Tin Man Games’ Ben Britten and The Voxel Agents’ Simon Joslin pose with their latest titles. PHOTO: James Fettes
TWO game developers in Melbourne’s north have plenty to celebrate as their newest titles launch on Facebook and iOS.
The Voxel Agents’ Toy Mania, available now on Facebook, is a twist on the colour-coded tile matching of hits like Bejeweled and Candy Crush Saga.
It marks the company’s fourth title, following their successful Train Conductor series on iOS devices.
The Voxel Agent’s creative director, Simon Joslin, says the company’s focus on mobile and online has allowed them to focus on doing one thing very well.
“By making a game that only expects one dollar from a user, you can really polish just one small thing,” he said.
The game tasks players with making the biggest and strangest toys they can, moving tiles around against the clock.
The mechanic, which harks back to the days of the Rubik’s cube, blends a simple concept with deep and complex strategy.
By all accounts, that method has worked. When the team showed the game at Melbourne’s first international games expo, PAX, they found people returning every 30 minutes for another go.
Toy Mania is still a work in progress, with The Voxel Agents using Facebook as a testing ground while it develops the game for mobile devices.
“We like to keep in contact with our players when releasing new builds of the game, so we can explore new methods of gameplay,” Mr Joslin said.
The Voxel Agents’ latest game, Toy Mania, tasks players with creating ‘toys’ as fast and big as they can. PHOTO: Supplied
Working in an industry that has changed dramatically in the past decade has meant that releasing a game is no longer the last step in the development process.
The company expects to be working on four or more products at any one time thanks to the extended product cycle. Still, Mr Joslin says the work pays off.
“There’s 300,000 that people pick up Train Conductor every month and play it,” he said.
“That’s kind of cool and makes it worth building stuff for those people.”
Working only a few dozen metres away in the same Collingwood office is Ben Britten, Technical Director at Tin Man Games.
His latest title, Fighting Fantasy: Forest of Doom, has been on the App Store for just over a month and as far as games go, it couldn’t be more different from Toy Mania.
The app is a digital remake of the 1984 adventure gamebook of the same name, written by Ian Livingstone.
“It’s excellent to be able to bring back the classics,” Mr Britten said.
Tin Man Games’ Fighting Fantasy: Forests of Doom is a digital remake of the 1984 adventure gamebook. PHOTO: Supplied
He describes the gamebook format as a cross between the choose-your-own-adventure books of the ‘80s and ‘90s and traditional role-playing games.
Where Simon’s team focuses on making the raw game mechanics as polished as possible, Mr Britten’s team sets their sights on story.
“Our games are big-world story games, where it’s all about branching narratives,” he said.
“It’s very much about story and exploration.”
He says that working in a small team makes standing out among the hundreds of thousands of other apps difficult.
“If you’ve got tons of money in marketing you can just throw money at the problem,” he said.
“For us, we’re on Facebook, we’re on Twitter. If you’re not active all the time, you’re not engaging your audience.”
Fighting Fantasy: Forest of Doom is available now on Google Play and the App Store.
