Rich talks to Magnus Rosén of Ouch Games about the making of the XBLIG title Tank-Tastic!
Background
Where did you get the concept
We thought of a smaller game that was fun and easy for everyone to just pickup and play together with your friends at home. The concept comes with inspiration from a mini game in Wii Play and old NES classic Micro Machines. Our thoughts for the graphics were to have the look of a school desk with a writing block and the whole game was a drawing on it.
How long did it take to develop
It took us around 2 months to develop.
How many people
We were six persons working on this. One graphics artist, one music/sound designer and the rest were programmers.
How many were full-timers, and how many freelancers
No full-timers, all work was done as much as possible on peoples spare time.
How much did you budget for development
Nothing
Did you go over your planned development time/financial budget
Yes we did go over our development time plan. Mostly because of redesigning some stuff and that the testing period took longer than expected.
Can you break the budget down into components – i.e. Art, Code, Music, Testing
Not really because we didn’t have budget. But game play and to have fun when playing was prioritized.
Development
What challenges did you face
When we thought the game was finished there was a lot of testing that was needed. More than we thought.
Did you run into any problems that slowed development and/or release
Release was delayed because of a lot of testing and some bugs that we didn’t expect.
Also is the submitting process on Creators club a bit frustrating when you have to what one week after a submit until you can submit it again if have failed.
Marketing investment
How much have you budgeted for marketing
Nothing
Describe your marketing plan – i.e. which outlets are you hitting, what are you doing with each
Nothing fancy, just email press releases and info about the game to a lot of different sites and newspapers. The difficult thing is to know which ones that needs to send to, because there is no real reason to send to the biggest papers and sites if they don’t really care about indie games. And it’s also difficult to know when to boost the marketing plan because on Xbox Live Indie Games you cannot control when the game is released. It would be better if when you get your game approved, you can decide for yourself when to release it to the public.
What social advertising have you planned
We have a Facebook company page (Ouch Games). And also we have a company homepage, which suppose to have a development blog later on. And of course is a twitter on its way. We also have made a trailer that is released on YouTube.
Are you doing any competitions
Not with this game, but with another game we have won one prize and nominated in another and also entered that in Dream build play and the Independent Game Festival (IGF).
Who do you send freebie copies to
Bunches of gaming sites and hopefully get reviews and some marketing.
Also some local newspapers around here for building on the company trademark around here.
Piracy
Do you have any plan in place to deal with piracy
No, Xbox Live Indie Games is hard or even impossible to piracy.
Sales figures
What are your sales forecasts
We don’t have any forecasts. We have seen that Xbox Live Indie Games doesn’t sell a lot and it is too bad people cannot make a living of it. Our hopes were that if you release one game every third month it would make a good start. But obviously Xbox Indie Games is not really there yet, but hopefully it’s getting better. The quality of the games is getting better and better.
What is your breakeven point
Every sold game is on the positive side.
How accurate do believe them to be
The game has sold less than we expected so far. But hopefully it will get better.
What difficulties do you expect with hitting decent sales figures
Xbox Indie Games has a bad quality stamp on their games, but I think the games getting better and better and hopefully it will get even better.
Comment on this post in our forums
Loading ...
