Gamester

Giant Fox Studios

BACKSTORY

It was the winter of 2014 when my friend Jackie asked me about making a game for her boyfriend to celebrate their anniversary. The game would feature them as the main characters and be customized to include their favorite animals, colors, music, etc. I thought it was such a cute idea that I found an artist and together we created the full game for free for her planning to find a publisher for it later on. I designed and coded the whole game while the artist worked on animations and graphics. On their anniversary, Jackie surprised her boyfriend with the game and he loved it. He played it for about 2 hours, determined to save his Princess Jackie in the game. 

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I showed the game to a few publishers but the response was different than I anticipated, they weren’t interested in publishing the game, but were more interested in hiring us to create games about their significant others, kids, and even pets. I realized there was an opportunity here, an untapped market of personalized games for consumers. There’s dozens of stories about Game Designers creating a personalized game to propose, but this isn’t something an every day consumer can do. So my solution to this was to build an app that allowed anyone to easily create a personalized game about someone they care about. 

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Watch the Princess in Peril trailer >

Play Princess in Peril on web >

HOW IT WORKS

PROCESS

After a month of demoing the app, we raised about $12,000. It wasn’t enough to hit our Kickstarter goal, so I started my search for publishers again and this time had an easier time finding one. Everyone loved the new concept and saw that there was revenue to be made from the amount of donations we received. We decided on having K Bros as our publisher to help with funding and marketing the game. Now that funding was taken care of, I focused on iterating the UX of the application based on feedback from the expos.

I saw a consistent issue that people had with the application, it took too long to get to the gameplay. I reorganized the user flow and simplified the process of making a game to get users to gameplay within an average of 15 seconds instead of a previous 4 minutes. This had a huge impact on user satisfaction. 

We showed an updated prototype to K Bros' contacts at Apple and were told we could have a two week feature on the front of the App Store with the release of iOS 11 as long as we included iMessage app support. This was great news, but the problem was that the deadline was a lot sooner than the timeline we had planned and I didn’t have a team set up to finish by then. I quickly put together an art and developer test to find great people to join our team and help hit the deadline. After three weeks of searching, I put together the perfect combination of freelancers to hit our goal. I created user stories and tasks and organized a SCRUM based production cycle on JIRA.

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K Bros ended up failing to pay for the development team which has lead to the project being placed on a brief pause while I reevaluate options to move it forward.

Click the images to learn more.

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View one of the Minigame Design Document >

Gamester's Website >