Kicking off a new section for indievision; ‘Making Of’, we talk to Mark Inman of Honeyslug about the making of the rather splendid PSP (& Flash) title Kahoots.

Where did you get the concept

Kahoots started out as a weekend prototype of a pursuit concept, in which the player had to direct a mouse to an exit door, whilst avoiding cats, by swapping the tiles that formed the world, akin to the gameplay of Bejeweled or Zoo Keeper. It originally had a sepia-tone pixel art style, but whilst this looked cool, we wanted to try something a little different, use Nat’s plasticine stop-motion animation background, and also try to keep the art budget low. As a result we decided not to hire an artist, and instead headed down to the local charity and haberdashery shops to hunt out potential graphics, returning with armfuls of candy, buttons, beads and plasticine, as well as being lucky enough to borrow some beautiful vintage fabrics to use for backgrounds – our entire collection of art assets fitted into a couple of plastic bags!

How long did it take to develop

The original flash version took around 2 months, the conversion to PSP which followed took around 2 months.

How many people

How many were full-timers, and how many freelancers

Honeyslug are a core team of three: Ricky Haggett (code, design, music), Nat Marco (design, animation) and Mark Inman, (project management, testing). Ricky’s brother Rob did all the music on a freelance basis, as well as patiently recording Ricky’s Pegbeast songs and Nat’s Kahoot voices.

How much did you budget for development

We try to keep the cost of development as low as we can without compromising our ability to make ends meet. We’re not particularly driven by making technologically cutting edge stuff, focusing our energy more on innovative look and feel, something we still believe we can achieve successfully in 2D. As such, for a game like Kahoots we had a very unique look to the game – but on an art budget of £35! In terms of budget, the flash game was funded by our friends at Gimme5Games.

Did you go over your planned development time/financial budget

No. Obviously moving onto unfamiliar platforms there were some elements which took us by surprise, but nothing that affected the development either from a budgetary or timescale perspective. We were helped out a lot on the PSP side by Sony’s dev support, who turned around solutions to our problems in no time at all.
 

Development

What challenges did you face

Did you run into any problems that slowed development and/or release

Finding a good process for treating the scanned or photographed elements to produce the final game assets in Photoshop was a little fiddly, and with a small office, trying to create a workable animation space proved quite challenging – and animating the foil wrapped limbs of the Cardborg turned out to be a substantially trickier affair than we first imagined. From a technical point of view, there was nothing major – we made day 1 launch for PSP Minis, so while we did hit several obstacles (which is inevitable on an unfamiliar platform) the dev support offered by Sony helped us successfully hit our launch target without too much trouble.

Marketing

How much have you budgeted for marketing

Describe your marketing plan – i.e. which outlets are you hitting, what are you doing with each

What social advertising have you planned

Are you doing any competitions

With Kahoots, we had several strands to our marketing strategy for launch:

We targetted the main online spots (IGN, Gamespot, MCV, Develop, Eurogamer, etc) and a lengthy list of additional well regarded sites to hit with press releases and review codes. We also had some support for the PSP version from Sony getting some of the higher profile websites and mags to review the title, as well as giving us access to their PlayStation Blog so we could preview the game in the run up to minis launch, and have just had a video feature on the main Souny Europe site (http://uk.playstation.com/games-media/news/articles/detail/item249610/In-Kahoots-with-Honeyslug/).

We also have a regularly updated website/blog and maintain a Facebook group, Twitter account and Youtube channel whenever we have something new to share with our fans. Kahoots also has its own website – www.savethekahoots.com -  which holds the Flash version, our growing list of reviews, news stories and various other items of Kahoots related stuff we think people will like, including a promotional photoshoot where we took the Kahoots on a picnic in the run up to the PSP launch (http://www.flickr.com/photos/43546320@N04/sets/72157622458679529/).

We’ll be releasing a new Pegbeast song / music video / trailer for the game in early 2009, as well as a bunch of additional content on the website, such as music downloads and desktop wallpaper. And hopefully Sony will feature some more Kahoots content on the blog.

As a small, self-funded developer, when it comes to meaningful marketing spend, we try to make sure that we do something which accentuates what makes us and our games unique and fun.

Piracy

Do you have any plan in place to deal with piracy

Piracy isn’t something we spend time worrying about. All indications are that any efforts directed at preventing the cracking, distribution and downloading of your game is effort wasted – the people who are inclined to crack and distribute games are determined enough to get around any protection you can put in place, and those who download pirated games are unlikely to buy them anyway. We prefer to concentrate our efforts on making our games as good as possible, to ensure the decent people who happily pay for games get as good an experience as possible.

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