Story of Pet Shows

Year 2012, October

We needed to find couple of concepts fast to present to an investor. I was playing a few different manager games at the time and we thought that manager game would be one possibility. Idea was to publish the game to Habbo hotel so we wanted to use a theme that suited both boys and girls. Our friend Ari gave us an idea to use pets as a theme and we liked it.

Basic idea behind the concept is to manage a team of pets. Pets have three different age phases. When they are puppies, player can train them, when they are adults, they can participate in competitions and when they are seniors they can breed with other pets to get new puppies.

It has taken about two years to complete the game. During that time almost everything has been rewritten or changed. Even tools that we use to create the game has been changed. Basic idea behind the concept is still there, but the whole game experience is totally different. Latest big change came at the beginning of this year when Pet Shows was accepted as AppCampus project. We added mini-games to the concept that are used to train the pets and to compete with other players teams.

This is just a beginning

Few days ago we got the news that AppCampus review team has accepted our release candidate and we can publish the game when we see fit. This is a huge step and allows us to continue to the next phase. Now we can start gathering feedback from the players. We will carefully go through the feedback and develop game further to give best possible experience for the players. It is hard to describe how exciting it is when you are just about to get real information from the real customers and to learn what they think about the game. All the feedback is good. If players don't like the game, we try to find out why and make the game better. If players like the game, then we are happy and continue to bring new features for them to enjoy.

Pet Shows

What is it about? Pet Shows is most probably different than you have used to see with pet themed games. The game has over 300 different pet profiles to collect, 5 different mini-games to attend and possibility to compete against other player teams from all over the world. It is about being best pet trainer in town. There is no payment wall and everything in the game can be achieved without using real money. Real money is used only to buy in game currency that can be used to help player to progress faster.

Pet Shows is now available in Windows Phone store. Check it out.

Our first mobile release

The last two years have been all about learning. Now we have encountered yet another possibility to learn when we launched our collectible card game Permia - Duels in Windows Phone store at 14 Dec 2013. After about one and a half months and almost 100 000 downloads later we have had first few small ideas what it means to publish a game in a mobile market place.

Earlier we only had experience of releasing game in a small social network Habbo hotel and it has been very much different experience.

Update delay

First of all, we cannot update the game currently whenever we want to. We have not yet implemented the feature that allows us to update the content for the game directly without going through store certification. That is something we definitely want to do in the future. Already we had an issue where Lumia black update changed the way some configuration for the viewport of the game were defined and our game was broken for all the high end devices with HD resolution. You can imagine how grateful I am for Microsoft Store certification team that handled the update in two days instead of one week just before our promotion all over the world started.  All the previous review periods were closer to that one week. Even if the certification goes as fast every time in the future it is still at least couple of days after we have the new version ready before the players can use it.

Analytics

All the data we gather from the game and feedback that we follow have helped us to react to the problems much quicker than it would have been possible without these. We have found couple of bottlenecks in our server code after the release and both times it has been the same. First active user tells that something does not work like it should. Then our ratings start to decrease. These are enough reason to start studying what is the problem. Then simple analytics that we gather from the game pinpoints the place where the problem lies. Both times we were able to fix the bottlenecks in one day after they first started to encounter. For the team that is as small as us I feel that it is amazing to react that fast.

Ratings

These seem to have power of the god. When we did not ask our players to rate us at all, we mostly got bad ratings. It seems that people remember to tell if they don't like the game or the game does not work much more often than if they like the game and we don't remind them to do that. Permia - Duels average rating was less than 4 before we implementeda "rate us" dialog in the game. We don't want to interrupt the player, but it is crucial for our game to have good ratings. Without good ratings, we don't get promotion from Microsoft. Without good ratings, players do not download the game and because our game is multiplayer game, our game cannot live without plenty of players. Everything starts from ratings. How cruel that is when you are not going to buy those ratings for you. We don't want to buy ratings so we decided to add the dialog. After we had the rate us dialog in the game our ratings have gone up to 4.4 average and still growing. We have had much more ratings than before and it has helped us to get promotion and more importantly the players as well. Yet another story is that only good rating is five stars. All the other will weight ratings in wrong direction. Average 4.3 is minimum that is expected from us.

Reviews

We had an excellent review from WPCentral. We advertised that in our Facebook and Twitter accounts. One day after that we got an excellent review from WP player ratings. We advertised that as well in our Facebook account. I was quite amazed how big difference was with the impact those messages had. The player review was seen by six times more people than the WPCentral one. With this case it seems that people are more interested about what other people say than what media says. The article in WPCentral reminded us about importance of the social media. We really have not been active enough to promote our social media sites. We have had over 1 000 000 players playing our games and we have little over 160 people that likes our Facebook page and little less than 100 people who follows our Twitter. We will test with next update if we can get little more players to follow us because social media is currently best way to notify our players what is happening.

Some final words

I have to say that we feel very welcome in Windows Phone environment. All the great feedback has given us strength and motivation to continue with the path we have taken. We are long way from the product we have in our vision. With the help of the players we will go towards that vision and continue delivering new features one by one. First couple of months we will use to make sure that everything works like it should. We create small adjustments to the game and after we are satisfied with the maturity we will start bringing new features to the game. If you have Windows Phone 8 and you have not yet downloaded the game, now is the perfect time to download it. :)

Twenty fourteen (and a little about 2013)

Happy New Year and… drum roll please, happy 2^nd birthday Seepia Games. Yes, we’ve been at this for two years now. Little longer in fact, Seepia Games was accepted into the Finnish company register in January 2012 but we did get our hands dirty a couple months earlier.

Anyway, 2014. We released Permia ‑ Duels for Windows phone and on Habbo Hotel last month and will now start working to bring the game to other platforms, namely Google Play and App Store. We also have a lot of new players to take care of now so staying in touch with you all is a priority.

The feedback we have received has been great. Our players have supplied us with useful bug reports, helpful feedback, good suggestions etc. Even those who have disliked the game have been very forthcoming – we do like to also hear from those who tried the game and for one reason or another did not find it enjoyable. Keeping an open mind and listening to the players is paramount. In our first update, we added a number of new languages (e.g. Russian, French and German) and made some changes to our ranking system.

We’ve had many questions about our pet-themed game, Pet Shows.  We are (finally) making progress on this front! The game is coming along and 2014 has given us some new ideas. There is not much more to say yet, but we hope to have the game in alpha stage quite soon. It probably comes as no surprise that the alpha launch will be made in Habbo Hotel. Just bear with us a little longer!

 I don’t like to make New Year’s resolutions (no one ever keeps those promises anyway) but I will say, promise even, that Seepia Games will continue to interact with our players, listen to feedback and make great games.

Have a good year!

The blog

First of all, welcome! This blog is long overdue. When we founded Seepia Games, one of the goals, a part of our vision really, was to be as open as possible. So far, our openness has only reached so far. With this blog, we will hopefully start edging towards being more open.

Pretty much any startup can start its first blog post along the lines of "it's been a hectic year/month/etc.". I'll spare you from the usual oh-we-are-so-terribly-busy lament. If you're running a new company and you're not busy, you are doing it wrong. Disclaimer: future posts may contain whingeing about deadlines, hecticness and whatnot. Bear with us. :)

Our goal is to have everyone from the team writing posts every now and then, so the topics covered should range from the "joys" of running a games studio to network programming. Each of us will likely focus on our strong areas so do not expect game design articles from me or a visual design masterclass from monsieur Rönkkönen. If there is anything you really think we should write about, just get in contact with us via email, Facebook, Twitter or email.

We will post roughly once a week but you may see more posts around important events such as games exhibitions etc. If you fancy even more regular updates, following @SeepiaGames on Twitter is a good idea.

If you already do follow us on Twitter, you will have noticed that we are currently in AppCademy, a four-week accelerator program kindly sponsored by Aalto University, Nokia and Microsoft. I will be writing a more detailed post about our learnings here later on.

Again, please, please be active and get in touch with us so we can write about the things you are interested in!

Thank you!

 - Pasi / Seepia Games

(My fancy job title is "Creative Director" - in practice, I'm responsible for all things visual in the company.)