If you’re unfamiliar with Burrito Bison, it’s a simple and supposedly addicting game about Mexican launchadores (launching + luchadores) wrestling gummy bears. It’s a classic launching game, like any you’ve probably played in your browser a couple years ago, but on steroids.

The Burrito Bison games are probably our most famous games to date, just above Knightmare Tower. They all went pretty viral back in our Flash days (we’re talking dozens of millions of plays). You might be thinking “if it’s your most popular franchise, why did you wait 4+ years to make another one?” That’s actually a very good question!

Why wait 4 years before cashing in on that success?

Busy Beast

The direct answer to that is probably that a bunch of opportunities led us to work on other things after releasing Burrito Bison Revenge (BBR) in 2012. Here’s a quick list of what we did since.

1. Burrito Bison Revenge on Kongregate
2. Knightmare Tower on Kongregate
3. Flippin Dead on Kongregate
4. Knightmare Tower on Ouya
5. Knightmare Tower on iOS
6. Toto Temple at ToJam
7. Gentlemen Dispute at Indie Speed Run
8. Knightmare Tower on Android
9. FROX at ToJam
10. Knightmare Tower on Steam
11. Toto Temple Deluxe on Ouya
12. Toto Temple Deluxe on PS4, Xbox One, Wii U and Steam
13. Right Click to Necromance at Indie Speed Run
14. Burrito Bison: Launcha Libre on Kongregate
15. Burrito Bison: Launcha Libre on mobile
16. Burrito Bison: Launcha Libre content update (Time Travel)
17. Burrito Bison: Launcha Libre content update (Stopwatch Mode)

As you can see, apart from Toto Temple Deluxe and a bunch of jam games, we haven’t release any new games. It’s mostly just ports of our old games.

Adventurous Beast

The other, less obvious answer to that brilliant question is that we like to create new things and experiment with new ideas. Making the same game over and over gets pretty boring (yes, like ports). We also felt that there wasn’t much we could add to the Burrito Bison experience to justify making another one.

The ugly truth

Let’s be honest for a second. The ugly truth is that… It’s that… Jeez it’s hard to say… The truth is that we did it for the money.

We can hear you judging us.

You’re probably thinking “well of course you did it for the money, you run a business and you need to eat too”, right?

Right?

Seriously though, here’s why.

Toto Temple Deluxe’s financial failure

It might be a surprise to you, but Toto Temple Deluxe didn’t sell that much. The game is good , fun and everything, but it’s local-multiplayer only, and these are extremely hard to sell. Long story short, it was a pretty serious situation that nearly kicked us out of business. We were out of money and we needed a way to get back on our feet quick.

Evaluating options

“How about a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for a new game?”

That would take months, requiring us to find a decent idea, build a prototype, make sure it’s fun, put some art on it to make it appealing, build the campaign, wait another month, etc. It would clearly take too much time and we’d run out of money before even reaching the end of the prototype phase.

“You guys are in Canada, right? Why not apply to the Canadian Media Funds?”

CMF is a really good option to fund a project, and we’re lucky to have it here in Canada. The thing is that applying to CMF is pretty similar to building a Kickstarter Campaign. It would take us months to build a solid pitch, without any guarantee that it would work in the end.

“Can’t you just get a loan from a bank or something?”

That would have been a solution, but it’s not always as easy as it sounds. We like to think of borrowing money as a last resort.

As you can see, we were clearly running out of options, until…

The Solution

Wait a minute. Remember that thing Kongregate did back in August 2015 called Battle KongRoyale? You know, when they pitted their top games against each other to see which one would get voted “Best Game on Kongregate Ever”? No?

Well, Burrito Bison Revenge ended up winning that popularity contest.

Shortly after Toto Temple Deluxe’s release, I remember being in an “emergency” meeting with Dom (the other co-founder) and suddenly thinking: “That’s it, that’s how we can get back on our feet!”

We could use this contest to ask Kongregate if they want to fund* the development of a new Burrito Bison game! Making a new one seemed perfect for a bunch of reasons:

• If Kongregate agrees, we’d get funding relatively quickly (allelujah)
• Thanks to them, we know the IP is still popular
• We don’t need to prototype much, we already know what’s fun
• We can probably make it in under a year, so it’s low risk
• We’ve always had a good relationship with Kongregate (they’re awesome)
• BBR winning their Battle KongRoyale recently surely adds weight to the pitch
• We keep receiving fan mail since 2012 asking for BB3

* By the way, Kongregate funding projects isn’t a secret. They even have an official page for their Launchpad program.

As you can guess, we got in touch with Kongregate, and after a couple weeks discussion surrounding our pitch, we finally got a funding deal for Burrito Bison 3! We were saved, but…

It felt a tiny bit wrong

Our priority was to get back on our feet (financially), and thanks to Kongregate, we succeeded. It still felt a little bit wrong for various reasons:

• We weren’t making a new Burrito Bison because we wanted to, but because we had to in order to survive as a business.
• It felt like a failure at first. After all, we were still tasting the bitterness of TTD’s unsuccessful launch.
• We’ve always made the games we wanted to make, and “making money” has never been at the core of our decision process.
• We like to make new things and explore new territories. Another Burrito Bison game isn’t exactly a “new thing”.

Yes, we know. We’re lucky enough to have a successful IP in our hands, and we’re still far from selling our soul for money. There’s nothing wrong here, but it’s just how it felt at first. It was a change in our usual process and we just had to go through it.

Making the best BB we can, no matter what

Even if making a new Burrito Bison game wasn’t our first choice, we still wanted to make it the best in the series. We still care about the quality of our games, and we would never release a game we’re not proud of.

Obviously, pitching a new Burrito Bison game meant that we needed to make it appealing. This meant new ideas! We had already made two very similar games in the past, and this one had to stand out from the other two.

In order to improve on an already good game, we used the same process we used to make the first two games. It was all about taking something we like, and finding what could be done better. We don’t want to change what’s working, but simply improve on things that have room for improvement.

Now I’m about to go through all the new features and how we made them. If you’d rather skip that part and go straight to the transition from Flash to mobile / free-to-play, just click here. Otherwise, let’s go!

Revamping old features

Right off the bat, we had ideas for new features, but also existing features that could be done better. Other ideas came later on in the process, as we were developing. It was a pretty organic development process, since the foundation was already laid out.

New gummies, obviously

You can’t make a new Burrito Bison without new gummy bears. It’s like a new Fast & Furious without new cars. It doesn’t make sense. Speaking of which, Fast & Furious would be an amazing subtitle for a new Burrito Bison game!

I’m sorry.

One of the first thing we noticed we could do better, on top of actual new gummies, was the complete removal of HUD elements from the mini games. If you’ve played the previous games in the series, you might remember these little things that would appear as soon as you grabbed a special gummy.

They were there to give you information on how to execute the mini game. In the first example above, you can see a vertical meter telling you when to click (when the little Burrito face hits the target). The second one is simply telling you hold the mouse button.

Not only were they hard to understand, but they were also distracting and taking you out of the action. Once you knew how to execute them, they would become useless and simply get in your way.

Most importantly, there was no relationship between how the mini games looked and how they worked. For instance, what are you supposed to do with a big, pink gummy? Roll with it? Smash it? Lick it?  It doesn’t convey anything by itself.

Let’s check out Puncheus Pilot’s design from Launcha Libre. What’s that you say? Puncheus Pilot is a great name? You’re right, it’s a pretty amazing pun (Pontius Pilate) from Kongregate user BSJ913. In fact, all the gummy names were suggested by Kongregate users, and they’re awesome.

As you can see, it has a big, red punching glove aimed towards the ground. What do you think it’ll do once you click? “Uh… I don’t know, maybe punch towards the ground?” And BAM, you understood what it’s about just by looking at it. No huds, no nothing.

Click, click, boom! I’m coming down on the stereo… Saliva? Anyone? No…?

First time you try clicking you’ll see the glove punching quickly towards the ground before retracting itself. It also has limited range, so you’ll need to time it to actually punch something. That’s it, you know everything.

Well, not everything, but that’s okay. As you keep playing, you’ll learn the finer details, like you only have 3 chances to punch something, every time you succeed you go higher, and if you get it right 3 times, the device will explode at the end, giving you a speed bonus. Overcharging you with information in a tutorial is useless and annoying, so we let you discover the rest. See how simple the tutorials are?

I have to click to punch stuff. Alright.

We applied the same process for all the mini games. It’s obviously harder for us to design new gummy bears this way, but we like to think we did okay, even if some are more obvious than others. We definitely think removing HUDs is a nice improvement that keeps you immersed in the action.

Psssst, if you’re curious about this whole “knowing what something does just by looking at it”, it’s called affordances and you can learn more about it in this short video by Extra Credits.

Carvable giant walls

You can’t make a new Burrito Bison without new gummy bears, but you also need giant walls blocking your way. What are you supposed to smash through if you don’t have any?

The giant walls stayed the same since the first Burrito Bison, so we thought there was room for improvement here too.

In previous games, you’d hit a giant wall standing in your way at the end of every zone. You’d need to gather enough speed to pass through it, otherwise you’d just smash your face in it and stop right where you were. It wasn’t really clear to new players why they would hit their face in the wall over and over again, as there was no clear feedback.

In Launcha Libre, it’s not all or nothing anymore. As you can see in the GIF above, entering the wall is easier, but it doesn’t mean you’ll exit on the other side. That’s because the cake matter slows you down as you’re carving through, making it clearer that speed is important to go through. The good news is that whatever you carve out stays like that forever. This way, you can visually track your progress between each run, making it a lot more exciting. Carving out more cake means that you’ll eventually get through the door, which is way more encouraging than stopping abruptly with no real feedback.

Oh, and it looks way cooler too!

New launchadores

When it’s time to revamp the game, it’s easy to think about features like gummy bears and walls, but what about Burrito Bison himself? He represents the actual gameplay, how you interact with the game, so changing him has a huge impact on the game’s core mechanics (it’s a one button game, after all).

Since the overall gameplay was going to be pretty similar to the previous games, we really wanted a way to differentiate this one from its predecessor. We wanted screenshots to really demonstrate that it’s a new game, and not the old Flash ones. We wanted something you never saw before, basically. That’s where the idea of new launchadores came into play.

Instead of simply changing Burrito Bison, or giving him different play styles (mechanics), how about we simply add new characters that each have their own style? This would allow us to put brand new faces onto the game, screaming that it’s a totally new one, while letting us refresh the gameplay at the same time. Genius!

Yes, we think we’re geniuses. Sometimes.

Pineapple Spank

Pineapple Spank came in first and relatively easily. We were thinking of ways to keep the same “one button” gameplay that would fit on top the existing content, and the idea of automatically picking the most valuable gummies out of the crowd sounded pretty cool.

Random generic gummy bear, I choose you!

The concept worked right away, but her hookshot ability ended up being pretty powerful compared to Burrito’s normal rocket slam ability. To to balance her out, we reduced her area of impact a little bit. For comparison, Burrito can smash more gummies around him when he slams the ground. We even added an “auto slam” ability to Burrito when he falls from high enough. This way, he can smash more gummies and avoid getting hurt on the ground without spending any rockets, which makes him as useful as Pineapple Spank.

El Pollo

El Pollo’s concept took more time to figure out, as we finally decided on its special ability around the end of the production phase. We dared to go a bit deeper by asking players to click and hold to perform its special move. El Pollo can fly through the air and sustain its altitude when you hold the button, just before doing a regular rocket slam when you release.

His ability is super useful to reach the clouds faster, as you can hover to target specific gummies to help you ascend. He’s a bit trickier to use, so you unlock it later in the game. We like to think of El Pollo as an advanced character for advanced players, adding depth to the game. Mastering El Pollo takes a while and we think it’s a good thing.

Most players prefer Pineapple Spank for her ease of use and efficiency, but we can sometimes find true hardcore players preferring El Pollo over the other two. We really wanted to have different characters (both visually and mechanically), so we hoped that everyone would have their own favorite, no matter the reason!

New opponents and launch system

If you’ve played the first games in the series, you probably remember those timing mini-games that you’d have to play to launch yourself out of the ring.

Just like with the gummy bears, we felt like there was no relationship between the mini-games (spinning HUDs) and the opponents themselves. So, we decided to remove the HUDs altogether.

This forced us to transfer the timing mini-games into the opponents themselves. The most obvious way of creating that relationship was to use their idle animations.

In their face!

As you can see above, you need to hit them at the right moment in their animation to get a “crit” bonus, otherwise you just hit them normally. That “right moment” isn’t explicitly revealed to you, so you need to analyse their animation and guess when that peak is. We mostly avoided creating a tutorial for this to lighten the load of everything you’re trying to learn at first. We didn’t want you to read a bunch of paragraphs just to try the game out. Seriously, who likes that?

Also, as you probably noticed, we changed the way you actually launch yourself. Instead of simply clicking the screen to let Burrito fly away, you actually need to pull the elastic cables back and let them go to launch the launchadores (à la Angry Birds, or Crush the Castle if you know your stuff).

Burrito has always launched himself by using the cables, so it just feels more natural to do the actual move with your finger. It also lets you aim at where you want to go, which let us create different opponent animations (like the Beaster Bunny who jumps in the air), adding more depth to the system.

The final addition we made to the launch system are the health bars at the top. In the previous games, you’d need to perfectly hit the opponents a certain number of times to defeat them. It was pretty hard to track your progress, so adding health bars made it super easy. It also helped push that wrestling / fighting theme further, along with the fact that you can K.O. your opponents like in a real fighting game

Opponents also randomly cycle between themselves as you defeat them, keeping things fresh as you unlock more opponents. In the previous games, you’d be stuck with the last opponent you’ve unlocked forever, which kind of feels dumb now that we think of it.

Overall, we think the new launch system feels a lot more natural and entertaining than the old HUD dependent one. What do you think?

Mexican culture

Launcha Libre is the first game in the series that does not take place in Candyland. That’s right, it’s all happening in Mexico, Burrito Bison’s hometown! We wanted to refresh things up and let Candyland rest a bit.

The main benefit from making the game take place in Mexico (and surrounding areas) was the cultural aesthetics. It’s super bright and colorful, just how we like our Burrito Bison games. It was also refreshing to surround Burrito in its element, instead of having him being the only Mexican element.

Not only can you feel the Mexican aesthetics in the backgrounds, but in the UI art, music (by Hyperduck) and sound design (by Signal Space) as well. You can listen to the amazing soundtrack by Hyperduck Soundworks here!

Deciding to use elements from Mexican culture meant that we had to do it in a respectful way, obviously. We just assumed we knew nothing about Mexican culture, which isn’t far from the truth, so we made a bunch of research for every elements we wanted to include in the game. We even double checked with friends that are actually native from Mexico, just to get their opinion on the whole thing. We love the Mexican culture (and food), but we’d never want to offend anyone with our games, obviously!

We like to think we did a good job respecting the culture, but please let us know if you think we missing something.

Real Recipes

If you’re a Burrito Bison fan (or Pulp Fiction fan), you’ll probably recognize this.

It’s Burrito’s wallet, the one the gummy bears stole back in Burrito Bison Revenge. Your goal was to get it back so you could pay for your groceries!

We’ve never been known for the complexity of our games’ ending (have you ever played Gobtron?) Even if we still wanted something simple to drive Burrito’s / your motivation, we wanted to drop the wallet thing and go for something else.

Introducing… the real recipes!

Burrito starts off in La Tienda, making his groceries, like in every Burrito Bison game, so we had the idea of replacing his wallet with a recipe book. It would get stolen by an evil gummy chef, and you’d then have to get it back. Real simple and fast to do, as we were on a pretty tight schedule at the time.

As we joked about the recipes, we thought it’d be funny to make them actual real recipes you can make at home. I remembered my mom having a pretty good salsa recipe she used to make when I was a kid. Naturally, I thought it’d be the perfect opportunity to share it with the rest of the world!

It started out with salsa, then we added guacamole, tortilla soup and huevos rancheros (credits to Kong staff Danilo’s mom for this one). Before adding them to the game, we cooked up all of them and adjusted them to make sure they were tasty and as easy to make as possible. It was nice cooking up at home, thinking “this is for work, hehe”.

For a simple “end game” reward, we thought it was pretty sweet that you could actually cook them. Unfortunately, not everyone thought so. We received a lot of comments complaining about the recipes just being plain recipes, and not adding anything else to the game itself.

We totally understand why you’d expect more from it, but we didn’t plan much further than this at first. We thought the game would “end” once you’d get all your recipes back, just like it would when you’d get your wallet back in BBR. We didn’t really think about the replayability of it, especially as a mobile free-to-play title.

On the other hand, a lot of players have vocally expressed their love for the recipes. Seeing someone cooking up one of the recipes puts a smile on our faces every time!

From Flash to mobile F2P

If you’ve known us for a couple years, you know we used to make Flash games. They’ve always been “free to play”, but not in the same way as modern free-to-play (F2P) titles. We used to get our money from the sites that were hosting our games, leaving them completely free to players. Making the jump from “free to play” to F2P isn’t exactly seamless.

Even if Burrito Bison: Launcha Libre is our first, real F2P title, we were confident going in, mostly because Kongregate are experts on the matter *. Really, it’s amazing how much they know their stuff.

*Just so you know, we designed the whole game by ourselves, and Kongregate never forced us to do anything we didn’t want to. They only offered tips and shared their thoughts on what we already did.

Right off the bat, we knew we had to retain the classic Burrito Bison experience. We wanted to keep the core intact, so no mobile gimmicks like “lives” or anything asking you to stop playing and come back later. Burrito Bison as always been about that “one more run” feeling, so we really wanted to let players play as much as they wanted to. Video ads with bonuses felt like the best option for the type of gameplay.

Video Ads

By using video ads as the main revenue source, we knew we’d keep generating revenues only as long as players were actually playing the game. This meant that we had to take the original 2 hour experience and stretch it as much as we could without dropping the quality of the game. Obviously, there was absolutely no way for us to retain that condensed 2h experience on the F2P market, it just doesn’t make sense.

Since watching video ads would give you bonuses to accelerate your progress, we started out by balancing the game for players who would decide not to watch any video ads. We wanted the game to still be enjoyable without ads, but still “slow” enough to make you want to watch the ads. Yeah, making F2P games is borderline evil, we know. Please stay our friends!

Piñata!

Before we even knew we’d be making BB3, we had this idea of wrapping video ads in an “opportunity system” to make them feel more special. Not having the opportunity to watch video ads whenever you want would technically make it more enticing to watch one when you could.

We wanted the thing offering you video ads to be in the gameplay loop and not just a UI thing slapped on. That’s how the idea for the Piñata came up.

It needed to be a gummy bear, so it could spawn in the world for you to smash. At first it was supposed to be some kind of gummy salesman offering some goodies in exchange for a video, but we quickly figured out that simply clicking “yes” in a dialogue box was less entertaining than smashing things. After all, that’s what you do in Burrito Bison, so it’s only natural to ask you to smash something to get your goodies.

Hey you, hit me!

This is where the piñata comes in! A piñata is supposed to be beaten up by default, plus it’s Mexican. How perfect! It was also a good opportunity to introduce a new character on its own.

The piñata’s personality came straight for the fact that it would let you beat it up if you’d watch an ad. We wanted you to want to beat it up, so it had to enjoy it. Imagine if it’d be scared of you beating it up? You would probably feel bad doing it.

That’s how we came up with a crazy looking piñata that keeps asking you to punch it. It enjoys it so much that if you take too long to take its offer to watch an ad, the piñata will try to click the “Yes” button with a stick.

We did our best to make it as satisfying as possible. Notice all the sounds, effects and confettis in the video above. It might not be the most satisfying thing ever, but we still think it’s doing a good job. Also, seeing things like this (below) makes us think we succeeded at creating a new memorable character for the game!

A lucky BB player received a real piñata for his birthday!

The piñata system had a couple useful perks. Its content was flexible, so we could add more goodies, remove some, change them, etc. We also made its content scalable, so it would follow your general upgrade level.

Each time you purchase an upgrade, you get a purple star for your piñata. Once you have enough, the piñata levels up and its content gets better, following your overall progression.

Release

Burrito Bison: Launcha Libre was first released in September 2016 as a web version on Kongregate.com. We used the feedback from the web version to improve on the game before releasing it on mobile in November 2016.

Web VS Mobile

Even if the game was born on Flash, the web version wasn’t as well received as the mobile version.

Let’s be honest, the game was designed for mobile first. It wasn’t as condensed as the original games, plus it had video ads in it. We learned that the web community doesn’t respond very well to those things, especially if it’s a sequel to a game they loved.

The weird thing is that even if the comments were bad, the numbers were good. A lot of players were playing the game a lot and watching all the ads they could. We decided to keep the game mostly as it was and wait for the mobile launch. Turns out it was the right decision!

Numbers

To this day, 10 months after its release, the web version is rated at 3.9/5 with over 1.8M gameplays. The mobile version is rated at 4.8/5 on Android and 5/5 on iOS, with 6.22M and 2.18M downloads respectively. That’s a total of 8.40M downloads to date.

As you can see, the mobile version did a lot better than the web version. Both markets are not of the same scale, obviously, but you can still see how ratings differ from one platform to the other.

In terms of revenues, here’s how it’s split between web and mobile, IAP and ads.

Compared to Toto Temple Deluxe, BB:LL has been a complete financial success. It has allowed us to get back on our feet financially, but also plan ahead for future projects. It might not have been our number one choice when it comes to which games we felt like making, but we’re super pleased of how well it turned out to be.

To wrap it up (like a burrito)

We still can’t understand how high the ratings are on mobile. I mean 5/5, what’s wrong with you people? We received a lot of fanart and amazing emails about how much the game means to some people. In other words, it’s been amazing to see the reception so far, and we hope the game will live as long as the previous ones in the series (people are still playing Burrito Bison Revenge, you guys are crazy).

Have you played the game? Did you like it? Would you change some things? Did you learn something by reading this awfully long post? Please let us know in the comments below, we LOVE reading comments while wearing our lucha suits.

Photoshop

We mostly use Photoshop for UI work and everything “branding” and “marketing”. It’s obviously a standard, so no news here.

One trick we use a lot is “Generate > Image Assets”, which automatically exports all your layers to PNGs if they’re named correctly. You can also customize the size, quality and file type of the exported image. It’s magic.

We also use Transform Each by Kamil Khadeyev, a free and super useful addition to Photoshop. It lets you transform multiple layers at once individually, instead of as a group.

Illustrator

We use Illustrator every time we need to come up with a new logo, either for one of our games or to refresh the Juicy Beast one (for the 100th time). We occasionally stray from Illustrator for a more hand drawn look, like with the Knightmare Tower logo and Toto Temple Deluxe logo, but even then, we start in Illustrator to sketch things up quickly, as it tends to handle type more easily than Photoshop and Flash.

Premiere & After Effects

We use Premiere Pro and After Effects for all of our video trailers. One thing that’s really useful is the “Dynamic Link” between the two softwares. It lets you embed an After Effects composition in your Premiere timeline without the need to render it first. You can edit the sequence in AE, save, and bam, it’s up to date in Premiere. More magic.

Flash

Yes, you read right, we still use Flash (now called Animate). Even though we don’t use it to make our games anymore (thanks to Unity), we still use it for art and animation. We really enjoy its benefits, like scalable vector art and being able to animate in the same software without the need to export first. It also let us switch between frame by frame animation and tween based animation on the go, which is always nice. Apart from the occasional crashes, we still love Flash <3

GAF Converter

We used to use our own Flash to Unity exporter, but we’ve been using GAF a lot lately. It renders all our art and animations to sprites and data, and then reads it back inside Unity. Basically, it lets us animate everything we want in Flash, like we’re used to, and magically pushes everything to Unity! We use it for both character animations and UI animation, like the opponents and the piñata from from Burrito Bison: Launcha Libre. You can read more about the process here!

Unity

No surprise here, we use Unity like a lot of other devs and probably for the same reasons. The ability to port to multiple platforms without rewriting the code is a huge plus for our small team.

2DToolkit

2DToolkit is a plugin available on the Unity Asset Store that we use primarily to manage all our sprites and frame by frame animations from Flash. It’s a very powerful tool if you’re doing 2D games that are not based on skeletal animations. If that’s the case, you should look into Spine.

Our own Juicy Framework

We Alex has been updating and maintaining and upgrading our own framework for years. It’s made our lives a lot easier by letting us do complexe things really quickly. It has a complete event system with built-in game state management, built-in optimized pooling system, easy UI building and management, and a lot of other useful things we won’t list here. Also, as you can see in the image above, we’re using Visual Studio (bundled with Unity on PC).

Audio Toolkit

Audio Toolkit is a Unity plugin that lets us trigger sounds with a single line of code. It has a bunch of nice features like sound randomization and pitch variations, plus it has great memory management.

DoTween

DoTween is an animation engine for Unity that we use (a lot) to make things move by code. It’s super lightweight, optimized and easy to use. In fact, it’s so easy to use that sometimes it’s easier to tween a value than to change it normally!

I2 Localisation

I2 Localisation is another Unity plugin we use to manage translations in our games. All our text fields are linked to a cell in a Google Spreadsheet, and all we need to do is fill it out to see the results in the game! Did we say we like magic?

Google Sheets / Excel

Can’t beat a good ol’ spreadsheet when it’s time to handle numbers and formulas for balancing stuff out. Another neat tool we sometimes use to figure out a formula from a sequence of number (because they feel good balance-wise) is WolframAlpha. You can enter a sequence of numbers and it will generate a formula to calculate the following numbers in that sequence. Super useful!

Align + Distribute

Align+Distribute is a tiny little plugin for Unity that helps a LOT when it’s time to meticulously place all those UI elements by hand. Until Unity can offer a solid built-in solution for this, Align+Distribute will keep saving the day!

Other tools

That’s pretty much everything we use to actually make our games or the stuff that goes in them. We also use a bunch of side tools to make it easier to collaborate, plan, discuss and research. Here’s a quick list, if you’re curious:

There’s also a bunch of sites we visit often for inspiration and research:

That’s it! If you use different tools or know any cool sites, please share in the comments below, we’d love to check them out!

The Sales

Let’s not waste your time, we both know that’s what you want to see As I’m writing this update, the game has been out for 4 months (released on Sept.29th 2015). Here’s how close we are from breaking even:

Almost! *curls into a ball and cries*

So 4 months later, we sold around 6k copies in total, which is really not a lot as you can see. Maybe we’ll benefit from the long tail eventually, or even better, the stegosaurus tail!

Why invest 2 years on such a small game?

The truth is, we never actually planned to do anything with Toto Temple (the jam version). We were presented with a chain of opportunities, and we simply decided to take each one of them as the development went on.

Year 1: Working with Ouya

The first opportunity we took after the Toronto Game Jam (where the game ended up being one of the favorites), was taking Ouya’s money to make a full fledged game out of Toto Temple. At the time, Matt Thorson’s Towerfall was Ouya’s killer app, and they wanted to cash in on that local-multiplayer trend (who wouldn’t). We took the money and made a bigger version of the game, which we then called Toto Temple Deluxe.

The deal was simple, get a bigger game (and more experience) in our portfolio without spending our own money. The game went live on Ouya, people enjoyed the Deluxe version, we even received really nice feedback from the press at E3 (Ouya booth).

Here we were, a couple weeks after the Ouya release, with a “console friendly” game in our hands, which technically didn’t cost us anything to make. For us, this was something unusual: we used to make small Flash / mobile games, and we now had a “big” game that could be played in the living room with actual controllers. It felt like a big deal, as we could remember actually saying a couple years ago that “we would probably never be able to make console games”. At the time, we didn’t have the skills to develop for consoles, and Unity wasn’t really a thing yet.

Year 2: Porting to consoles

This is where we took the opportunity to get in touch with the 3 giants. We arranged meetings at GDC and pitched Toto Temple Deluxe to the 3 console owners. They all liked the game and things moved forward pretty quickly after that. We officially became PS4, Xbox One and Wii U developers, which still felt like a really big deal. We were in the big leagues now.

Being total beginners in the console market, we quickly realized that we would never get an interesting exclusivity deal with any of 3 console owners, since the game was already out on Ouya.

Knowing that, we decided to release the game on all 3 consoles. The decision was mainly based on 2 points:

• Our thought process back then was that if we can’t strike a good exclusivity deal, then let’s do all 3 consoles for 3 times the revenue.
• We also thought that we probably wouldn’t get the media’s attention 3 times for the same game (the 3 releases), so let’s release the game on all 3 consoles at the same time. That way, we would get decent attention one time and speak to all console owners at once.

Was the game at least fun?

We genuinely think Toto Temple Deluxe is a lot of fun, under the right circumstances. We designed the game to be as family friendly as possible, meaning that anyone should have a minimum amount of fun, no matter how skilled their opponents are (auto-balance system, etc). It’s also designed to be played with real people, in the same room, on the same couch. The more yelling, the better!

We also witnessed genuine fun and engagement from players who tried the game in public events, like PAX and Comiccon (see the engagement below).

We still get goosebumps over this one.

Gameplay analysis

We don’t think the game didn’t sell well because it wasn’t fun. On the other hand, Toto Temple Deluxe is still quite different from those other popular local-multiplayer games.

Intuitive controls

One of the first thing you notice when you first play Toto Temple Deluxe is how tricky it can be to effectively move around in the game (by using the dash mechanic). Even if we did our best to explain the controls in the most intuitive way we could think of, there’s still a difficulty curve that you need to overcome to really feel at ease while moving around.

It definitely comes in the way of our goal to make the game family friendly. We should either have made the controls simpler, or aimed at a more “experienced” crowd from the start. Not both.

In Towerfall, for instance, everyone can be deadly by simply pressing the “shoot” button once. It’s that simple. In Toto Temple Deluxe, you need to:

1. Get close to the goat carrier
2. Use a combination of 2 buttons to dash towards the goat carrier
3. Hope that you were aiming right
4. If not, you need to turn around and start over

It’s definitely not a problem once you get the hang of it, but it’s not making the game as easy to get into for new players.

The show

Tricky controls can actually be a good thing if they’re funny to watch. Our friends from Breakfall did just that with their game Starwhal. The game is pretty hard to control, but it’s part of the show, as you watch your starwhal wiggle its way towards your opponent’s heart.

This game will touch your heart

In Toto Temple Deluxe, it’s actually pretty hard to make sense of what’s happening on the screen if you don’t know the game already. I mean, look at this:

This is probably confusing if you’ve never seen the game before.

Toto Temple Deluxe doesn’t really give a “good show” by default. You never see spectacular kills like in Towerfall or Starwhal, and not many actions are worth their own replay / slow motion sequence (there are, but they’re harder to spot). It’s not making the game less fun to play, obviously, but it’s making it less fun to watch. It might not be that attractive to YouTubers and Twitchers for this reason.

Intensity variations

In most competitive local-multiplayer games where you can “eliminate” players in some way (Samurai Gunn, Nidhogg, Towerfall, Starwhal, etc), you often find significant variations in intensity.

The tension goes up as you’re fighting / trying to survive, but once you or the other player is eliminated, there’s this drop in intensity that lets you breath (and celebrate) for a couple seconds, which feels right. On paper, it would probably look like the graph on the left:

On the other hand, Toto Temple Deluxe’s intensity graph probably looks more like the one on the right. It’s more like a marathon, less like short sprints.

You get micro rewards / satisfactions every time you steal the goat or strike a power-up, but the game doesn’t stop nor celebrate it that much, it just keeps going. Your real reward is at the end, when you finally reach 3k points and win the match.

We don’t think this kind of intensity is necessarily a bad thing, but it forced us to reduce the time of a match to about 2 minutes maximum. Anything passed that would really drain you out mentally, and a single game was usually more than enough.

All of these elements are probably not responsible for the game not selling well, but they do have an effect on the actual feel and accessibility of the game.

Theme, title and trailers analysis

Following the release of the article, we received a lot of feedback regarding the general theme and title of the game. Here’s an update on this particular subject.

A big huge part of selling copies of your game is to grab people’s attention when they first encounter your game on a website or in a store. You do that by having a good looking game (originality, style, theme, etc), which comes up in screenshots and trailers. You also need to have a good title that is both memorable/catchy and describes the game well. Finally, your game’s description (elevator pitch) also needs to let people wanting more, or at least generate some kind of wonder in their mind.

We didn’t have any of this in Toto Temple Deluxe.

The theme

The Mayan / temple theme wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t good either. It’s clearly overused, uninspired and doesn’t make you want to discover the game’s universe because you already know what that kind of universe looks like. Don’t get me wrong though, I think our game is beautifully drawn. We’re solely talking about theme here.

The main reason for all of this is because we chose the theme during the initial game jam. It was nicely supporting our first prototype about little servants defending the treasures in a temple for some god. You can see how the gameplay changed drastically during the jam.

We ended the jam with the Mayan theme, and we had no reasons to revisit it afterwards. Then Ouya came in and asked us to take what we had (which was good enough), and make something bigger out of it. It was faster to keep it like this and take the money, rather than re-design everything from scratch and lose money in the process.

After the Ouya version, we had a finished product that was a good fit for consoles (for the first time ever). It was obvious that we wouldn’t start over from scratch at that point. So that’s how we ended up with this theme.

We didn’t really notice that our theme was bad at the time because we were kind of confusing weirdness with originality. The whole “goat on your head” thing felt unique, unseen, so we were under the impression that our game was unique and memorable. But, yeah, we were wrong.

The character designs were also created during the jam, and we never went back to them. I personally still think they’re cool/cute, but it’s true that they aren’t as strong as other characters. For instance, I really like Candyman and Latch from Lethal League (Team Reptile). They’re unique and have strong, memorable features (thanks to Team Reptile for their feedback on the subject).

The title

The title also came during the jam, and our main focus back then was to make it sound catchy (4 successive syllables starting with “T”). It was also a reference to Toronto and ToJam. Toto.

By the time we finished the Ouya version, the title had already spread a bit on Google (articles, download sites, etc). We thought that Toto Temple was still catchy, so we decided to keep it and simply add Deluxe to make it distinct from the jam version.

Back then, we thought that “catchy” and easy to find on Google was enough for a good title. We never asked ourselves if it was suggesting the gameplay well enough, of anything else for that matter.

We received a lot of feedback regarding the Deluxe part saying that it had a strong “puzzle” feel to it, which was misleading. At first I was a little bit skeptical, but a quick search on Steam revealed that it might lead to confusion for some users.

It’s not ALL puzzles, but I get the point. The title itself isn’t responsible for the poor sales, but it certainly played a role in the whole thing, being one of the first things people see (usually).

The trailers

I like to think that both trailers are good. They’re not perfect, but they’re good. Again, I might be biased here because I made them myself.

The first one that came out, the Goat Interview, was supposed to teach viewers about the game’s mechanics. We wanted to do something like this because we felt like the gameplay was super chaotic and hard to understand just by looking at it.

The voice is from Julian Smith, a really good voice actor!

The trailer is a bit too long, but as first my first attempt at writing a script ever, I still think that it wasn’t that bad. We were also in the process of getting more powerful computers at the time, so the gameplay footage isn’t exactly smooth either.

The second trailer that came out was the “official” gameplay trailer, where you can see how crazy Toto Temple Deluxe is. In a perfect world, you would have watched the first one before watching this one. That way, you’d understand what was going on.

When you’re exhausted, adding WTF moments in a trailer [0:28] can help with motivation.

I might still look like pure chaos in there, but I took particular care to teach important elements in the right order. In other words, the trailers talks to you the whole time. Here’s what it’s telling you:

Everything’s going SUPER fast, and you might not get everything in one view, but at least it’s the idea. I used a lot of repetition and slow motion to help you catch all the details, but even that wasn’t enough to clearly see everything. By the way, if you want to hear more about “making good trailers”, I suggest you read this great article by Kert Gartner.

Another point that could have helped selling the game to local-multiplayer aficionados is including live action footage of actual players enjoying the game (like this). This way, you really get an idea of what the game is about and how it is best played.

A good example of that is the Sportsfriends trailer by Die Gute Fabrik.

Looks pretty fun if you ask me.

Once again, not a deal breaker to omit this kind of footage, but it can definitely help sell the game to the right crowd.

Marketing experiments

We tend to do everything in-house (contacting media, official websites, video trailers, community management, etc). We’ve never been fans of spending money on marketing for things we could do ourselves. We also try to come up with creative solutions to market our games to counter-balance our low marketing budgets.

For Toto Temple Deluxe, we really tried to do more than what we usually do. We went to PAX for the first time (remember, we used to make Flash games), and we also paid for PR for the first time as well. While going to gaming events and paying for PR services is pretty traditional, we also experimented a bit with other things like real goats and automatic Twitch raffles.

Paying for nothing PR at PAX East

Our first experience with PR wasn’t super useful in the end, to be honest. Even if we managed to get those services for a reasonable price (being “new customers” to a super friendly PR company), the end results left us pretty unsatisfied.

The services they provided were very good, don’t get me wrong. We managed to get a couple interesting meetings scheduled at PAX (big websites), but the snowstorm that happened that week made some of them cancel. When we got back, the PR company helped us reschedule new online meetings with the sites who canceled, but none of them answered our multiple emails afterwards.

One other big website that actually came to the meeting wrote an article about the upcoming game following the event, but they never bothered writing a review once the game released. We contacted them multiple time with no luck, which is weird, considering they already showed an interest in the game.

Giving away $17,000 worth of Toto Temple Deluxe at PAX East

We already wrote a detailed overview of this experiment, which you can read in full here.

This particular experiment (the showdown system) was really successful at the event. We attracted big crowds and got noticed by a lot of players. The only problem is that we didn’t get noticed by that much press, which would have helped promote the game later down the road.

The showdown system worked so well with player though, that we replicated it at future events (like the Montreal Comiccon), and received the same type of response (only on a smaller scale).

It’s definitely something we would try to adapt to our future games, and we encourage anyone to remix this idea to fit their needs.

The Real Goat bundle

When the game came out, we had a plan to join a good cause by promoting the Oxfam Unwrapped program. Oxfam are offering to buy real animals (like chickens, goats, donkeys, etc), to provide communities in need around the world. It’s a sort of donation, basically.

What we did is we committed ourselves to buy real goats in the name of anyone who would purchase the Real Goat bundle. The buyers would also get 4 copies (Steam keys) for Toto Temple Deluxe to share with their friends.

Despite being really well adapted to the theme of the game (goats) and being original to some extent, the Real Goat bundle didn’t sell at all. We think it’s probably due to 3 factors:

1. The steep price of the bundle ($60 USD), which basically just covers the price of the goat. We make no money with the bundle, which actually fits the “good cause” idea. We’re giving away copies of our game in exchange for a donation to a charity organisation.
2. We only felt comfortable giving away PC versions of the game. The game is more enjoyable / popular on consoles, but we’re not allowed to distribute console codes that way.
3. The game doesn’t support online-multiplayer, so 4 copies of a local-multiplayer game might feel less interesting a deal if it doesn’t let you play with your friends online. We were aiming to give buyers an opportunity to simply gift the game to their friends, but we completely understand the ambiguity.

Bot Bet Battle

Following the release of Toto Temple Deluxe, we organized a 1 day Twitch event called Bot Bet Battle.

We had the game’s bots fight themselves in a classic tournament, and viewers could vote for the bot they thought would win. Everything was AI controlled, so we had no input over which bot would win.

The number votes would update in real time (or almost), the names of the voters would pop on the screen for everyone to see, and the tournament would start when enough votes were entered to fill the “votes bar”.

At the end of the tournament, everyone who voted for the winning bot would automatically receive Steam key in the chat system (as a whisper, obviously). You basically had a chance out of 4 to win a free copy of the game.

We would also ramp up the amount of necessary votes from round to round, so that viewers would invite their friends to accelerate the process.

We gave away about 1,400 Steam keys during the event. Knowing that a single account couldn’t win twice, and that a lot of viewers never won a key, we know we reached a lot more than 1,400 viewers.

We promoted the event on our social pages and a bunch of related subreddits, so there was probably a decent percentage of “new customers” in the lot.

Even though the event was fun, and that we probably managed to reach new followers, we barely noticed any bump in the game’s sales.

Cameos

This one took us a lot of time and grew out of proportion pretty quickly. When we started working on the Deluxe version, we knew we wanted to include cameos from other games as a replacement for the goat (what you’re fighting for). By other games, we mean games made by friends of ours and other developers we admire and respect. We also wanted to include people in there (not just game characters), like the developers themselves.

All of this was supposed to be a small and cute addition to the game. We were adding unlockable cameos from games we love, and everyone from the team started to pitch in. This is where everything exploded. We created around 150 cameos (and by we I mean JP, our artist), ranging from game characters to their developers themselves. Here’s some examples:

We reached out to every single developer to introduce our idea and get an approval if they liked it. Some of them were already our friends, which was easy, but a lot of them were big developers we never spoke with before. Sometimes it took a lot of effort / contacts to get the missing email addresses.

We wanted to do things in a clean way, so we wrote a personalized agreement for each of them, stating that the cameos were just cosmetic additions, and that we would never sell them or make money directly from them, etc.

The agreement itself let the devs change the name of the cameos, decide on which consoles they would appear, pick the secret code to unlock them, and if they agreed with the whole idea or not. A digital signature was required, and boom, everything was set (no PDF, no emails).

A couple months later, on the actual release date, we’ve seen a lot of those devs share their cameos (and their secret code to unlock them) on Twitter and Facebook. Not all of them shared though. There was obviously no way to predict who would share and who wouldn’t, but we still saw a LOT of tweets that day.

A tweet by Renaud Bedard

A tweet by Drinkbox

A tweet by Capy Games

A tweet by Brace Yourself

It’s pretty hard to calculate how much visibility we gained through the cameo system, as we can’t access other dev’s Twitter stats, but we probably reached a lot of people who wouldn’t have been aware of the game otherwise. What we can calculate though, is how many new connections we made with developers we admire, and we’re pretty happy about it <3

Newsletter

A newsletter system is nothing new, but we also toyed with it for the first time. Okay, maybe the second time. Remember that part where we gave out free Steam keys at events? Well they weren’t really free. We actually asked people to subscribe to our newsletter in order to receive the key. You can get all the details about how we did it here.

We even created a sweet little backend system (with the help of our good friend Devine Lu Linvega) that automatically distribute the keys without having us send a single email. We just need to upload the keys to a database, and the system handles everything.

1. Users need a unique code printed on the “key card” they won
2. They join our newsletter by entering their email address and unique code in a Mailchimp form
3. Mailchimp sends the info back to our backend system, where we validate the code and register the email if it’s good
4. Users automatically receive an email with their key in it

We managed to gather 1,437 email addresses around Toto Temple Deluxe (not just with free keys), which all received a single email on the release date (we don’t like spam). Out of these 1,437 emails we sent, 493 (34%) were opened, and 72 (5%) got clicked. Based on certain benchmarks, these numbers aren’t that bad!

So, why didn’t the game sell?

The game was fun and players were genuinely engaged at events. We reached out to a lot of press with the help of a PR company, but barely got any coverage. We tried different and original marketing tactics, but they didn’t resulted in many changes in the sales. So, what happened?

There’s a good possibility that the game didn’t have good enough “hooks” to captivate people’s attention. Sure, “fighting your friends to put an egg-laying goat on your head” sounds funny and weird, but it doesn’t really give you a clear idea of what it’s like to play Toto Temple Deluxe.

At the end of the day, we think the biggest factor is because it’s a local-multiplayer game with no online play. The game is aiming at a pretty niche audience by requiring actual human friends to play, and we can’t ignore the impact it has on sales. A quick look at comments on YouTube, Reddit and such, and it’s obvious that a lot of people are simply not buying the game for this very reason (that along a lack of solo experience). Here’s one example:

To confirm this idea, one of our contacts from a very well known gaming site explained to us why they wouldn’t write an article on Toto Temple Deluxe. Apparently, it’s simply because local-multiplayer news don’t generate enough clicks to be worth it. We totally appreciated the honesty!

On top of all this, we also think the game came out almost 2 years too late. Back in 2014, when the local-multiplayer boom was happening, Toto Temple Deluxe’s development felt more logical. Today, it feels a bit out of place, as we think a lot of player might have bought popular local-multiplayer games in the past, then realized that they would play them less and less frequently. We definitely can’t blame them, since it’s pretty much the same for us.

Obviously, these are all based on our current knowledge and experience, and probably doesn’t apply to all local-multiplayer games. If you’re reading this and you’re thinking we missed a point, or have a different opinion on the subject, we’d love to hear it!

Porting to 3 consoles at once

Releasing the game on the 3 consoles at the same time felt like a good idea at the time. We were only thinking about it from a revenues and media coverage standpoint, which was obviously a big mistake (for a local-multiplayer game released 2 years too late with no online mode, at least).

The actual ports

The worst part in all of this is probably that our only programmer, Alex, did all the heavy lifting by himself (the guy’s a freaking machine). Making the game run smoothly on all 3 consoles took him a good amount of time and energy, especially during the certification process.

To give you an idea of the difference between the 3 consoles, here’s how we spent our time on the actual ports over the second year of development:

Considering that we made about equal revenues on each consoles so far, you can see that one was definitely more expensive to port to. This might change in the future though, as this was our very first time working with consoles. We also received a lot of help from our friends from Chainsawesome Games for the Xbox One port, which saved us a lot of time and headaches!

Another factor that greatly extended the port process was having to jump back and forth between the different versions of the game. Yes, Unity makes it easier to port to multiple platforms, but the requirements for each console were so different that we ended up having 3 different Unity projects / branches to support them.

Fixing and patching and fixing and…

We lost a LOT of time patching little mistakes here and there, like details we added or fixed on one version but forgot to include in the other, etc. With only 2 team members skilled enough to handle the “technical stuff”, you can surely imagine how this inefficient workflow became extremely messy during the certification process.

What about the other team members?

We mentioned that most of the ports were handled by Alex, our programmer, with a lot of additional help from Dom (certs, store metadata, etc), so a Reddit user asked “what were the artists/other non-programmers doing during that time?”

It’s a totally legit question, considering I didn’t cover it much in the article. As you already read above, JP, our artist, handled all the cameos. He drew around 150 in total, with a lot of them being “caricatures” of real people (kind of harder to draw). I was overseeing the whole cameo thing with Dom, but I was also in charge the 2 trailers.

My answer on Reddit:

“We made our 2 trailers in house, and one of them was a frame by frame animation / cartoon with scripting and voice acting. We also needed to render, submit and rate both trailers, for 3 companies, split in 2 continents (American and European divisions are all separate entities), which all have different requirements depending if it’s a storefront video or a website video, or a YT channel video, etc. Each company has a required set of video encoding setting that differs based on what I just listed, and we’re not even talking about legal lines at the end of trailers, rating icons (ESRB, PEGI), console logo placement / colors / size requirements (because that’s a thing). Here’s a screenshot of the list of all the different renders we made for just 2 simple trailers:

A lot of that year was spent f*cking up and trying to fix things. Big AAA companies usually have complete departments dealing with certs and all that kind of stuff, they’re used to it and they know what they’re doing. We don’t ;)”

Obviously, the rendering of all these videos is nothing compared to 3 actual ports, but if you’re thinking about doing it yourself, it’s useful to know that it might take you more time than expected.

Burning out

We spent 2 years, full time, working on Toto Temple Deluxe. The first year was about developing the game and its content, while the second year was about porting it to 3 different consoles at once. That second year is where we started to feel the burn.

We’re a team of creative people, and we get our motivation and energy by exploiting that creativity. We like to create things, invent worlds and mechanics. That second year of development was all about paperwork, unusable console portals, technical problems, bugs and desperate searches for information (consoles and their documentation are not really easy to navigate).

Uuuugh…

Once we shipped the game on Sept 29th, we all went home and did nothing for a least a week. Porting Toto Temple Deluxe really drained us out, especially for Alex who did a inhuman job all by himself (seriously, a machine).

The process of porting the game was hard by itself, but following up a year of non-creative work with a launch that doesn’t make much noise, nor sell a lot, was pretty hard on all of us. We’re slowly getting back in shape for a new project (winning the prize of the most addicting game with Right Click to Necromance for Indie Speed Run shook things up a bit), but we can still taste the bitterness of the unsuccessful launch.

No deal, no help

Back in the days, when we were young and naive, we pictured console storefronts as big marketing machines with lots of users and traffic (remember, we were doing Flash games). We realized pretty quickly that it’s not how it works!

Since we couldn’t really strike an exclusivity deal with any of the consoles, with the Ouya version already available, and we were porting to all 3 consoles at the same time (no “semi-exclusivity”), Toto Temple Deluxe probably wasn’t perceived as a really interesting deal for any of the consoles. Sure, they were getting a new game for their system, but that was pretty much it.

Because of that, we weren’t really able to get a featured spot on any the storefronts, except for Nintendo who actually featured us on both the American and European front pages. Thanks Nintendo!

Oh, look at that! Photo by Tim McLennan

Wow, twice? Photo by Tenkoman

What’s also interesting is that being featured twice on the Wii U eShop actually ramped up the sales of the game to almost equal numbers with the other 2.

Next time

We’ve learned a lot with Toto Temple Deluxe, and there’s a lot of things we’d do differently (or not at all) for our next game:

1. No more local-multiplayer
   • They’re easy to make in a game jam, but super hard to market if you don’t add online play.
2. Strike a deal first
   • If we’re to make another game on console, we’ll make sure to strike an exclusivity deal first, so we can get a bit more help and visibility from the console owner.
3. Only one console
   • It goes without saying that with we’ll only do one console if we strike an exclusivity deal, but even without that, we wouldn’t port to 3 consoles at once ever again. It’s a LOT of hard work that didn’t really paid well in the end.
4. Design from a marketing perspective
   • Visibility is getting harder and harder to come by, so we’ll try to design our games with marketing in mind from day one. Having a solid hook and making sure there’s a potential audience for your game is super important. I suggest you read this great article on the subject by Ryan Clark from Brace Yourself.

I think it’s easy to think of Toto Temple Deluxe as a failure. Even worst, a waste of time and resources. Sure, the game only generated a fraction of what we spent on it, but we’ve learned a lot. Now it’s time to get up, dust off our shoulders and get the creative juice flowing again!

Back in May 2013, we participated in a game jam called ToJam and we made a game in 3 days. This is how the original Toto Temple was born.

About a year later, after a lot of revisions, live events and even a partnership deal with Ouya, Toto Temple evolved into a bigger and better game called Toto Temple Deluxe!

How to play

Just in case you haven’t played the game, here’s a short introduction to the gameplay:

1. Get the goat and keep it on your head to score points
2. First player to reach 3k points wins the game
3. If you don’t have the goat, steal it
4. You steal the goat by dashing onto the carrier (this is important)

That’s essentially the goal of Toto Temple. There’s more depth to it, but it’s stuff you’re supposed to figure out by yourself. Here’s a relevant (and really important) example:

1. Dashing is not strictly reserved for stealing the goat
2. It makes you move quickly in a straight line, so use it to move around faster as well (don’t walk)

Notice how Yellow got to the goat before Green did?

That’s it, you know how to play Toto Temple. We’ve added a lot more content since then, but the basics are still the same.

First UI concept (jam version)

Before we talk about the UI system currently in place in Toto Temple Deluxe, let’s see where we started. The first (and only) menu we had in the jam version was this:

“A” to join, “B” to… un-join?

Super straightforward. You press A to join and when there’s at least 2 players, the “press start” option pops up and you can start the game. Note that there’s no “color selection” option (say what!?). You simply press “A” and figure out which color you got depending on which controller you picked up.

The lack of color selection might seem weird at first, but it didn’t feel that important during the jam, especially since there’s no behavior/skills differences between each color (more on that below).

Live events: Looking for trouble

Back in November 2013, the original Toto Temple was being featured at Gamercamp, a small and charming event taking place in Toronto.

Back in November 2013, the original Toto Temple was being featured at Gamercamp, a small and charming event taking place in Toronto.

Between the jam version and the version we presented at Gamercamp, we’ve made a bunch of tweaks in the gameplay: smoother controls, balancing the points system, etc. One thing we didn’t do, though, was making changes to the UI system. Why would we change something that isn’t broken, right?

During a live event, the ideal scenario is usually to let players figure out the game / controls by themselves. It’s a lot less work for you and it’s a good sign that your game (or UI) is well designed.

What we noticed back then is that once in the game, most players had no clue how to navigate using the “dash” mechanic. Even after “reading” the short tutorial for controls and listening to our oral explanations, players kept moving around by running and jumping.

See? No dash. Oh wait! Green player is on to something…

Over and over, you could hear us say: “To dash, you need to press the X button AND the direction in which you’d like to dash. So to dash up, you push the left joystick up and you press X at the same time. You can dash in all 4 directions, even left up right down consecutively if you want”.

What we think was happening is that players associated the dash mechanic with “stealing the goat”, and only with that, since it’s the main objective. They would wait to come aligned with the goat carrier before dashing. Like we mentioned above, dashing can be used to move around faster, something most players didn’t think of. It’s technically not a bad thing, since you’re supposed to learn that kind of stuff by yourself as you play, but we still felt like we could have done a better job at introducing the concept to new players.

Back to the drawing board

At that point, we noticed that dashing in multiple directions was definitely something most players had trouble with. Dashing left and right was kind of okay, though. Since your Toto was automatically facing left or right, you ended up dashing in one direction or the other by simply pressing X (no direction).

Dashing down is not often required at first (you start using it more as you start dashing to move around a lot). The real problem was dashing up. You had to dash up way more often than down, since gravity was pulling you down and you often wanted to go up in the level.

Dashing is noticeably faster than running and jumping

Eventually, players would understand that dashing is always useful, but it was hard to enjoy the game and be competitive without knowing that important detail. We had to do something about it.

Character selection: First lesson

A short time after gathering all that new information, we got invited to demo Toto Temple at a small gaming event in Montreal called The Prince of Arcade. It was a good occasion to try and improve the game’s teaching methods and see it in action.

First idea we had to solve the dashing problem was to bring the platforming and the physics into the menu and literally ask players to dash up to join the game, instead of simply pressing “A”. It wouldn’t teach them how to play, but they would at least be aware of the key combination.

Dash up to join, dash down to quit

After watching players play the game all evening, we noticed that most of them would take less time to start dashing in different directions. The new “playable” menu definitely had an impact.

We didn’t know back then, but that would end up being our very first step towards a completely physical and playable UI.

Deluxe makeover

Shortly after testing out the playable menu, we got in touch with the great folks at Ouya and managed to get a partnership deal for a bigger and better version of the game.

We had plans for more levels, new modes, power-ups, and of course, a completely new UI system. Since we were going for a physical and playable approach for the new UI, we decided to literally go “outdoors” with temple-like boxes, etc.

No more abstract boxes! Smell that fresh air?

The first version based on the new look & feel was pretty much the same thing, but inside some nice looking pillars in an outdoor scenery (see above), you know, instead of boring and flat boxes.

Since we didn’t have that big and colorful picture of the player in the background anymore, we added colored statues on top to really add contrast regarding who is in and who is not. It creates a visual mass in the top part of the screen that is easier for the eye to scan, compared to just a button being on / off. While not the main purpose, it also creates a small visual celebration. As a newcomer, it makes you feel a bit like the game is happy that you joined!

Weird behaviors

Now for some strange reasons we still don’t understand, we’ve seen a lot of player dash up to join the game, then immediately dash down to leave the game. Then dash up, then dash down. Again and again and again.

They would do that until someone pressed start, and if they were lucky, they would happen to be “in” as the game progressed to the next step. Most of the time, they ended up being “out” and we had to go back, wait for them to join, then proceed again.

The worst cases were the ones when another player would mindlessly dash down and leave as we were waiting for the remaining player to join. What the heck?

What we think is that players aren’t used to have an impact on the UI by playing around with their character. They simply don’t realize their actions are changing the game’s settings.

To fix the problem, we simply removed the “dash down to quit” button (see above). We also made the background light up to make it more obvious that you’re in. To leave the game, you had to dash in the “join” button again (a toggle system, basically).

It helped reduce the amount of weird “switch flicking”, but once in a while we can still see some players join and leave over and over using only the top button. It didn’t completely fix the problem, but at least they seem to understand what to do after their first try.

More content, more problems