Four years of Seepia Games

This week we celebrated our four years journey of Seepia Games. We had some home made apple pie made by me and my wife. For some reason our discussion went to butter and sugar and how healthy they are. Result was that pie was unhealthy and oh so excellent in taste that it does not matter.

Team tasting some apple pie on b-day!

We can be proud for our first four years. Pauli, the CEO of our dearest rival Headnought, reminds us sometimes that game studios survive in average about two years. Our game-time is already double! In a way we are in same situation as when we started. We have not been able to produce a hit-game with big commercial value yet and we need to do outsourcing for business customers to finance our game development. Then again, we have four years of game industry experience instead of none, we have released three games on seven different platforms with over 2,5M downloads, updated them multiple times to learn how to best serve our customers, built platform for turn-based multiplayer games, have participated different events almost on all continents. You can say that we are in better shape than ever and ready to strike.

Jukka presenting our growth strategy earlier last year

Coming year looks very promising. We are developing Permia - Duels II that will bring our loved game from middle class to the top where it belongs. We are experiencing a time of change where we go from HTML5 to Unity, we are aiming for bigger platforms than before and we are actively looking for new partners and talents to help us to reach our first goal to have sustainable business.

I want to personally thank everybody that have influenced Seepia Games and who will influence us in the future. We are living our dream and soon we can even afford to do it. :)

Cheers!
- Jani Tietäväinen

Five reasons why Google Play is the ultimate soft launch platform

Deciding on which platform to soft launch your mobile game can make or break your whole game. Two major platforms currently are Google Play and iOS App Store. This article tries to express few major differences between the two and why game developers need to take these factors into account when choosing the soft launch platform.

1. Reach

Reach means how big user base the platform has. Reach can be divided into global and local reach. Global reach means the worldwide reach of the platform which is more suitable parameter for global launch. Local reach means the reach of the platform in selected soft-launch area (country).
When comparing two major mobile distribution platforms (aka “app stores”), Google Play reached 1 billion monthly active users on September, 2015 according to Mashable. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get any reliable data of monthly active users of iOS App Store due to Apple’s traditional way of not publishing these figures very often.

Image 1: Mobile OS Marketshare (Dec 2015, NetMarketShare)

However, the market share of smartphone OS sales, according to Kantar Worldpanel, Android leads the market in Europe’s big five markets, USA and in China. Also, when comparing “usage share” of mobile OSes, Android leads the market with 57,29% according to NetMarketShare. When considering these data points, it is very likely that Apple’s iOS App Store has fewer monthly active users on their distribution platform than Google.

2. Submission process

The variable with greatest importance to soft launch platform decision is the speed from submission from developers to being available for end users.

Google Play has tremendous advantage in this regard. In Google Play it is matter of hours when the game or new update is available to the players. In iOS App Store, it takes at least one week from submission for being available to the players due to the heavy review process by Apple.

This allows developers to bring new updates and fixes much more rapidly to end users than in App Store.

Another variable which relates to submission process is the ability to update app store listing elements without updating the binary itself. Google Play allows change app description, screenshots and feature image and promo videos without updating the binary itself. iOS App Store allows the developer to change app description but not keywords or screenshots without updating the binary.
 

3. App Store Optimization

Another important consideration is the possibility to alter and test game’s icon, landing page, keywords and screenshots rapidly and compare different versions to each other.

Image 2: Screenshot depicting Experiments audience selection tool in Google Play Developer Console

Google Play announced great feature called Experiments on May 28th 2015 which allows developers to AB-test graphical as well as textual elements in their app store listing. Graphical elements which can be tested include icon, feature graphic, screenshots and promo video. Textual elements which can be tested include app’s short and long description. After the experiment has run, developers are able to view the results of the test in Google Play Developer Console.
iOS App Store doesn’t include AB-testing abilities currently, so if you want to AB-test fluently your games store listing elements, Google Play is the way to go.

 
4. Paid user acquisition possibilities

As what comes to paid user acquisition possibilities, both platforms have lot of ad networks which offer huge inventories for running your UA campaigns.
But what comes to UA possibilities inside the platform itself, Google Play offers something unique. It allows developers to buy Search Ads which let them display advertisements inside Google Play search results. Google Search ads are excellent because they tap into intent-rich moments in users’ mobile use cycle. Search Ads display both in mobile Google Search results as well as Google Play search results.

Image 3: Google Search Ad on Google mobile search

Image 4: Google Search ad as seen on Google Play Search

The greatest thing is that you can use 3rd party partners such as SensorTower to analyze the best keywords for your title (or your competitor’s) and buy Search Ads from those keywords. What could be better UA strategy, especially in those markets and keywords where competition is still low and prices relatively cheap?
 

5. Desktop-to-mobile conversion

In my experience, one important but surprising factor which most developers don’t understand is the desktop-to-mobile conversion. With desktop-to-mobile I mean the ability to save, install or favorite a mobile game on desktop so that you can play it later on mobile phone. This is important because a lot of time, people may find interesting games while they use desktop computers, but either don’t have time or have limited intent to use their mobile phone at that time. At that time, it is really nice to be able to efficiently save, favorite or install the mobile game on the desktop, without changing the focus to your mobile phone.

Google has really nice advantage to other mobile distribution platform holders with their huge presence on desktop internet. According to NetMarketShare usage monitor, Google’s Chrome browser holds second place in desktop browser market share with 32,33% usage market share. Since a lot of users have Google account, and due to the possibility to sign-in to your Google Account in Chrome, Google makes it really easy to download games from the desktop view of Google Play to your mobile phone. You just first tap “install”, then confirm that you give the rights to the app which it requests and then the download to your mobile phone begins.

Image 5:  Mobile Strike on Google Play desktop browser view

iOS App Store also allows users to download game via desktop, but little bit less efficiently. First, the user has to open up the app in iTunes program in PC (assuming that he has installed that), then download the game to the desktop, and then synch the data to iOS device via USB-connection or through connecting to same Wi-Fi where the desktop is. That’s a lot of steps compared to simple two-step installation process on Google Play desktop.

Sum Up

Above, I have presented five major reasons why Google Play is the ultimate soft-launch platform for mobile games. There are other reasons beyond these - such as revenue per download, payment behaviour etc. - which are different in different platforms. But since actual data on some of these factors is really hard to find, I have excluded them from this analysis.

What do you think? Did I miss something important? Do you disagree me on these findings? Please comment below!

Review Optimization for Mobile Games

Rating importance on App Store search

As Store search is most popular discovery avenue of mobile apps and game (Nielsen 2015), it is important to know what part user reviews play in Google Play and Apple App Store search ranking algorithms.

Inside Mobile Apps conducted a study in which they examined a random sampling of easy, medium and competitive search terms on both Google Play and App Store to see how each app ranked based on the average user rating in the search list. Based on the findings of the study, it is clear that average ratings play important part in both stores search ranking algorithms. Thus, review optimization is crucial for increasing the search rank in the app stores.

Google Play places more importance to avg user rating in search ranking.

Review optimization is a set of processes and tasks with a goal to maximize the amount of positive user reviews and ratings for the game on the Store.

There are four basic factors which the developer has to take into account when optimizing for reviews:

1. User’s emotional state at the time when asking for an review
2. Suitability of the state of time for user to give a review
3. Motivation for user to give a review
4. The ability to hide negative reviews from the Store reviews

So let’s take a deeper look of all of the different factors, one by one.

User’s emotional state at the time of asking for a review is related to feelings which the user might feel during the time when asking for a review. As games are emotionally very intense products (at least for avid gamers), it is of paramount of importance to be able to identify potential feelings of user at this time. Typical way of doing this is to use behavioral analytics. For example, usually users are feeling satisfied and positive after winning battles, leveling up or after receiving some sort of rewards in the game. So a good time for asking a review could be after user comes back to the main view after victorious battle, or after the player has leveled up his character.

Suitability of the time when asking user for a review means that is it best possible frame of time to ask for a review from the user. Even after successful battle, it might not be the best time to ask for a review since user might have got rewards or in-game items from the battle which he is planning to use to upgrade his troops in the card battler game. So asking for a review at this time just distracts and annoys the user from accomplishing his main goal at this time. So how do we know what is the best time to ask for a review?
Once again, we have to turn to analytics for help. Specifically, we are analyzing in-game events which have happened shortly after the user has left the game and stopped the session. Typical good points of time might include the time right after the energy has run out in free-to-play game or after user has started training of troops in town battler game AND when he doesn’t have full amount of troops ready. Also, it is a good idea not to ask for a review in the first sessions of the game due to user still being novice to the game so don't know much about the game. Different genre of games have different mechanics and different games have completely different optimal points of time, so best thing to do is to analyze the data and tie the user review feature to these in-game events.

Motivation for user to give a review related to Call-to-Action texts and rewards that motivate user to give a review. Usually, it is a good rule to explain shortly why it is a good thing to give a review of the game. These CTAs might be e.g. “Please give a review, it helps us to make the gaming experience better for all of us!” It is also a good idea to reward the user for giving a review with some unique reward. This is necessary to optimize the review funnel despite the fact that there is no way of getting the information from App Store that has the user actually gave a review.

Great visualization of review optimization process for Circa News app.

The ability to hide negative reviews refers to the rules within the game how the reviews are handled. One common strategy is that if users give negative review (below 4) of the game, review mechanism asks, in-game, what could be done to make the game better. After the user has typed in the feedback, then the review component can ask user to submit that to developers via in-game support-button. Note that in negative review cases, the user is not asked to leave a reply to App Store or Google Play page. In positive review cases (4-5), the user is asked to leave a review to App Store or Google Play product page after the in-game review prompt.

Mechanics of mobile collectible card games - an overview

Today's post deals with the mobile collectible card game (CCG) market and why we believe Permia - Duels will rise to be a winner in the future. In the western markets, the most of the notable mobile CCG:s are either manager CCG:s and so called line mechanic CCG:s. Additionally, the market has some notable games, whose mechanics differ from the main categories,  most important being of course the Hearthstone. Also worth mentioning are the mobile spin offs of the old physical CCG giants Magic the Gathering and Yo-Gi-Oh!. Lately the card mechanics have become popular also when integrated into other games, such as card based sports games.

Manager CCG:s

Image: Rage of Bahamut

Manager games are the most populous group of mobile CCG:s (For example Rage of Bahamut, Heroes Charge, MARVEL War of Heroes and Heroes of Camelot). In manager CCG:s the tactical elements have been stripped completely or are very light in the battles. As a result, the battles are very fast and can often be skipped all together directly to the end result. Such games focus on the collection, card development, deck building, story and/or social elements instead. This works well on mobile, as battles are short and can be easily played anywhere. But the lack of a real tactical skill element also means that the game is essentially the collecting and upgrading system and once that wears out, there is little replay value due the non-existing battle mechanics.

Line mechanic CCG:s

Image: Order & Chaos Duels

In line mechanic games players in turn play units into the battlefield into designated places. The units then fight automatically and if there is no defending unit in the opposing slot, the player takes the damage himself. There exists different variations of the basic system: some games have multiple battle lines, others allow movement of units etc. Some examples of line games include Lies of Astaroth, Tyrant Unleashed and Order & Chaos Duels.

I have newer been a big fan of the line mechanic, as it offers seemingly lot of tactical choices through card special abilities. With a closer look, the mechanics tend to prove rather shallow due to the line system limitations and become repetitive after a while. Even worse, games tend to drag on needlessly long when the battle grid gets filled with creatures and player runs out of tactical choices to implement. The problem is worst with equally good decks and players.

Conguer a base CCG:s

Image: Battle Decks

Conguer a base CCG:s combine card mechanics with a board, where units can be moved. Such games are more popular in PC, but a few examples exists also in mobile  such as Battle Decks, Cabals: Magic & Battle cards. While they offer both strategic and tactical depth, such games are tend to have long battles, which is not optimal as mobile experience.

Physical CCG spin offs

Image: Magic Duels

For example Magic Duels, Yo-Gi-Oh! Duel Generation, Magic 2015. While the physical games have been great successes, they have had difficulties on adapting to the electronic and especially mobile environment. The mechanics are very deep on both strategic and tactical level, but also overly complicated for mobile. Some of the mechanics do not translate well from the physical world to the mobile experience, like the interrupt concept in magic, which makes Magic Duels a sluggish experience, as one needs to wait for possible interrupts all the time. Also the battles take long time.

Hearthstone

Image: Hearthstone

Hearthstone is the biggest electronic CCG in the market today. In essence Hearthstone resembles a
simplified version of Magic the Gathering, where the mechanics have been streamlined and modified to work well in an electronic game. The designers did a good job and the game offers enough strategic and tactical depth to make skill matter while still keeping the game easier to approach compared to the Physical CCG spin offs. In addition to the mechanics, that stand out from the mobile competitors, the monetization model of Hearthstone is rather non-aggressive for a mobile game. The battles take 10 to 30 minutes, which is a bit long in a mobile game though. Also while Hearthstone has social elements, like spectator mode and chat, its lacking  in-game cooperative interaction.

Permia - Duels

Early concept of the new art style.

So how does our Permia -Duels fit to the market? Duels shares many of the strengths that have made Hearthstone the biggest CCG around: The game stands out from the main competitors on the market. Combining depth with simplicity in the mechanical design of the game has proven to be a winning combination. Not too aggressive monetization model will be better in the long run, as players are getting more sensitive to the free-to-play tricks also in the mobile. These give a good basis to start from, but the real strength of Permia - Duels in the mobile are the short battles. While being able to offer lots of strategic and tactical depth, the battles of Permia - Duels typically take less than 3 minutes. This is less than any other CCG:s (aside from the manager games, which lack tactical battles altogether).

Another important aspect of Permia - Duels, that will be added in the upcoming grand update, will be the Guilds and related in-game cooperative integration  to keep players playing for a long time. With the updated visuals and content upgrades of the grand update, Permia - Duels will have all the elements to take over the mobile CCG market. Stay tuned!

Competitive advantage of a game company

In the shadow of fairly recent M&A news of Activision-Blizzard buying Candy Crush Maker King with $5,9 billion and many, many others, I've recently pondered what is the REAL competitive advantage of a game company nowadays.

In order to understand what is the real competitive advantage of a gaming company, you have to first study the market dynamics of the games industry. In this analysis, I'll review the game industry based on Michael Porter's Competitive Advantage -theory and 5 competitive forces that play crucial role in determining the competitive advantage of a company in any industry.

Pace of Change

This factor is actually not in Porter's Five Forces model, but I wanted to add this here, because it makes a world of difference when thinking
As most of us know, games industry is one of the most fast changing industries in the world. Eight years ago, no-one would have bet their money on the mobile gaming landscape due to the shortcomings of Java-games on earlier smartphones.

The Entry of New Competitors
The democratization of game development with free or low-cost such as Unity, Game Studio and alike, it is much, much more easier to start making products to gaming in gaming industry than it is to do e.g. restaurant business.

In addition to lowered costs of production tools, the costs of distributing the products to customers have lowered substantially with new distribution channels that have come along with internet and smartphones.

So it is good to say that game industry is one of the most competitive industries in the world that puts a lot of pressure to new and existing game companies.

Threat of a Substitute Product

Threat of a substitute product means the extent of threat of substitute product from a different industry that can substitute the value of the industry's product.

Reflecting this into a games industry, it is very clear that the value of game industry product (=entertainment value, escapism value) can be substituted with e.g. a book industry product, a sports industry product or a movie industry product, to name just a few.

Hence, it is clear that the threat of a substitute product is very high in game industry.

Buyer's Bargaining Power

Buyer's bargaining is the level of leverage the buyers can use to alter the price, quality and customer service of a product. There are many factors which affect buyer's bargaining power: buyer concentration, switching costs of a product, level of backward integration of a product and purchasing volumes of a buyer of the product.

Relating these to games industry, we can conclude that there are more buyers than there are sellers (despite that it doesn't always seem like this within the industry, with more than 450k games on App Store alone). Also, switching costs of a product is fairly low due to the high amount of competitive products on any given platform these days. Level of backward integration and purchasing volumes are not factors in games industry since we are B2C industry and selling digital products mainly.

My conclusion is that because of very low switching costs, buyer (player) has a significant bargaining power in games industry.

The Bargaining Power of Suppliers

The supplier's bargaining power in Porter's theory means the extent to which suppliers can put pressure to businesses by raising prices, lowering quality or reducing the availability of their products.

In games industry, suppliers don't really have that much bargaining power since most of the outsourced work (namely, quality assurance, localization and graphic production) have so many suppliers worldwide that they really don't have that much leverage to game developers or publishers.

So, what gives?

In porter's original theory, company would have choose strategy based on two basic types of competitive advantage; cost leadership, differentiation. In cost leadership, you would select a strategy that focuses on cost-aware consumers and reducing the production costs of a product. In differentiation strategy, you would pick up a niché in selected vertical and differentiate your product based on the attributes of competitive products so that the product satisfies a (unidentified) market need.

Either of these strategies are not applicable per se to a game company, due to marginal costs approaching zero and due to high competitive landscape in the games industry.

So what to do in an industry where in four out of five forces, there is high pressures and there is no seemingly clear strategies for sustaining growth and increase your position in the market?

In my view - and strictly hypothetically speaking - learning, and in particular, organizational learning is an aspect of corporate strategy that is too often neglected. The importance of learning comes very clear when you reflect the speed of change of games industry. In order to create a long-term profitable businesses, you have to focus on not only the core competencies of your employees, but also the meta-competencies of your whole firm. This can also be viewed as a rate of learning of an organization. 

Not only it is required that individuals learn, but it is fundamental that teams, departments and whole organizations learn at the same time when doing the day-to-day business.

I will cover more how organization learning translates to games industry, and how game companies are able to implement organizational learning in the operations in following articles.

One thing your game development team doesn't need

In my career, I have managed game teams of from small indie team (4 persons) to mid-sized team of 20+ persons. I'm always looking for great articles and insights how to maximize team performance and quality of work. But I have learned from experience that there is one fundamental thing that is VERY often overlooked in the hiring process and during everyday activities in game companies. And which every person in game teams need to recognize in order to get all out of game teams.

That's the absence of ego. While that may sound very odd, let me elaborate. Ego is the thing that makes seemingly great team to perform poorly. Ego is the thing that makes a dialogue into an argument. Ego is the thing makes good people to pursuit false goals.

Because game development is so intrinsically interpersonal effort of great individuals, it is therefore really important to note what ego can do to teamwork if not attention is not practiced.

I have heard many legends of game companies and startups which have got millions of funding and who had hired the best people but who failed utterly because the rock-stars in the teams did not get a long with themselves.

Ego dominance in team can show up many ways, below few of them:
1. Conversations between different team members turns often into arguments and negative energy
2. Team members won't let of their ideas, but instead hold on to them with aggressive resistance
3. There is jealousy and talking behind the back if someone is praised for good work
4. Direct feedback cannot be given / taken without considerable resistance and negative energy

In contrast, a team / company without ego dominance can be recognized from following phenomena:
1. There is a real dialogue between team members, even though the viewpoints would be opposite
2. Team members openly encourage everyone to share ideas, and they give space for new ideas to emerge and take stand
3. All team members recognize that if someone else get praise or even raise, it is not deducted from their own assets
4. Team members openly praise, encourage, challenge each others mental models and give direct feedback to them and the feedback is taken without resistance

Please note that I said without ego dominance. In all of us ego is active in some way. With very few, aware individuals, the ego stays in the background and therefore the presence is active in most of the interactions during the day. In most of us, ego runs our lives more or less.

I think that in addition to formal skills and attitudes, we need to start recognize the level of awareness of ego of individuals working in this industry. And we need ways to develop this awareness within teams and companies so that we can harness the power of teams better in the future. And thus, make better games!

Permia - Duels: The struggle for a good tutorial

Designing a good tutorials for our free-to-play games has proven to be one of the most challenging game design tasks we have faced. When Permia - Duels was first released as PvP-only game, the only tutorial it had was a three page rules summary, that was shown to the player before the first match.

The next step was to create a forced tutorial, which would walk players through the rules with a series of example matches. We expected to see an improved player engagement but the results were a disappointment as described in the The great tutorial mystery - post. Clearly we failed to do very good job with the tutorial.

After that we concentrated on working with Pet Shows and apply the lessons learned for the tutorial there (Tackling the tutorial mystery). Making the tutorial less forced by slicing it into smaller pieces was a clear improvement. Additionally we made some of the game content to unlock while player progresses instead of everything being accessible from the start and added new achievements to reward the player for progressing and giving objectives. Naturally we wanted to bring these elements also to the Duels tutorial. 

After getting back to developing Duels we started the planning of adding a story driven single player campaign to the game. In the process, the old tutorial was thrown away and the tutorial was integrated into the campaign. The PvP game mode is now locked at the beginning, and new players start by playing the campaign. The instructions are given as tips in the first campaign matches, without a forced tutorial. Players start with only a single unit and the first task is to collect a full deck of units by defeating the initial tutorial campaign matches, after which the PvP matches unlock.

While it's impossible to analyze the effects of adding the campaign to the effects of changing the tutorial separately, their combined effect roughly doubled our retention numbers, which was of course a huge success. So clearly we did something right. Regardless, based on the feedback, we still have a lot to do with the tutorial.

Previously players complained about being forced to play the forced tutorial (and rightly so), which felt too much like tutorial. Now some players feel that we are lacking the tutorial completely and they struggle to understand how the game is meant to be played. While being non-intrusive, the tips are also easy to ignore. Even more importantly, many players fail to identify the real depth of the game at the beginning, labeling it too simple or less skill based than it really is. By making the tutorial non-intrusive and as simple as possible, we may have managed to hide the complexity of the game too well. 

Essentially we have two somewhat conflicting objectives: The first encounter with the game should be as easy and welcoming as possible, to prevent frustration for needing to learn many rules at once. On the other hand, the tutorial should convey the feeling of depth to come. A frustrated player will likely quit playing early on as well as a player who does not see enough depth to make it worth investing time into the game.

In order to help the players struggling with the rules, we could add more interactive components to the tutorial: keep the it simple and non-intrusive normally, but when a player seems to be doing poor decision and losing games, the tutorial should become more intrusive and give detailed instructions to improve the situation.

The strategic elements of Duels include the unit development system and the selection of units to the deck. At the beginning it's mostly selecting the most powerful units to the deck, but as the collection grows, the options increase and one should build a deck with units whose numbers work well together. Similarly when upgrading the units, selection of sacrificed units has an effect on the outcome and can be used to direct the process to get desired kind of units. 

On the Tactical side, understanding that it's sometimes better to concentrate on creating a good defensive position or building a trap to allow capturing many units with one move, is sometimes better than simply trying to capture units with every move, separates veteran players from the beginners. Also the starting player shapes the game a lot with the selection of the first unit and it's placement. With a wise placement, one can use a well designed deck with maximum effect. 

These are all aspects of the game, which are not obvious to a new player and not easily communicated through the normal tutorial flow. One possible way to convey the depth at the beginning could be through adding special puzzle missions, where the player is forced to play in an non-straightforward way in order to win. In addition to the tutorial tuning, we could also add new content to the game, which would create the feeling of depth in a more straightforward way, like new unit special abilities and game modes. Again with these we need to be careful not to introduce them too rapidly to overwhelm a new player, but fast enough that he will not get bored.

Tackling the tutorial mystery

One area we have been struggling with all of our games is the tutorial for new players. It's so easy to concentrate making the actual game and then add a tutorial as afterthought. When one knows the game inside out, it becomes hard to design the tutorial for players who see the game for the first time.

We are just beginning to grasp the importance of a good tutorial and all the challenges included in making one. The tutorial is the first thing a new player sees. Especially for free-to-play games, poor tutorial can easily kill even a good game. People generally hate learning rules and if the process is not fluent and fun, they simply quit and find something else to play. Optimally the tutorial feels like a natural part of the game flow and progresses by creating objectives to the player instead of a forced step by step process. The biggest challenge is that players often don't read the instructions. A good tutorial should be intuitive enough to direct the player to do right things without relying on text.

In the great tutorial mystery I was wondering why adding a tutorial to Permia - Duels did not improve our numbers. Looking back now, it's evident we did not do that good job with the tutorial: It is too long, feels forced and partly concentrates on teaching irrelevant details too early for a new player. In Pet Shows we improved by slicing the tutorial into pieces which are activated as the player progresses. Regardless, the first tutorial is too long and contains too much information by trying to teach all the mini games at once. Additionally it is lacking clear objectives.So how are we planning to solve these problems?

The answer for Pet Shows lies in understanding that the player does not need to have access to all of the mini games at once. While for a veteran player it might feel limiting to have only a couple to choose from, it's enough for first time player for whom everything is new. Locking some of the mini games at the beginning also creates natural objectives for the player to continue playing to get them unlocked. As added bonus the new flow allows easy way to add more mini games in the future. 

Another thing we have been underestimating are the achievements. By designing the flow correctly, the achievements can be powerful tools for teaching the game flow without a forced tutorial. For player they form objectives with a promise for rewards. Game instructions can be hidden inside the achievement descriptions and by fulfilling achievements players learn the game flow as a side product. Additionally the achievement rewards work as a feedback for the player for doing the right things. Conversely poorly designed achievements can distract the player and thus both the achievements and their presentation needs to be designed carefully to support the desired game flow.

So that's the plan and we have already started implementing the new tutorial flow for Pet Shows. Duels will follow later, after we finish the current graphics upgrade. I will get back to the subject later, when we know were we able to improve the new player experience for Pet Shows through these changes or not. If you have any ideas for the tutorials, please let us know!

Clarity's the word

We have, in the past, made some absolutely terrible design decisions. We have even been told by a number of people that they are terrible ideas and yet we have gone forward with them. Looking back at these decisions, I cannot believe how thick we have been at times.

During the past month or so, we have been working on a Permia – Duels facelift. Most of the feedback we have received from players (in terms of the game’s appearances) has been positive but we still felt that we could do better now than when we first designed the game. We also felt that we could make the game more accessible to a wider player base by addressing some of the usability/design issues, which is why the update goes beyond being just a facelift.

By far, the most problematic part for us has been the actual game board and specifically the hexagonal tile design. Our game unit tiles carry a lot of information which we have to fit into a very small space and still ensure that it is legible on a small mobile display. Unit type, special attributes, unit rarity etc. are all emblazoned on the small hexagonal tile.

Possibly the most grotesque design mistake in the old design is the unit’s border we use to mark the card’s rarity level. What possessed us to think that it was a good idea to have a “blue player” and a blue border that denotes something completely different, I do not know. We have even used a different shade of blue in different parts of the UI. Fantastically confusing but not very player friendly.

After the update, the unit’s border finally stands for what it should’ve stood for from day one: whose unit it is. Unit rarity, an attribute with no intrinsic gameplay value, will now take a step back and assume a smaller role in the unit’s design. It will still be visible, but far less dominant. Because of these changes, we can drop the gradient we have previously used to indicate “ownership” and make more room for the actual unit illustrations. These changes should make the situation in the game much easier to read.

Unit design evolution (left old, right new. Not necesarily final graphics)

This is not the only change we have made but it is possibly the most important one and we hope that it will help new players get a grasp of the game quicker than before. We still have many other areas of the game to address (the tutorial comes to mind). The update should go live within a couple weeks. Once again, we would then love to hear what you think of the update? Are we headed in the right direction or has it all gone horribly wrong?

Happy 2015! And happy birthday, Seepia Games!

I figured that I’d be in a better position to write this if I read my “happy new year” post from 2014. Luckily I did not make too many promises we could not keep.

Quite a few things have changed since the 2014 post. Habbo Hotel’s Game Centre, once an important channel for us, is no more. While I would not go as far as describing it as a shock, the game centre’s closure still came as a surprise to us. As a result, we had to shut down Tetrablok servers and effectively kill off our first game. A very cathartic experience that I recommend every developer goes through. If you are interested in our rationale for letting Tetrablok go, have a look at our press release.

On a more positive note, Pet Shows is finally out!  It took us much, much longer than we ever expected it would. We are only now starting to get some actual feedback and metrics from the game. We’ve already implemented a few changes based on early player data and more changes are in the pipeline. If you haven’t given it a try yet, head to Windows Phone Store and download it! We’d love to hear your thoughts.

Going back to our 2014 plans, perhaps surprisingly, we still have not made a single Android/iOS release. There are a number of reasons why it is so. Maybe more on those later on.

2014 also saw us move into a new office. We blogged about the pros and cons of the change before but the move has since also meant that we have been, for a lack of a better word, reunited with Headnought. Working alongside them is always a blast and I cannot emphasise the value added by having a team to bounce ideas off.

Our team has also grown in size. We have more people working on our games than ever before.  With two games to support, we are still stretched thin but it’s not quite as bad as it used to be. We are fantastically pleased with our new recruits and their great talent beautifully complements our team.

2015 is set to become another busy year. In just a couple of weeks we are heading to London for Pocket Gamer Connects, a Steel Media event where we can meet press and investors. The Permia – Duels facelift we have been working on is well underway (some of the changes are already in the game, the rest will follow soon). Pet Shows is still in its infancy. We have even started work on the prototype of our next game.

Thank you very much everyone for sticking with us and let’s all have a fabulous 2015!

Permia - Duels: Back into action

Games take a lot of work to do. It is also hard to estimate the required effort as correctly, as often multiple iterations are required to get it right. For a small company like Seepia, the resources are always limited and simply not enough to accomlish everything we would like to do.

As such for the last half a year, our whole team has been concentrating on getting Pet Shows ready to be published on Windows Phone. Unfortunately during that time, we have had little time to concentrate on developing Permia - Duels beyond the Windows 8.1 version released in July. But now Pet Shows is finally out! We are now concentrating our efforts for updating the games and taking them to new platforms.

For Permia - Duels we are working on a major updates. Part of the updates will be published in December to kick of our Christmas campaign: there will also be Christmas present for all active player and the Christmas booster available, so Christmas will be a great time to play Duels! Rest of the updates will be published in January

The game will have a completely improved graphical outlook. We have learned a lot compared to when the Duels UI was originally designed. With the clearer presentation, added polish and fancy animations the game is starting to simply look great! 

Early concept art of the new game view.

Among other improvements of the update will be an improved mailbox, updated achievements, percentage based season rewards and a possibility for filtering tiles in the deck editor. For the daily challenges we are planning to change the system such, that skipping a single day won't lose the whole progress.

With the update, we are bringing the Windows Phone version also to the universal app world. This will mean using the Live ID as the primary player identification method instead of the ANID2 which is currently used. To do that, we are creating a separate helper app for linking the ANID2 accounts to Live ID for players who have not yet done that in the game. The reason for the separate app is simply that ANID2 is not available in the universal app builds.

For a bit further in the future, Duels will be extending to other platforms. The tutorial still needs more work. Also a Facebook connection to enable playing with friends as well ass the ability to communicate with other players during games will be added eventually. Additional content, like single player campaign, new units and special powers, new game modes and guilds are all planned.

So fear not! While the update schedule of Permia - Duels have been a bit slow lately, we have not abandoned the game, just been too busy with Pet Shows. Now we are again back into the track of making Duels the best collectible card game around! 

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.

Onto something

Three years

Long ago, I had a dream. I wanted to create games. Over 15 years ago I realized, that I don't have to do it alone. I tried, and I failed. I wasn't ready. At 2011 we studied the feasibility of an idea to start a game studio. Result of that study is Seepia Games. We managed to put together a small dream team without game industry experience. Fortunately we got a good adviser to our board to help us learn quick. Still it took about three years before we feel that we understand what it takes. Succeeding in game industry is really not the easiest way to make living. It really needs that cliche of passionate and dedicated team every investor is trying to find.

Experience

You can study and research as much as you like. Before you have real life experience, it does not matter much. We are very fact driven team. You can imagine how much more fun it is to estimate product revenues after you have some. Before that we can use some industry averages from the web, and oh boy how far from the truth that takes us. We have been lucky. Our first game Tetrablok was published by Sulake in Habbo hotel and we got a one million downloads for the game. A good number for the first one you think. It did not perform well in monetisation, but gave us a valuable experience about synchronous multiplayer game and free-to-play business model. Our second game Permia - Duels has been one of the top ranked collectible card games in Windows Phone store and has gathered about one million downloads so far when all the platforms are combined. We really succeed with ASO to pull those numbers. Product is good and we have ideas to make it great. After a couple of next updates we will know how it goes. More experience is coming soon with our next AppCampus game Pet Shows. It is combination of everything that we have learned so far. The concept itself is already two years old and the journey with it has been really long. We have practically developed the game three times during this time. Thanks to Visionplus for their patience with us.

Pet Shows - Main menu first concept

Ready

We started with the vision to create free-to-play cross-platform multiplayer games. First three years we used to learn. Today our vision is to create free-to-play cross-platform games for mobile and tablets. We know what it takes from the product perspective and we are ready to unleash our full potential. For that we have started a process to get investors for the company. We are looking for investors for seed round. We hope that we can find ones with good knowledge about paid marketing. That is something that we don't have experience yet with our team because we have not used paid marketing to get current figures. Our first step is to participate The Web Summit - Dublin next week and Slush later this month. We will release Pet Shows on Windows Phone store later this month and we are also preparing Permia - Duels for Apple store and Google Play. It looks like we still have something to do before year is done and should have something to write about to incoming blog posts as well. Stay tuned.

Pet Shows - Main menu from the game

Sitrep

Our blog has been quiet for a while now. It’s about time we gave you a quick update what’s happening inside Seepia’s offices.

We moved into a new office a couple weeks ago. Nothing terribly exciting, we are still in the same “business park” and about 2 minutes’ walk away from the old one. Pros? You no longer need your little magic access token to get back to your desk after a visit to the loo or the coffee machine. Cons? We are spread across three different rooms now which obviously is not the end of the world but it does make communication a bit more difficult.

Development wise, we have all been working hard to get Pet Shows ready for release. The game is starting to shape up. We have made some pretty major changes in the past months but it has definitely been worth the effort. The game looks better than anything we’ve released before and the reaction from people we have shown the game to has been overwhelmingly positive. We will post a more detailed update about Pet Shows soon.

We also recently released a Windows 8.1 version of Permia – Duels. The world outside mobile phones is still somewhat uncharted territory for us so it will be interesting to see how things develop on that front.

All in all, "busy" has once again been the operative word for us. I won't promise you more frequent blog updates but I do promise that you will hear more about Pet Shows soon.

The great tutorial mystery

When Permia - Duels was first released, we did not have time to make a proper interactive tutorial for the game. Instead we had a three-slide slideshow explaining the basics, which was shown to the players before the first game. Later the beginning was improved slightly by forcing the first three games against a really easy computer opponent and showing only one slide before each game. Despite the slight changes, we did not have a proper tutorial until now.

As we constantly have more things to do than resources to do them, prioritizing is essential. Originally the tutorial was not among the top priorities and was thus neglected this long. But lot of the feedback we received indicated that the missing tutorial was a major problem for the game. A typical player feedback would say that the game felt much more complicated at the beginning than it actually is due the missing tutorial. Many of the game business veterans we have talked, have emphasized the importance of a good tutorial. Even publishers we talked named the missing tutorial as a major flaw in the game.

So we felt a bit stupid for neglecting such an important issue for so long and decided to fix the issue. The interactive tutorial explaining the basic game play was added in the last weeks update. The tutorial is by no means complete yet, as it only explains the basic game. We still have work to do to properly explain the rest of the game, namely the card development system. But back to the issue, what is the great mystery of the tutorial then?

When we make changes and add features to the game, we try to anticipate the effects and then measure if we were successful on improving the game or not through data and feedback. In the tutorial case the assumption was clear: All the signs indicated that the first contact with the game felt too complex for the players. Many did not clearly understand what to do at the beginning, got frustrated and quit playing due to that. Each such player could have potentially liked the game and continued playing if the beginning would have been more welcoming. So we should see an increase on the percentage of new players who continue playing past the couple of first games after adding the tutorial. Or a drop,  if the tutorial was poor and players get frustrated to it.

Now we have the data from the first week of having the new tutorial. So, did we see an increase or drop? The answer is neither and that is the mystery of the tutorial. The numbers are almost exactly similar before and after the adding the tutorial. At the moment we are more than slightly surprised by the result. We were all definitely expecting an effect, some smaller some larger, but at least something.

So what can we actually learn from this? The lesson is definitely not that tutorials are unimportant. But it might be that the importance of a tutorial is somewhat dependent on the type of the game in question. Permia - Duels is a strategic collectible card game, which has a bit of a niche appeal. Maybe making the game more easily approachable is still not enough to convince players who don't like the genre to begin with, while those that do are willing to learn the game anyway with or without the tutorial. The results might be completely different for a different game though. In a broader concept, this should remind us, that each game is unique and a common wisdom that is true for most might not automatically hold for this particular case.

Of course making the tutorial has not been a wasted effort. It should make it easier for new players to get in the game make the overall player experience better. We will also be adding the missing tutorial parts in the future and believe that despite the initial numbers, having a proper tutorial will benefit the game in the long run. But all that said we are still quite puzzled by the lack of any measurable effect of adding the tutorial. So if you have an insight to the mystery of the tutorial, please let us know!

AppCampus

Today we reached our first #1 position in Windows Phone store in the card games category in Brazil. This is a good moment to look back at how we got here.

First concept

Already in 2011 we had an idea of collectible card game Permia - Tournaments. We started working with the title and in March 2012 we hada a working prototype of the game to show in Game Connection - America. (Concept demo) We met with over 20 publishers and most of them liked the idea behind the game. The concept was early stages and we were a brand new team so we did not manage to start co-operation with any of them. We believed in the concept and we continued working towards the closed beta launch. In June 2012 we launched the closed beta mostly because we promised to do so. It really was not in any shape for release, but it was something. At that time we concentrated on selling the idea to the publishers or some funding partners that could help us to continue with the product. For that purpose we produced a new trailer to be shown at Gamescom 2012. (Trailer)

The result was quite similar. People liked the concept but were not ready to take the risk with it. One of our last hopes for the product was AppCampus. They had started the program where they give grants for promising projects with a 6-month exclusivity period. They had an event here in Lappeenranta where they presented the program to us. We sent the application and started waiting for the results. After a couple of weeks they granted 20k€ for our project. That was not enough for us to really deliver the first idea of the concept, but it definitely helped us. It was part of the bigger picture where we managed to get a Tekes project approved as well.

Birth of Permia - Duels

We did not start immediately with the design milestone. The reason was that we really did not have enough resources to continue with the original concept and our hands were full with the other projects. Almost half a year passed before we were ready to continue with the program. One of the close colleagues came up with an new idea for more simple card game that might be more feasible to do with our resources. We created a design plan based on this new concept for AppCampus and they approved it. We were in a hurry because financially it was really tight situation at the time. In 3-4 months we passed the first release candidate to the AppCampus quality team and at the time they were not satisfied with it. There was one big feature missing and the quality of the game was not good enough. That was the first wake up call to really take Windows Phone environment seriously.

AppCademy

We continued to work with the missing feature and decided to apply for the AppCademy (AppCampus acceleration program). We were really sceptical about the acceleration program at first. One month away from home listening to lectures and coaching. Participation means that product would be on hold during that time. However, from the first day we were satisfied with the decision to join the program. We were given top level coaching in all areas from production to branding, marketing and user experience. The time spent there helped us go towards better quality than we would have been able to do without it.

Promotion

We don't have plenty of resources to promote our app. I think it is a same situation with most of the independent teams at start. Today it is crucial to get visibility for your app to have any possibility to really succeed in the market. After we released our game at December 2013 in Windows Phone store we really did not know what to expect. We knew that we have possibility to get some promotion from Microsoft and Nokia if we have good ratings. But the amount of support we have had from AppCampus program has been amazing. First month went almost on our own. It was Christmas time and we were little too late to be part of the Christmas promotions. We used that time well and noticed that downloads from Russia were progressing well without any promotion. We discussed with our Nokia contact about possibility to have local campaign in Russia that we will support by localizing the game. Our Nokia contact was successful and the result was whole week featured in Russia. At the same week we were featured all around the word and it was really good campaign for us. We still have most downloads from the Russia and they are really important market for us. After that we have worked closely with our Nokia contact to plan different campaigns and we have supported those campaigns with game content whenever it has been possible. We have updated the game often and have developed it further.

Final words

If we think about the support from AppCampus. The first thing is the grant. It can be something from 20k€ to 70k€. Money is always welcome and helps. The real difference comes from the other forms of support. They really push for the quality and help us developers to get good ratings with better quality apps. AppCademy is excellent acceleration program and is valued much more than any grant they give. And after those they put so much effort to really help us to promote our apps in store. That is something that is hard to buy with the money. I can imagine that without them Permia - Duels would not have over 260 000 downloads today and our #1 store position in Brazil.

Big thanks to the AppCampus staff. You have been a great asset on our journey to app developer. You have shown the possibilities that are in Windows Phone environment and we are really happy to be part of the program.

Permia - Duels Updates: what's been done and what we're working on next

During the first two months Permia - Duels has been online, we have already done a lot of updates for the game and have much more planned or under development right now. In this post I will shed some light on what's going on with the updates.



This far we have concentrated mostly on fixing bugs and improving the technical side to work well. We had some hiccups at the beginning where increased number of players caused the service to slow down and get "network error" notifications. Another major issue which has been fixed in the latest release is the freezing of the shop screen, which prevented some players from making purchases. Several smaller issues have also been fixed and we will continue the technical optimization of the game. If you encounter a problem, please let us know so we can fix it!

Facebook

A Facebook page for Permia - Duels has just been opened. In addition to having the game related information, it's a place to go for discussions about Permia - Duels with other players or us.

Ranking system

The ranking system has had some major tweaks. The starting player has a disadvantage and statistically wins less often that the second player. To balance this out, we have biased the ranking system to favor the starting player. The biasing formula is based on a real game data and is thus able to efficiently balance out the effect of player order. 

Another recent change is that now new players start with score 0. The old system, which started from 15000, resulted for new players being matched against more experienced from the start. As a result the difficulty curve should now be more reasonable for new players. 

We want to allow players to always play without too much waiting. For this reason the match making will pit one against a computer opponent, if a suitable human player is not found in reasonable time. The decks of the computer opponents are based on decks of human players of similar level. We have already done lot to balance the computer players to offer a suitable challenge for players of different levels. This is an ongoing task and we are still finding new ways to do it better.

Platforms and Localization

A big news for us was the recent announcement from Habbo Hotel that they are going to close their game center, in which Permia - Duels is available. In order to allow Habbo players to retain their game progress and continue playing, we have implemented the possibility to link the Habbo accounts to a Seepia account. When the Habbo game center closes, we will open a web client which can be used to play the game using the Seepia account credentials. In future we will allow also Windows Phone players to link their game accounts, so that the game can be played in different platforms alternately.

For the additional platforms we are planning to release a Windows 8.1 version of Permia - Duels in near future. Android and iOS versions are also planned eventually. 

The game was originally released only in English, but currently we have localization for total of 13 languages. We are very grateful for any reports of language mistakes in the localizations.

Next updates

We are constantly developing the game and will be releasing new features regularly. We also want to listen closely the feedback we get from the players. In the last update we added the possibility to buy unlimited vigour as a feature desired in the feedback we received. Related to that we have had feedback wishing for more ways to speed up the upgrade process of units. That is something we are considering at the moment, but have not yet definite plans. 

We want to make the game experience more rewarding for the active players. As a part of that, we are planning to decrease the season length and slightly increase the comparable season rewards. Additionally, we will be adding a daily rewards system, which will allow players to gain special rewards for the first victory each day, including Qual rewards. 

At the moment we are preparing a major UI update for the deck editor. It will be possible to get a detailed view for each unit including the currently missing unit information. These will include full sized images as well as flavour texts to properly link the units to world of Permia.

Another wished for upgrade we are planning to add are "golden directions", which will provide a way to boost a single direction of an unit. 

Future

We of course have lot of plans for developing the game after the next few updates. One thing which needs some love is the tutorial, which we plan on upgrading piece by piece to be more interactive than now. Additional content, such as single player mode, new units, new special powers, ability to see other players information and player clans are also high on the list of things to add to the game.

This is by no means a complete list of updates we will be doing in future. Some may be left out, some new will emerge, but it gives a bit of idea we are planning to do next. If you have a great idea how to make the game better, please let us know! 

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. :)