Kingdom Rush 'Behind The Scenes' is a behind-the-scenes look at the popular Kingdom Rush tower defense game series from developers Ironhide Game Studio. The article is written by three members of Ironhide - Alvaro Azofra, Gonzalo Sande, and Pablo Realini - and provides insights into the game's development.
Modern applications are concurrent, parallel, asynchronous, and synchronous; they utilize many different subsystems, including network systems, actor systems, distributed systems, and more. Across all these modes of computation and different subsystems, the one constant is failure. Errors happen everywhere, and taming their monstrous complexity in a way that helps developers write correct code and troubleshoot failures is one of the hardest challenges of modern application development.
In this presentation, created just for the Dublin Scala Meetup, John A. De Goes and Kai from 7mind.io will take attendees on a tour of error management in Scala, comparing and contrasting Scala's own Future type, and the ZIO effect type. You'll see how functional effects provide features that go way beyond Future: including unified errors across all modes of computation, powerful error operators, lossless error propagation, compiler-assisted error handling, and a stunning new feature for debugging, sponsored by Irish consultancy 7mind.io, will be unveiled exclusively at this presentation.
Come learn about how modern functional effect systems like ZIO provide compelling new solutions to the problems of everyday error management.
What is a declarative HTTP client vs. an imperative one? Why are they useful and why should I care? We’ll talk about options that are available in the Spring portfolio and what’s coming on the horizon. In this session, we’ll look at the history of declarative clients in Spring via Spring Cloud OpenFeign. We’ll also dive into upcoming options that are coming to Spring and the advantages that these new technologies bring to the developer experience. Spring One Tour Tel-Aviv 2022.
(video and more at http://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/fppatterns)
In object-oriented development, we are all familiar with design patterns such as the Strategy pattern and Decorator pattern, and design principles such as SOLID. The functional programming community has design patterns and principles as well. This talk will provide an overview of some of these patterns (such as currying, monads), and present some demonstrations of FP design in practice. We'll also look at some of the ways you can use these patterns as part of a domain driven design process, with some simple real world examples in F#. No jargon, no maths, and no prior F# experience necessary.
Playwright and Cypress are two of today’s hottest automation frameworks, but which is better? Andy Knight and Filip Hric jump back into the ring for another round of Cypress vs Playwright: Let the Code Speak.
Explore comparisons of Cypress and Playwright in Developer Experience, Finding Selectors, Pluggability, Reporting, and more.
Watch the on-demand recording and see the session materials, including the example code at https://applitools.info/0lx
There are several JavaScript libraries available in the world of web programming. And, as the usage and complexity is increasing day by day, sometimes it becomes very difficult and confusing to understand and create modules using those libraries, especially for those having strong background of Object Oriented Languages.
So this one hour session will make an effort to go into the very basics of JavaScript and put a base for writing modular JavaScript code.
Modern applications are concurrent, parallel, asynchronous, and synchronous; they utilize many different subsystems, including network systems, actor systems, distributed systems, and more. Across all these modes of computation and different subsystems, the one constant is failure. Errors happen everywhere, and taming their monstrous complexity in a way that helps developers write correct code and troubleshoot failures is one of the hardest challenges of modern application development.
In this presentation, created just for the Dublin Scala Meetup, John A. De Goes and Kai from 7mind.io will take attendees on a tour of error management in Scala, comparing and contrasting Scala's own Future type, and the ZIO effect type. You'll see how functional effects provide features that go way beyond Future: including unified errors across all modes of computation, powerful error operators, lossless error propagation, compiler-assisted error handling, and a stunning new feature for debugging, sponsored by Irish consultancy 7mind.io, will be unveiled exclusively at this presentation.
Come learn about how modern functional effect systems like ZIO provide compelling new solutions to the problems of everyday error management.
What is a declarative HTTP client vs. an imperative one? Why are they useful and why should I care? We’ll talk about options that are available in the Spring portfolio and what’s coming on the horizon. In this session, we’ll look at the history of declarative clients in Spring via Spring Cloud OpenFeign. We’ll also dive into upcoming options that are coming to Spring and the advantages that these new technologies bring to the developer experience. Spring One Tour Tel-Aviv 2022.
(video and more at http://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/fppatterns)
In object-oriented development, we are all familiar with design patterns such as the Strategy pattern and Decorator pattern, and design principles such as SOLID. The functional programming community has design patterns and principles as well. This talk will provide an overview of some of these patterns (such as currying, monads), and present some demonstrations of FP design in practice. We'll also look at some of the ways you can use these patterns as part of a domain driven design process, with some simple real world examples in F#. No jargon, no maths, and no prior F# experience necessary.
Playwright and Cypress are two of today’s hottest automation frameworks, but which is better? Andy Knight and Filip Hric jump back into the ring for another round of Cypress vs Playwright: Let the Code Speak.
Explore comparisons of Cypress and Playwright in Developer Experience, Finding Selectors, Pluggability, Reporting, and more.
Watch the on-demand recording and see the session materials, including the example code at https://applitools.info/0lx
There are several JavaScript libraries available in the world of web programming. And, as the usage and complexity is increasing day by day, sometimes it becomes very difficult and confusing to understand and create modules using those libraries, especially for those having strong background of Object Oriented Languages.
So this one hour session will make an effort to go into the very basics of JavaScript and put a base for writing modular JavaScript code.
The lazy programmer's guide to writing thousands of testsScott Wlaschin
We are all familiar with example-based testing, as typified by TDD and BDD, where each test is hand-crafted.
But there's another approach to writing tests. In the "property-based testing" approach, a single test is run hundreds of times with randomly generated inputs. Property-based testing is a great way to find edge cases, and also helps you to understand and document the behavior of your code under all conditions.
This talk will introduce property-based testing, show you how it works, and demonstrate why you should consider adding this powerful technique to your toolbelt.
Lambda and Stream Master class - part 1José Paumard
These are the slides of the talk we made with Stuart Marks at Devoxx Belgium 2018. This first part covers Lambda Expressions and API design with functional interfaces.
What is the state of lambda expressions in Java 11? Lambda expressions are the major feature of Java 8, having an impact on most of the API, including the Streams and Collections API. We are now living the Java 11 days; new features have been added and new patterns have emerged. This highly technical Deep Dive session will visit all these patterns, the well-known ones and the new ones, in an interactive hybrid of lecture and laboratory. We present a technique and show how it helps solve a problem. We then present another problem, and give you some time to solve it yourself. Finally, we present a solution, and open for questions, comments, and discussion. Bring your laptop set up with JDK 11 and your favorite IDE, and be prepared to think!
This talk was given at "The KISS Method and PageObjects" meetup (https://goo.gl/2DBuxj).
The talk is about KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) principle applied to PageObjects design with a comparison to other more classic approaches.
The slides contain both Selenium Webdriver and Selenide examples.
src code for the talk: https://github.com/yashaka/talks/tree/master/kiss-pageobjects
JavaScript has some stunning features like Closures, Prototype etc. which can help to improve the readability and maintainability of the code. However, it is not easy for inexperienced developer to consume and apply those features in day to day coding. The purpose of the presentation ‘Advanced JavaScript’ is to help a reader easily understand the concept and implementation of some advanced JavaScript features.
This document covers the rational for cross browser testing ion the cloud. Selenium testing infrastructure can be cost effectively replaced with Sauce Labs Selenium in th cloud offering, called Sauce OnDemand.
How the Go language can be used to implement a version of the Actor Model for concurrent programming.
Talk given at the Golang UK conference, August 2016
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCbon_9yGVs
QA Fes 2016. Алексей Виноградов. Page Objects: лучше проще, да лучшeQAFest
Page Objects, вероятно, самый известный на сегодня паттерн, используемый в автоматизации через UI. И самый простой, скажете вы? Не соглашусь, по моим наблюдением применение данного паттерна таит в себе подводные камни даже для наиболее типичных веб-приложений.
В данном докладе я познакомлю вас с тремя простыми и практичными видами PageObject архитектуры - Static, Void и Fluent, продемонстрирую использование кодом, сравню плюсы и минусы подходов. Также я расскажу о важных недостатках Yandex HTMLElements и о некоторых других неудачных подходах, которые повторяются из одного самодельного фреймворка в другой. Вы увидите на примерах, как простой код решает проблемы лучше, чем слишком умный. Примеры на языке Java/Selenide легко переносимы и на другие языки программирования (.NET, Python и другие).
YouTube Link - https://youtu.be/CwLrdjgsJjU
** Selenium Certification Training
https://www.edureka.co/testing-with-selenium-webdriver **
This Edureka PPT on "Test Automation using Python" will provide you with detailed and comprehensive knowledge on selenium fundamentals. It will also guide you through Python concepts, how to locate elements in selenium using Python. This PPT will cover the following topics:
Introduction to Selenium
Why Python for Automation Testing?
Selenium and Python Binding
PyCharm for Python
Locators in Selenium
Demo - Automating Hotstar website
Selenium playlist: https://goo.gl/NmuzXE
Selenium Blog playlist: http://bit.ly/2B7C3QR
Software Testing Blog playlist: http://bit.ly/2UXwdJm
Follow us to never miss an update in the future.
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/edurekaIN
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/edureka_learning/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/edurekaIN/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/edurekain
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/edureka
The lazy programmer's guide to writing thousands of testsScott Wlaschin
We are all familiar with example-based testing, as typified by TDD and BDD, where each test is hand-crafted.
But there's another approach to writing tests. In the "property-based testing" approach, a single test is run hundreds of times with randomly generated inputs. Property-based testing is a great way to find edge cases, and also helps you to understand and document the behavior of your code under all conditions.
This talk will introduce property-based testing, show you how it works, and demonstrate why you should consider adding this powerful technique to your toolbelt.
Lambda and Stream Master class - part 1José Paumard
These are the slides of the talk we made with Stuart Marks at Devoxx Belgium 2018. This first part covers Lambda Expressions and API design with functional interfaces.
What is the state of lambda expressions in Java 11? Lambda expressions are the major feature of Java 8, having an impact on most of the API, including the Streams and Collections API. We are now living the Java 11 days; new features have been added and new patterns have emerged. This highly technical Deep Dive session will visit all these patterns, the well-known ones and the new ones, in an interactive hybrid of lecture and laboratory. We present a technique and show how it helps solve a problem. We then present another problem, and give you some time to solve it yourself. Finally, we present a solution, and open for questions, comments, and discussion. Bring your laptop set up with JDK 11 and your favorite IDE, and be prepared to think!
This talk was given at "The KISS Method and PageObjects" meetup (https://goo.gl/2DBuxj).
The talk is about KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) principle applied to PageObjects design with a comparison to other more classic approaches.
The slides contain both Selenium Webdriver and Selenide examples.
src code for the talk: https://github.com/yashaka/talks/tree/master/kiss-pageobjects
JavaScript has some stunning features like Closures, Prototype etc. which can help to improve the readability and maintainability of the code. However, it is not easy for inexperienced developer to consume and apply those features in day to day coding. The purpose of the presentation ‘Advanced JavaScript’ is to help a reader easily understand the concept and implementation of some advanced JavaScript features.
This document covers the rational for cross browser testing ion the cloud. Selenium testing infrastructure can be cost effectively replaced with Sauce Labs Selenium in th cloud offering, called Sauce OnDemand.
How the Go language can be used to implement a version of the Actor Model for concurrent programming.
Talk given at the Golang UK conference, August 2016
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCbon_9yGVs
QA Fes 2016. Алексей Виноградов. Page Objects: лучше проще, да лучшeQAFest
Page Objects, вероятно, самый известный на сегодня паттерн, используемый в автоматизации через UI. И самый простой, скажете вы? Не соглашусь, по моим наблюдением применение данного паттерна таит в себе подводные камни даже для наиболее типичных веб-приложений.
В данном докладе я познакомлю вас с тремя простыми и практичными видами PageObject архитектуры - Static, Void и Fluent, продемонстрирую использование кодом, сравню плюсы и минусы подходов. Также я расскажу о важных недостатках Yandex HTMLElements и о некоторых других неудачных подходах, которые повторяются из одного самодельного фреймворка в другой. Вы увидите на примерах, как простой код решает проблемы лучше, чем слишком умный. Примеры на языке Java/Selenide легко переносимы и на другие языки программирования (.NET, Python и другие).
YouTube Link - https://youtu.be/CwLrdjgsJjU
** Selenium Certification Training
https://www.edureka.co/testing-with-selenium-webdriver **
This Edureka PPT on "Test Automation using Python" will provide you with detailed and comprehensive knowledge on selenium fundamentals. It will also guide you through Python concepts, how to locate elements in selenium using Python. This PPT will cover the following topics:
Introduction to Selenium
Why Python for Automation Testing?
Selenium and Python Binding
PyCharm for Python
Locators in Selenium
Demo - Automating Hotstar website
Selenium playlist: https://goo.gl/NmuzXE
Selenium Blog playlist: http://bit.ly/2B7C3QR
Software Testing Blog playlist: http://bit.ly/2UXwdJm
Follow us to never miss an update in the future.
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/edurekaIN
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/edureka_learning/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/edurekaIN/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/edurekain
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/edureka
Animation Film Production Pipeline By : animationgossips.com (Jayant Sharma)Jayant Sharma
Animation Film Production Pipeline By : animationgossips.com (Jayant Sharma)
Topic : Production Pipeline of Animation
What is the production pipeline?
Logical organization of the steps required to produce an animated feature film
Overlaps with the company organizational structure – departments, budgets
For more visit : http://www.animationgossips.com
Pipeline Organization
Every company has its own pipeline
Every movie changes the pipeline
– requirements are changing
– save money
– increase the quality of the movie
For more visit : http://www.animationgossips.com
Pipeline Organization
Many Departments
For more visit : http://www.animationgossips.com
Pipeline Organization
Pre-Production
For more visit : http://www.animationgossips.com
Pipeline Organization
Characters and Sets
For more visit : http://www.animationgossips.com
Pipeline Organization
Movement
For more visit : http://www.animationgossips.com
Pipeline Organization
Post-Production
For more visit : http://www.animationgossips.com
Stage 1:
In stage 1 we have to develop a concept or idea.
And from that concept or idea we collect more information related to it and start developing a story for our Animation Film/Clip.
For more visit : http://www.animationgossips.com
Stage 2: PRE-PRODUCTION
In Stage 2 we breakup our story in multiple scripts.
STORY = SCRIPT - 1 + SCRIPT - 2 + ... ... + SCRIPT - n
For more visit : http://www.animationgossips.com
Stage 2: PRE-PRODUCTION
Then we prepare thumbnails of each scripts separately.
Stage 2: PRE-PRODUCTION
Next Step is to prepare following from each thumbnails:
Character Designing
After story come characters
Consists mostly of drawings, or sculptures
body poses
facial expressions
key features from multiple points of view
Character Designing
Character in various Emotions and Face Impressions
Story Boarding
The film in outline form
specify the key scenes
specify the camera moves and edits
specify character gross motion
Typically paper and pencil sketches on individual
Sheets taped on a wall
For more visit : http://www.animationgossips.com
Stage 3: PRODUCTION
In this stage now we are going to animate our movie.
Animate
Character Animation
Stage 4: POST-PRODUCTION
This is last stage for Animation movie/clip where we cover following:
Compositing
Rendering
Sound/Music Designing
For more visit : http://www.animationgossips.com
Stage 4: POST-PRODUCTION
Frames can take hours to render.
1800 frames for a single minute of animation.
Pixar has a HUGE render farm.
Stage 4: POST-PRODUCTION
Sound and Music must have to match your video theme and Character Voices have to match your characters.
Sound/Music Designing
For more visit : http://www.animationgossips.com
Thanks Jayant Sharma For more Info : http://www.animationgossips.com
Basic overview of the 3D animation workflow. From workspace to modeling, texturing, animating and rendering. This is part of a course introduction to digital graphics and animation.
Ever wondered what it takes to create an animation? In this fun and descriptive eBook, you will learn how animation starts from imagination to the big screen! Lets take a step-by-step journey into the world of an animation studio.
Pre-production, Production & Post-production Process in 3D Animation Veetil Digital Service
Transforming virtual ideas into larger than life is 3D animations. Cutting-edge applications, digital marketing efforts, highest efficiency; The animation process can be classified into three stages.
This is a general overview of the animation process. Covering the initial planning stage, pre-production, shot planning and output. Presented as part of a course introduction to digital graphics and animation series.
This is the full results deck for the 2012 Flash Games Market Survey, conducted by Mochi Media and our survey partners Adobe and FGL.com.
Now in our 4th year, Mochi Media conducts this annual survey to "take the pulse" of the Flash games industry.
Due to lowered barriers and improvements in technology, we are seeing an evolution of the Flash games industry, where old labels of "Flash game developer" and "mobile game developer" are being replaced with simply "game developer".
Driving Stage3D: A Post Mortem by Nate Beck and Jeremy Saenzmochimedia
Nate Beck (co-founder, The Engine Company) and Jeremy Saenz (principal architect, Leedo Studios) talk about their installation project where they utilized Stage3D.
Next Generation Flash Gaming: Lessons from Console Development by Justin Lamb...mochimedia
Justin Lambros (general manager, Kabam) discusses how his own experiences in the console gaming world have influenced him, and what the takeaways are for Flash game developers.
Panel: Flash Development Life 2012, Moderated by Ethan Levymochimedia
Moderated by Ethan Levy, this panel of Flash game developers consisting of Dan Stradwick, Sean McGee & Andrew Sega covers current trends and topics that Flash game devs are thinking about.
Panel: Flash Development Life 2012, Moderated by Ethan Levy
Kingdom Rush 'Behind The Scenes'! by Ironhide Game Studio
1. Kingdom Rush ‘Behind The Scenes’!
By Alvaro Azofra, Gonzalo Sande, & Pablo Realini
Editor's Notes
<Greeting> Hello everybody! I hope you are doing allright!Welcome to Kingdom Rush “Behind the scenes!”.We are the founders of Ironhide Game Studio.this is Pablo Realini, Gonzalo Sande and i’m Alvaro Azofra(First i’d like to say that we are spanish speakersso we hope our english won’t be too terrible for you.)With that said, i’d like to talk briefly about our studio:
[Slide - Uruguay + Studio]We are from Uruguay, South America and started Ironhide 2 years ago as a flash developers but recently expanded into mobile.
Our first game was Clash of the Olympians, a defend the temple game where you could play one of 3 greek heroes.
Then came Soccer Challenge World Cup edition 2010 , a trivia game that we used to test the facebook platform
and finally Kingdom Rush, our fantasy tower defense game.
Today we will talk about the development and creative process of Kingdom Rush, thechallenges we faced, the sponsorship, premium content and the overall experience of making the game and some of the things we learned by doing it. We will share some figures and statistics. Just to have an idea, how many of you have played Kingdom Rush? For those who don’t, Kingdom Rush, it is a classic fantasy tower defense game with a few tweaks that became the top rated game in Armor Games and Kongregate.
< Concept >How we came up with the concept for Kingdom Rush? and why make a Tower Defense game?[Slide : Concept Games - Muestra los concept art de los otrosjuegos]The concept of Kingdom Rush was more the result of a process. We wanted to make a strategy game, so we started brainstorming and went through a few concepts, some of them you can see over there. The process was to think about the main features of the game and then create a sketch based on what we talked about. For one reason or the other we ended up discarding them, some were to complex while others didn’t really come together, but they helped set the stage for the tower defense because many of the features we thought for those game ended up being part of it.
So we started creating the concept of a tower defense, and when we saw this early sketch we knew that was the game we wanted to make.
[Slide - Scales : Cons] But to be honest we were a bit afraid of going towards that genre, because we felt it was a bit saturated, there are a lot of great titles already out there with many established standards and on top of all, Tower Defense games can be very complexto make where many things can go wrong.[Slide - Scales : Pros]On the other hand, we loved the genre and we always wanted to do one. We thought there was still room for improvement and we really liked some of the ideas we had for the game, but more importantly we believed our ideas would offer something different... so we took the leap.
We didn’t really knew how to make a big game, our other games had short production times and were a lot simpler, so for this one we took a different approach, we would do a lot of concept and prototyping before getting into development.We spent a lot of time doing concept and prototypes but it was really worth it since we could test things really fast and adjust them until we found the solution that felt right for us. So we could get into coding the game with a precise idea of what we needed.
One of the best examples of how prototyping helped us was the barracks one. ( The barracks would spawn little soldiers that block and fight nearby enemies)We weren’t sure if the barrack idea was gonna work until we saw the prototype. It worked perfectly as a slowing tower and it was really cool to see the little guys figthing there. But it also changed how the game was played, and we inmediately knew this would make Kingdom Rush different from other tower defense games. We liked it so much it led to the reinforcement spell, so the player could use this mechanic anywhere in the map.
Prototyping also helped us know that a good sounding idea may not be that good in the end. We wanted to show the incoming enemies, pretty much as other games do it with a timeline. But when we made the prototype we noticed the timeline was very distracting, it took the attention away from the action, you kept on looking at the timeline instead of the towers, so we decided to go the other way, take it away and add an indicator with a tooltip which was a lot cleaner, easier to understand and also served as a next wave button.
In conclusion, we learned that taking the time to do concept and make prototypes really pay off in the long run, even if it is all throwaway code, it is really worth it. - Gives a better idea of how the core mechanics of the game work - Helps in creating cleaner code since you will know exactly what you need- Helps in solving challenges early before getting into developmentTo keep with the Summit theme... it is a way of early Maximising your game.
We kept building the game for a few months until we reached a point were we had the gamewith one generic stage, a few creeps and almost all working towers with several powers. We were so happy with what we had, we showed it to a few friends so they could test it out and give us some feedback.It was terrible. They where overwhelmed by all the options and they didn’t enjoyed a bit of it... even teaching them the basics didn’t really work. You could see they made an effort to try and play it but they lost interest after a couple of minutes.The problem was we didn’t had a game, we just had a basic engine that looked and worked great but had almost no play value.We were so busy thinking about the game mechanics, coding and art we completely forgot about the user experience.So our first real milestone was to create an early playable Alpha version of the game for early testing.
The first Alpha had 4 stages and it was sent to 20 testers (all friends). <stop>I’ll tell you something : “Friends never tell you your game is bad” , ..and aside from that people have a hard time being specific, they just tell you the game is good, that they had fun. Which may be nice to hear but it doesn’t really help you.So our approach to that was to include a feedback form with the questions we needed answers to, and ways for the testers to rate different aspects of the game so we could collect specific data.[Slide - Alpha - Results ]This worked excellent! We had great feedback and it allowed us to take the game in the right direction. {rally}For example on that version, you couldn’t change the rally point on the barracks, it was fixed, we weren’t sure a movable rally point would work, but after the alpha almost all testers requested the feature. So we made a prototype of it and as soon as we tested it, it was clear that was the way to go. {reinforcements}Another concern was the reinforcements, we thought it was a great spell to play with but we were afraid players would see it like a chore. since it had a very short cooldown.Reinforcement were intended as a way for players to affect the outcome of a battle, interrupt the flow of enemies and also as entertainment while they collected gold. The reception was awesome, every tester loved them so they stayed for good!{tutorial}What they didn’t love, was the tutorial! They just skipped throught it. People don’t want a tutorial they just want to get into the game and our tutorial was standing in the way.So what worked was to make it as simple and graphical as possible, show the most important thing on the first slide and the less important on the second and third. It didn’t really matter if players saw the second and third slides... but we wanted them to see the first, the others are good bonus and help people who are not familiar to tower defense games.Also as other games do, we included bits of information as you played the game, we call them tips & alerts and they would popup at the right time to teach the player something new. This worked great, and reception from our testers was very good. It also served as a way of teaching the players that every stage had something new so that would motivate them to keep going.
Conclusion, doing early beta testing of the game was crucial, it allowed us to find and fix problems early on, test and adjust several features as well as knowing the ones we did right. In other words Maximise your game through early testing by taking it on the right direction!
Our next milestone : Flash Game License!Uploading an almost finished game would have taken too long so we decided the FGL version would have 9 levels instead of 12 with no additional modes. BUT all the content in the game would be release candidate and we would focus on making that version as polished as possible. Maximise the game through polish, after all this version had to sell.{details}We believedetails can really make a game stand out, players really notice them and are worth the time. For example the archers on the tower take turn to fire their arrows, the artillery reloads after each shot, soldiers open the door to get out of the barracks, etc. So what we did and still do is every time we make something we also do the details on it. For example, every time we made a new stage we made sure, to add every portrait, notification, etcetera in order to finish the stage and move on to the next. That way we could really see each stage as a finished part and it also created a sense of advancing in the project. That was great and really worked for us.{fun stuff}Also part of the polish we believe, is what we call the fun stuff, flavor texts on the tooltips, exploding sheep, odd achievements, etc... any hidden joke that could make some player smile for a second is great to have and fun to make. So every time anyone on the team comes up with some crazy idea or joke that makes us laugh, we try and think of ways to put it inside the game.For example the exploding sheep in reference to warcraft or the icon on the Die Hard achievement.{production value}Last but not least, there are some things that will really add to the game but you cannot do yourself or maybe you can but you shouldn’t. For us that was music, voice talent and of course the english narrative.Although we didn’t had a real budget we wanted to have custom music tailored to the game, voice over clips to give personality to the towers and also as an opportunity to add more of that fun stuff for, and of course texts in correct english.So we worked with the guys at Taking-off from Argentina on the music, with Sean Crisdenfrom voices.com on the voice talent, and with Martin Perez a friend, thats very good at english and is somewhat of a writer.They were all awesome to work with and we believe their work really adds to the game in many levels.
In conclusion we believe that taking the time to polish and add all the extra features really make a difference, makes the game stand out, improves the user experience and adds a lot of value to the game. Players will really notice it and enjoy it.
So we had the FGL game version ready, we did some beta test rounds and ordered first impressions that brought positive feedback, we had all the must haves : Good icon & description,Cool screenshot Home made video game trailer highlighting the best aspects of the gameAll that was left was submitting for approval... and sooo we did. The game got approved on Friday , July 10th, of two thousand elevenwith an editor rating of 9, which was great.3 days later on Monday we accepted a bid from Armorgames.
The Armorgames bid Exclusive License 30k +(plus) funding for the iPhone/iPad version (30k) with share revenue from day 1 and Ipads2 for testing.You may be wondering why we took the bid so fast, and if we should have waited for other bidsA bid like that was exactly what we were looking for at the time, because it opened the door for us to get into mobile gaming, something we were thinking about for a while. Also we had worked with AG before and they had been great with us. Should we have waited?Yes we believe we should have, looking back, with what we know now, we think we could have gotten better offers and should give other sponsors the chance to bid on the game,which we didn´t.So our advice here is to be patient and let the FGL system work.
Having the game sponsored really brought in a second wind to the team, so after the sponsor deal was made we completed the whole game in a little over a month.But before releasing we wanted to do an Open beta.To test the difficulty curve, find bugs, test user reception and be able to make adjustments before the official release. We wouldn’t want to get badly rated because of some minor detail we missed.So we worked with Armorgames so they would publish the game on their Armorblogmaking it available to thousands of players but not too many as on the homepage and we again included a feedback form for testers to fill out. But the most important was we included custom metrics on almost all game events so we could track almost everything that went on a game session.The Result?Over ten thousand testers tried the game for one week producing a lot of data that allowed us to really tweak and adjust the game experience.
{reset button}For example, through the feedback form, reported several obscure bugs, typos and details. Also many asked to be able to reset the upgrades. We had thought of the reset button thing but felt that it would take away the decision making. But receiving so many requests for that feature made us think again, so we added it to test it out. It was very well received, most reports thanked us for adding it, so it was the right move and we believe it really made the game much more friendly, it took the frustration of making a bad decision early on the game away, so that was very good.{difficulty curve}Another very important thing was tweaking the difficulty. Metrics allowed us to see how many people played each stage... so we were seeing that we lost half of our players on stage 3. It was clear there was something wrong there... So we looked further into the metrics and we knew exactly what was the problem, so we tweaked a few thing and made an update. And after a few iterations the curve ended a lot smoother meaning gameplay was really improved.It was awesome to work with those metrics, it really helped see the game from a very different angle and we advice anyone with any game to include a report tool to see how their players play the game.We used Playtomic, but you can also use Mochi that is really good also.Conclusion, doing an open beta was great, it gives you the chance to test the game without risking a bad rating and also players tend to be a lot more forgiving and helpful if they know it is a beta.
{reset button}For example, through the feedback form, reported several obscure bugs, typos and details. Also many asked to be able to reset the upgrades. We had thought of the reset button thing but felt that it would take away the decision making. But receiving so many requests for that feature made us think again, so we added it to test it out. It was very well received, most reports thanked us for adding it, so it was the right move and we believe it really made the game much more friendly, it took the frustration of making a bad decision early on the game away, so that was very good.{difficulty curve}Another very important thing was tweaking the difficulty. Metrics allowed us to see how many people played each stage... so we were seeing that we lost half of our players on stage 3. It was clear there was something wrong there... So we looked further into the metrics and we knew exactly what was the problem, so we tweaked a few thing and made an update. And after a few iterations the curve ended a lot smoother meaning gameplay was really improved.It was awesome to work with those metrics, it really helped see the game from a very different angle and we advice anyone with any game to include a report tool to see how their players play the game.We used Playtomic, but you can also use Mochi that is really good also.Conclusion, doing an open beta was great, it gives you the chance to test the game without risking a bad rating and also players tend to be a lot more forgiving and helpful if they know it is a beta.
{reset button}For example, through the feedback form, reported several obscure bugs, typos and details. Also many asked to be able to reset the upgrades. We had thought of the reset button thing but felt that it would take away the decision making. But receiving so many requests for that feature made us think again, so we added it to test it out. It was very well received, most reports thanked us for adding it, so it was the right move and we believe it really made the game much more friendly, it took the frustration of making a bad decision early on the game away, so that was very good.{difficulty curve}Another very important thing was tweaking the difficulty. Metrics allowed us to see how many people played each stage... so we were seeing that we lost half of our players on stage 3. It was clear there was something wrong there... So we looked further into the metrics and we knew exactly what was the problem, so we tweaked a few thing and made an update. And after a few iterations the curve ended a lot smoother meaning gameplay was really improved.It was awesome to work with those metrics, it really helped see the game from a very different angle and we advice anyone with any game to include a report tool to see how their players play the game.We used Playtomic, but you can also use Mochi that is really good also.Conclusion, doing an open beta was great, it gives you the chance to test the game without risking a bad rating and also players tend to be a lot more forgiving and helpful if they know it is a beta.
So beta was over and we had the game ready for publish. But we wanted to have the best possibilities of creating a fan base, so we had a developer website, made sure our twitter and facebook channels were updated and even created the Kingdomrush.com website to promote the game.What we also did was including a way for players to stay connected with us from within the game. Not just the classic Facebook Twitter Credits button , but instead give an incentive. We added a panel that would popup after stage 4 and offer a reward to players if they followed us on twitter and facebook... they didn’t had to actually follow us, just clicking on the links would give the reward. The point of adding it after stage 4 was they would already know the value of a star and they would already know if they like the game or not.So we had all this and all that was left was publish the game...
The game was released on July 28th of 2011 (two thousand eleven) ,and it got an incredible rating of 9.4 the first week...reaching 9.7 later on becoming the toprated game of all time on Armorgames.This was followed by a social explosion... we started out with 600 likes on facebook and 100 twitter followers and in the first week we reached 10 thousand likes andover 3 thousand followers ontwitters.Today we are celebrating over 2 hundred thousandfacebook likes and over 40 thousand twitter followers and counting.We believe these tools combined really help you create a fan base and adding systems for players to reach you and stay in touch is a good thing. Also a little incentive doesn’t hurt... in fact it may help a lot.
So how do you Maximise your revenue when you have a popular game? You give it premium content.We thought of adding it before release but it made not much sense without having a fan base, but a month later Armorgames asked us to do so because of the popularity of the game... and so we did. Although we were a bit nervous, because maybe players would hate us for it.We never did premium content before, so our first aproach was to add some bonuses and some extra cosmetics, part of the reason for it was we had to rush the premium package because the sooner we published it the sooner it would start monetizing and we didn’t knew how much longer the game would be on the top. That first version did really good, but the bonuses broke the game balance a little bit because it made the game too easy and people were a bit disappointed because they expected extra stages.So for the second version we added what people expected, an extra stage. Makingthat update increased sales by a 30 percent and user reception was great, they really liked it, in fact we even made another update with yet another stage sales increased even more.
In conclusion, premium content is a great way to bring extra revenue, and we believe it works best when it adds what players are expecting, so listening to you fan base is a good idea here. Also if the premium is doing good it may be a good idea to keep updating it.
After a few months of the game being exclusive on Armorgames we released the Viral version along with a custom version for Kongregate with premium content. And these were the results:The viral version doubled the amount of plays per day while also doubling premium content revenue which has been great.The Kongregate version was an instant hit, it became the top rated game on the first week generating over 14k (fourteen thousands) on premium content revenue and over 5k (five thousands) of revenue share so far.So making that version was the right move.
Here is an overview on the numbers and statistics for the game. I don’t really know how to spell most of them in english so feel free to read them.
We are near the end of the presentation, so i´d like to add that Kingdom Rush was a school for us, it taught us a lot of lessons, good and bad ones, so here are the some of the ones we feel are very important :Take the time to make concepts and prototype.Do early testing of the game, it is very valuable and can pinpoint problems early on.Polish your game as much as you can afford to, it can make a huge difference.Think about your fan base and listen to them.Use premium content to give players what they want.If your premium is doing good, keep updating it, it will do better.So we have come to the end of the presentation and we don´t have any more time, so i´ll leave you with this.
Thank you very much for listening, i hope you had a good time, for us it was great And maybe you noticed this was our first presentation ever and in a foreign language.