Lazy Bear Games: We didn’t make the game to make a lot of money, but to make the game

The questions were answered by Nikita Kulaga, a co-programmer, game designer and script writer of Punch Club.

 Nikita Kulaga

Hi! First of all, I want to congratulate you on the first million dollars earned by the game. Do you already feel like millionaires?

Thanks. The full realization of success has not yet come. What exactly is there is fatigue, the first week after the release we slept for 3 hours a day.

Lazy Bear Games is a rare example when a studio that was engaged in free-to-play builders (you had an excellent “Royal Fairy Tales” behind your back, among other things) suddenly turns to paid projects. How and why did this happen?

To tell the truth, we have never considered ourselves fans of free-to-play. The only successful free-2-play game for us was “Royal Fairy Tales”. But within the framework of this project, we were engaged only in the software part. So we have no experience of balancing and monetization of such games as such. Slava and I [co-programmer and sound engineer in the team, – approx.editors] consider ourselves hardcore players, and our dream has always been to make premium games for players like us. So everything turned out logically – we finally reached our goal. Another thing is that the path to this goal was tortuous.

Does the success of Punch Club as a paid application mean that Lazy Bear Games will not deal with shareware builders (you’ve eaten a dog on them, consider it)?

We have always wanted to make premium games, and now we have such an opportunity. So, I think it’s a sin not to use it. Now we have all our plans for the future connected with this segment of game development.

Good guy Roy relaxes

Do I understand correctly that the development of Punch Club was conducted as a hobby? At what stage did you move to full-time work on it?

Yes, for Slava and me, Punch Club was a side project. Only our artist, Alexander, has been working fulltime on it for two years. During the main working hours, we were engaged in the revision and maintenance of the “Royal Fairy Tales”.

How long was the development going on and which stage was the most difficult?

It took us a little more than two years from the idea to the release. Two things were the most difficult. The first is when, after the first year, the initial fuse disappeared, and the project was practically not developed for several months. The second difficult moment was the last few months before the release. Initially, we planned the release for October 2015, but after beta testing and consultations with our wonderful publisher, we made a difficult decision that the project requires some improvements, and we need to postpone the release date to early 2016. The decision turned out to be correct, but the last months of refinement were on pins and needles.

Did you immediately come to the idea that the game should be pixel-based, or were there doubts / desires to approach the visual design in some other way?

Punch Club is one big declaration of love for the era of the 80s-90s. From the very beginning, we decided that there would be a lot of references to this time period in the game. And in our opinion pixel art as a graphic style is best suited here. It took us about a month to decide on the style of pixel art itself, but after that the graphic design of the game did not change.

One of the pages of the official art book of the game

By the way, how far has the game gone from the prototype you presented at Kanobu’s GamesJam? Why was it abandoned, and what was implemented and why?

The very idea and atmosphere of the game has definitely remained unchanged throughout the development stage. The combat mechanics with indirect control and strikes randomly selected from a predetermined pool also remained unchanged.

Several times we reworked the logic of choosing punches and the punches themselves, eventually settling on the skill tree and perks. Well, how many times we redid the interface and its individual parts, I don’t even remember anymore. A lot of new things in the game appeared after analyzing feedback from our alpha and beta testers. Thank them so much!

When playing, I couldn’t get rid of the idea that Punch Club is a large-scale rethinking of a mobile “Bum” who managed to make good money in the Russian App Store two years ago (for games of this kind). Were you guided by him? What projects did you look at when developing?

This is the first time I’ve heard about the “Homeless Man”. What we focused on was all the games from the Japanese company Kairosoft. First of all, of course, “Game dev story”. Even the first name of the project “VHS Story” is a tribute to the Japanese series of the game.

In the blog of Svyatoslav Torik, the idea has already slipped through that the game on the screenshots can make an impression of a fighting game. Initially there was no desire to make the action game interactive, if so, why did they abandon this idea?

No, there were no such ideas. Such a fight would require us to have a greater variety of characters and their animations, and with our one artist we were very limited in resources. In addition, we wanted to make a strategy game where you have to think and choose the right strategies, and not quickly press the buttons. Our internal setup was the idea that the game should be comfortable to play with one hand, lounging in a chair. Plus, the tension that sometimes arises during equal fights should have become a very big part of the atmosphere of our game.

This is how the action game looks like in the game

At what stage did tinyBuild get involved and what, as a publisher, was she responsible for, how did she help?

tinyBuild got involved at the stage when we already had the first decent game prototype, with which we were no longer ashamed to try ourselves at the DevGAMM Awards. Actually, it was on DevGAMM, after the game lynch, that we had that fateful conversation with Alex (CEO of tinyBuild).

Initially, it was agreed that tinyBuild takes over all the marketing and promotion of the project, and we are left with all the development. At the same time, no one hindered us in the freedom of creativity, but in fact it turned out that many ideas were born together and their vast experience and expertise helped us a lot.

The game is positioned as an indie – at the same time, it was not released independently. Don’t you see a contradiction in this? Or is indie today more related to the manner of execution than to the format of development and distribution?

After all, “indie” in our opinion is when a game is made by a small team of like-minded people who are trying to implement their ideas and their inner vision in it and are not tied to the opinion of investors and even the needs of the market.

In a word, we did not make the game in order to earn a lot of money, but in order to make a game. All we wanted was to earn enough to be enough for the next project.

I have already come across the opinion that the game owes its success to media support. At the same time, the hype around the game has already risen at the stage of Twitch-passing. Can you tell how many users actually came from twitch, Youtube, and how many from media?

In fact, it is very difficult to evaluate it. But according to our feelings, Twitch and Youtube are much more important than print media. At least at the initial stage of our release.

There are enough active game channels

Since we’re talking about Twitch: how difficult is it to adapt the game to it?

In general, we were lucky that at the moment when we came up with the idea of “Twitch Plays Punch Club”, it turned out that we had a game in our hands that was ideally suited for such integration. So in our case it wasn’t too difficult. But still, it took us about a month to put everything together and prepare a version for Twitch.

You have opened a new free promotion channel, which is not yet jaded. Are there any thoughts about how soon it will cease to be a “golden ticket”? And in general, which games will it work with, and which ones should not be knocked there?

Yes, in fact, it’s not about the channel itself – it was opened before us. And the thing is how well a large number of factors have coincided – a suitable game, an interesting setting, an original marketing move, a pleasant picture.

And as for the move about the fact that the game will be released only after Twitch passes it, so it was most likely a one-time case at all.

Next time we need to come up with something new.

The catch-up question is about the share of platforms. Which one accounted for the greater number of downloads?

Initially, we generally focused only on the PC (Steam), so the game was made primarily for computers. And it was only after we started working together with tinyBuild that we started looking towards mobile platforms.

As a result, most of the revenue came, of course, from Steam. Probably something around 70%.

According to SteapSpy, sales of the game on Steam reached almost 80 thousand copies by January 21

I have come across the opinion that the game was overlooked by the Russian gaming press. What do you think about it?

Yes, our release came at the height of the New Year holidays in Russia (January 7). So at first, our press may have lagged behind a bit. But now it’s already catching up.

Has this affected downloads in Russia? In general, what proportion of downloads comes to Russia? Which country dominates?

It is difficult to say about “reflected”, because there is nothing to compare it with. We think that not much. About 8% of downloads come from Russia. The bulk of the players, of course, are from the USA (more than a quarter).

But the Russian pirates are leading by a large margin among all their pursuers.

I know that you have a big content update for the game in your plans. And then? A sequel or a brand new game?

After our ending, a lot of people demand continuation. So, I think they won’t forgive us for the absence of a sequel. But this is still in the distant future. So far, we want to further develop the current part of Punch Club.

Thanks for the interview!