Bouncy Smash Dev Post-Launch MiniVlogs

[katastrophic88]

Hi there!

We’re a little more than a week past launch and we wanted to share some of our post-launch stories with you in a series of mini vlogs we produced!

As many of you know, the development journey never ends. In “Very Helpful Feedback,” we share some of the more entertaining reviews we received and how we plan on incorporating community suggestions. One of the more interesting things that’s happened is being featured as a top sticker pack on the iOS App Store. In “Did We Make a Game or a Sticker Pack?” we share our disbelief and amusement when we charted 90th for stickers. In our last vlog “We Got Featured,” we discuss...well...being a featured on Apple’s New Games We Love List!

We hope you enjoy them, and we would love to hear some of your own stories! If you have any questions, feel free to ask

https://app.frame.io/r/aa363161-092c-4166-921b-9a866bd2129b?f=f250a6c0-30e0-4d82-b0e4-c64ea181c4f2

[katastrophic88]

Hey there!

The IV Studio team had a blast at PAX East and was super excited to be one of four games featured in the PAX East Indie Showcase. On PAX setup day, they rode down the escalator slack-jawed and eyes wide with anticipation. Austin Harrison, Producer and Lead Tester at IV Studio, can still recall a few faces from the large number of people who stopped by to play Bouncy Smash. There was a mom and son Mario and Luigi duo, a cosplayer wearing creepy contact lenses that made their eyes a wicked color, and a kid no older than 4 that performed better than half the adults who stopped by. But none of these stick out in his mind more than the guy that absolutely wrecked his high score.

Immediately noticing his skill, Austin told him the PAX high score was 11 million. Reflecting on it now, he wishes he hadn’t encouraged him. Soon, this first-time player was soaring past 11 million and well on his way to third place globally. Austin watched in horror as he passed 20 million – something previously only Eric and Austin (Bouncy Smash’s creators) were able to accomplish. The player ended with a mind boggling 30,771,200 points. No one else at PAX ever got close to half of that score.

PAX was an amazing time comprised of meeting new people, sharing the game the IV Studio team worked so hard on, and seeing awesome things that other developers had worked incredibly hard on. What took the cake for Austin, however, was the moment his global high score was beaten by a guy on his very first game. It was, quite possibly, one of the coolest things that’s ever happened in the team’s time working on Bouncy Smash.

If you took the time to check out the IV Studio booth to play Bouncy Smash, thanks for stopping by! We hope you enjoyed your time with the game. For those who attended, we hope you had a great time, too!

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[katastrophic88]

Launch Day. The end of a chapter in a game developer’s journey and a big step forward for your game. Releasing your game to the public is a big deal, and we would like to share our Bouncy Smash launch day experiences, mishaps and advice with you.

Below are three tips we have for game developers gearing up for launch day. We hope they’ll help you successfully smash this next chapter of your game’s life cycle!

Share your game. If you have an opportunity to attend a convention or get your game in front of people prior to launch day, do it. Share it and watch people’s faces as they play it. Seeing a smile erupt on somebody’s face just because they crushed a baddie in something you created from nothing is a hard feeling to explain — joy mixed with disbelief mixed with self-doubt.

Sometimes, you won’t launch on your launch date, and that’s okay. We planned to release Bouncy Smash in November 2017, then that turned into December 2017. Ultimately, we released on February 20, 2018. Like every other setback that happened in the development of Bouncy Smash, delaying our launch proved to be a serendipitous occurrence. We’ve learned to roll with the punches and not get caught up in the failure of our best laid plans.



Surround yourself with people who have done it before. Whether they’re your friends or paid consultants, having people with a deep knowledge of the industry around you will help you make the best decisions possible. Without the people we had in our corner, we would have made countless mistakes that could have easily derailed everything we were trying to build.

We hope this advice is useful to you as you prepare to launch your game. If you’ve already launched, please leave your advice in the comments!

[katastrophic88]

Reining in the scope of your project is one thing to which most game developers can relate. In order to stay on target, Bouncy Smash developer’s IV Studios left a lot of great ideas on the cutting room floor. But in managing scope creep, they were able to release a better game and better experience for players. Here’s some tips from IV Studio to keep in mind on your own project:

Stick to your vision! Set out a core vision at the beginning of your project and ask if every decision or new feature fulfills this vision. IV Studios has found this approach to be extremely helpful during their many years of client animation work. Sound interesting? Check out "The Vision Based Methodology!" for details.



Don’t rush your ideas. Give yourself some time between ideation and execution. It's easy to get really excited about a new idea for your game and immediately drop what you’re doing to try and implement it (because it's fun and exciting!). IV Studio lost a lot of development time trying to build features they later realized weren't important. When you have a new idea, write it down and talk about it with your friends or teammates; but first, finish the features you're already working on. If you and your team are still excited about the idea after finishing your current projects, then it might be worth pursuing!

Learn from others. Find developers/teams with similar games and ask what features they found most important (and what might be a waste of time!). For example, IV Studio spent a lot of time creating Facebook leaderboards for Bouncy Smash. Part way through development, they learned from a friend who made a similar game how few people actually signed up for Facebook leaderboards. Because of this, IV Studios scaled back this feature dramatically. In another example, one of the goals for IV Studios was to get their game featured by Apple so they brought on an ex-Apple employee as a consultant who helped pick and choose which features were important from their perspective.

What advice or questions do you have when it comes to scope creep? Let us know in the comments!