Republic of Fun is a game developer you should definitely get to know, if you haven’t already heard about them. Their games are available on various platforms, including the iPhone, Wii and PC. Republic of Fun recently released the iPhone and iPod touch game, Slug Wars. Republic of Fun is also responsible for the addictive Tiki Towers, available on the iPhone and WiiWare. They have a vision (and Manifesto) that sees the gamer, and game creator, in everyone. Seeing no boundaries between labels such as "hardcore" and "casual" gamers, Republic of Fun is on a mission for creating games with fun in mind.
Read the GamingBits interview below with Mike Rasmussen, President of Republic of Fun, and Rett Crocker, Lead Game Developer, for some insight on their experience, how pricing can shift how games are received, the importance of "crowd-sourcing," and what Republic of Fun is planning on next.
Who are you and what do you do in the gaming industry?
Mike: My name is Mike Rasmussen, I’m the President of Republic of Fun. We’re a small game studio that has done some Wii games, PC games and iPhone games. We just released our second iPhone game called Slug Wars. I have about 14 years of experience in the game industry. Most recently I was at Real Networks where I headed up their console publishing business.
Rett: I’m Rett Crocker, and I’m the creative guy, or game designer, of the bunch. I’ve been in the industry since 1991. I’ve done games across all possible genres, from advergaming, console, mobile, and lots of web games.
Is there any one platform you start developing on and then translate over to another?
Rett: It’s dependent on the project. In the case of Tiki Towers, we designed that initially as a Wii game and that got ported over to the iPhone. In fact, it’s a pretty different game on the iPhone to the Wii. The Wii version is 3D, there’s the gestural interfaces that you use on the Wii. The version on the iPhone is straight up 2D and it’s a simplified interface. Interestingly the iPhone version is more popular than the Wii version.
Do you have an estimate on how many units of Tiki Towers were sold on the iPhone versus the Wii?
Mike: The history on Nintendo consoles is that first-party games do really well and everybody else really flounders. We hoped that it wouldn’t be the case with WiiWare, but it ended up being the case. On the iPhone we almost hit the top 10 with Tiki Towers. We were number 11. It’s still selling pretty well. It’s currently .99 cents on the App Store. When [Tiki Towers] was at the peak, Real Networks raised the price to $4, and then it just tanked. We would have been in the top 10, and probably did even better, if they just left the price at .99 cents. So there’s really strong price sensitivity, especially on the iPhone.
Rett: Even on Xbox LIVE Arcade and WiiWare, the price sensitivity is very apparent. When you release a game for $10 versus $5, that’s a pretty small difference in terms of the size of people’s wallet. People will say "oh, what a rip-off, that game should have been $5 instead of $10," we see an even more amplified version of that on the iPhone where a $2 game will get ripped because there is another game that is similar to it, but not as good, for .99 cents.
What about bringing iPhone games to DSiWare or PSP minis? Have you considered those platforms?
Rett: We have. We’re considering doing Slug Wars as a PSP mini. Doing it for the DS, maybe we’ll do it, maybe we won’t. Frankly it’s not really on our radar, because the iPhone is such a powerhouse at the moment. And it is so easy to develop for.
Can you give a rundown of how a game goes from its initial concept to delivery?
Rett: All games are the same, except if their for existing IP, or branded games. Those are a different animal. You come up with a concept. Once you got the concept you go through this stage of design where you work out the details of how it actually plays or figure out the game mechanic. Every game designer is different. The way that I work is always make these little paper tests, where I basically turn each game into a little board game. Once you got that stuff worked out and a pretty firm concept, the result of that is the game design document that becomes the bible for the team. At that stage, the artist do the art, the programmers do the programming, and the writers write. At the end it hopefully culminates to something that is a working game. The next stage is the tuning process, where everybody plays the game a lot and tries to figure out how to make it better and make it feel right for someone who is a beginning player and someone who is an advanced player. That process takes a bit of time. Eventually you go through all the Q/A cycles, until you ultimately release a game.
Is the Q/A process like a focus group?
Rett: Yes and no. The tuning and Q/A process is this interesting mix. There’s a lot of people in the game industry nowadays that use this project management process called SCRUM. For Slug Wars, for instance, we had this mammoth session one day where me and several other people were trying out different things in the game. We would change the power of this unit versus that unit. For example, the Tank Snail was too powerful so we changed him into something less powerful. Then we’d all play it for a little while. Most games, it is a focus group of the team, but then you also have beta testers and Q/A people. Additionally, [Republic of Fun] has a different approach to game development where we might have a large community outreach. Over the course of our development process, we’re constantly pushing out concept art, early prototypes, videos of the gameplay. Way before you would normally show it to people.
Mike: So that was actually a really interesting process with Slug Wars and sort of a departure from the way that games are normally made, and something that we’re pretty excited about. Rett mentioned the normal game development process. Well, with Slug Wars we didn’t even create a game design document. It was a simple enough idea that within a few days Rett had a prototype up and running. We spent most of the time getting feedback from the community and tweaking the game and making it look pretty. It’s a much more enjoyable process than typically where you just have this giant game design document that can get kind of cumbersome sometimes.
Is that what you call "crowd-sourcing"?
Mike: Absolutely, that is one thing we’re really excited about. We think that there is some potential there to generate some ideas from the powers of the crowds. There’s a couple of different levels of crowd-sourcing that we’re looking at. All the way from just letting people submit their ideas on YouTube and getting people on Facebook to come and vote, to what we did with Slug Wars. We came up with the initial idea in Slug Wars. We would crowd-source elements of a game like Slug Wars throughout the process. If you go to our Slug Wars Facebook Fan Page, you can see the results of this right away. We put everything up about Slug Wars on our fan page. Sketches, animations, logo designs. Everything went up there. We’re looking to formalize that and have that on our actual website.
Did you guys feel that Slug Wars may have shifted from what you thought the game would initially be?
Rett: Slug Wars is a kind-of simple enough concept that it stayed pretty true to itself. The community pretty obviously got what we were going after. I never felt that people were suggesting that we completely change the game or do anything really different. As we do this process more, I’m sure there will be instances where the game will change pretty dramatically over the course of the development.
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Thanks to Mike Rasmussen, Rett Crocker and
Wendy Beasley for making this interview possible. Visit Republic of Fun’s official website at www.repfun.com and their official Facebook page to keep up with their latest games in development.
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