Interview With Hidden Variable Studios

When designing Bag It! and determining the content it would have upon release, what was the team’s approach to ensuring the game would A.) stand out in the vast library of casual-friendly puzzle games, and B.) enjoy a lasting stay on consumers’ mobile devices?

It’s no secret that there are a ton of puzzle games out there, but we felt that many of them utilized similar mechanics or built on existing trends. While there are some really fun games that do that, we wanted to try and make a game that ventured further afield. Our game certainly draws upon mechanics of classic games like Tetris, but it also throws in new elements and combines them in distinctive ways. We also went out of our way to avoid putting any birds or zombies into our product.

First and foremost, we wanted our game to be satisfying and fulfilling, but we also wanted it to have replay value. We added challenging “medals” to our game in addition to scores and stars, which adds secondary goals to the play experience. You can’t complete and achieve all of those goals in just one playthrough, and often times you have to complete the level a totally different way than you did the first time. Providing a fresh perspective on a familiar puzzle was something play testers really responded to. Furthermore, we added Endless Modes to freshen the player’s palate and give them something fun to strive for, even after getting 100% on everything else.

We are also planning on adding leaderboards to further this competitive layer. These elements are just the tip of the iceberg, though. We’re committed to making and delivering content in Bag It! well into the foreseeable future. This isn’t just a “launch and forget it” strategy. We’re here for the long term, and we want to create lasting relationships with our players to give them what they want.

Any plans for content updates to Bag It!, or did you guys pretty much empty the barrel of ideas and run with everything the game could possibly hold at release?

It would be so much easier to answer “Yes” to this question and be done with it. This was one of the toughest challenges in our development process. We have hundreds of ideas and we all had some passionate debates trying to figure out which ideas would give us the greatest return. We didn’t want to go into a development treadmill where things are constantly being added, removed, tweaked, and modified. Rarely is anyone who is committed to making a great product satisfied by the end results. The tough thing is making sacrifices for the betterment of the product.

For instance, as noted earlier, one of our goals was to keep our product under 20 MB so that anyone could download our game over a 3G network. Subsequently, we couldn’t just throw everything we wanted into our game. We also had to balance the time investment of certain features versus what we thought the final consumer would want. At the end of the day, we made tough decisions, but we were comforted by the fact that adding a new feature is just a single update away. That’s one of the great benefits to today’s gaming platforms.

Looking ahead, we’ve only scratched the surface. We want to add everything, from more characters and levels to new gameplay features and modes of play. Stay tuned for more details!

Having released in both the App Store and the Android Market, you must have an interesting perspective on the strengths and weaknesses of each. What advantages and challenges should a fellow indie developer expect in one of these marketplaces vs. the other?

The App Store is very well structured and, as a result, it has a lot of constraints and conditions to ensure the minimum quality level of each app.  This means that there is a lot of competition and that most of the competition is pretty good, especially when talking about the top 20 apps or games. If you want to make money on the App Store, you need to be in these top categories. The App Store is also well known for its ease of use and high numbers of app buying consumers.

The approval processes exemplify some of these differences. On the App Store, launching your game is a regimented multi-stage process where the title is thoroughly reviewed (the process can take up to a week). Even then your app can potentially be rejected for a host of different reasons. On the Android Market, you fill out all of your data, upload your build, and click “publish.” That’s it and your game is live.

However, the biggest difference between the Android Market and the App Store is the number of devices a developer has to support. We were always planning on supporting Apple and Android right from the beginning, and we picked an engine (Unity) that was well suited for cross-platform development. By doing this, we felt that we addressed a lot of the problems that come with porting late. However, there are still an incredibly wide range of devices that a game can support, all with different technical specifications. So a big question was figuring out which ones we would support, and where we would draw the line for our “min spec” device.  It’s actually quite similar to the process of developing games on consoles, which all have consistent hardware, versus developing games on PCs, which can run the gamut.

At the end of the day, we currently support over 400 Android devices and just ensuring that our game was compatible on all of those devices was a challenging undertaking. The obvious benefit to supporting these devices is the incredible range of potential players we can reach. Ultimately, that is something we’re definitely trying to capitalize on, getting our game into as many Android markets as possible.