Game Industry Guest Lecture Series 2010

Angry Birds

Mikael Hed, the CEO of Rovio, started this year's "Game Industry Guest Lecture Series" course at the Turku ICT House in the beginning of September. Unlike last year this time around all the attendees had chairs to sit on but that's not to say that the room was full because it was, just not quite filled to the brim and over as before.

As one aware of the current mobile game market might guess Mikael's talk dealt with Angry Birds which has become a borderline insane phenomenon in the States. For example celebrities there are using Twitter to explain how completely they are addicted to the game (Kylie Minogue ) or how their lives have lost its meaning after having beat the game (Tony Hawk). Rovio has also made connections with movie companies in the States which might later on result in an Angry Birds tv series or a movie.

There is little left for reasoning here when thinking about why this clamor has ensued. When confronted with the question "why is Angry Birds as popular as it is" Hed commented briefly that they plain and simply did enough of things right. He also elaborated that the game is simple enough for a wide variety of people to grasp quickly and start playing and having fun. As an anecdote Hed told the story of how his cousin once showed the game to his mother before a party when the game was not released and how she instantly got hooked on it and played the game for one hour straight forgetting the party totally. At that point in time Hed said he knew they had created something superb that might become bigger than anything Rovio had done before.

According to Mikael the initial concept for the game came from Jaakko Iisalo, who pitched the idea with the support of screenshots of the game characters. Mikael did not understand the initial idea but liked that characters as did everyone else. After that the decision came to build a game around the plush bird characters with eyebrows and no wings.

Before Rovio released Angry Birds they had created 33 mobile games over a period of six years and as such success didn't happen overnight for them. It required them to work on multiple subcontracting game projects such as Burnout or Need For Speed, whilst still doing their own IP games.

In the beginning Mikael explained that the developers in the company worked more or less in a haphazard way with having the goal of finishing the game in mind. Later on as development got more serious with outside projects being worked on they tried switching to a more organized developing style with plans, estimates, and a predetermined schedule aka. the waterfall method and when that didn't work they switched to a more agile approach with Scrum. After Scrum they again decided to go back to their roots by working how ever they pleased.

The important lesson here according to Hed was that the method of developing the game is not as crucial as having an experienced team. The team that Rovio had at the later stage could use which ever method they more or less wanted and still be successful. It can be easy to get caught up with trying to find out the ideal method for your team to work and then miss the mark on the most essential thing, which is to develop the game with an awesome bunch of people.

Rovio was not able to give Angry Birds the marketing it required just by themselves which is why they turned to the publisher Chillingo to give it a boost. The boost worked and the game zoomed directly to the #1 position where it has stayed pretty much ever since. Now that the game has gained the traction that it required, Rovio does not need the publisher any longer and can just publish continuations of the game as much as they please.

I find the story of Angry Birds to be highly motivating and inspiring in many regards. First of all it goes to show that a mobile game company in little old Finland can become the biggest phenomenon ever in the mobile gaming space, which speaks for the globalness of the whole thing. Secondly it's clear that one should not abandon their zeal in making something of their own and just spin their wheels by making games for other companies. Although the game mechanics of Angry Birds are copied from other games, the IP is Rovio's own, which no one but they themselves came up with. This results in Rovio being able to be on their own from now on, they get to step up a notch in the game development business.

The new trend in games: reality

Teemu Kurppa from Huikea Experience, a newish two-man game development company, came to talk about his take on the game industry. His position is that the industry is in a state of change from multiple angles. The platforms, the distribution channels, the business models, the themes, the game mechanics, and the user interfaces are all molding. In his opinion the current state of the industry is similar to what the movie industry was like in the 20'ies when it had not yet reached the current maturity and when the movies were more or less merely copying theatre performances on film.

It takes a paradigm shift or even multiple paradigm shifts for a creative field to reach its full potential and do away with the legacy of the older ones. For example the touch and gesture interfaces of today are only scratching the surface of what is possible. The business models need not be restricted with the old method of selling the game for a price but instead they can be tied directly to building a large user base for the game and gaining virality through sharing and generating leads for additional sales.

If we are to succeed with games today we need to understand and take advantage of these changes and new possibilities. Otherwise we might end up with a similar fate as the newspaper industry is currently undergoing.

Some years ago location based games were on the radar here in Turku but for some reason they did not become popular. Possibly they were ahead of their time at that point when the devices were not that wide spread yet. Now that smart phones with GPS location services are quite commonplace however the situation has changed drastically. As Teemu mentioned the Foursquare web service can be thought of as a game where the player is trying to gain points and badges by visiting different physical places and then competing against friends. In the States the playing part of this has gone even to the length where people gain a special “I voted” badge if they visited a voting venue at the time when an election was under way.

This is changing what we think of as a game. Even normal every day activities such as brushing the teeth or jogging can become a game that you play against yourself or other people online for example through Facebook or other services. The person who uses a bicycle instead of a motor vehicle would get environment points where as the person who prepares food for himself would get cooking points. If you put this sort of information for everyone to see you are likely to perform better than when you yourself are the only person knowing what you do in a day-to-day basis. It is of course debatable if people would do this sort of thing in the amounts it would take to make an actual difference in the world, however it is an appealing notion to say the least. Also we do have web services such as Facebook where millions of people play games each day and on top of that we have things like HeiaHeia!, a Finnish sport tracking service on Facebook, so at least people do have interest in such things.

In his past Teemu mentioned he has worked at the university of Helsinki as researcher of robotics and machine vision. He has always liked the techy kind of things like programming but as the beginning part of his talk goes to show, he is also a bit of a visionary. After Helsinki university Teemu went on to work with Symbian phone development in Nokia for a few years after which he joined a new start-up company called Jaiku in June 2006. The same week he quit Nokia he was planning on starting a new company by himself, Jaiku was just something he was asked to join up with by chance at the same time and he decided to go with that. As most people know, Jaiku was later bought by Google.

In April of 2009 Teemu founded a new company, Huikea Experience, with his friend Pekka Uronen. The goal they set for themselves was to design and develop social mobile games. Being technical-minded, they set out to create a UI framework that would allow them to make the games they wanted on any platform they pleased. After having worked on the framework for a considerable amount of time they decided to try making a simple game with it to test the framework out. Facetap, Huikea's first game was released on February 22nd 2010 on the App Store for iPhone and iPod devices. In Teemu's words the game proved to be a flop.

Teemu and Pekka were not too concerned about this however and soon after they continued with a new game idea, an MMORPG for the iPhone. As that project was not anywhere near completion in October 2010, Teemu and Pekka decided to put it on hold and instead create something simple that they could ideally finish before Christmas. The initial concept for the game was to create a realtime multiplayer board game for the iPad, utilizing the device's touch controls to the maximum benefit. After four weeks of working on it they had prototype ready they could let other people try and see their reactions. The game was dubbed Dust Up Uranus, which is likely not going to be the final name for it, “Dust Up!” being a more likely candidate.

Teemu and Pekka decided that the development process should be quite open so they could get the most benefit of game testing. At the end of his lecture Teemu took out his iPad and showed the game for the audience here in Turku. The game seemed to intrigue at least a couple of persons as a crowd of around 10 to 20 people gathered around Teemu and his opponent even after the lecture was over.

It's funny how Huikea's presentation out of all the other ones in the "Game Industry Guest Lecture Series" course was the least interesting to me initially, partly because of the name Huikea and partly because I checked beforehand what releases the company had done. Now when the course is over Dust Up! is the game I'm playing the most out of all the games on my iPad and Huikea is definitely a company I'll keep following and having contact with. Last weekend we even organized the world's first tournament in that game in the Gamelab.