Interview with Alis Games

Hello, Denis! First of all, congratulations once again on winning the contest!

Yes, thanks. We hope to justify the trust.

I’ll start with a simple question – tell me about the team?

There was such a company Reaxion. She had two development offices – in Minsk and in Moscow. Both were developing games for mobile platforms. We were doing this long before it became a very popular thing. Basically, we made games for the J2ME and Brew platforms. Then there were three notable companies on the mobile phone games market in Russia: G5, Herocraft and, in fact, us.

What happened to the company?

It seems to me that we had a good team, we made more than a dozen good games, but for some reason we could not make money on it. At some point, the company lost its founder, Misha Lyalin.

What year was it?

Oh, then about the iPhone just appeared on the market.

But did you then make games only for ordinary pipes?

When the iPhone appeared, of course, we switched to it. Maybe a little later than they should have. Our Moscow office has made a pretty noticeable hit – Finger Physics on iOS. But, by and large, the company was slowly dying. When it closed, Alis Games appeared on the basis of employees of the Minsk office, a number of key employees of the Moscow office ended up in Zeptolab. Our former creative director Anton Volnykh, who left a little earlier, made Playmous and released Tap the Frog.

If you look at our games, they are quite close in style. At least, that’s what they usually say. We’ve always been a team. And the style of art that Semyon Voinov and Anton Volny built in Reaxion – it has remained with us all, it seems to me. We, in turn, at Reaxion, initially focused on the graphics of the classic Disney/ Pixar animation, something similar was then done by Digital Chocolate.

There was a project at Game Insight – Diamonds Blaze. When I first saw “Looking for a Hero” a year ago, I immediately remembered it and thought it was its sequel.

Well, yes, this is also our toy.

And how did you become a part of Game Insight?

In the spring of 2010, Reaxion was dying, and we went to people who clearly know how to do business. So we ended up in Game Insight, made several games, including Diamonds Blaze, which, conceptually, is Bejewelled Blitz.

And what exactly have you done in their walls yet?

We have also released “Careerist” for VKontakte, Orcut and a number of other social networks. As for Diamonds Blaze, it was quite viral, generated installations well. But personally, I rate the projects as not very successful. After small premium projects for mobile devices – to start making service free-to-play games for social networks on a flash, servers under load – it was just hell. There are too many new things. I remember these changes that happened to us – what I was thinking at the time is not clear (laughs).

But do you rate this experience positively?

In any case, we had to go through this and it was a very painful transition, at some point it seemed to me that we could be left without a team at all. I do not know any examples of teams that were successful in the premium segment and then would be successful in free-to-play. Maybe you know. Basically, successful in free-to-play games are new teams. In general, something like this happened to us.

Did you move to Moscow or stay in Minsk?

We have always been in Minsk, we were one of the internal studios.

And how did you end up outside of Game Insight?

With your permission, I would like to leave this out of the scope of our conversation. Anyway, I am very grateful to the GI team, it was a fantastic experience.

When did this happen?

A year and a half ago, maybe a little more.

Did you start developing a new independent project at your own expense or did you quickly find an investor?

To be completely honest, for all the previous years of development, I had accumulated a certain amount. It was enough for three months of the studio’s life. I hope my wife won’t read it (laughs).

In general, for the first time after parting with Game Insight, we spent my family money and were looking for an investor. The situation was difficult, usually it takes, say, 6 months to look for money. Our history, product portfolio, and the help of Petya Kharitonov, who is now the boss of MIMIMI Games, helped us a lot.

Oddly enough, there were no big problems, there were enough options for investors. It turned out to be true that the investor, first of all, looks at the team, and we had an order with this.

In general, we found an investor and started working. Only we were looking for an investor for one project, we did pre-production in three or four months, and, as a result, we decided to wait with him. At what point was the idea born to make a game based on the idea of Diamond Blaze. After all, the project itself was not bad, it generated traffic well. In addition, we saw in detail how it works, understood what needs to be changed in it, how to make sure that it still earns well. The idea was to make a casual F2P Puzzle Quest and, of course, it was not only us.

At that time, there were quite a few match-3s on the market. There was no Candy Crush, there was no Puzzle & Dragons and many, many others. Plus, our match-3 mechanics are not classic when you swap the pebbles. In our game, you need to spend as long a chain as possible. The selection mechanics were spied on by 4 Elements from Playrix. The mechanics were cool, not worn out. And it seemed to us much better than the classic one, because there are more combinations on the field, it’s easier to look for. The game itself is more, let’s say, relaxing because of this.

How many people worked on the project?

We have 9-10 people in our team. Everyone is working on the same project. And, as it seems to me, this is the right approach, this is our advantage, not a disadvantage. To be very successful in the market, in addition to serious money, of course, one very cool product is enough, and it is always made by a very small team of professionals. We will always have time to become a big studio again, but it seems to me that we need to do this on the basis of a successful product and our audience.

How is the company segmented by profession?

Three artists, an animator, an art director, three programmers and I am a designer. Plus an accountant, yes.

How long has the project itself been developed?

We were well aware that free-to-play should be released as early as possible. We released Alpha early, at the beginning of April last year, by which time the project had been in development for about 7 months.

How much did the development of the game cost by that time?

Look, 7 months, a team of 9 people, we are in Minsk, respectively, anyone can calculate the burn rate in Minsk.

On the whole, I can imagine the St. Petersburg costs, but not the Minsk ones.

Well, less, of course, than in St. Petersburg.

Okay, let’s move on. You have released the project, what’s next?

To be honest, we still don’t think he was released. For us, the launch will be an iOS release. We are Apple fans, and we started on Android so that we could change everything very quickly. This is initially the approach of Game Insight, which seems to me very correct (so as not to wait for an update for a week). We released Alpha all over the world at once, but at first we gave advertising traffic only in Canada and the UK.

Given immediately?

No, the first weeks we were just debugging the game. When they gave the first test traffic, everything, of course, was bad. I do not know those who feel good in such cases right away. We, like everyone else back then, looked at what Zynga was doing, made paywalls. In our case, his role was a well on the player’s path after a series of levels. To fix it, it was necessary to collect a lot of things.

From the player’s point of view, it all looked bad: for some reason the game wanted money.

Yes, it worked, brought some amount of money, but user losses at this point were up to 80%. The “exchange of money for the audience” was too big. We removed, first of all, these wells.

Instead of “wells” we have bosses. You play, you play, at some point the boss appears. To defeat him, you need cool ammunition, which you need to collect the same amount of consumables that you needed for the well. Players perceive such bosses fundamentally better. The player buys a sword, persistent upgrade. He doesn’t get the impression that at some point the game just wanted money. The fact that the monster has become stronger looks natural, not far–fetched.

And the player stopped being annoyed that for a new sword he needs to go through the entire previous pack again?

Yes, the farm has not gone anywhere, but it has become noticeably better perceived. This, it seems to me, is the magic: how to beat monetization beautifully, so that it looks natural, so that it is not perceived by players as a deception.

F2P is, in fact, a hidden loan and, in general, a fraud. This is not the most honest model, but, unfortunately, we simply do not have a choice in the mobile market. Most people cannot live without loans. And we can’t not make mobile games, this is our life.

You spoke about the outflow before the introduction of this mechanism at 80%. After the introduction of bosses, how much has the outflow decreased at these stages?

We changed not only that, but, as a result, the losses at these points were reduced to a very good 10%-20%.

We have surprisingly good retention, and the loss of people is small. However, I had to redo everything more than once, the tutorial and the first map changed probably ten times.

Initially, the game was in real time with primitive spells in battle, and the monsters, in fact, were no different except in appearance.

The problem was that our monetization, which was built on spells inside the battle, was perceived as alien. You play action, you play fast, all the attention is there, and here, right in the middle of the battle, they periodically stop you and say – choose / buy magic. It was perceived badly.

In a good way, we redid almost the entire game when we made it step-by–step, and when we made it step-by-step, we realized that without time pressure, it was boring to allocate chains. Then we added unique gameplay features for each monster, for example, the witch slugs, which work on the principle of chocolate in Candy Crush. Diagonal cuts were allowed and the controls were redesigned.

The magic itself was completely redone, in fact, the player was given a choice, tactics. Strategic depth has appeared. But the main thing is that after all this, the opportunity to buy a spell is perceived completely differently. Naturally.

We made a great crafting system. These are usually done in social networks. Somewhere I called something, somewhere I dropped monsters, somewhere I need to play farms with a boy and a donkey, all this then changes to resources of the second or third order. Initially, none of this happened. This is done so that users react much more gently to the same collection of resources, so that there are no stories when they say: collect 200 nails, and the player understands that the game wants money.

Plus, the fundamental point is that we still could not without energy. Initially, there was no energy, play as much as you want, there are no restrictions. The players liked it a lot. However, the main breakthrough in money occurred just when we introduced energy and redesigned monetization inside the battle. Energy was introduced as food, so that the players again perceived it better. What surprised me was that after the introduction of energy, the retention almost did not fall. The players didn’t stop playing much.

In fact, in the 3-4 months that we did the update with realtime, we made another game on the same schedule. The players, yes, were surprised, but they seemed to like this new game more.

And wherever you look, which element of the game you won’t take – we radically redesigned it several times to make it all work. In general, no publisher in the world would allow a developer to finish the game for 8 months. And, of course, we are not proud of it, I’m just telling you how we did it.

And the complexity of farming and monsters at the same time reduced in the game?  

Oh. This is the biggest problem and I doubt that we have solved it ourselves so far.  How to balance the game with the mechanics so that it would be interesting for you and me, midcore players, and our wives to play it is a huge problem. After all, the game (not the click manager) implies a skill, and if there is a skill, then there is a significant difference in the result of the players, and this kills the F2P model. The model from King-a in CCS with infernal levels every 3-5 levels, I honestly don’t like it at all.

How to give a choice to a fan player, so that there is no choice, so that the result does not differ much later? They say there are similar tasks in politics (laughs).

Automatically raise the difficulty depending on the player’s actions?

As soon as the player understands this, the game is over. Rather, something else.

Let’s start with the fact that there are the first stars for you to pass the game, watch cartoons. These levels are made for a casual audience. The second and third stars are for other users. At the same time, even if you play the first stars, the game is made so that you, a hardcore player, will be interested. As a rule, cool players just go for opponents stronger than themselves with smaller upgrades. They need to farm less. To buy upgrades, all players need to periodically play 2nd stars.

The rage recruitment algorithm is designed in such a way that even the worst player makes a hit once every 4 strikes, cool, say, in 2-3. We teach weak players to look for and shorten long chains by the handle, experienced players do not see this. There are quite a lot of such systems and this is the main problem, in general.

And why do you have so few levels?

We did this on purpose to be mentally ready to change everything. About a month and a half ago, we received indicators for our business model and now we will quickly increase the content. The second episode is coming out this week.

How important is the role of PvP in the game?

Ideologically, we took a week-long tournament from Diamonds Blaze, divided it into leagues and groups of 100 people.

To be honest, it doesn’t work very well yet. Money is not paid as well there as in the levels, but people play, plus, PvP, of course, brings together all the other game features.

Will there be clans?

It’s too early to talk about it, we’ve debugged the game, actively adding content, porting wherever possible (iOS, Facebook, Amazon, Asian markets), pouring traffic.

When on iOS?

We will make a version within a month, but I don’t know when we will release it, it depends on our marketing strategy.

I see, thanks for the interview!  Do you have any final advice for our readers?

You never clone anything, even if something is in the top, you have no idea whether it earns money, whether the model inside is working for your company. Everyone has always made and will continue to make this mistake.