FutureDeluxe - Experiments, 2017

Amber Manifesto

We’re innovation partners for creative industries.

Amber is a game development agency built by a collective of artisans residing in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Bucharest. The company concept was inspired by the decades of game dev experience of its leadership, through the realization the industry needed a more versatile development services platform. To this end, we defined a series of operational methodologies that helped us to evolve a unique offering in the services provider landscape, one we hope will better address the needs of our partners:

1. Contained Distributed Development: Amber placed its consultancy talent in physical proximity to its clients. Since the overwhelming majority of our current partners are based in California, we’ve opened offices in San Francisco and Los Angeles. This is unusual for offshore vendors, who tend to concentrate their workforce in low-cost locations and build only a Business Development presence in their client markets. In contrast, we have no formal sales organization, but rather we co-locate a network of producers, project managers, specialists with our partners in order to build a closer working relationship. This allows our clients to more naturally interact with our staff and thus we can strive to eliminate the inherent friction resulting from external development.
2. Hiring the Best: No vendor who would ever say their aim is different, but in Amber’s case, we mean it. From inception, the company has hired the best game developers it could find in its local labor markets. It’s a tough choice to make if you follow it to its logical conclusion — this implies paying top salaries for the most senior and accomplished staff we can recruit. In turn, it means we can no longer compete on cost, but rather on quality. As a result, we prefer to bid on complete projects, rather than work on the basis of hourly cost, since we can deliver faster and smarter than our competitors, due to the quality of our talent.
3. Innovation Partner: An indirect consequence of our hiring philosophy is that we can assemble the best collection of game dev specialists in the industry to solve complex problems that most service vendors cannot hope to unravel: to support product innovation by providing elegant solutions to technology challenges, feed game design experimentation via rapid prototyping, or supporting business model innovation. This implies that we must show remarkable flexibility, dedication and skill in adapting to our partners’ needs. It also means that we can offer our partners a competitive advantage by engaging subject-matter experts to tackle complex business challenges.
4. Continuous Improvement: Amber’s kaizen is a central organizing principle for our internal operations, since each team maintains a complex roster of process improvement initiatives refreshed on a quarterly basis. We’re pursuing a higher standard in service delivery through focus and innovation. Furthermore, through our consultancy arms, we aim to inspire process improvement for our partners, creating transparent and detailed reporting, project set-up procedures and sophisticated planning for resourcing and risk mitigation.
5. Partner Focus: The history of games development is littered with external development horror stories. From inception we wanted Amber to reach a higher standard. To do so, we’ve adopted an obsessive focus on the customer, which is expressed in regular partner surveys of our performance directly tied to staff compensation, frequent due diligence visits to the partner location, but most importantly in always providing honest estimates on the effort and cost required to deliver our projects. Our pledge of integrity means we’ll only take on projects we know we can deliver on-time, on-spec and on-budget, with resources we know we can secure, on the basis of cost that will not be artificially revised later on in the project lifecycle. We want to be the partner you always love to work with, because we’ve earned your trust and we’ve always delivered above your expectations.

Our Work

Amber’s service offering emanates from its engineering core. The company was built around a group of senior engineers and over time we’ve gradually added all other game development disciplines, in order to respond to partner demand. In its ultimate expression, this aggregation of disciplines allowed Amber to grow into a fully-contained studio, capable of building complex, high-quality games. During this journey we’ve also created systems for improving the operational conditions of game development. Today we offer the following services to our partners:

1. Full Game Development: Our specialty resides in delivering bespoke experiences to our partners in a manner that respectfully leverages their brands. We’ve delivered a line-drawing puzzle game for Disney on mobile, a text-based simulation for Glu on smart watch and an original puzzle game design for Carbon. Several other projects are now in the works. We’ve established strong expertise in the puzzle genre under the F2P/live service model, so if you have such products in your portfolio, Amber should be on your short list of studio candidates.
2. Co-Development: This is a core specialty for our team. Amber has had co-development projects since the beginning and thus the opportunity to hone its skills over the years. We’ve supported Scopely and Kixeye on various projects and we have people, systems and tech to enable a seamless collaboration across timezones, when augmenting an existing team’s capacity.
3. Custom Engineering: This is Amber’s foundational service, the driver of our company’s growth from inception to this very day. When a new partner considers Amber for an engineering engagement, a clearly delineated custom project is usually the first step, whether this means developing a modular feature, integrating a service, or even bug fixing on an existing project.
4. Tools Engineering: During the course of delivering engineering services for our partners, we created a series of proprietary tools to help us work faster and smarter. In time, we discovered our partners also needed such tools, so we had to either build new ones from the ground up or customize tools we already had (i.e. device performance testing, inventory, reporting dashboards, live ops automation, etc.).
5. Live Ops: Live ops represents a major focus and area of investment for Amber. We’ve created this specialization in response to requests from our partners, but we decided to not only respond to demand, but also to create the best turn-key live ops solution for mobile F2P titles the industry has ever seen.
6. Quality Assurance: The caliber of staff we’ve assembled in our QA leadership team is world class, most of them having led teams of hundreds of testers for large publishers present in Bucharest, Romania. This is a very senior, battle-tested team. We’ve adopted the “Hire the Best” principle for QA as well. We try to recruit experienced testers within the Amber team and then offer them a career growth path in our studio (production, project management, design and engineering being the most logical paths).
7. Quality Engineering: Adding automation to our offering was not simply a means to augment our QA practice, but rather we wanted to improve the way games are being developed, by making engineering more effective. We wanted to deploy scripts that allow developers to check the integrity of the code before the builds ever got to QA. Also, to system test the integrity of back-end system under simulated heavy load conditions and to automate core functions of game development.

Through these solutions, Amber delivers a comprehensive development services platform for game developers worldwide. We’ve built a company meant to last, which has the objective of creating a framework for continuous improvement in development services. We’ve already begun investing in customarily neglected areas of opportunity in game development, such as:

§ Evolving the QE discipline beyond QA task automation and leading into development transformation (QE as a means to make development more efficient).

§ Creating engine-specific test harnesses in order to reduce the friction resulting from system integration.

§ Automating the functional tasks required by live operations, such as AI-driven content development.

§ Creating tools to support the mechanics of live ops, such as automated server deploys, web tool templates for campaign management and player profile editors for CRM.

A Method to Awesome

Amber’s staff hails from some of the greatest names in the games industry: Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, Gameloft, Bandai Namco, and others. We’ve delivered complex projects for all major mobile platforms, PC and console. We’ve employed development frameworks and utilities such as Unity, Unreal, Cocos2D, Marmalade, FMOD and a myriad of proprietary engines. We have a deep understanding of cross-platform development, parallel launch strategies, game mechanics, freemium monetization systems, product analytics and live operations.

Our objective is to complement the product vision of our clients, seamlessly blending into the cultural fabric of the teams we collaborate with, learning from their varied experiences and achieving perfect synergy in pursuit of our clients’ business objectives. Every project is a unique opportunity to explore the many ways we can exceed our customers’ expectations, but this creative journey is guided by a strictly rational framework. While we recognize no process can be a substitute for deep experience combined with unrelenting commitment to the product, we are proficient at both waterfall and agile methodologies, deploying either depending on the nature of the project.

1. Communication: It is extremely important for us to meet our client’s expectations in terms of product vision, schedule and quality. Transparent and constant communication is enshrined as one of the company’s core values and we’ll customize the information flow to match the project needs.
2. Evaluation: Based on the project scope, we evaluate and analyze all the development variables: from risks and dependencies to goals and requirements, all assembled in a detailed execution plan.
3. Execution: The magic of crafting spectacular products lies in the various methodologies we’re using according to our secret Amber recipes. Our team of experienced professionals can handle anything, from retro-tech to next-gen, they’ve seen and done all.
4. Delivery: After completing the previous steps in the development lifecycle, upon meeting all product requirements defined by our customers, we move to deliver the final package.

Using this approach, we believe Amber is primed to revolutionize creative industries by offering the full range of turn-key software development and live service solutions outlined above.

We hope you’ll offer us the chance to show you the Awesome.