Indies can make big games too. The Fabulapps team, consisting of two people who have never met in person, has been making its own Clash of Clans for two years now with step-by-step combat and without pay-to-win monetization.
A very interesting material about Fabulapps appeared on the pages of Toucharcade. The studio consists of two people and uses the help of freelancers only in terms of voice acting and translations.
The studio’s developers, Thomas Pagot and Gildas Quiniou, told the publication that they planned to spend six to eight months on Korrigans: Kingdom Wars. When assessing the deadline, they were based on the experience of working on their first project, Heroic Legends. It took them a year. A solid part of the time was then “eaten” by things like social integration. When developing Korrigans, the guys planned that they would be able to avoid similar problems, and therefore complete the game faster. But even 8 mesets could not do – they have been working on their time manager for two years now.
But the end of the work is near: the game is now in the softlonch. And we have no idea how it is possible to create such a large and complex project together.
Korrigans is a mix of Clash of Clans, where the player needs to build buildings, collect resources, train troops, with turn-based tactics. The combat system of the game is vaguely reminiscent of Fire Emblem: in battles, the user moves the heroes on a map divided into squares. However, the moves themselves are limited in time.
Korrigans is largely a work on the mistakes made in Heroic Legends.
We had (and still have) “pay-to-win” problems in Heroic Legends. In the game, you must either complete tasks or fight to earn experience. Energy is a good way to slow down the pace of player progress, but we were also selling refueling. As a result, we got players who spent hundreds (if not thousands) just to climb higher in the leaderboard and reach the maximum level. And in this regard, Heroic Legends surprised us: we did not expect that there would be users willing to spend such funds for a quick rise in the charts, thereby disappointing players who either spend less or are simply not willing to pay in-game for it. How many users have left the game for one “whale”? We are sure that all of them on a global scale would pay more than whales.
Thomas Pagot
In order for their second game to be honest, Fabulapps made some curious decisions.
For example, you cannot buy resources directly or replenish storage facilities, only temporarily increase the production speed for money. Moreover, in order to maintain high positions on the leaderboard, you need to constantly return to the game, otherwise your position will fall.
Also in an interview with Fabulapps, they noted the importance of a soft release, which allows not only to find errors in game design before the world release, but also to approach a number of game moments differently. However, there are problems here too.
The main problem of a soft launch is where to get players if you don’t have a marketing budget. The soft launch itself makes sense only you have interesting statistics and reviews from a large number of players on your hands, and this is not so easy for independent developers. We’ve heard stories about studios spending huge sums just for a soft release to get accurate numbers and make improvements, but we’re clearly not that kind of studio. We tried a bit of FB advertising, but without success. Our only remaining solution was to use players that we already have in other games
Thomas Pagot
That’s just what to do if there is no such database of projects, he did not explain.
The full version of the interview can be found here, read it, there are many more interesting things there.
The project itself can be downloaded from the App Store if you have a Canadian/New Zealand/Australian account.
