Fine & Dandy Games is the small indie game shop behind the new iOS game title Goop, a puzzle game in which players help a group of small creatures navigate the game's stages while avoiding dangerous goo dripping from above. Fine & Dandy Games is made up of one developer, myself, and one business manager and "everything-elser," Ashli Norton.
Sharing years of experience in operating small software shops, we are both complete newbies to the exciting world of game development. My experience as a self-taught software developer goes back to age 12, and I have always had the desire to get my foot in the indie game door. That finally happened in late 2010 when I made the decision to tap into the creative side of my brain and shift away from traditional mobile and desktop applications.
From day one, it was a truly exciting experience to begin building a game company. Everything from choosing the company name to writing and sketching out numerous game title ideas was simply exhilarating. As I've worked with Ashli before on numerous projects including our current software company, it was almost a no-brainer to team up again to deliver our high quality game concepts. My more analytical way of thinking matched perfectly with her more out-of-the-box, consumer angled focus and this helped shape Goop into what it is today.
Being fans of most things Apple and understanding the Mac and iOS ecosystem made it easier to narrow down a platform for our first title. We also knew we wanted to target a large segment on the iOS platform and create a game in a category we typically played.
Our partnership highlighted our strengths as I was the sole developer and typically made the final creative decisions. Ashli focused on bringing this game title to the masses while inputting her creative ideas from a perspective I typically didn't recognize. We went with outside help for music and art, since we knew these were skills that weren't present in our DNA.
What Went Right:
1) We narrowed down design and concept early and stuck to it
We had dozens of ideas for possible games as our first release, from fully documented and sketched ideas to "wouldn't it be cool if..." ideas that were never put on paper. Ultimately, we chose a game concept that we felt could utilize some of the common traits of other popular casual games in the App Store while also allowing us to implement our own ideas, such as the usage of unique characters that possessed personalities of their own, a very low learning curve for most users, and attractive graphics that would lure curious browsers. One thing that we're proud of is that we didn't let feature creep get the best of the project and the final result is very much similar and to the initial idea.
Nailing down the concept early was key to a timely completion. We were able to communicate and share ideas with the designer early, although not as soon as we would have hoped, which allowed her to give us important feedback. Sticking to concept gave me the chance to fully plan the direction of development, such as how collision and touch would be handled. A very welcomed bonus to staying on course was the ability to begin polishing the game without waiting until the end, the time when you're just ready to see your app live in the store. Although we didn't have a hard deadline set, narrowing the specific design and concept ahead of time led to a project that was able to launch in a reasonable timeframe.
2) Thorough market research on the game we wanted to release
Market research is the first thing most companies do before developing a product in any industry to lessen the chance of failure, and we were no different. We needed to learn about our demographic and determine if it was viable to pursue our game concept. As a small shop it's very easy to let your imagination and ideas run the company, and while you may have all the best intentions, you risk the chance of completely abandoning the very market you were trying to serve with your "what if" and "it would be cool" ideas. Market research helped us determine how our game could be different from the thousands of games currently available. Being unique and identifiable was very important to us, so lots of time was spent determining if there were titles too similar in the App Store.
We made sure to evaluate other games currently available on the App Store, looking at which games were popular, which games received media coverage, which aspects of popular games users seemed to like most, and why some games couldn't get traction. Using these findings really strengthened our ideas by reducing weak points in our game concepts and marketing.
Although we did gather a lot from existing games, we were adamant about our game being unique, which is easy to do with the game's name. Believe it or not, this took months. We went beyond a typical App Store search and looked around the net to make sure there were no other similarly named titles. We wanted the game's name to be unique, easy to pronounce, identifiable, and effortless to remember.
The same applied to naming the characters. First, we needed to name our characters as a group, which led us to something that was likable and easy to remember ‘Eeeps'. Giving each character a name was a bit more challenging. We had to ensure each name not only matched each Eeep's personality, but that the names weren't human-like. In addition to ensuring the names didn't sound human, we had to come up with Goop's character types and names which were unique to our game alone. The character names also had to be non-offensive and translate well in the future to localized versions of the game. For instance, our Plumpy character type could have been named a lot of other things, but we had to choose a name that was cute, ensured that the player liked and wanted to save Plumpy, and users didn't find the name offensive.
