your professional and educational background?
I'm 34. I grew up in the UK, studied Human Sciences at Oxford then worked in a range of industries from venture capital to running a soft drinks brand before ending up in the games industry. I spent a year in Paris making Facebook games and then 3 years in Berlin making mobile games (both as a product lead rather than a developer) before leaving to work in e-commerce, learning to code and making Head of State.
What technologies/frameworks did you use to build Head of State?
Unity, coding the scripts in C# and bug fixing where necessary and as little as possible in XCode (... I hate it SO much).
Head of State had me dealing with a lot of cognitive dissonance (nothing ever felt black and white with my choices). How have players responded to this?
Some players have found the choices you make to be ambiguous or to have too little feedback. This was partly a conscious design choice - when we added more feedback the game seemed far to complicated, so we toned it back a bit.
Others agonised over every decision, as they were forced to choose policies they would never endorse in real life in order to win. This was definitely by design, because we wanted people to think about the process of entering a democratic election as a candidate, and what you might be prepared to sacrifice and compromise on to win.
How long did it take to build Head of State?
About 8 months, coding 10-15 hours a week, having done very little coding before (so a LOT of refactoring, debugging and getting stuck). Head of State is perhaps 80% of the coding I've ever done. I had help from a writer and an artist too which helped immensely, not only by providing assets and content, but having collaborators to bounce ideas off and hold me accountable to self imposed deadlines.
How big is the code base?
About 20k lines of code.
How much lifetime revenue (gross) has the game generated on iOS? On Android?
The game has been live on both platforms for 18 days now.
On iOS we got featured on the homepage in 83 countries (#15 or #16 in New Games we Love), so far we've made $27k revenue, $17k proceeds, 14.9k downloads. At the moment we're getting about 100 downloads a day.
On Android you couldn't even find our game in the Play Store the day it launched. So far we've made just under 500 EUR (revenue), 320 EUR proceeds. We get 3-5 downloads a day there at the moment.
During the sale and development of Head of State, what was one of your happiest moments?
Seeing Head of State climb to #5 paid game in the UK - you could see it above the fold in the charts. I was ecstatic, and it didn't feel quite real. I kept checking the charts every hour or two to see if we moved and whether we would keep climbing. I knew from making games professionally how difficult that was. To do it on a first game was incredibly lucky.
Your saddest moments?
Not being able to find the game on Google Play as we were featured in the App Store was incredibly frustrating. The game was there, people could download it if they had the link, but if you searched for the name it didn't show up in the first page of results... given the effort I'd put in to making the Android version work, making the game playable on variable screen sizes and coordinating a simultaneous launch on both iOS and Android it was a real kick in the teeth.
My frustrations with iOS were equal at other points in the process. I lost two days at one point updating first my iOS, the Mac OS, then XCode and finally Unity to make sure everything was up to date and played nicely with each other. Unbelievably painful.
What tips do you have for those that are just starting with programming and game development?
Get something on your phone within a day (there are tutorials that will take you from literally zero coding ability to something on your phone in four hours, including downloading all the software you need, which is free). Then build and experiment from there. There's nothing quite like people asking what you are up to, and whipping out your phone and showing them a game they can actually play. The reactions you get, especially if they don't think you can code, give you the motivation to keep plugging away. You want to have something new to show them next time you see them.
We may have a couple of project managers reading this interview. Any tips for them with regards to managing a project/interacting with developers?
Developers are craftsmen, artisans who work in code. Make them feel that way. Get them to take pride in their work and create something that is elegant, functional and delightful for their users. Make sure they understand the problem you are trying to solve and suggest answers. They will probably be able to come up with better solutions than you can.
Also, we may have a couple of ad men reading this interview. Any tips for them with regards to marketing a game?
All the PR I did myself and it went ok (an interview and pre-launch press on the major mobile blogs; a few non English reviews after launch). It's just a case of being disciplined:
- Read the advice on writing a press release
- Get it out 2-3 weeks before launch
- Write every email with a personal intro
- Write hundreds of emails
- Follow up once or twice per journalist
But the best and most fun marketing thing I did was write the blog for Gamasutra about how the game went from a passion project to a top 5 downloaded game. We think this is the reason that the game went from #200 to #36 in the US charts the week after the launch. People love a story. I wouldn't start working on a new game without working out the story I'd write for the launch press now.
You went for a premium game as opposed to a game that was free with IAP. Why?
Well, originally we were going to release the game for free, more or less as a political statement. The further we got into development, the higher the quality got. Eventually I realised that we would be very justified charging for it given both the quality of the game, and the time we were putting into it.
So we never really thought about the commercial strategy from the start, just decided to flip from free to premium.
But IAP typically requires a LOT of content. Players chew through content incredibly fast - I knew this from my time working in F2P professionally. I wanted something manageable, but also finite. I wanted to code the game and then be able to leave it and move onto other games / projects rather than have it hanging over me indefinitely. I guess I could have done a free mode with IAP to unlock more game modes etc. but that felt too complicated.
Given hindsight is 20/20, would you have done anything differently with regards to building and selling Head of State?
Not much to be honest. It went a lot better than I ever dared imagine. I would have started coding earlier though, and just got on with it. I would have loved to start in June 2015 and launched in March 2016. With the Brexit referendum and US presidential elections 2016 is the year to be launching political games...
Any other tips? EG: Any "must do this or don't come crying to me" kind of stuff?
- Start the project, don't just talk about it.
- Work out what you are doing that is actually different from everyone else. (i.e. what is the launch PR?).
- Finish the project. Ship something.