Spaces Of Play

We released our action-puzzle game Spirits on the iPad in late 2010. Over the next two years, we ported it to iPhone and Mac internally, and to PC, Linux and Android with the help of Tim Ambrogi and Apportable. For each port we spent a significant amount of time in getting the quality of the ports up and above the original version, supporting platform-specific features like Retina resolution or Steam Cloud. Reaching more players on different platforms helped our studio to be sustainable, and to be able to have some money in the bank while we work on our next game Future Unfolding.

We want to share our revenue per platform numbers with you since there are some interesting observations to be made – some going against common perceptions (e.g. Steam being the most important platform). The distribution of revenue amongst platforms looks different for every game, but we hope that sharing our numbers will give you at least one data point that might help you decide which platforms you should put your effort into.

After the split the platform-holders take, Spirits has made a total net revenue of 279987 EUR (approx. 366000 USD) to this day. To put the numbers per platform in context, have a look at the months (mo) in the pie chart that the game has been on sale on each platform. (We only count the periods which we have been already paid out for, which can differ by a few months depending on the platform.)

Given that the iPad version has been on sale for the longest period of time, it’s not surprising it accounts for the highest amount of revenue. It’s also priced at a premium of 4.99 USD and doesn’t support the iPhone, which was more common in 2010 than it is now.

What’s more surprising is that Google Play is #2 for us. This version is 2.99 USD and works on both tablets and phones. We were lucky to get a feature early on and temporarily changed the price to 0.99 USD during the feature. The saying that Android is not worth developing for compared to iOS does not seem to be true anymore.

Humble Bundle is an interesting one for us as well. We launched the PC, Linux and Android versions here, but it did probably not cannibalize Google Play and Steam sales by much. Looking at online discussions, Humble seemed to have helped getting the game to players who never heard about Spirits before. However, there might have been a perception issue with launching the PC and Linux version as part of the Humble Android bundle, and some players may have disregarded the game for being a port of a mobile game. What-if scenarios are hard to measure, but it’s something we keep in our minds while developing our next game Future Unfolding.

Steam is a tale others have told before: Sale promotions make the majority of the revenue. However, nowadays a sale without any kind of feature can go very much unnoticed in the vast sea of great (indie) games available. Two things that helped us was being featured in a flash sale, and being included in a large indie bundle which found many buyers despite its relatively high price point. It’s great to have your game on Steam to reach core gamers, but with 11.4% of the revenue it was not make-or-break for us.

At a lower price point (2.99 USD), Spirits on the iPhone made a bit more than a third of the iPad revenue. This was the easiest port to do. The work mainly involved optimizing the frame rate on older iPhone models.

Mac App Store was not huge, but worth more than we’d have thought. We got a good feature here and the fact that the game’s visuals and polish make it a good showcase app probably helped here.

T Store might not be a common household name, but it has a significant Android market in South Korea. This is one of the few smaller deals we made that actually was worth the paperwork and localization.

Indie Royale was a nice bonus after having had the game on Humble Bundle. It also got the game on Desura, which a handful of players had requested.

So far, we’ve had zero visibility on Amazon’s Appstore for Android. The slice on the pie would be too small for you to actually see it. This is another indication for us that putting up a good game on a store is not enough to actually sell anything.

With our revenue being spread relatively evenly among different platforms, going multiplatform was a strategy that worked well for us. It allowed us to get more out from our initial investment of designing and developing the game and to reach more people enjoying the game.

2012 has been a great year for games without any doubt. Here are our personal favorites.

Mattias

1. Journey, thatgamecompany

2. Spelunky, Mossmouth

3. League of Legends, Riot Games

Marek

1. Proteus, Ed Key and David Kanaga

2. Frog Skins, Jason Rohrer
Image credit: The Photo Group

3. Starcraft II, Blizzard

Andreas

1. Sound Shapes, Queasy Games

2. Proteus, Ed Key and David Kanaga

3. Dear Esther, thechineseroom

2012 has been busy and all about Spirits for us, but we have something new coming! Here’s our squeezed-in-one-paragraph recap.

We run into #1 Spirits player Mads Johansen at Nordic Game Jam and hire him to design a few bonus levels. Spirits becomes a first-class citizen on the Mac with iOS Retina updates as a side-effect. We redesign our press kit, which inspires Vlambeer to make the useful presskit(). GDC as usual followed by a weekend at a friend’s retro-futuristic house in the woods. Other activies include disc-golfing, running the Golden Gate Bridge and AcroYoga. Mattias and Andreas attend No More Sweden and make a little 4-player arcade digging game. Spirits comes to Windows, Linux (ported by Tim) and Android (by Apportable) via Humble Bundle and Steam. Kert Gartner produces a beautiful trailer. The box-stacking game Ordnungswissenschaft co-designed by Marek is shown at the Hammer Museum in LA, Spirits at f/ in Stockholm and hóPlay in Bilbao. We finally start working on the Adventure game idea we had back in January. The image above is very early work-in-progress, but we’re excited to work on a bigger project again.

Happy holidays and all the best for 2013!

Spirits has been orange-lit and comes to Steam next Tuesday, September 4! It’s 10% off for launch, so pick it up for just 8.99 USD or 8,09 EUR. The new version includes all the new levels by Mads, neat tech on the PC-side by Tim, 14 Steam Achievements from easy as pie to practically impossible, Steam Play (buy it once, play it on PC and Mac), cross-platform synching of save games via Steam Cloud, and the all-new 10-page digital booklet “The Art of Spirits” with previously unreleased sketches and graphics.

We’re really proud of this release, and we hope you can see the amount of detail that we put into it. Enjoy, as always!

Mads, please introduce yourself. Hometown, hobbies, favorite beverage, Spirits world rank?

I’m a danish Software Engineer and I currently reside in Copenhagen, where I’m doing a Master of Science in Games. I love playing games of all sorts, and I especially love playing challenging games. My favorite beverage I would have to say is water, I like my H2O just as much as the next Waterboy. My current world rank in Spirits is 3rd with my iPhone 4. I was rank one for a long time, but after the new iPad turned up, a rival has shown up, unfortunately I haven’t had the time to fight back yet. On the desktop version I’m ranked 13th with my speed run (2 hours and 30 minutes) from the launch day of Spirits for Mac.

You’re currently doing a Master of Science in Games at the IT University of Copenhagen. What’s it like there for you?

It’s very busy. I work part time as a Software Engineer, while studying and doing hobby projects on the side. But it’s a great environment for being creative and I get to do some interesting stuff with my programming skills, so I like it a lot.

When we ran into you at Nordic Game Jam you showed us some scores in Spirits that we didn’t knew were possible. What’s the best strategy to rank high in Spirits?

To rank high in Spirits you’ve gotta be persistent, very systematical and you’ve got to be able to see where you can optimize a solution.

We asked you to design a couple of new levels for Spirits. Without giving away any spoilers, what was your approach when designing them?

I wanted to make levels where there was a lot of room for different solutions, where the player could find many solutions, but had to spend some time to figure out the best one. I was also just thrilled to get to play around with the level editor and try out different things I had in mind when I’d played Spirits.

You knew Spirits very well from the perspective of a long-time player. How did your perspective change when you started to design levels for the game?

I had to put some of my player background behind me, because in the beginning I was very focused on how to solve the levels I made, and I thought it would be fun to have the sense that there was a lot of room for optimization, once you’d played through a level once. But I shifted a bit away from that later on to focus more on the puzzle side instead of the optimization/slack side. Getting the feel of a level just right is actually not that easy, especially when my feel was very focused on the perfectly optimized solution. So I had to try and think about what the player naturally would do in a situation and then I’d try to make that more puzzling.

On a scale from 1 to 10, how hard is it to get the perfect solution for the new levels?

In relation to the other levels in the game, I’d probably say around 8–9. But in relation to the World Rank #1 solutions of some of the levels in the game, these are probably only around 6–7.

You are the co-creator of LAZA KNITEZ!!, a local-multiplayer top-down arcade-game that won the Indie Sensation award at Nordic Game. What does the game play like, how did you come up with it and what have you planned for it in the future?

The game is like a crossover between Joust or Asteroids from the early 80′s and Unreal Tournament / Quake. It is really fast paced jousting and shooting, combined with powerups and deathmatch gameplay, and all of that on one screen. The game has an arcade feel, and it really shines on a cocktail style cabinet, where players are moving around more freely and the atmosphere is more like the one you’d find around a fussball table. The air becomes electric and people are having a lot of fun.

The game was created as a student project in the course Game Design at the IT-University of Copenhagen, and we wanted to make a 4 player game that we could all have fun with (we were four people in the group). For now the game is free to play online on LAZAKNITEZ.com. We’re talking about remaking the game as a non-flash game, and distributing it somehow, to let more players play it with their friends.

Where does your nickname and Twitter handle @pyjamads come from?

I wanted to have a funny handle that could be pronounced by anyone in the world, and still be personal and unique. So I just found a word where part of it sounds like my name “mads” pronounced “ma’s”, that word was pajamas/pyjamas (English/Danish), then I combined the two and got pyjamads.

PC or Mac guy?

PC guy, even-though I like the idea of the new MacBook Pro with that gigantic resolution.

What game influenced you the most in your decision to become a game designer?

I love playing games and having fun, so naturally when I found an excuse to begin making games, I just went for it. But any single game, that’s a hard one, I mean over the years, the game I’ve played the most ever is Quake 3, and I loved the competitive elements in that game so much, that I really want to make games with those elements.

What’s your favorite spot in Copenhagen?

Damhussøen.

Tim, please give a short introduction about yourself. Hometown, pastimes, favorite food, current leaderboard position at Jamestown?

I’m Tim, the programming half of Final Form Games. As a kid I actually moved around a lot overseas. My parents taught at international schools, so I was dragged around from country to country until I went college (at which point I moved to the US). I love cooking, playing games, reading historical fiction, and, of course, making games. As to my Jamestown scores: my glorious records have long-since been obliterated by talented players like this.

We asked you to port Spirits over from the Mac to Windows and Linux. Could you go a bit into the technical details of that? What was the hardest part of porting the game?

Well, because the game was written for Mac, there was a fair bit of Objective-C code that needed to be ported to C++. Additionally, even though it was built on top of OpenGL and OpenAL, the game still relied on some audio and video playback functionality that was not cross-platform. So, I had to write some code to playback video and audio on both Mac and Linux. This A/V code took a fair bit of work, but I’m quite happy with the end result. Due to the generosity of Spaces of Play (to both myself and the indie community), I was permitted to create the audio mixer as an open-source library for all to share!

The other big challenge was getting the Linux port to play nicely across different distros. While I did some Linux development before for Jamestown, there is a huge amount left for me to master. Many thanks to Ryan Gordon (aka icculus) for his help getting the Linux port out the door!

You’re based in Philadelphia, we’re over here in Berlin. What was it like to work on the project remotely in a different time zone?

It was actually pretty easy, though I suspect this had a lot to do with Mattias’ talent for never sleeping! The Basecamp groupware that we used helped keep small tasks in sync, whereas Skype worked well for complex debugging and collaborative problem-solving. Ultimately, though email was the most extensively-used tool – there were times when Mattias and I would create a thread 30-emails long in a single day!

Soft or hard tabs?

Always soft tabs if I can – the trick, of course, is getting a group of programmers to agree to do the same.

You developed the frantic multiplayer top-down shooter Jamestown at Final Form Games. Do you see local multiplayer games making a comeback with indie developers slowly picking up the genre again?

Oh my, this is a sensitive topic, isn’t it? Because local multiplayer is usually orders of magnitude easier to create than online multiplayer, I expect many developers will be faced with the following decision: single-player-only or local-multiplayer? In the case of Jamestown, we knew we couldn’t afford to create online-multiplayer, so we chose to create local-multiplayer instead of nothing. I think it was the right choice – imagine the fun our players would have missed out on if we’d only created a single-player game! That said, it’s a risky choice, and I’ve seen several games docked a point or two in reviews because the multiplayer they did add wasn’t online-enabled.

What I really hope, actually, is that we will see a revolution within our wireless internet infrastructure (such as DIDO), enabling us to dramatically increase bandwidth and reduce latency. Coupled with cloud gaming systems such as OnLive, we would be able to implement online multiplayer using the same techniques that we currently use to implement local multiplayer. If that sci-fi reality should come to pass, it could open the floodgates to developers of all sizes being able to implement online multiplayer in their games.

Where did the “neo-classical” inspiration for the story and art style of Jamestown come from?

We’re often drawn to historical fiction because it helps to anchor a story within a familiar world, without sacrificing the freedom to follow our imaginations (no matter how implausible an idea may be). The old-school genre, old-school art, and historical setting provided us with an classical feel to the game. In the process of developing the game, we also explored modern game mechanics and science-fiction story elements, eventually ending up with something that felt classic, but was clearly a modern work. So, as a pretentious tongue-in-cheek allusion to the musical world, we decided to call it a ‘neo-classical’ game.

Jamestown is a very impressive debut game. What did you guys do before starting Final Form Games?

Before Jamestown, we worked in the game industry in San Francisco, CA. I programmed PC, Wii, iPhone and PSP games for 5 years, saving up money to found my own studio. My brother Mike did art, animation, level design and game design for 7 years at various companies prior to Final Form. My friend Hal (our third co-founder) worked at LeapFrog designing the database back-end systems for educational games and toys for children. Francisco (our composer) worked (and still works) on television and as a studio/concert performer.

What’s your favorite development tool of all time?

Honestly, it’s got to be Visual Studio. Other favorites for cross-platform development are CMake, CodeLite, Python, and valgrind.

What’s the best thing about Philadelphia?

I can’t pick just one thing! There’s so much to love: the cool people, the beautiful architecture, the culture and art museums, the beer, and, of course, the sandwiches.

Spirits running on Kindle Fire and Nexus One

Today Spirits goes truly multiplatform and comes to Windows, Mac, Linux and Android as part of the Humble Bundle for Android 3, alongside with indie classics Fieldrunners, Bit.trip Beat, Uplink and SpaceChem.

The game has been faithfully ported to PC and Linux with the help of Tim Ambrogi of Final Form Games, developer of neo-classical top-down shooter Jamestown. (If you haven’t tried Jamestown’s 4 Player Co-Op Mode yet, I encourage you to pick it up!)

The Android version has been developed in collaboration with Apportable, the team who brought Osmos from iOS to Android. It supports both phones and tablets and is available on the Google Play Store as well.

The Humble Bundle also includes a key for the upcoming Steam version of Spirits that supports Steam Play, Steam Achievements and syncing via Steam Cloud. We also threw in a bonus Art Pack including sketches from the development and a digital poster featuring all levels. Spirits is coming to Steam regularly shortly after the Humble Bundle campaign is over.

As topping on the ice, all versions of Spirits (including iOS!) now come with new, challenging levels by long-time #1 ranked player and award-winning game designer Mads Johansen. We ran into him by chance at the Nordic Game Jam in Copenhagen, and he showed us how to solve levels in a way we never thought was possible. Bonus tip from him: “Using the pause-feature is half the game.”

To round this off we asked Kert Gartner to make a beautiful new trailer for Spirits. Enjoy.

Not an early adopter? Looking to give a great game to a friend? Until Sunday you have the chance to grab Spirits on the Mac App Store at half the price.

It still looks gorgeous on whatever Mac you have. And it’s a delight to play. In fact, good game get! named it “one of the best contemporary puzzle games today”.

It’s yours for USD 4.99 or 3,99 EUR only.

Know someone who’d like Spirits? Please share the news.

(Click on images for full size.)

The last months we have been working on porting Spirits to the Mac, redrawing all graphics to work in practically every display resolution up to an iMac 27″. During that time, we kept hearing the same rumours again and again that the next iPad will feature a Retina Display with double the resolution of the original iPad. So we decided to back-port our new HD graphics from the Mac to the new iPad.

Our goal is to get this Retina update to Spirits for iPad on the App Store as soon as possible. We think it’s going to look pretty neat.

We have been Mac fans for years, so it’s no wonder we ported Spirits to the Mac first.

One of the things that’s great about the Mac is its ecosystem of native apps that focus on user experience and feature a tremendous attention to detail. Here’s a selection of our favorite apps that help us being productive and getting things done everyday.

Since we work from three different cities we practically live in Campfire. It’s a web-based group chat system that doesn’t get in your way and works great both in real time and asynchronously. Best enjoyed together with Propane, a native OS X client for Campfire.

Whenever we share a screenshot on Twitter or Campfire, we use CloudApp. Drop any file on its toolbar icon and press CMD+V – you just pasted the file url right where you want it. There is no step 3.

From YouTube to iTunes Connect, we literally have dozens of accounts. Wallet makes sure we keep our credentials encrypted in a central place, so we don’t have to use “god” for all our passwords. Syncs between Mac and universal iOS app via Dropbox.

We use Writer to write most of our copy, be it a press release, a submission to a festival, a blog post or our latest newsletter. It works perfectly and distraction-free on Mac and iPad and syncs effortlessly between the two via iCloud.

We go to Transmit to keep our website updated, edit files on the fly, login to S3 to access our database backups and manage file permissions in our WordPress install. Simply the most solid FTP tool out there.

For coding we fire up TextMate – the canonical text editor on Mac. Even though its successor TextMate 2 has been in development limbo forever, the “old” release still excels at coding practically any language with its flexible and elegant bundle system.

If you keep forgetting how you named your files or where you downloaded them to, Fresh is perfect for you. Press a keyboard shortcut and it will show you files that are new, changed, recently opened or stored in Fresh by you.