“The retention of the 1st day ranges from 40 to 60 percent,” – Game Insight about his new project Guns of Boom

Hi! I’ll start with introductory simple questions. Please tell us about your new project — Guns of Boom.

Maxim Donskikh

Hi! In order not to retell the description in Google Play, I will say the most important thing. Guns of Boom is a bright and dynamic multiplayer shooter that is convenient to play on mobile phones.

The main feature of the game is automatic shooting. That is, the player only needs to aim at the enemy sight, and the weapon shoots itself. This makes it possible to play comfortably without suffering from a lack of finger speed, strafe, aim and pull the trigger at the same time. The feeling of a full-fledged FPS, but at the same time anyone can play.

In a sense, the game can be viewed as World of Tanks: it is a shooter for those who are uncomfortable playing ordinary shooters.

How long and with what composition did they make the game?

I can’t answer this question for sure, because before the release in its current form, the game went through a long and very tortuous path, which included, for example, open beta testing of the PC version. And if we talk about the mobile version, as soon as we identified its main feature — automatic shooting — it gathered very quickly, within a few months. But this is only due to the fact that by that time the team had already gained a lot of experience with Unity, 3D, server technologies, etc.

How long it would take to develop such a game from scratch by some other team, I won’t even undertake to guess.

The game was created on Unity. Was there a temptation to try something else?

Of course it was. Especially when they tried to squeeze the engine to the maximum for the PC. But there was not an extra year or two to start everything from scratch: to gain the necessary technical expertise, rebuild all the pipelines, and acquire tools.

When you sent me a link to the .apk of the game before the release, for some reason I thought that the new Game Insight project was a MOBA. After all, strategies and derivatives of them were initially closer to you. And they are just on the wave right now. The fact that you are making a multiplayer shooter turned out to be a complete surprise. I am sure that this is news for those who have been following the company for a long time. Why the shooter, how did you come up with this idea?

When we decided to move in the midcore direction, we worked through a variety of ideas and considered many genres. From the perspective of prospects on mobile platforms, MOBA does not seem to be the best solution. At least, in the form in which everyone is trying to do it now. Too cumbersome. At best, it turns out to be convenient for tablets, but not for small smartphone screens. The only acceptable option seems to be a complete rethinking of the genre, as it happened with Clash Royale, but then even the name will not remain from the original MOBA.

We chose something more suitable, and launched a whole line of projects. Including the shooter. This is also a super-popular genre, it has already proved its viability on mobile platforms, but so far there has not been a really breakthrough title in its accessibility for a mass audience. Shooters are not yet adapted for smartphones so that it is convenient for anyone to play them. In this we saw an opportunity.

Once upon a time, it was a marginal genre on consoles, because it was terribly inconvenient to play shooters on a gamepad. Gradually, this problem was solved by adding automatic aiming and many other features that simplified management and opened FPS for a huge casual audience. And now look: this is the dominant genre on home gaming systems.

We are now talking about a project that has gone into a “soft launch”, but, according to subjective feelings, it is still at the very beginning of the path. There are no different modes or specializations. Are they planned, or have you decided to focus on something else?

Now Guns of Boom is really only at the very beginning of the journey, and we have grandiose plans for the development of the game: adding new modes, content, deepening the social interaction of players. I don’t want to get ahead of myself, but there will be a lot of cool stuff.

What we are seeing on the softphone right now is excellent engagement rates. Depending on the country and the source from which the player came, the retention of the 1st day ranges from 40 to 60 percent. Now we are focused on making sure that on days 7 and 30 it will also be much higher than the average level.

By the way, despite the lack of specializations, the roles in the match strongly depend on the type of weapon with which the player went into battle. Considering that it cannot be selected within the framework of the match, this is an innovation, as is the fact that shots are fired automatically when aiming at the enemy. What other gameplay chips did Game Insight prepare in Guns of Boom?

I don’t want to get too far ahead and reveal the details, but the main gameplay chips that we are preparing are somehow built around automatic shooting. This is a very interesting, but at the same time difficult game design task, because the usual things in this perspective begin to look quite different. For example, how should a sniper rifle be played? It is impossible to make an instant shot when aiming at the target, as for an assault rifle or shotgun, because with a huge lethal force and range of the shot, this will break the balance. Or how will the bazooka be played? What will be the differences between submachine guns and assault rifles? How, finally, to sum it all up in numbers?

Let’s talk about the patient, about balance and monetization. Multiplayer action games are projects in which the player’s skills play the “first fiddle”. It is a very difficult task to monetize them without a roll towards the pay-to-win that users dislike. In Valve games, it is solved by “caps” — the ability to customize the appearance of weapons and game characters for money. How do you solve this problem?

In games where success is 100% dependent on the gamer’s skills, it is really very difficult to build a working monetization model. And we see this in a bunch of bad examples. Therefore, one of the tasks was to reduce the impact of shooting skills. So that on the one hand it was an interesting FPS, and on the other, so that I, an adult bearded wealthy man who was tired after work, did not lose 10 out of 10 times to a schoolboy who shakes his spinal cord instead of the brain all day long.

The first thing that should equalize our chances a little is the auto—shooting that has already been mentioned more than once. You yourself probably noticed that in Guns of Boom, lightning-fast reaction speed is required to a lesser extent when compared with other shooters. There is no need to tap all the fingers of the symphony on the mobile phone screen.

The second is a pumping system balanced in such a way as to equalize the progress of a superactive player with one who plays less often, but is willing to pay.

All this makes the game no longer look like CS or Team Fortress, but rather like The Division. That is, the skill, of course, is important, but without the appropriate gear it is impossible to jump above your head.

Last question. How long are you planning to finish the game in Russia on Android before the global launch? How long does it usually take you?

When half a million players come to you for a test launch in a month, the boundaries between a softlonch and a full-fledged launch are blurred. If we look at hardcore projects for Steam, it is quite normal for them to be in “Early Access” for a year or even more. And we see the same path for Guns of Boom. We have a lot to do in order not to lose the interest of the huge audience that is already playing – to roll out new large blocks for it, such as, for example, an advanced clan system. And at the same time, prepare the server infrastructure for the gradual expansion of the geography of players, because in a dynamic online shooter, low ping and a stable connection to the server are no less important than cool graphics and game design.

Thanks for the interview.