Saqqarah

Anyway the game is now an exclusive title for BigFish and it is currently getting serious promotion on their website.  What more could a developer want? In fact I could think of something, especially  after some recent events…

BigFish is a very dynamic and aggressive company – and most of the time it’s good as they give competitive services to their customers, earn a lot of money for the developers and help expand the casual games market. Unfortunately an aggressive strategy sometimes might get out of hand and you might unintentionally cross the line – that’s what I believe happened in our case.

Prior to launching  Saqqarah, BigFish issued a press release (http://www.pr.com/press-release/92381) which you can read here:

Big Fish Games Launches Ancient Quest of Saqqarah

Seattle, WA, June 26, 2008 –(PR.com)– Big Fish Games™, the world’s leading online destination for casual entertainment, announced today the release of Ancient Quest of Saqqarah, a new casual game available exclusively from Big Fish Games.

Ancient Quest of Saqqarah is a Puzzle game with motion picture quality in story, sound, and script adding a new level of superiority to classic Match 3 play.

In the game, players travel back to Saqqarah, an ancient Egyptian dwelling, where an eclipse transpires over a mystic pyramid every thousand years. Below the pyramid’s sands, a magical underground oasis is filled with puzzles, treasures, and legends. Players are tasked with fulfilling an old Egyptian prophecy to stop the evil god Seth from breaking out of his arcane tomb prison. In order to succeed, players must master seven distinct types of puzzles along with mini-games spread over 500 hand-crafted levels.

Players begin in the temple of Isis, swapping neighboring tokens by clicking on three or more items of the same kind. Throughout several stages, the objective is to light the entire board by making combos over the dark areas. Ancient Quest Saqqarah is an innovative Match 3 game in the way it lets players make matches vertically and horizontally in one simultaneous move adding an entirely new experience.

After five strong matches, an explosive fireball is hurled into the board by Khufu, the summoned monkey, for a “Mega Sweep.” Players also experience bonus points with the Pharaoh’s Combo and Desert Combo. When earned, a Shuffle option is available to reconfigure the board for additional matches. Unparalleled high-definition graphics along with motion picture-quality sound create a highly-immersive Puzzle experience.

Download Ancient Quest of Saqqarah today at Big Fish Games. The trial version can be downloaded for free; the full version is available for $19.95 (U.S.).

Big Fish Games is a global leader and innovator in the casual games industry, producing and delivering the world’s best games and game experiences. Big Fish Games Studios develops and publishes the industry’s leading brands. Its portfolio of hit games includes Mystery Case Files®, Hidden Expedition™ and Azada™. Big Fish Games’ portal at www.bigfishgames.com distributes more games worldwide than any other online site and offers visitors a rapidly expanding selection of content by launching A New Game Every Day!TM

I’m sure you’re thinking – and yes, you are correct - that we didn’t take any part in preparing this statement as it makes a terrible and wrong description of Saqqarah mechanics and (what’s much worse) it doesn’t even mention that the game has been developed by Codeminion! So far we have received one letter from BigFish stating that it was first time they did a similar press release and that in future developers would be kept in the loop. But this is of little comfort to us as the harm has already been done. I have already sent a letter stressing our utmost disappointment…

That was the personal part, but wait – there is much more interesting ahead! Recently we have learned that much is going to change in the landscape of exclusive game releases where BigFish is king. Soon, If you are going to give a single publisher even a short term exclusivity (two weeks for example) most other portals will not accept your game at all. IWin has written about it here as they are implementing this strategy in full force as of August 1, 2008. During the last week we’ve already received several emails from other major publishers who want to follow.

I hope that we manage to launch Saqqarah on most of the major channels before the new standards settle, but for what it is worth I personally vote in support of such changes. To be frank with you, exclusivity deals are only a tip of the iceberg in this case. Most developers and publishers don’t approve of certain distribution strategies. As it turns out some distributors (BigFish again being the finest example) are shipping insane amounts of games at discount prices. This turns out to be especially bad for developers and their brands and basically it is bad for the whole industry.

I regret that I have learned all of this only recently. If we had realized it earlier we would probably change our publishing strategy with Saqqarah or maybe even with StoneLoops. After all, if you think about it for a second we, developers should give preference to portals that support full price sales, and treat anyone who sells our games at discount rates as lifecycle portals that don’t get our game from day 1. In fact this is an advice we recently got from one of the major networks and I think we’re going to follow it with our future titles.

I’m not sure if this industry wide shift is really going to change everything very soon, but I keep my fingers crossed and I hope we can turn the boat around. I find it very interesting what will happen in the coming months and I wonder how BigFish will respond. Personally I don’t think they will easily give up their aggressive strategy. They can afford much better deals in exchange for exclusivity and they have the means to compete, after all they are a true big fish…

Back in 2005 we didn’t have the knowledge and resources that we have now so publishing Magic Match on our own would be very difficult. We were approached by Oberon representatives soon after showing first screens from the game. At first we were very skeptical about Oberon’s strong faith in the inevitable success of Magic Match, but soon we realized that they knew what they were doing. To cut the long story short Oberon did a hell of a good job launching the game on all major portals and promoting it for many months. If it wasn’t for them, Magic Match would probably not spawn two sequels (Magic Match: The Genies Journey and Magic Match Adventures) , web games, mobile phone versions and some localized versions. Oberon also managed to publish all of parts of the game in retail in the USA. Of course we were very inexperienced and we made many mistakes negotiating the IP sell agreement (for example we didn’t secure our right to have our company logo on the covers of the boxed game), but at least we are receiving royalties on all those derivative works.

You are probably now wondering, why we have now decided to self publish our games, especially after our cooperation with Oberon was so good and profitable? There are actually many reasons to that. First of all we wish to gain the knowledge about the pros and cons of self publishing so that we have firsthand experience in both approaches. The second reason is that we are hoping to publish our games much better than Oberon or any other publisher would.

Back in 2005 Oberon was a fresh startup and they desperately needed a strong title that would become a flagship product for their portfolio. And that’s where we shown up seeking a publisher for Magic Match. As you see, everything might have been very different if it wasn’t for the good timing on the both parts. Normally it is rare to find a publisher willing to heavily invest in the promotion of your title. Today it’s even more difficult as the publishers have a huge pile of games to choose from and they usually try to divide their marketing attention between many titles rather than focus on a single hit title.

Another thing is that today the biggest publishers don’t like each other. There are many dependencies that might not be visible at first look. For example if your game is being published by BigFish or by Oberon it won’t be added to any of the channels owned by Real (RealArcade, GameHouse, Zylom, etc.). It works vice versa as well, so if you want your game to appear on BigFish or Oberon game centers be sure not to go exclusive with Real. Of course going with a smaller publisher or talking directly to all distributors you still have the chance to launch your game on all the channels, and that’s what we are trying to do.

But publishing is not only about launching your game on different distribution channels and negotiating deals. To monetize the full potential of a title you need to develop many derivative works that work in a synergic way for your success. Internally we use the term “branching”, as the amount of derivative works tends to grow almost exponentially during the post-development cycle of a project. With our current games (Saqqarah and StoneLoops) we have ambitious plans as we want to create many localized versions of both games. In fact we’ve already got 7 language versions of StoneLoops ready (English, Polish, French, Italian, German, Spanish and Russian) and they are currently being deployed on various distribution channels. For example the Spanish version of StoneLoops was launched yesterday on BigFishGames. In fact we’ve even decided to make a Japanese version of StoneLoops! We are also developing flash webgames, mac versions, level packs, we are also working with retail publishers and negotiating porting of our games to mobile platforms such as Nintendo DS or mobile phones. I hope that we manage to do it all swiftly and that it all pays up. After all the ultimate goal is to have more knowledge and resources so that we can develop better and bigger games and I only hope that regardless what people write about our current games we will be up to the task!

StoneLoops! also had a very positive response when we released the game, but ultimately you can only measure how good your game really is when you count the number of people who actually decide to purchase it. Yesterday, on the first full day after the launch of Saqqarah we have sold 25 copies of the game, which is an amazing result for us. Our website is visited by about 1500 unique visitors per week, which is not impressive at all, but to give you a comparison Magic Match, which is our best selling game so far, at its peak managed to sell 14 copies in a single day (28th of October 2005 to be exact). This of course doesn’t prove or change anything, but we are very happy nevertheless and we hope that the game will do even better on the portals. Having said that, I’m sure that you can now easily guess which game is currently nr 1 on Game Club Cafe…

Restore the ruined temples in an ancient tournament of divine puzzles!

Take part in the Ancient Quest of Saqqarah and descend deep below the sands to the magical underground oasis filled with puzzles, treasures and mysteries! It’s up to you to fulfill an ancient Egyptian prophecy and stop evil god Seth from breaking out of his arcane tomb prison. In order to succeed the chosen one will have to master 7 different types of puzzles as well as exciting mini-games spread over half a thousand hand crafted levels. The Ancient Quest of Saqqarah awaits you!

Game features:

• 7 different puzzle mechanics
• Hidden Object bonus rounds
• Over 500 hand crafted levels
• Stunning high resolution graphics
• Earn Ranks, Trophies and Magic Powers
• Epic and engaging storyline narration

< Click here to play the final version of Saqqarah! >

Match-3 games are not as popular as they used to be and even though Saqqarah sets a new standards in such games it might be difficult for us to reach and stay on the top-tens for a longer period of time. But that is not the only reason behind our worries. Judging from the feedback we received on the beta version we can already tell that the game is a little bit too aggressive for the casual audience. I don’t mean of course that it has violence or bad language – because it hasn’t - but it is too dynamic and exciting…

At moments playing Saqqarah feels almost like watching an epic adventure movie that keeps you on the edge of your seat. That was our intention when designing the game, but now we realize that many casual players want a soothing experience so they can relax after a hard day at work. We tweaked many parameters of the game during the beta (including the sound levels) so that the game is not so stressful but of course we weren’t able to change the basics of the gameplay and the basic game structure.

Apart from that we had signals from some distributors who were worried that the game might be too difficult for their audiences. It seems that matching tokens on a distorted grid is fun and easy for match-3 enthusiasts but it might be a little too complex for match-3 genre newcomers.  This is a downside of incorporating original concepts into your games and I find it quite sad that some distributors might reject Saqqarah in favor of more Bejeweled and  Mystery Case Files clones.

Anyway, Saqqarah was designed as a hit match-3 game from the very start and produced with an exceptional target quality so it would be a real shame if our efforts went to waste because of market going into a different direction and distributors afraid to launch a product that is different from your average casual game. We would be thrilled if Saqqarah could repeat the enormous success of Magic Match, but then again it’s not our last game and I’m sure that if we work hard enough we still have a big chance not to die as a one hit wonder gamedev company.

I imagined that supporting a closed platform like Mac would be much less troublesome than developing games for the Windows platform. Unfortunately I was wrong as it seems that supporting OSX 10.3 and 10.4 on both PowerPC and Intel is more troublesome than supporting all versions of Windows since W95! Thank god, I am not responsible for Mac porting at Codeminion!

Today we have decided that we will be supporting only OSX 10.4+, but I’m not sure if it is the right decision. After talking to some portal representatives I learned that some of them still require OSX 10.3 or even 10.2 support and it would be a big shame if our games could not be distributed there.

Although it is taking so long, I think that all this hurdle will eventually pay off. After all sooner or later we will resolve all the issues and when we have it all under control making our future games Mac compatible should be a breeze. I just hope it will be sooner than later…

Apart from being a game distribution website, Game Club Cafe is now our publishing brand. It means that all games that we decide to publish on our own will have the GCC logo. StoneLoops was the first game published under the Game Club Cafe brand and Saqqarah will soon be the second. We are also working on new in-house projects and with second party developers so we hope to bring you more excellent games in the near future. We hope to get some synergic results from being a casual game developer, publisher and distributor at the same time. Time will tell if our plan works, but if you want to support our efforts just visit the website and buy some of the excellent games from our catalogue.

Please note that Game Club Cafe has just been launched and we might experience some problems before the website is mature and stable enough. Nevertheless the basic functionality is working and you can already download and purchase games, add reviews and browse the catalogue using category and tag filters. Do not hesitate to contact us in case you find any bugs or glitches on the website.

I can also tell you in secret that we plan to make a soft launch of Ancient Quest of Saqqarah in the near future on Game Club Cafe. If everything goes according to the plan it should be in less than 3 weeks! Be sure to subscribe to our newsletter in case you don’t want to miss the launch of this upcoming match-3 hit game.

What you must know is that we didn’t start by making casual games - mainly because back then no one knew the term and we didn’t even know that such games have already started appearing. Rather than that, we were under heavy influence of “normal” hardcore games like Diablo, Master of Magic, Lands of Lore and such, and we wanted to be a part of it. Bu let’s not get ahead of things.

I know Konrad (my business partner at Codeminion) since primary school, but we attended different high schools. In 2001, after my final high school exams I learned that we were to attend the same college and that became a great occasion to re-join our forces and start some serious game development which was our common goal. We came up with the name for our “development studio” and decided that we would turn my early 3d engine attempts into a full-fledged 3d computer role playing game Spellscape. At that time we had some skills but were very inexperienced and didn’t know what we were getting into…

After all, making a huge cRPG game as your first project is a very common mistake. In fact it is probably the most dumb thing an aspiring game developer could do and somehow everyone makes the same slip-up. If you search the web you will find hundreds of amateur game development projects that share two things in common – the project scopes are far too ambitious and they all eventually fail. I’m still waiting for someone to succeed with such a project, but then again it would just probably be an exception proving the rule.

Anyway, the basic idea behind Spellscape was to create a game similar in gameplay to Diablo, but it was to feature full 3d graphics and an engaging storyline focusing on 3 spell casting characters – The Battle Mage, The Wizzard and the Psionic Mage. We developed a whole history of the world and designed many locations for the game -  the school of magic, dungeons, ancient cities transported into parallel dimensions, etc. Today I know that in order to develop such a game we would need a team of about 100 skilled developers and it would take at least 3 years of constant development.

The worst part about the Spellscape project ironically was that we succeeded in the early development of the game. Somehow we managed to create the basic engine, music as well as some graphics that were on par with professional productions from that time. We released a tech demo of the game in 2002 which spawned great interest in our project. We were contacted by publishers from different countries and there were even professionals who wanted to license our engine and music for their own games. All of this reassured us that we were on the right path, which was not the case as we now know.

Soon after releasing the tech demo we started developing more advanced features of the game – outdoor locations, advanced monster and character AI, dialogues, spells - as well as final content for the game - characters, monsters, items, locations and sounds. Soon we started to realize that somehow the development of the game was slowing down although we were dedicating more and more of our time to developing the game! We were shocked when we discovered that we are completely unprepared for the complexity and enormity of tasks that were to be done in order to actually complete the game. This is how a seemingly successful project turned into a development nightmare. From some point in time we knew that we were unable to complete the game but we refused to acknowledge this fact. After all dropping the project would mean that almost three years of development would go to waste.

It was of course a tough decision to make, but it was only a matter of time before we decided to drop the project. From the today’s perspective we have very mixed feelings about the game.

Conclusion: The good and the bad

The bottom line is that we failed to complete the game. Although the project was a failure we learned a lot during the 3 years of development. I think it was a necessary step on our road to professional game development but I regret that we didn’t decide to make a smaller game that we could have finished or that we didn’t have the guts to drop the project earlier and save at least some of our time. Basically we lost three years of our lives trying to chase a wild-goose.

If you wish you can download and check out the Spellscape tech demo. It consists of a three level dungeon with a boss character to confront at the end. You can also view the Spellscape project website which is still online and reminds us of our early game development adventures.

The rest of the Codeminion story should be known to you by now. After Spellscape we decided to create a smaller game and that is how Pteroglider was born. After that we turned our attention towards the emerging casual games market and created Magic Match. Our latest games are StoneLoops! and Saqqarah, but that is no history at all.