Postmortem: FootLOL

Hi! My name is Pavel, I work as a producer at HeroCraft and I want to tell you how we made and promoted the game FootLOL on Steam.

Development

The release of the project in the App Store and Google Play officially took place in July of this year. The game was released on Steam a year and a half ago. However, our acquaintance with the project took place much earlier: in 2012 it was brought to us by “man and steamboat” – an independent developer Aurelius (Andrey Babak), who, by the way, at the age of twenty, single-handedly developed the Cubium logic puzzle. It was published in 2011 by Kaliningrad studio KranX Productions.

Conceptually, FootLOL was and is a mix of a number of popular mechanics. It can be called pong with lemmings about football. There is a lot in the game from the equally classic Nekketsu High School Dodgeball Club: Soccer, released on the NES back in 1990.

Nekketsu High School Dodgeball Club: Soccer

Needless to say, we really liked the project even at the prototype stage. We immediately took FootLOL “under our wing”, which allowed Aurelius to start working on the project in full force, and not only in the evenings.

From the initial version to the release, the game, as it often happens, has come a long way. The first version of FootLOL was written without using third-party solutions – directly in C++ and DirectX. But it soon became clear that if we want to get a multiplatform, we will have to abandon our own engine in favor of a ready-made alternative. So the choice fell on Unity.

Alpha version of FootLOL

Yes, at that time, in terms of the structure and principles of work, Unity did not give as many advantages as it does today, but we were not ready to write thousands of lines of code to support mobile platforms. So we switched to it.

Plus, as developers, we already had experience working with Unity, which we could share with Aurelius. It was clear to us how to optimize performance within the framework of the engine, save fillrate, monitor DIP, optimally use textures and blends.

For example, lightmap technology was used for backdrops (stadiums), this is the fastest lighting model. Since there was no strong texture there, we managed to get good soft shadows simply using ambient occlusion.

But if there were no problems with technology, then the tutorial and control in the game became the main headache for us. The reason is simple – the game has a very high tempo. And the number of objects on the screen is constantly very large. So I had to constantly redo the tutorial. During one of the changes, it was necessary, for example, to abandon the delicate red arrows pointing to the buttons necessary for pressing, in favor of giant constantly flashing contrast pointers.

The funny thing is that, despite the maximum optimization of the training mode, as our focus tests showed, there were always several players who missed two or three basic phrases that are necessary to understand the game.

Sometimes we ran into completely unexpected obstacles. For example, one of the stores where the game was sold found fault with the color of the players. The fact is that initially all the little men in the game were black. This led the editors of the store to think that the game could be perceived as racist. As a result, we changed the color of the characters to blue.

Black people 

Steam Logout

Today, many perceive Steam as an ideal platform for small and independent teams. But in fact, they won’t let you on Steam so easily. If you are not a star, then you will be sent to Greenlight, and there – sit, wait until a certain minimum votes for you (however, now this practice is gradually being curtailed).

While your creation is on the first page of Greenlight, a large number of people see it. There is one big pitfall in this — the game may be interesting only to a part of the public. For this reason, there may be a lot of “against” votes at the start. But don’t get upset: the average for/against ratio at the top–50 level is 47/53.

On Greenlight, Steam clearly does not advertise how many votes need to be scored, they evasively write: it is important how much the game is gaining compared to other games. And so, in principle, anyone can upload the game to Greenlight, add screenshots, a description. Did the users like the game? Welcome to Steam!

As soon as the fruit of many months of work flies off the first page of Greenlight, dreams of success are broken about the life of a game developer, since there is no way to bring the project back. At least five projects arrive every day, which means that any toy goes down at a very high rate.

So very often a developer is faced with a situation where a maximum of 20% is scored in order to get into the top 100. At the same time, traffic drops every day.

What should we do to prevent this from happening? First you need to organize external traffic. In the case of FootLOL, we did the following: we made news about the game and began looking for reviewers, streamers on youtube, as well as posting an announcement on forums in order to achieve at least some positive dynamics.

The game page on Steam

There are several pitfalls in this case. For example, admins of popular forums really don’t like it when something even remotely similar to advertising appears on the pages of their favorite resources. Such topics are deleted, and accounts are banned. Therefore, it is better to choose the resources closest to the topic and very carefully start communicating there, and then keep in touch with the people responsible. We have a community/SMM manager doing this, but if we are talking about a small development team, then, in principle, you can manage on your own.

Communication with users on Greenlight can also sometimes unexpectedly help – for example, it turned out that some English-speaking people do not like the name FootLOL. It was too late to change, however, but in another situation this information would have been useful.

You can also make a newsletter yourself, or the publisher, as a rule, already has a list of “lured” resources, and just a large database of contacts.

The same goes for reviews. In fact, they can be divided into two camps – honest and paid. From experience, paying for reviews to small sites is money in the wind. Their merit in the growth of interest in the game is no more than a statistical error.

Another point about communicating with journalists – it’s easier to agree on publication with some if the game is already running on some market.

By the way, the Russian press should not be neglected at all. Our domestic community on Steam is in second place after the Americans. A noticeable jump in the advantages of Greenlight appeared after publication on one of the major domestic sites that published a review simply on acquaintance with Aurelius.

Every time after a positive review, the game received a boost of votes “for”, so if you want to raise the game to Greenlight, then you need to provide targeted traffic.

As another tool for promoting the game, I can advise you to include the game in indie bundles.

There are resources that help developers promote their projects – they collect several indie (and not so much) crafts, and put them up for sale, but each user chooses the price himself. Part of the money goes to the developer, part to the store, part to any charity. If the game in the bundle is promoted on Greenlight, then information about it appears on the seller’s website. We received about 15% of the amount from FootLOL sales from Steam thanks to bundles.

The last thing I can recommend for promotion is a good website for the game. And if you have Unity, which is very likely now, then you can even create a page with a demo version that will load directly in the browser.

All promotion activities should be launched simultaneously. Then there are more chances that the game will reach the top 100, and then Steam is just around the corner. The game store is added in packs of 25 pieces at a time, respectively, being in the hundredth place, you can jump up to 75th place at a time. In any case, the path to the top may take a different amount of time, in any case, you need to be prepared for the fact that the process may take six months or more.

Greenlight, by the way, we passed successfully.

The game also has a good baggage of awards and nominations (for example, Indie Cade selection and IMGA). So if your game is original and, most importantly, looks original and high—quality – I recommend applying for contests to the maximum, it can help, at least, in maintaining interest from the press.

Once again, I note that the choice of the name must be taken very seriously. The name FootLOL, despite being accepted by European and Russian audiences, was completely not accepted by Americans. We had to do two localizations: one was made for the USA, the second for the UK: Crazy Soccer and Crazy Football, respectively.

It is curious, by the way, that Aurelius did without an office almost throughout the development, and even now he works outside of it. His wife helped him on the schedule, he has a permanent PM, everything else is outsourced. And, of course, he does a lot of things himself. However, when the game was almost ready for PC, we took it away, and we finished it ourselves for mobile platforms. As for Aurelius, now he is doing another crazy project at home, now about pirates. A unique person.

Sales of FootLOL on PC, according to SteamSpy, amounted to about 40 thousand copies.

• The game page on Steam: http://store.steampowered.com/app/263740
• The game’s page in the App Store: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/footlol-crazy-football!/id986773517
• The game’s page on Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.herocraft.game.footlol