Since launching over a year ago, we’ve had about four thousand people roll through the Atomic Brawl gates. We were thrilled to see that many people loved what they saw and played the game fanatically. As game creators, having people love what you create was, and is, an amazing feeling.
The unfortunate part of this story is that the games industry is a hit-driven business, and it’s very difficult to succeed financially. Despite our best efforts, we haven’t been able to attract enough players to continue active development.
Ken and I spent a hard 3 years developing this, on top of of normal full-time jobs. We invested a significant portion of our own money on legal, art, marketing, and server costs. At this time we’ve lost a lot of money making this game, not to mention the thousands of unpaid hours. As much as we would love to continue development, adding new cards and features and growing the game – we can’t justify investing any more time and money at this point without the confidence that it will pay off.
Atomic Brawl will continue to run for now. We’re happy to cover the costs of running the game – so if you’re an active player – things are not going away. We’re planning to keep it online for another year at least, unless anything goes terribly wrong, or there are very few people playing.
For everyone who gave us a shot and all the friends we’ve made along the way: Thank you! You’ve made this experience awesome! While we never grew the level we wanted, it was still a ton of fun. Keep Brawlin’
Atomically yours,
Chris and Ken
]]>In the video games, free to play (or F2P), seems to be a term that is fostering more and more negative connotations. Games without any upfront charge are often viewed as means to exploit the players emotional reactions to the input they’re receiving. When this stimulus is peaked they are then presented with a pay wall – asking them to pay or hit the road. The financial success of these types of titles are immense, and there are tons of new games daily trying to cash in on this trend. The backlash against games that operate in this fashion is growing daily, and because of this, any game without an upfront cost triggers red flags for many consumers.
So when we launched Atomic Brawl a few months ago we had many conversations around this topic, but eventually decided to make it free despite the growing backlash. Atomic Brawl is a multiplayer game – and as such – the fun players receive from it is largely proportional to the amount of people invested in the community. Our fear was that with any up-front cost we would limit our user base. Very few people would be willing to throw money at something they’ve never played or heard about. So we marched forward with a free game, and hoped that we designed our minimization mechanism in a manner that didn’t exploit the players unable to pay. No pay walls, nothing you can’t get without playing more.
Now is “free” viable as an indie game? An indie game that wants to grow and develop into a long-term project? Atomic Brawl is proof that… we’re not quite sure yet. We’ve been able to draw a very active and engaged community. We have not however, reached any sort of mainstream success. In fact, I would argue that doubling down on our community engagement has been one of our better decisions. The number of people who seem to really love what we’ve created has been awesome (check out all the awesome reviews over at the chrome web store).
Up until now we’ve relied on grass roots marketing, and admittedly, probably not enough of it. This has given us enough success to prove we have something people want. It has not however provided enough income for the game to sustain and grow itself for any length of time. Our next step is to march onto into more mainstream media circles. See if we can peak the interest of anyone who’s best friend isn’t already an Atomic Brawl addict. With that as a backdrop, we just completed our first game trailer:
(SHAMELESS PLUG: please like, share, favourite, rub, comment, consume, and enjoy this)
And with this trailer, we plan to make a concerted effort to drive more players to the site. In doing so we hope to grow this game into an ever evolving and excited means to waste 5 minutes of your day.
For the players who have been playing an loving Atomic Brawl over the past few months we hope this effort will give Atomic Brawl enough traction so that we can turn this into something you love even more.
]]>This week we cover the deck size changes, and some plans for getting more people into the land of Atomic Brawl.
As you probably noticed, we rolled out the changes to deck sizes that we mentioned last time. Decks changed from a 40-card minimum to 50, with a max of 3 of any card instead of 4. Feedback has been mixed on this one. We’re convinced it will be good for the game long-term, as it’ll help encourage variety, and mitigate totally broken combinations of cards (especially once we start rolling out expansion sets). Unfortunately, one big casualty was that combos balanced for the old deck sizes got much worse, due to decreased odds of having all the cards you need to get the combo working all at the same time. We’ll be tweaking combo cards over the next while to make them fun to play and build decks around, but not totally broken.
In that vein, one feature we’re considering adding is a “search” card, which would let you look at the top cards of your deck and choose some to keep. That would allow combo decks to go “hunting” for that last card they need. If this turns out to be easy to create, we might do it sooner than later (modifying Light Bulb or Stroke of Genius), but otherwise it’ll be a high priority for the first expansion.
We’re still hard at work on a trailer, and that has taken up quite a bit of our time lately. The first draft is done, and we’re working on sound for it and the final draft now. It should be ready sometime soon, hopefully in the next week or two.
Now that we’re done that big tuning pass and the deck size changes, we’re shifting focus to getting more players into Atomic Brawl! Our #1 complaint has been that it’s hard to find games when you want them, and/or hard to find a good variety of evenly matched opponents to play against. We hear you loud and clear, and want more players in Brawl just as bad as you do. Once the trailer is ready, and the holiday season and best of 2013 lists are done, we’re going to be slamming on marketing, trying to get reviews, Let’s Play coverage, and so on. This is our first time marketing an indie game, so if you have any bright ideas or good connections, we’re all ears!
We’ve been ensuring all along that the game works well on iPads, and is semi-reasonable on iPhones. Over the holidays we’ll be playing around with a more official iPad version of the game, to see if we can get it solid enough to submit to the App Store. We’re thinking that this could help open up Atomic Brawl to many people who use iPads as their primary gaming device. It’ll be a bit of work, though, so no guaruntees, but we’ll of course keep up our iPad support for web-based ‘Brawl either way, and eventually shore up iPhone and Android support as well.
So that’s it for this week. Happy holidays, and thanks a million for all your support of Atomic Brawl. We couldn’t ask for a better Christmas present than people enjoying this game we made.
]]>This week we cover the most recent patch, along with what didn’t make it into the patch.
We launched the big balance patch last Sunday. For the most part, we feel we made a lot of good strides with this. The amount of feedback (both positive and negative) has been shocking! It’s great that people are so passionate about the game!
Balancing is a pretty tough process, and things that we thought worked well in our heads and in testing don’t always pan out in play. So bear with us, and we’ll keep on tweaking until we get things right. But keep in mind, some changes might seem big in the beginning, but once you settle in and adapt to them, then can be better in the long run.
As always, any and all feedback is more than welcome, so keep it coming!
We originally planned to include some changes to deck size in this release. However – there are some complications so we decided to get the balance patch out first, then deal with this.
The intent of this change is to encourage more variety in decks, which should lead to a more interesting and diverse game.
Currently, we have a minimum deck size of 40 cards, with no more than 4 copies of a single card. We are considering moving to a 50 card minimum with a maxmium of 3 cards of any one card.
That ratio is also much closer to those in other collectible card games than what we have now. Magic has a 60 card deck minimum, with max 4 per card, so a ratio of 1:15. HearthStone has 30 cards decks with a 2 per card maximum, so a ratio of 1:15 as will. We currently have a 1:10 ratio, which, when combined with the lack of resources in your deck as in Magic, results in much more predictable plays where you generally get similar cards every game. Moving to a 50 card minimum and max 3 per card would put the ratio at 1:16.6, so a touch higher than Magic, but also lower variance due to the slightly smaller deck size, and a bit less predictable than HearthStone (which, in my humble opinion, is too predictable).
There are quite a few reasons for doing this, the obvious being it forces people to be more creative in their deck building and helps ensure that decks have more variety, which should result in a more interesting – and strategic – game.
Another thing we’re mulling over is making a change to the advantages/disadvantages to going first or second in the game. The current win ratesfor the starting player at high levels of play (Hitmen and Emperor leagues) are:
So, there’s definitely a first-mover advantage. Currently the only penalty of going first is the lack of a turn 1 draw, but that’s not enough, as a 5-card hand is already quite large.
Some ideas we’re tossing around:
That’s all for this week!
]]>When it comes to balance we use a few things to decide what to change:
So we have a pretty massive list of things to investigate. So far we’re about ½ way through. The approved changes so far include:
In addition to core card changes, we’ll also re-examine and possibly change:
This all of course may change before we release it, but we thought it made sense to show you the direction of things to come.
We like to celebrate our failures. With that in mind, here’s a pretty funny bug report (now fixed) that involved Bully pushing a unit into a Wormhole. The pushed unit would then travel back across the map, and in this case, hit every trap on the way:
A big balance pass is coming up next in the development queue. We have a few goals for this, but at a high level it’s quite simple:
Balancing is a very tricky topic, and a tough intellectual exercise. Generally speaking we tend to be conservative with these things and would rather take many small steps than completely nerfing or buffing a card. There is currently some lively conversations over on our subreddit for anyone who wants to weigh in on the topic.
Last night we launched our friends feature. Now you can track your record against your friends, chat out of game with them, and view their stats. You can also view anyone’s profile — someone you’re playing a game with, or anyone in your league.
Sounds are pretty much all done! This includes both sound effects, and the voice over on the tutorial. The folks at Power Up Audio are just cleaning some things up and then we’ll release it onto the world. This should be ready in the next week, so keep your eyes and ears open.
We made a change to leagues so that people don’t end up in small divisions almost all alone. For now, we combined things into a single division per league. So take another look at your league – you should have some new friends to play with! Once we have so many players that the leagues are getting so large to be silly, we’ll go back to splitting things up into smaller divisions.
So… Did you see our recent post about Atomic Brawl cosplay? If not – you should probably go check that out. Click here for all the amazing photos. Here’s a little teaser:
Throughout development, this vision became more clear. We wanted to build a game that people loved. We wanted to build a game that people obsessed over. We wanted to build a community.
We work hard with our players to make them feel involved in the development process. We value their opinions, and incoporate all we hear to produce the best game possible. It’s our hope that by respecting and valuing their thoughts, we can realize our goal.
With that said, something truly scary happened this Halloween. Something I never anticipated when I began this project. It started with some deceit from my co-founder:
Like most lies, it wasn’t long before the dirty little secret came bubbling to the surface. In my inbox, the duplicitous nature of my co-founder was presented to me as an attachment.
The previous night he had actually attended a “You Just Turned 30 / It’s Halloween – So We All Secretly Dressed Up As Characters From Your Indie Game” party:
I really didn’t anticipate cosplay so close to launch! But man, these pictures blew me away. For this, as so many more reasons, our community is amazing!
]]>Sound effects are nearly done! The crew over at Power Up Audio (@PowerUpAudio) has been hard at work, and is just putting the finishing touches on things. We think you’ll really like these when you hear them as they add a TON of depth to the game. We expect to have these live sometime this weekend.
Ken and Jacob Burgess (@CapnXez) recorded a heap of takes for the voice overs for the tutorial last Friday. The results are super awesome, and ridiculously funny. We just need to choose what takes we want and toss them in the game. This will go live sometime in the next week.
We finished the “Friends Feature” on the weekend. Just a bit more testing to do, and then it’s launch time! This will mean a few new things:
The next big thing we’ll focus on once all of that is launched is balance. Balance is a tricky topic, but we have a boat-load of feedback along with various stats that we can use to determine which cards are underpowered and which are overpowered. If you have any thoughts or ideas, please send us in-game feedback and we’ll incorporate your suggestions into our balancing discussions.
Last week we mentioned Day[9]’s Spellslingers. There’s a new episode that just came out and it is full of awesome. Check it out, MTG peeps!
Alex Holowka (@infinite_ammo), creator of Aquaria, gave an AWESOME talk at the event we attended about his experiences as an indie dev and also included a trailer for his upcoming game, Night In The Woods. The game is currently being kickstarted and looks awesome! We backed it, and SO SHOULD YOU!
]]>This week we’ll talk about what’s next in our work queue, highlight some interesting community goings-on, and introduce a Random Thing of the Week.
This week we have a few things we’re working on in parallel. As always, bugs are top of the list, and anything that comes in will be addressed immediately.
This week, the amazing folks at Power Up Audio (@PowerUpAudio) will begin helping us with the development of some sound effects for the game. One of the biggest critiques we get when people first check out the game is:
What!? No sound… Why is there no sound? Are my speakers broken? This is a game right!?
Sounds can be turned off if it’s not your thing, however we really think this will add a ton of depth and polish to the game. This polish should help us convert more potential players into Atomic Brawl addicts.
On the topic of sound, we’ve been working on cleaning up the tutorial in preparation for some voice-over work. We’ve teamed up with the illustrious Jacob Burgess (@CapnXez) to come up with some rocking narration for the tutorial. We did a trial run of this and the result was amazing. This is another thing that will really help us get some more meat players for everyone to consume play with.
Finally, on the feature front. This week we’re going to try to get an implementation of our Friends feature complete. What is friends, you ask? Great question! Here is what this feature will look like:
The friends feature addresses some super common feedback we get, so let us know if you have any other ideas in this regard.
I thought this week I would bring attention to some cool community stuff. Let us know throughout the week if there’s anything you think should be mentioned in this section.
Firstly from @JustinMolinari we have:
Still hooked on @AtomicBrawl after more than a month! Really surprised this game has not seen more buzz. Come battle: http://t.co/9PbPkf4O5r
— Justin Molinari (@JustinMolinari) October 22, 2013
We love hearing this sort of stuff. We hope we can generate more buzz soon. Internetting is hard. Next up we have @AlexCatamo who wrote:
@AtomicBrawl. A sweet #game for next time you feel like NEVER BEING ABLE TO STOP http://t.co/6Q6GmhbtGr
— Alex Catamo (@AlexCatamo) October 7, 2013
Which made both Ken and I laugh pretty good. Over on reddit there’s a few really interesting discussions going on:
Ok – so what is this feature? Basically, just a place for Ken and I to write a little something about anything on our mind. This week – our Random Thing of the Week will be a link.
Before we start, Ken and I both love all things Day[9]. Ken has, on many occasions, said:
If Day[9] plays our game, that’s success. That’s all I want.
So it comes as no surprise that when I run across something Day[9] related, Ken gets sent that thing pretty quickly. This week, I found Day[9]’s new web series on the Geek and Sundry channel where he plays MTG with his friends. Since our community has a lot of Magic players, we figured some of you may get a kick out of these, if this is you be sure to check out Spellslingers. It’s super well done, and a great way to showcase Magic.
That’s all for now. See you next week.
]]>The State of the Game posts will be posted weekly and lay out where the game stands, what we’re working on, or anything else that’s on our mind. Please let us know if you’d like to hear about anything specifically.
Users! And more users! We currently have about 400 active players (about 2100 signups). For new users coming in they can often have problems finding a game. We secretly (evil laugh here) changed our algorithm for matchmaking the other day to broaden this criteria a bit – however – it’s still a population problem, and one we’re working hard to address.
Along these lines, we’ve found that we don’t do a great job of getting people to signup. Once they do however, most people really seem to enjoy things. To address this we are working on:
All of these efforts are largely being done by friends, or other talented people we’ve managed to snag. This means Ken and I can continue working on features, bugs, customer support, etc. Once these are in place we can push our marketing efforts a little harder – and hopefully find a bigger audience.
Over the past week or so we’ve been super busy with in-game support, minor bug fixes, and consuming turkey for Canadian thanksgiving. Here are some things that will be deployed in the next week:
Plus a bunch more smaller tickets that we’ll get done over the next few days. Finally, here are some more interesting higher priority things which may make it in if time permits:
We get a lot of questions, comments about balance. Here are some common requests that we will likely address soon:
Not sure when/if or how we’ll address these – but I thought it would be interesting to list out these common concerns.
I wanted to say that so far the game is going really well. People seem to be having a really good time. Ken and I are working our butts off to make the game better. We really appreciate all the feedback, support, and advice everyone has given us. We’ll continue to work to try to grow this into something amazing.
If you could help us by telling your friends, giving us a review in the Chrome App Store, or just helping us get the word out – we would love you long time.
More words next wednesday – keep brawling’.
]]>Making software is difficult. Making software whose objective is as abstract as fun compounds that.
Last Sunday, we launched Atomic Brawl. Atomic Brawl is an in-browser strategy game where you can take turns in bite-sized chunks, allowing it to fit into any schedule. You collect brawlers, formulate strategies, and compete online against other players.
Three years is a long time to commit to anything. Both of us having day jobs meant that free time was almost always spent on the project. Over these three years we:
I believe both of us would’ve thrown our hands in the air and moved onto something else if it wasn’t for a few key things:
For most games this post would be a post-mortem, marking the end of a journey – for us, this marks the beginning. As a free online product we need to work hard on live-support, marketing, and growth, in addition to development, so that we can turn this into a sustainable venture.
If failure does happen, we’ll be happy having known that we went from nothing to something, without compromising our vision, and took a shot at something we were passionate about.
If you’re interested, you can play Atomic Brawl on our site, or check us out in the Chrome Web Store.
]]>We knew roughly what we were building by through the prototyping we had done prior. Coders at heart we moved onto the always fun task of choosing what technology to use on the front-end.
We decided to use Javascript and HTML for a variety of reasons:
So with that, we dug in and started to figure out how we could do this. Our first step was toying with the HTML5’s new Canvas element.
Canvas is quite simple to use for anyone who has used similar tech. The API is familiar, and while there are quirks, our initial impressions were positive. Our first goal was simple: Using Canvas, layout a hexagon based grid with click detection:
You can play with this here (with source). Click to add or remove tiles.
In very little time we had our grid laid out. While ugly – it proved that it could be done pretty simply. Our next proof of concept was to see how difficult it was to animate things.
As we started adding animation we felt the need to wrap this all up in a nice clean framework. While there are quite a few to choose from these days, at the time, there wasn’t. We started to put together something that would:
With that, we came up with:
Like the previous example you can play with this one here (with source). Click on a hexagon to add or remove it, and click on the stationary guy to move him around the board. He will choose the most efficient route given the current state of the board.
This is by no means production quality code but it does achieve a few things:
Now sadly, that last statement was only partially true. One of our reasons for going with HTML was that we wanted to ensure that everything ran well on mobile devices as well. When we wrote this (last year) we couldn’t squeeze out more than 15 FPS on a first generation iPad.
Most of this time was spent in clearing and redrawing, especially when semi-opaque images were involved. One technique we didn’t experiment with at the time, which may of helped, was using multiple Canvases to represent the different layers.
Regardless, after some time, this lead us to re-evaluate how we were doing things. Perhaps we didn’t even need Canvas?
Atomic Brawl is not a title that relies on graphical sophistication. We started to wonder if we could do what we needed with just HTML utilizing CSS3 to animate when needed. It took us about a week to re-write the core abstraction layer to use HTML instead of Canvas and the performance benefits were dramatic.
At this point, there was no compelling reason to Canvas. We could achieve all the animations we needed without it, and had great performance.
You can check-out the resulting CSS3 based animation by checking out our Tutorial.
We decided to prototype using HTML5, specifically, Canvas. It ran well and did everything we needed to. Performance on mobile devices was sadly, not up to par. Using straight HTML with CSS3, we were able to achieve the same visual results with great performance on mobile.
]]>Our goal for the game was simple – create something fun. Too often games, especially those played in the browser, are just thinly veiled compulsion loops that prey on human psychology to keep you clicking over and over, but aren’t really all that enjoyable to play. We decided to focus on creating a fun core game experience first, and then build on that solid foundation. So we started developing playable paper prototypes of, what we were calling at the time, ‘Villainy’.
We had a vague idea of what we wanted Villainy to be. An online collectible card game that took advantage of the digital medium by having complex interactions between the pieces in play. Said another way, we wanted the fun and design sensibilities of an board or card game, that could be played through the convenience of online. It only made sense that we started prototyping with pen and page.
The very first iteration of the game was lane based:
In each lane you could play a ‘Unit’ (now called a Brawler) which would automatically start wandering down that lane and start attacking enemies. Our original inspiration for this concept was a collectable multiplayer Plants vs Zombies, or kind of like multiplayer tower defence.
We had the concept of ‘Avatars’ (now called Cores), which represented your team of characters. These avatars had unique abilities that affected the game, and formed the basis of your team. Just like now, the goal of the game at this stage was to destroy your opponent’s avatar.
Itching to try the game out, we created some templates for cards, printed off a stack of ‘em and went crazy creating about 100 different of cards that we could used with our ever shifting rule-set.
All the basic cards types in this version (Cores, Brawlers, Traps, Items) are all still in the game today. The only addition since then has been ‘Structures’, which are essentially immobile Brawlers. The big thing that was dropped was the idea of “attack patterns”, which were super cool but only really made sense when the Brawlers were on autopilot.
The hardest part of this stage of development was tweaking and tuning the rules, trying to find the fun factor. We bribed some friends to come over for a few nights of beer, pizza and play-testing to help us out. We played a boat-load of games, and toyed around with tons of different facets of the game mechanics. Here’s a short list of core choices we made that shaped the game we have today:
As I mentioned earlier, in this version of the game you played a unit and it moved forward and attacked according a defined rate and pattern. The issue with this was that you could almost never react to what your opponent was doing (especially when they were reacting to what you were doing), as once a unit was played it was out of your control. We couldn’t decide if the game was about your macro decisions, in deck construction and high lane choices, or micro decisions – carefully choosing who attacks whom, who moves where, etc. It was a very tough call, but we decided a more tactics-like experience was more fun.
One huge difference between this and what we have now is the concept of attack and effect patterns. This was something that we were first drawn to in Phantasy Star Online Episode III: C.A.R.D Revolution (that name is out of control). Attack patterns forced you to consider your positional strategy, and in a lane-based game it had a large impact on which lane you choose to play various cards. This was dropped for two reasons: It was really tough to forecast how patterns would impact the game, and from a UI standpoint it was difficult to do this on a hex based grid (something we decided on after the prototype).
We toyed around with a real-time versus turn-based gameplay. While real-time is fun, turn-based gameplay was something that we knew would attract those wanting a more thought-based strategic system opposed to a twitch based one. Furthermore, we knew that turn-based would eventually allow us to go the asynchronous route, a decision made further down the line, which was an attractive option in and of itself.
We wanted to make a game! So we built a bunch of paper prototypes, which helped us shape what we were attempting to make. Our original concept shifted from a macro-oriented multiplayer tower defence game to a micro-oriented multiplayer tactics game. Paper prototyping helped us quickly and efficiently tune what we were building.
See the third post in this series here.
]]>Like most development stories, it started off with two nerds wanting to build something cool. After four years of service together at Electronic Arts, and a brief intermission, we decided to get the band back together and create what is now known as Atomic Brawl.
After some paper prototyping and many heated discussions about What The Hell We Were Building, development began in earnest in March of 2011. A year and a bit later, we’ve got a real live asynchronous multiplayer strategy game, currently in beta testing with about 80 rabid testers. Not that we’re biased, but the game is awesome! We’ve drawn from some our favourite games, including Magic The Gathering, Final Fantasy Tactics, and maybe a touch of the flavour from something like Earthbound, and made it available and playable in any good old browser (including mobile).
The game, as of today, looks a little something like this (final art still pending):
It’s asynchronous, so you can play as fast or as slow as you like, and you can have as many games on the go as you want. Playing the game earns you rewards which gets you access to more cards, which add to your collection and can be used to power up your deck and come up with new strategies.
Unlike most other online card games, our cards have fairly diverse effects that can create very interesting gameplay situations. Some examples:
You pay for cards using “energy”, which increases automatically throughout the game. The question is, do you stack your deck with low-cost cards in the hopes of polishing your opponent off quickly? Or do you delay the game and knock them off with more powerful cards later on? Do you focus on cards with high movement or high attack? Or perhaps you play loads of traps then try to lure you opponent into killing themselves? These are a but a few of the multitude of strategies you could try in Atomic Brawl.
Finally, thematically the game is light hearted and fun. While we all love our high fantasy, or future warfare, we wanted a game where a Sugeon with a Big Foam Hand could punch a Pink Tutu-wearing T-Rex and have it explode causing AOE damage because it had eaten a Burger Bomb several turns earlier. This is that game.
Okay, so why does this blog exist? Well, we’d like to tell our development story and give a bit back to the community that we love so much. For the next few posts, we’ll cover how we got started, including some of the pitfalls we hit and the decisions we made to get us where we are today.
See the second post in this series here.
]]>