Tortuga Team: Sunday Avenue - our pen test in free-to-play (+UPDATE)

The authors of the popular Braveland, the Tortuga Team, released their first shareware project and told us about it (this interview was released back in January, but today we learned a little bit of details, which we share).

Anton Mikhailov (game designer and co-founder of the Tortuga Team) answered the questions.

Anton MikhailovHi!

Please tell us first about Sunday Avenue – what is this project, what is it about?

This is our new game about the beginnings of a young designer who is going to equip a small tropical beach. Coming up with new ideas in his studio, he creates private beaches, surf stations, tropical bars and invites new guests to his resort. Not a game, but a dream. :)

Could you elaborate on its mechanics?

Our game mechanics are easy and clear. In a small mini-game, we open the drawings of certain buildings. After that, we build new buildings on the beach or improve existing ones. In our opinion, this is just what you need to pass a few free minutes.

Personally, I was a little confused by the root gameplay. Very simple. It resembles a naval battle. Why did you stop at it, and not, for example, on the mechanics of match-3?

Everything is right. We can say that this is the return of the mechanics of the “sea battle” to the expanses of casual games. Match-3 seems to us quite hackneyed mechanics, and therefore we settled on the option of finding figures on a closed field. In our opinion, it turned out interesting. In addition, this is combined with the essence of the designer’s work, when the author digs out his idea bit by bit and, if successful, creates something new.

I think no one expected a casual resort-themed game from Tortuga Team. What in general made me so seriously move away from fantasy and midcore?

We ourselves are still in shock and cannot believe that we have made and released a casual game. :) But seriously, this is a side project. Even before the creation of Braveland, our artist did a lot of work on creating many colorful beach houses. But when the idea of Braveland came up, we all switched to it so as not to be sprayed. So it was possible to return to Sunday Avenue only after a couple of years.

In the new game, you not only start working with a new audience for you, but also with free-2-play. How painful was the transition to shareware monetization for the team?

For us, first of all, the energy of the game is important. If it’s interesting to make a game and it turns out to be good, it doesn’t matter if it’s free-2-play or paid. Although we faced a number of difficulties in development. But this also has its own interest. I want to try different directions.

At the end of September, the third Braveland was released, the release of Sunday Avenue, according to App Annie, followed literally two months later. How did you manage to prepare the game so quickly?

Sunday Avenue began to be developed in the winter of 2015. On the one hand, it was a bit of a distraction from Braveland Pirate. But it also gave us the strength to finish the trilogy. There was a separate dedicated programmer on Sunday Avenue, and the rest of the team members only occasionally helped him. We took up Sunday Avenue tightly with the whole team after sending Braveland Pirate to the stores and completed the game in a couple of months.

This was, as I understood it, a test release. What did it show, what conclusions could you draw from its results?

To tell the truth, we caught a couple of bugs and happily started to refine the game. The bugs were not very critical, but under certain circumstances they could deliver a few unpleasant minutes. We also started optimizing the game and introducing a new category of buildings on the beach. As a result of all the improvements, the opening of all buildings now takes about a month, which in our opinion is not bad.

A full-fledged soft launch started with the release of the first update a couple of days ago, right? What do you expect from him?

We want to confirm on our own experience the hypothesis of the death of free-2-play games without investing in advertising. :) But seriously, we hope to get the interest of various stores. Perhaps VKontakte, whose API we have integrated, will also like the game. The graphics in the game are pleasant, the gameplay allows you to pass a few minutes and admire the colorful beach scenery. We hope there are people in the world who like it as much as we do. :)

You have added VK support and appeared in the mobile catalog of social network games. As I understand it, it is the grid that you are counting on in terms of attracting traffic? Are there any first results?

The launch of the game took place just the other day. While it is difficult to talk about some metrics. VKontakte is only one of the sites, and it seemed to us the most accessible. And the more sites, the more players will see the game. We want to find our audience. It’s not for nothing that our artist painted all these beauties. :)

The last question is about plans: how do you plan to develop Sunday Avenue and should we wait for the new Braveland?

Sunday Avenue is our small project, which was planned as a pen test in the free-2-play genre. Time will tell whether he will develop. There is enough content there for a good month of the game and if the players want more, then why not. As for Braveland, we have completed the storyline with a trilogy. Although the players are still asking us to add duels, so who knows. And, of course, we don’t forget about the new paid games. But to release a modern exciting indie game, you need a lot of components. Now we are scrolling through several ideas in our team and believe in a bright future.

update

At the request of our readers, we asked Anton how things are going with the project. And this is the answer we received:

We have tested the game in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan with the integration of Vkontakte. The game gets good ratings, it has more than 30 thousand installations on two platforms. This, of course, is a bit compared to the old golden times, when free games quite easily gained a lot more installs. We are currently preparing a worldwide version of Sunday Avenue with Facebook integration.

We will definitely return to the project after the world release.

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The Sunday Avenue iOS version of the game is available here.