Apps Ministry: a brief post-mortem of working with the Fixiki brand

In connection with the release of the “Fixy Runner“, Apps Ministry shared with App2Top.ru a brief history of working with the Fixiki brand.

We have been working with the Fixiki brand for about two years. During this time, we have released 3 apps that have accumulated more than 6 million downloads in the App Store and Google Play. There are two more on the way. We tell you how it was.

Fixies

What does it take to enter the mobile app market so that you will be remembered? The application is developed conscientiously: with nice graphics, user-friendly interface, interesting ideas. And it would be good under a loud brand.

The first success of the company was brought by the application “Masha and the Bear”, released under the brand of the same name. When we released it, the animated series was just at the peak of its popularity in Russia. So several seasons of the series, collected in one free application, brought us to the TOP 3 Free iPad.

“Masha and the Bear”
With this project behind us, it was already easier to find partners.

Plus, we must understand that by that time our team had gained good experience in development and promotion and was eager to fight, wanting to implement new ideas.

We decided to continue our work in the mobile market by cooperating with brands. In search of the latter, we discovered an IP that, like “Masha and the Bear”, was quite promoted in Russia — the “Fixies” of the Aeroplane studio.

The Russian animated series “Fixiki” is part of the media project of the same name, designed for a wide international audience. It was created based on the novel by Eduard Uspensky “Little Guarantee Men”. On the territory of Russia and CIS countries, this brand is represented by Aeroplan, a production company that was established in 2005 and which specializes in large—scale projects in the field of artistic animation.

Our first joint project was the application “Fixiki and Fixipelki” with all cartoon series and children’s karaoke. We are working on it to this day, adding series, improving the work, changing the structure.

 “Fixies and Fixies”
The brand was perfect for bringing game ideas to life.

And together with our partners — the Infotech mobile application development studio — we started brainstorming the next project.

Useful cartoon — useful games

The cartoon tells about a family of Fixies — little people who live inside the equipment and fix its breakdowns. In each episode, the main characters invent something, fix it and find out. The animated series is interesting and useful for both children and parents.

Inspired, we decided to make the same useful and educational quest game: open rooms, look for broken objects and learn how to fix them! The work, which lasted six months, began to boil.

There were two main prototypes: a three-dimensional one, which was discarded due to the complexity of implementation without winning the functional part, and a two-dimensional one. A lot of time was spent on drawing diagrams for the items that the child had to repair. The subjects were tested on children. Everything incomprehensible was thrown out, replaced by understandable.

The output turned out to be a training quest “Fixies of the Master“, which then got into the Top 20 free iPhone apps and Top 5 free iPad apps.

 “Fixies of the Master”
It’s no secret for developers that New Year’s holidays are a “golden time” to promote the application.

People relax, play games in their free time, get new devices. On New Year’s Eve, we reached the top and thanks to organic installations, we stayed there for about three weeks.

The way users liked the project, it became a sign for us that we need to continue working: add new rooms and objects, translate it into other languages, release updates. This is how we coped with retaining the traffic we needed.

One game is good, but only users asked for more. So, together with Infotech, we have started the development of the next game: “To the Moon with Fixies: Space Adventures”, which was based on existing developments on repairing items in the “Masters”, and the gameplay was expanded and refined.

Since the players have already fixed a lot of things on Earth, we decided to send them into space, drawing an idea from one cartoon series. The players had to control the rocket, avoiding meteorites, and carrying out repairs in case of collisions. Satisfied users, in turn, sent us to the Top 5 free iPad apps (however, it was not without the help of Apple’s fitting, after which we flew to the Top 2 with 20 thousand downloads per day).

“Fixie Runner: keep your balance – help Zero”

Already working on “To the Moon with Fixies: Space Adventures”, we decided to launch an experimental project with Fixies, which would be radically different in gameplay from the previous ones. The idea of a simple runner was taken as a basis, but with unique features that set it apart from other projects.

The first thing we did was replace the three main lanes of the character with one, adding an element of keeping the balance of the hero by tilting the device. After playing with this prototype, we were very pleased with the result. The game turned out to be quite fun and competitive.

However, after some time, all the people taking part in testing the game began to run too long distances, gradually losing interest in the game. We could not allow such an outcome and strenuously took up the adjustment of the balance.

As a result, the game began to grow a little. Editing the difficulty and increasing it as the distance traveled led to the fact that we made an improvement store in which you can pump character characteristics for longer races. Next came the coins collected along the way, because improvements need to be bought for something.

But the simple collection of coins did not seem enough to us. It’s much more fun if the coins are difficult to collect! This idea led to the fact that we placed the coins at the level of the Toe’s head, and their collection began to depend on the tilt, and sometimes it was better to skip another coin than to collect it and fall.

The last step to improve the game was bonuses. We have added them to the level with the possibility of pumping. And, of course, they introduced obstacles.

And a few words about the generation of the world. The main problem we faced when building an endless corridor through which our hero runs was that this corridor could not be generated immediately, but loaded gradually. It didn’t look good.

As a result, we implemented two solutions: a gradually bending corridor that closes the view of ungenerated areas, and fog.

As a result, the project, which was conceived as very simple and fast to develop, has grown. But at the same time he kept his original idea.

Our unusual runner is already available in the App Store. So you can feel for yourself what we have told you here. By the way, now we are also finishing work on another game with Fixies: “Adventures of the Toe”, but about it sometime next time.