April 23, 2014
Hello everyone!
Muffin Munch was released tonight and is live on the App Store. You can download the Game for FREE for your iPhone & iPad.
Download for Free!
We hope you enjoy the game! Feel free to share it with your friends or leave us a review in iTunes.
April 21, 2014
Hello!
This is Weekly Update #15. Two days until Muffin Munch 2 hits the App Store. We are very excited to see how our game will be received by the players!
Finding your players
Making games is hard, bringing your game to players in a horribly crowded market is harder. For Muffin Munch we knew it would be very difficult. On one hand we have a very broadly appealing Match-3 game which does some new things, but the devil is in the details and without playing the game, a potential customer would never see those differences. This means that our game is just another Match-3 in the flood of Match-3s on the App Store. On the other hand we have a very specific theme. One could argue that Candy and Cake is as broad as Match-3 but still it’s way more niche than Pixel-Platformer oder Modern-War FPS. So how do we promote a game that is niche in it’s visuals/theme, so it would instantly appeal to a certain audience and has a very overused gameplay that no one would pick up (at least in the indie space) if we would promote it as Match-3 meets X.
In our case we believe that our players don’t know about our game yet, in the sense that they don’t look on the App Store for games about Muffins. So our solution for marketing the game is to find our target audience in their “natural habitat”: cake and baking-blog communities. After doing some research we found out that there are hundreds of very sophisticated individuals who bake and document their progress in very detailed ways and putting their creations on blogs to showcase them. What really struck us is the amount of followers those bloggers have. Doing a quick Facebook check it seems that this niche is quite big:
So why not give it a try and pitch the game to those who the theme would appeal to and are not biased by Match-3, or even better they don’t know about Match-3 at all. You now could argue that those people are no players and that pitching a game to them would not work anyways. But we believe that a highly relevant app can open up a new world for those who haven’t tried a game and first and foremost this is what iOS or mobile gaming is about: bringing games to those who would never consider them selfs as gamers.
Marketing your game is hard and we will see how much this approach will help us to bring the game to the right players, but it’s definitely way better to try new things than again to write 200 emails to App-Blogs that never will never even open your email.
Easter eggs
As already posted on Twitter and Facebook we have taken great effort in having a small easter egg hunt. We have hidden some very nice easter eggs on the App Store and we will give out some tips on how to find them. So take a closer look at the following hints and have a nice day!
HRHEAAMTAATA
AH4WNL9YNEKE
FAR7YJ47E36F
PYXM3WNLR4WE
NJKXHP7RJTL9
WXLY7469ER64
JY9FT9LA4PLP
9XNM6HLM7HRE
KA3EX4YRJJER
JR4EKPR4WMLJ
We will be back soon with more Muffin Munch launch hype!
April 14, 2014
We are back with our Weekly Update #14! The past Week was all about the AMAZE Berlin which took place from 9.-11.04.14. Here’s a little writeup how we experienced the AMAZE and why you should come next year too!
Day 0 Wednesday
Photo by Ratking
Wednesday started with an open evening for everyone. The exhibition area was hosted in the Urban Spree location (like last year) and round about 50 official games where shown. Additionally the Indiearena had a small Piano, yes a Piano, which was reused as the exhibition table for mostly mobile games.
Wiebke and i came to hang out and tried some of the more extravagant exhibition pieces like Roflpillar or an installation where you could physically experience a Kite-Glider in the Occulus VR. Speaking of Occulus VR, which plenty of people had setup to experience their games, Wiebke had never tried the Occulus and her second contact with the Occulus ever was the Guillotine-Simulator. I tried SUPER HOT with the Occulus which was pretty cool also.
Besides playing a lot of games we met some people we already knew from last year, some new ones and one of my favorite indie-guys Ed Key who made Proteus.
Day 1 Thursday
Day 1 started with the Keynote held by Henry Smith, who talked about the successes of Space-Team. Followed by a very interesting talk by Pippin Barr about his collaboration with Marina Abramovic who does very intense performance art. He talked a little bit about how games and time interact and how his games try to show that there are games that could literally take 100 years to complete.
A panel discussion about games and the future of VR was informative but not very interesting in terms of how the future will be, because nobody of the panelist had a real answer to the question.
My personal highlight of the day was Dennis Kogels interview with Jonathan Blow. I have to admit that i’m a huge fan of Jon’s way of thinking about games and his attitude in general. The talk itself was nothing new to me personally, but non the less very impressive how he interacts with other people. The talk part of the day ended with the 5-Minute Talks of some Indiearena members, which was a very nice format to get a cool overview of what the german indie-scene is up to. At 19:30h i had to chicken out due to my headache and had to get some sleep.
Day 2 Friday
Day 2 started a little bit late with Major Buenos talk of their experience with their “1 Game a month” year, where they actually finished 12 games in 2013. The second highlight of AMAZE was the interview of Tale of Tales which was moderated by Chris Priestman. Tale of Tales for me is the spearhead of avant garde art games and their latest game Luxuria Superbia shows that in many ways. They talked a little bit about their intentions and what message they like to communicate with their games. Two things stood out for me.
1) Even after 10 years of making internationally acclaimed games they can’t comfortably live by selling their games and
2) even though Michaël to me looked like the last person who would enjoy mainstream games, he recommended Battlefield 3 as a game he enjoyed for its entertainment value.
Rilla Khaled talked about reflection in games and how too many games are about short term entertainment instead of making the player think and reflect about his actions in a game. The last talk for Friday i listened to was the “Game Criticism Panel” moderated by Anjin Anhut which was pretty interesting too and gave some insight about how games writer aproach games and why they write about them at all.
At 15:30h i switched over to the exhibition and showcased mainly our strategy prototype.
Day 2 Awards
Friday evening the AMAZE Awards where given to several games. Leo Schönfelders Perfect Woman took the main price, the Human Human Machine Award went to Nidhogg, Choosatron took the Audience Award and FJORDS the WTF! Award.
For me personally the best game of AMAZE was Gang Beasts a hilarious 4 player brawling simulator.
Wrap-up
Our AMAZE 2014 was super interesting/informative/friendly/weird and exhausting. A lot of cool games, even cooler people, super good opportunities to play test our games and present them to real players. The Festival was way better organized than last year. The Talks where a good mix between art and relevant information and had mainly quality content. Additionally there were some very cool workshops which i couldn’t attend at all.
AMAZE is one of the most interesting Festivals you can go to in the category of games and the community that has been build around and out of the AMAZE is just fantastic. We are highly recommending it to everyone who wants to see what games have to offer besides Call of Duty or Candy Crush.
We will be there next year and hope to see you around!
April 6, 2014
March 24, 2014
March 16, 2014
March 12, 2014
March 9, 2014
March 1, 2014
February 24, 2014
February 16, 2014
February 7, 2014
February 1, 2014
