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Show HN: Launching our first iOS game, BAMF

9 points by benzor ↗ HN
I am from Double Stallion Games, and yesterday was the global launch of our first iOS game, Big Action Mega Fight!, or BAMF! for short. It's now sitting at #70 overall for iPad games on the US App Store and we're pretty stoked about it. Meanwhile, an Android version is in the works and coming soon.

Most notably, we developed the game thanks to the support of an incubator/accelerator called Execution Labs, which was founded in Montréal and accepted its first cohort this past January (2013). Its model is similar to a miniature Y Combinator, focused specifically on mobile games. We get seed money, office space, mentor advice, and valuable connections over the 6 to 9 month program, in exchange for temporary profit share and equity.

I would love to get some feedback about the game from everyone, or answer any questions regarding our development, launch or marketing, efforts as well as our incubator experience.

Landing page: http://bigactionmegafight.com/

Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPkuRGbjJyw

App Store page: https://itunes.apple.com/app/id672277660?mt=8

8 comments

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hitsurume
Game looks awesome and fun!

I personally don't play games on my Iphone5, but it would be cool if there was a PC port that you can throw on steam.

benzor
Oh man I would love to get this game on Steam. Not sure it would be a great fit for the platform though, as such traditionally hardcore gamers can be rather hostile to freemium. Some day we might rebalance it to be a premium game if we get the chance!
coralreef
Game looks fantastic! How is your business model doing? Only purchase option is the $4.99 coin doubler, seems risky.
benzor
We actually have a full set of In-App Purchases (IAPs) ranging from $2 to $99, as well as the $5 coin doubler.

That being said, we're not trying to monetize by being heavy-handed and squeezing players for money with paywalls and the like. Instead, our in-game premium currency serves the purpose of "shortcut money" to alleviate frustration or grind. The game has been balanced to be pretty generous with giving out premium currency, and pretty easy to continuously play without pay, because then we can just monetize on ads instead. Better to make slightly less money from happy players than lots of money from pissed ones, we think!

zura
Great game! Reminds me one game on NES.

Since you posted on HN, some technical details wouldn't hurt I guess - what engine, tools were used, etc...

Also, free apps with IAPs are really trendy nowadays. Is the market really bad for "old school" paid model?

benzor
The game was built with Cocos2d-x [1], a C++ port of the excellent Cocos2d game engine, and Marmalade [2], our cross-platform SDK/OS abstraction layer so we can port it quickly to other platforms like Android, WP8 and BB10.

The main reason we went for the freemium model (aka free with IAPs) is because, as a first-time developer building a new IP, it's basically impossible to get your game noticed if you charge money for it. Competing with free is a really hard sell on an App Store with 700k+ apps... If we were already well known (e.g. NimbleBit) or had some solid IP backing us up (e.g. Star Wars) I think it would still be perfectly feasible to make a successful premium game, but we have neither for now!

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocos2d

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marmalade_%28SDK%29

zura
Thanks for the interesting answer!

As for the engine - Cocos2d-x is already cross-platform, including the platforms you've listed, I believe, so I didn't quite understand where does Marmalade fit?

benzor
Cocos2d-x handles the game engine side of things really well (scene graph, asset management, input handling, etc.) and all that runs cross-platform without any issues.

But Marmalade comes in real handy for all the platform-specific stuff like in-app purchase support, game services (achievements and leaderboards) and the like. The Marmalade team provides us with custom-built extensions for each platform. And if ever we run into anything else they haven't built for us already, they have an excellent Extension Development Kit (EDK) that lets us easily call native code (Objective-C for iPhone, Java for Android, etc.) from within our main C++ app. We've been using it extensively, in fact [1], and we're really pleased with it.

Finally, as a nice little bonus, their deployment and signing tools are also really slick, as they let us deploy straight to an iOS device with two clicks from our Windows machines, which is much appreciated by us non-Mac OS X fanboys!

[1] https://github.com/dblstallion