Interview with Dodo Games

On March 15, the Beach Girl Aloha game by Dodo Games studio appeared on the App Store. On March 20, she topped the Russian chart of free apps. We asked Artem Zemtsov, one of the studio’s founders, about the project and its promotion in Russia.      

Tell us a little bit about the Dodo Games team first.Dodo Games is a small studio consisting of 11 people.

At the moment, the studio is developing two mobile projects – Tiny City, a bodybuilder, which was released on Google Play at the end of 2012, and the Beach Girl Aloha project, which was launched on March 15 this year. 

Beach Girl is the second project of the studio. Why, after a serious Tiny City, did they take up a much simpler game in mechanics?By the time we started making Beach Girl Aloha, everyone was pretty tired of the long development of the Tiny City project.

And since our team consists of creative people, the routine of long-term construction is difficult to endure. Everyone wanted at least some creative realization and would be happy even to have a “black square” that would appear as an application on the market under the Dodo Games logo. We all needed a small, fast and beautiful project in every sense.

Tiny City – the first project of Dodo GamesToday, many developers are looking for a successful “recipe” for creating a mobile game, suffer with monetization, load the gameplay with different chips, but you, it seems, went from the opposite: you simplified the mechanics as much as possible.

Why?In fact, there was no plan on simple mechanics to climb to the top of the App Store.

We all wanted a project, but there was practically no time and money to develop it. Therefore, everyone understood that nothing serious could be done. The whole project was born literally during production. A prototype was made in 1-2 days, thoroughly tested by the whole team, and if they came to the conclusion that the mechanics were not viable, then the idea was dismissed and the process started from scratch.

How long was the development of the game?The development of all three games took no more than one month.

For another month we were engaged in polishing, testing balances, connecting additional services.    

How did its development begin? From what idea or concept?Every member of our team is passionate about games, so we are in a constant process of generating ideas.

When there was a need to make a small, quick project, we remembered that not so long ago our artist offered several mini-game concepts, which were the starting point of the Beach Girl Aloha project.   

Now there are three minigames in Beach Girl. Will there be more of them?We see several ways to develop the project.

To date, only one thing is clear – the project will definitely develop.   

Monetization in Beach Girl is a classic freemium. Now, of course, it’s too early to talk about the results, but if we talk about ROI, how satisfied are you with this approach to monetization?We use a free-to-play model, but your question is not accidental:

we really originally planned to come out with a freemium model, but at the last moment we decided to still give players the opportunity to get all the content of the game for free. As for talking about ROI, it’s really premature to talk about it.

The first project of the studio was published by Cillingo, the second by IT Development. Why did you refuse the services of an American publisher?No matter how funny it sounds now, but we showed this project to several publishers and everyone found it uninteresting, so we had no choice but to promote the project ourselves.

You say that “I had to promote on my own.” Did I understand correctly that IT Development is also you?IT Development is our legal entity that conducts all activities.

Dodo Games is a brand that we are developing.   

Now, just a couple of days after the release, the game is at the top of the free top in the Russian App Store of iPad games. Share what methods of promotion have you resorted to?All the promotion was reduced to posts on social networks on the pages of friends, acquaintances and in some friendly groups.

We are grateful to everyone who supported us on social networks. Your support helped Beach Girl Aloha get to the top 10 of the Russian App Store, and only after that a wider audience was able to notice us..

A classic question about plans: What can Dodo Games fans expect after Beach Girl?So far, all our efforts will be focused on the development of Beach Girl Aloha and Tiny City (their launch in several more markets will take place in the near future).

As for other games, I am sure we will be able to please players with our products in the near future.