Darklings: successful game from the second attempt
The appearance of the game Darklings was an event on the AppStore at the end of 2013. Perhaps many of you have already taken the side of Light and have gone through epic black-and-white battles, banishing the monsters of Darkness with inscriptions. The developers of Darklings received the Crystal Pixel Award for the best gameplay and decided not to stop there - but do you know what they went through before receiving their well-deserved honor and respect?
We in Alconost were lucky to work on the localization of Darklings into 8 languages ​​and on a teaser video for the second season of the game. And we decided to translate for you the story of the creation of Darklings, written in the first person. We are sure that this story will give strength to the teams going through difficult times and ready to give up. Just as Darklings did on the team, - don't give up guys!
In May 2013, Burkai Ă–zdemir and Emre Kanbazoglu founded the MildMania gaming studio in Turkey for their money. The first development of the studio, the game Darklings , was hardly released in November 2013. As Emre remembers, making the game was " especially hard in Turkey, where the game industry is very weak ."
')
Darklings is a game for mobile devices with a “fundamentally” unique gameplay: as in epic tales, here Light meets Darkness. You play as the Firefly who fights with Darkness and returns Light to the Universe.
Emre himself will tell us how the game was created and what was behind all this.
It all started with the fact that Burkay saw the poster of the only at that time (end of 2010) startup incubator specializing mainly in games. Together with two friends, he filed an application there. With this team, we have announced the Icons social board game project, which has nothing to do with Darklings.
In the same year, Burkai was accepted to the master's program in gaming technology, where I also studied. As our course project, we presented a game similar to the computer games Harry Potter (where you need to draw to cast spells) and the HTML5 game Z-Type (where you need to write letters for an asteroid explosion). But unlike these games, our game was designed for mobile devices and perfectly adapted for touch screens.
Our team started searching for the right tools, attracting all the experience and help of friends.
But before we continue working on Icons, we spent the first months with a new team in a startup incubator solving a number of problems. Firstly, for everyone in the team, game development experience was limited to a couple of educational projects that are far from perfect and do not reach the level of commercial games. So our team started searching for suitable tools, attracting all the experience and help of friends: professors from the master's program, colleagues from other game development teams and industry experts from the startup incubator.
Later, we suspended the work on the project filed in a startup incubator, and set about playing with the working title Monstiez (where we had to draw to kill our enemies), because it seemed to us that it could be finished in a few months.
Ready prototype Monstiez attracted the attention of gaming publisher Chillingo and industry experts at the Startup Turkey 2012 conference. We are among the top 15 startups in Turkey and we have a chance to communicate with a large number of investors. Everything seemed to be going well. Having started working with Chillingo, we received a lot of tips to improve the game and changed the style to black and white - while Limbo and Contre Jour became popular, which increased sales and received awards.
But after a while the development stalled: everyone around considered the game too boring and primitive. Since changes were made to the project too often, moving forward became painful. This and a number of other factors put the team on the brink of division. We could no longer work together, our views were too different. After much debate, the team disagreed completely: the gap was inevitable. The designer decided to leave and take all his work.
Only Burkai and I didn’t give up. After all, we believed in it from the very beginning, believing that this game could become something completely new on the market. We tried to learn from our mistakes and not turn back on the wrong (as it seemed to us) path. The last time we took up the development of the game, thinking through everything very carefully, so that the new version of the game just turned out much better.
We have not given up on the game. After all, we believed in it from the very beginning.
We found Juan Pablo Casini , who designed and designed, and David Stanton , to music and sound. What was even better, we founded MildMania LLC and brought Contrast8 to the creation of our corporate identity. As a result, we began to make decisions much faster than before. It was still not easy, but we finally began to like what we were doing, as at the very beginning.
We made one big mistake: we were too attached to certain people and their number in the team, being confident that you can always solve all the problems and continue working with the same team without any problems. And since we started three together, it seemed to us that a team of three people should complete the work on the game.
The game could have come out earlier, if at the very beginning we made the right decisions.
Splitting a team is not easy for everyone. But, looking at it now, we see that after the split, things went uphill: from external relations and connections, important and everyday decisions, the people we worked with, to the satisfaction of what was done. We realized that if we had previously decided to split the team and cooperate with our current designers, we could have released a well-thought out game much earlier.
So we learned that each company must find out whether partners are able to understand each other and work together without disagreement, without turning every little thing into a problem. Everyone should ask themselves whether their vision and expectations coincide with their partnerships. This is not just business or friendship - it is a little bit of both, and it’s very similar to the relationship with your soulmate. :)
For nine months, we worked with three designers, one audio designer, and two programmers. Three people from this team were freelancers, with whom we have collaborated for a long time. Our relationship was good enough to, if necessary, move everyone together to the office and continue working from scratch - from corporate identity and new names to game graphics. It was not only schism that pushed us towards fundamental changes, the main reason was still quality: we realized that it should be much higher than the previous one. We worked on changing the game with members of our team and industry colleagues to bring the game closer to the expectations of the AppStore users.
The cost of eight months of redesign may seem too high for a casual game. But after the sacrifices that were made to the project, we could not let the game get lost in the ocean of thousands of applications.
We are convinced that Darklings have done better by adding a lot of content (gaming spaces, tactical fights with bosses, tasks and achievements), possibilities of individual settings and changing game mechanics. Hundreds of people participated in the testing, including developers, designers and business managers from around the world. We passed all the tests with TestFlight and conducted user beta testing, which was accessed after the teaser was released. We invited everyone who showed interest in it, as well as our friends from Turkey - game developers and gamers at the same time - to the game. Hundreds of people from many countries have contributed; In order to get maximum information, along with the in-game feedback mechanism, we implemented a collection of analytics. Now Darklings is not at all like the game we worked on for a year and a half. All feedback gathered helped us correct a lot of mistakes.
We completely remade the user interface, come up with unique fights with each boss
For example, it turned out that the user interface was not quite suitable for mobile phones: some buttons were too small. In addition, fights with bosses quickly bored the players, so we completely remade them by inventing a unique battle with each boss.
We planned to release the game on November 27th. After such a long development, we could not wait for Darklings to appear in the AppStore and were terribly happy when our first application finally came out and instead of the test builds we saw the status “Ready for sale”.
We couldn't wait for Darklings to appear in the AppStore.
But the publishers were suspicious of us, considering the project too risky due to the split of the team before launch. In addition, our former designer launched a campaign of accusations (both public and targeted), desperately speculating on pereinachnyh stories to tarnish the name of the game and the company. We did not react: instead of being involved in public discussions, we tried to focus on the product. We knew that all the tales of our former designer were a lie, and we could have defended our rights in court, but it would have taken years. Instead, we directed our efforts in a different direction, and the reward for these efforts was the launch day and the day following it. Both days were incredible! American and Canadian AppStore called Darklings one of the best applications. Discussions on the forums were initiated by the users themselves, the media published excellent reviews. We received tons of letters of support, to which we responded tirelessly. Watching Darklings going around the world was part of our dream that finally came true!
Suddenly, the decision to go out by samizdat opened up new opportunities for us. Just a week before the game appeared in the AppStore, we met with Ajay Chadkha , the founder of B27 , and agreed to combine our efforts. It was not about publishing, but rather about marketing and business development in the United States and Europe. This helped us to go samizdat, as we wanted.
Our brand began to line up itself
With the help of Ajay, we have established really good relations with representatives of the industry, where we have been recognized, thanks to the quality of our game, and thanks to the friendship with B27. Our brand began to line up by itself. Now we already have agreements with Unity Tech Japan and the Kakehashi Games about the Japanese edition, with Joygame about the publication for Turkey, the countries of the Middle East and North Africa. We are also continuing negotiations on entering Korean, Chinese and other markets. In addition, we are trying to attract funding to expand the team and work on parallel projects without loss of quality, and this is where we can benefit from good relations with investors from around the world.
The amount of work after launch has approximately doubled. And we found that our actions after launch are also significant for the success of the product. At the end of the development, a completely new world opened up to us, and we adapted to it, getting a lot of pleasure from the process.
The business side of the industry, building relationships, searching for local publishers, distributing interviews, getting media reviews, observing how the game is highly rated by industry veterans, planning business a year in advance to develop the game and strengthen its position - all this was new to us. because before that we were completely focused on the development! And even taking into account that the creation process was one more headache, we gained confidence that since we were able to enter this industry, our products will be even better in the future.
The number of work after the launch Darklings almost doubled
Now we are almost ready to announce the release of the second season of Darklings, which actually could turn into Darklings 2. But we decided to release it as an update, because the game itself is only three months old. On the other hand, it is something fundamentally different! And this means that we are not going to throw the game and make sure that Darklings fully realized their potential.
Darklings is available in the AppStore . The game is being prepared for release on Google Play, Samsung Apps, Amazon, LeapMotion, as well as for PC and Mac. Meanwhile, the MildMania team promises more surprises, including exclusive releases and new products to be announced soon!
About the translator
The article is translated in Alconost.
Alconost is engaged in the localization of applications, games and websites in 60 languages. Language translators, linguistic testing, cloud platform with API, continuous localization, 24/7 project managers, any formats of string resources.
We also make advertising and training videos - for websites selling, image, advertising, training, teasers, expliners, trailers for Google Play and the App Store.
Read more: https://alconost.com
We in Alconost were lucky to work on the localization of Darklings into 8 languages ​​and on a teaser video for the second season of the game. And we decided to translate for you the story of the creation of Darklings, written in the first person. We are sure that this story will give strength to the teams going through difficult times and ready to give up. Just as Darklings did on the team, - don't give up guys!
In May 2013, Burkai Ă–zdemir and Emre Kanbazoglu founded the MildMania gaming studio in Turkey for their money. The first development of the studio, the game Darklings , was hardly released in November 2013. As Emre remembers, making the game was " especially hard in Turkey, where the game industry is very weak ."
')
Darklings is a game for mobile devices with a “fundamentally” unique gameplay: as in epic tales, here Light meets Darkness. You play as the Firefly who fights with Darkness and returns Light to the Universe.
Emre himself will tell us how the game was created and what was behind all this.
Initially, there was a poster
It all started with the fact that Burkay saw the poster of the only at that time (end of 2010) startup incubator specializing mainly in games. Together with two friends, he filed an application there. With this team, we have announced the Icons social board game project, which has nothing to do with Darklings.
In the same year, Burkai was accepted to the master's program in gaming technology, where I also studied. As our course project, we presented a game similar to the computer games Harry Potter (where you need to draw to cast spells) and the HTML5 game Z-Type (where you need to write letters for an asteroid explosion). But unlike these games, our game was designed for mobile devices and perfectly adapted for touch screens.
Our team started searching for the right tools, attracting all the experience and help of friends.
But before we continue working on Icons, we spent the first months with a new team in a startup incubator solving a number of problems. Firstly, for everyone in the team, game development experience was limited to a couple of educational projects that are far from perfect and do not reach the level of commercial games. So our team started searching for suitable tools, attracting all the experience and help of friends: professors from the master's program, colleagues from other game development teams and industry experts from the startup incubator.
Later, we suspended the work on the project filed in a startup incubator, and set about playing with the working title Monstiez (where we had to draw to kill our enemies), because it seemed to us that it could be finished in a few months.
Split - for the better
Ready prototype Monstiez attracted the attention of gaming publisher Chillingo and industry experts at the Startup Turkey 2012 conference. We are among the top 15 startups in Turkey and we have a chance to communicate with a large number of investors. Everything seemed to be going well. Having started working with Chillingo, we received a lot of tips to improve the game and changed the style to black and white - while Limbo and Contre Jour became popular, which increased sales and received awards.
But after a while the development stalled: everyone around considered the game too boring and primitive. Since changes were made to the project too often, moving forward became painful. This and a number of other factors put the team on the brink of division. We could no longer work together, our views were too different. After much debate, the team disagreed completely: the gap was inevitable. The designer decided to leave and take all his work.
Only Burkai and I didn’t give up. After all, we believed in it from the very beginning, believing that this game could become something completely new on the market. We tried to learn from our mistakes and not turn back on the wrong (as it seemed to us) path. The last time we took up the development of the game, thinking through everything very carefully, so that the new version of the game just turned out much better.
We have not given up on the game. After all, we believed in it from the very beginning.
We found Juan Pablo Casini , who designed and designed, and David Stanton , to music and sound. What was even better, we founded MildMania LLC and brought Contrast8 to the creation of our corporate identity. As a result, we began to make decisions much faster than before. It was still not easy, but we finally began to like what we were doing, as at the very beginning.
Teamwork - business, friendship and romance
We made one big mistake: we were too attached to certain people and their number in the team, being confident that you can always solve all the problems and continue working with the same team without any problems. And since we started three together, it seemed to us that a team of three people should complete the work on the game.
The game could have come out earlier, if at the very beginning we made the right decisions.
Splitting a team is not easy for everyone. But, looking at it now, we see that after the split, things went uphill: from external relations and connections, important and everyday decisions, the people we worked with, to the satisfaction of what was done. We realized that if we had previously decided to split the team and cooperate with our current designers, we could have released a well-thought out game much earlier.
So we learned that each company must find out whether partners are able to understand each other and work together without disagreement, without turning every little thing into a problem. Everyone should ask themselves whether their vision and expectations coincide with their partnerships. This is not just business or friendship - it is a little bit of both, and it’s very similar to the relationship with your soulmate. :)
How not to get lost in the AppStore
For nine months, we worked with three designers, one audio designer, and two programmers. Three people from this team were freelancers, with whom we have collaborated for a long time. Our relationship was good enough to, if necessary, move everyone together to the office and continue working from scratch - from corporate identity and new names to game graphics. It was not only schism that pushed us towards fundamental changes, the main reason was still quality: we realized that it should be much higher than the previous one. We worked on changing the game with members of our team and industry colleagues to bring the game closer to the expectations of the AppStore users.
The cost of eight months of redesign may seem too high for a casual game. But after the sacrifices that were made to the project, we could not let the game get lost in the ocean of thousands of applications.
Testing can lead to full redesign
We are convinced that Darklings have done better by adding a lot of content (gaming spaces, tactical fights with bosses, tasks and achievements), possibilities of individual settings and changing game mechanics. Hundreds of people participated in the testing, including developers, designers and business managers from around the world. We passed all the tests with TestFlight and conducted user beta testing, which was accessed after the teaser was released. We invited everyone who showed interest in it, as well as our friends from Turkey - game developers and gamers at the same time - to the game. Hundreds of people from many countries have contributed; In order to get maximum information, along with the in-game feedback mechanism, we implemented a collection of analytics. Now Darklings is not at all like the game we worked on for a year and a half. All feedback gathered helped us correct a lot of mistakes.
We completely remade the user interface, come up with unique fights with each boss
For example, it turned out that the user interface was not quite suitable for mobile phones: some buttons were too small. In addition, fights with bosses quickly bored the players, so we completely remade them by inventing a unique battle with each boss.
Focus on product instead of public debate
We planned to release the game on November 27th. After such a long development, we could not wait for Darklings to appear in the AppStore and were terribly happy when our first application finally came out and instead of the test builds we saw the status “Ready for sale”.
We couldn't wait for Darklings to appear in the AppStore.
But the publishers were suspicious of us, considering the project too risky due to the split of the team before launch. In addition, our former designer launched a campaign of accusations (both public and targeted), desperately speculating on pereinachnyh stories to tarnish the name of the game and the company. We did not react: instead of being involved in public discussions, we tried to focus on the product. We knew that all the tales of our former designer were a lie, and we could have defended our rights in court, but it would have taken years. Instead, we directed our efforts in a different direction, and the reward for these efforts was the launch day and the day following it. Both days were incredible! American and Canadian AppStore called Darklings one of the best applications. Discussions on the forums were initiated by the users themselves, the media published excellent reviews. We received tons of letters of support, to which we responded tirelessly. Watching Darklings going around the world was part of our dream that finally came true!
Brand Darklings created himself
Suddenly, the decision to go out by samizdat opened up new opportunities for us. Just a week before the game appeared in the AppStore, we met with Ajay Chadkha , the founder of B27 , and agreed to combine our efforts. It was not about publishing, but rather about marketing and business development in the United States and Europe. This helped us to go samizdat, as we wanted.
Our brand began to line up itself
With the help of Ajay, we have established really good relations with representatives of the industry, where we have been recognized, thanks to the quality of our game, and thanks to the friendship with B27. Our brand began to line up by itself. Now we already have agreements with Unity Tech Japan and the Kakehashi Games about the Japanese edition, with Joygame about the publication for Turkey, the countries of the Middle East and North Africa. We are also continuing negotiations on entering Korean, Chinese and other markets. In addition, we are trying to attract funding to expand the team and work on parallel projects without loss of quality, and this is where we can benefit from good relations with investors from around the world.
The amount of work after launch has approximately doubled. And we found that our actions after launch are also significant for the success of the product. At the end of the development, a completely new world opened up to us, and we adapted to it, getting a lot of pleasure from the process.
The business side of the industry, building relationships, searching for local publishers, distributing interviews, getting media reviews, observing how the game is highly rated by industry veterans, planning business a year in advance to develop the game and strengthen its position - all this was new to us. because before that we were completely focused on the development! And even taking into account that the creation process was one more headache, we gained confidence that since we were able to enter this industry, our products will be even better in the future.
The number of work after the launch Darklings almost doubled
Now we are almost ready to announce the release of the second season of Darklings, which actually could turn into Darklings 2. But we decided to release it as an update, because the game itself is only three months old. On the other hand, it is something fundamentally different! And this means that we are not going to throw the game and make sure that Darklings fully realized their potential.
Darklings is available in the AppStore . The game is being prepared for release on Google Play, Samsung Apps, Amazon, LeapMotion, as well as for PC and Mac. Meanwhile, the MildMania team promises more surprises, including exclusive releases and new products to be announced soon!
About the translator
The article is translated in Alconost.
Alconost is engaged in the localization of applications, games and websites in 60 languages. Language translators, linguistic testing, cloud platform with API, continuous localization, 24/7 project managers, any formats of string resources.
We also make advertising and training videos - for websites selling, image, advertising, training, teasers, expliners, trailers for Google Play and the App Store.
Read more: https://alconost.com
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/222597/
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