Madfinger Games: A blockbuster in five months

There is an opinion that the development of mobile games is becoming more and more difficult and requires more and more time. But, for example, one of the most beautiful modern shooters for mobile platforms – Dead Trigger – was made at Madfinger Games, responsible for Shadowgun, by only four full-time employees in five months without any crunch.

Programmer Petr Benysek, who joined the team in February 2012 after 12 years of working on console projects, told about this in a little more detail. 

“We had three programmers who had not worked on mobile games before. The words Unity and C# were also new to them. And do you know where we started? We went to rest,” Benesek reports. 

But the development of the game took so little time, not only because of the well-spent weekend with which it began. It’s just that the decision was made initially:

– do short missions

– take the usual gameplay as a basis (in other words, do not reinvent the wheel)

– use “motion capture” for animation 

As a result, less than six months later, Dead Trigger was born. However, with only four game cards and the same number of modes: only 10 hours of gameplay, if the player wanted to collect all the achievements and open all the available monsters.  

Since Dead Trigger was originally created as an f2p experiment, IAP was introduced into it after the release. To the surprise of Madfinger Games, the user reaction was negative. The situation with her was solved by a complete transfer of the game to a free basis (now the project has more than 5 thousand positive “five-star” reviews in the App Store). The game also includes a daily reward system, a casino and another mode with paid access. 

By the way, on the Android platform, the developers previously explained the transfer of the game to f2p rails with a high level of piracy. 

At the moment, the total number of downloads on iOS and Android has reached 1.5 million.