Space Ape Games: fans of our game have composed several songs based on it in the style of heavy rock

Why a mobile game needs a story from Rihanna Pratchett, is there a place for midcore in the market and why venture capital is needed – he told about this and not only at Unite Europe 2015 in an interview App2Top.ru Technical Director of Space Ape Games Simon Watmough.

Rival Kingdoms has a very rich universe. The plot of the game was written by Rihanna Pratchett (Rhianna Pratchett). Why do you need such a big world for a mobile game?

 Simon Watmough

It’s all about adding depth to the gaming experience. We didn’t want to create another empty clone of Clash of Clans, so we put a lot of effort into the gameplay, and not only in it. We tried to improve literally everything.

And just one of the components that we also wanted to improve was the plot.

We wanted the game to have a backstory, we wanted to tell about the origin of the world, so that the game characters were personalities, something unique. We wanted the players to interact with them and thus learn more about them, feel in some sense attached to them.

Usually, when a game comes out without a backstory, and then becomes popular, the fans themselves think over the world. So why couldn’t it be done this way? Why not say: “We made a cool game with curious art, and now — go ahead, invent your own stories”?

It is very valuable and important to have such a community in which people want to create content and fill the world around the game. But it seems to me that you should provide a stage for this kind of creativity. You can’t just create an empty product with cute art, but without careful study and depth, and expect users to gather around it and build a community. You have to put something into it to feed the community.

As far as I know, your previous Samurai Siedge game didn’t have such a well-developed universe. The game had cool art, similar mechanics… and the game was still popular. And now, a few months after the release of Rival Kingdoms, you can compare the impact of the background on the indicators.

Despite the fact that Samurai Siedge was not so worked out, we had a plot written for it (by ourselves), different characters, their motivations, everything in that spirit.

If you look at the community, at how it reacted to Rivals, then everything is fine here.

By the way, there was one thing that really impressed us: a group of guys composed several songs in the style of heavy rock, telling about game characters. We then played these tracks many times in the office!

The same heavy rock based on Rival Kingdoms

There are a large number of examples of how the seed that we sowed by creating a backstory influenced and inspired users to create various things.

Let’s talk about the game itself. In my eyes, Rival Kingdoms is a synthesis of Clash of Clans and Game of War, since it is a little more complicated than the first and, as it seemed to me, borrowed something from the second. But before development, how did you describe the game for yourself?

A curious assessment, but we proceeded from something completely different. Our goal was to make something less hardcore than Samurai Siege. We knew that we wanted to make the game simpler and more accessible in terms of gameplay, and this influenced our decision to exclude some mechanics, and we wanted to slow down the pace in the game. We wanted to make the game a little more casual, which becomes quite hardcore as you dive into it.

Here we return to the availability of the game. In fact, the gameplay of the project is very hardcore, but the game is very accessible, you can play it in short sessions at any time (it was impossible in Samurai Siege, there were many special events that required the player to participate at a strictly defined time).

Today, when users write about your project or projects with similar mechanics, they often express themselves in the spirit of “this is another Clash of Clans”. How is it possible to create anything new using this mechanics?

It all comes down to finding something that you can do to be different. Take away the gaming experience, the feeling of Clash of Clans and games like it.

When developing Samurai Siege, we decided not only to stay within the “clash” genre, but also to bring to the project some of the knowledge we gained while working in other companies. For example, we gained an understanding of how players can interact socially with each other while working at Playfish. As a result, we added Alliance Wars to the game so that users could share their experiences. And the players really liked it! This has become, perhaps, one of the most important successes of the project.

Samurai Siege

At Rival Kingdoms, we wanted to continue working in this direction, as this is something we are well versed in. So the game has Kingdoms and Kingdom Wars. We have given such a form to social interaction in the game so that the experience from it is deeper. We have given players different roles within the kingdom and different types of projects to interact with. And there were also other simple improvements, like improved chat: now players can communicate with those of the players with whom they interact.

Clash of Clans is a great example of real—time strategy. But there are also a huge number of examples of other games in the same genre! Therefore, I believe that making a real-time strategy in itself should not be the goal. Do you want to conform to the framework of the genre? Good! But why should the user play it? That’s what, first of all, you need to think about!

You said that when developing Rival Kingdoms, the team wanted to create a slightly more casual version of Samurai Siege. In this regard, the following question: two years ago, midcore was on the rise. Is it really as popular now? Or do mobile developers still have to work in a casual direction today?

An interesting question. It seems to me that there is no need to worry here. The mobile market is so huge today, everyone has a device. And there’s a market for almost every genre you might want to work in. The same applies to the complexity of the products. Therefore, you simply choose a segment within which you have the experience and potential to do something good. If you’re a small developer, you can target something big [popular] to capture the maximum market [audience]. Equally good advice would be to choose a very narrow niche and do something targeted, because you know that you will do it well. But I’m not really sure that I’m in the best position here to tell you exactly what to do, but that’s how I see it.

In the next question, I want to touch on marketing. Samurai Siege and Rival Kingdoms are without any doubt very high—quality projects. But would they have become so popular without the participation of venture funds, whose money, among other things, went to promote games?

The fact is that venture capital is not what underlies your product, it is what makes it possible to create it.

The Samurai Siege team was, for example, quite small: a couple of programmers, several artists, a producer and a designer. They learned Unity and developed the game in 6 months.

If you have the opportunity to spend more time developing with fewer people or create a game with more specialists in a shorter time, there is no reason why you can’t create a successful project. But if you want to start a business, you need to get investments from somewhere.

Venture capital has been very useful to us. I think we were lucky, because among the friends of the company there were people with connections who knew those who invest in startups. Plus, the team itself had a good reputation, its employees were behind the success of such European companies as Playfish, Mind Candy and Skype.

And the last question: after the launch of Rival Kingdoms, Apple was actively promoted. Was it luck or the result of hard work with the office?

I know that many developers are focused on feathering, because a good promotion is a huge sign of trust, especially when it comes to the “Editorial Choice” that Rival Kingdoms received, but I think that focusing on it is superfluous, it distracts.

Rival Kingdoms

The guys at Apple don’t take games out of the hat for feathering. Every week they receive a lot of applications. And they, in fact, give the opportunity to become stars of the best games that are most likely to resonate with their users.

To polish and make a project special requires a lot of hard work, but regardless of the feature, you still need to do it.

I think that the standards of Apple editors, based on which they make a decision on promotion, are what people should strive for. These are high standards that are difficult to achieve, but it’s definitely worth it.

Thanks for the interview!

Alexander Semenov talked

Deciphered by Irina Smirnova