2017 TGDF Notes: Postmortem on What Went Right and Wrong

Speaker | Monkey Potion | Jheng-Wei Ciao

Jheng-Wei Ciao has six years of game company experience and six years of independent development experience. He worked on mobile games including Bonnie’s Brunch and Magatama Ninja, and wrote the book Halfway Defection. He runs the Monkey Potion blog and has the kind of production history where schedule slips and budget explosions are not theoretical.

─ Excerpted from TGDF official

These are personal notes and may not fully represent the original speaker’s intent.

Game case: Beast Soul Battle

Types of Taiwanese indie game teams

TGDF 1

Team composition

Small team with operational needs
Internal team: 1 planner, 2 programmers, 3 artists
Outsourcing: 1 music, 1 sound design, 5 art contributors

Postmortem lessons

TGDF 2

What went right
1. Found money and people: co-developed with a game company and received publisher funding.
2. Started moving before everything was settled: tested and iterated early while the plan was still incomplete.
3. Target:Uncle mobile games
  - Lower competition
  - Casual rhythm: play when you want, stop when you want
  - Emotional appeal
4. Took breaks at the right time.
5. Talk about success after it actually happens.
What went wrong
1. People problems: collaboration creates differences between people. The three barriers to entrepreneurship are money, people, and law.
2. Schedule delays: a game is not only its core loop. Polish, operations tuning, social features, and similar work all consume time.
3. Both mainstream and independent:
  - Japanese style VS. American style
  - Cute girls vs. beast men
  - Auto Play VS. Manual Play
  - Disposable story VS. real story content
  - Operations VS. Experience
  - Gashapon VS. Paid Download
4. Testing started too late.
5. The project was not settled early enough, and the publisher contract was terminated.

Attribution

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