THE £150,000 APP | BETA
have less ability to take risks if it was about making money.” So Whale Trail and its forbearers have given
Ustwo a chance to flex its creative muscle, learn important lessons about owned IP, and flesh out ideas that may be hard to realise in a client work context. But that’s just the beginning of the CWA’s task. Their real goal is to serve the wider company. If successful, Whale Trail could provide
significant exposure for Ustwo, securing more client work, and making more money in the long term than even generous app sales alone could do over many months. Mojang Specifications and Rovio are establishing themselves as perhaps the coolest companies of the technological elite, and have undoubtedly earned the luxury of turning down biz dev offers that most creative organisations can only dream of. If Whale Trail can propel Ustwo into that
kind of league, suddenly £150,000 doesn’t seem like all that much to pay.
ONCE UPON A TIME The CWA story actually starts with two different apps; Nursery Rhymes and Papercut. The former, which cost £60,000 to make,
SIZE MATTERS
Ustwo co-founder Mills isn’t afraid to admit that making Whale Trail – which cost the company £150,000 – would probably have come in at at least three times less if it was produced by a microstudio or bedroom. In the end, the game was developed by a ten-strong internal Ustwo team,
known as the CWA, who invested 1,500 hours into the game’s production. That’s all very impressive, but why spend so much, especially in the current financial climate? “The fact is, we just can’t do it any cheaper,” explains ‘idea engineer’ Neil
McFarland (far right). “It’s expensive for a company like us to do anything because of our size. And that’s not the only factor. With so many of us in the CWA not devoted to our usual client work, the rest of the Ustwo staff have to make even more money.” But, say Mills (right) and McFarland, the size that brings about the cost is also the very reason it is worth spending such a vast sum. If Whale Trail can succeed in establishing Ustwo as a studio anything like as well known as Angry Birds outfit Rovio, then the potential for making vast sums in the future will exceed anything most microstudios could hope for.
DEVELOP-ONLINE.NET DECEMBER 2011 / JANUARY 2012 | 19
allows users to read stories to loved ones remotely. Despite critical acclaim, it only made £24,048 in revenue. Papercut, meanwhile, offers a suite of interactive short stories. Again, it was praised a momentous amount, but didn’t sell as well as its creators feel it deserved. “After Nursery Rhymes and after Papercut – which both got great critical acclaim and lots of love from Apple – we had to look at things carefully,” says Mills. “The actual reach was something like 30,000 people for Nursery Rhymes. That’s a bit disappointing when you’ve put so much effort into something. The problem there was that the amount of people that actually want to buy apps for their children is pretty small. Games in general though; that’s a huge market.” And so, in spite of Ustwo’s complete inexperience in game development, it was decided that work would begin on a game. The focus from day one was on something casual and accessible, and the core concept was conceived using techniques familiar to the studio’s staff who worked on animation, design and story writing. Quickly the look and character was established, and Whale Trail’s protagonist Willow – who it can’t help
be noticed happens to be perfectly formed for plush toys and merchandise – emerged. “Out naivety about making games is what made it so fun,” insistsMills. “We’d never made a game before. Personally speaking, looking at all the games coming out on the App Store, I didn’t see that much quality in terms of games, and they weren’t really exciting me. “A lot of developers have been off chasing that hunt for freemium bullshit, and I think they lost their minds a bit. While they were devoting themselves to that, we were just concentrating on making something nice. We’re not games makers and we’re not going to go with some fad like 8-bit pixel art bullshit; we’re just going to make something truly special using our guys who make incredible stories.”
A WHALE OF A TIME And apparently, a lack of game development experience isn’t a major hurdle. On its first day, after months of promoting and stimulating word-of-mouth hype on Twitter and other social networks, Whale Trail shifted an impressive 6,500 units. The same week, Willow took her place in Apple’s Game of the Week slots in 87 countries.
Whale Trail’s polished look comes courtesy of Ustwo’s history as a design studio
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76