The idle game market on mobile seen by one of its french developers, the IRL Team.
Discussion with Antoine Violet, Hugo Dumouch and Liam Lepinay, founders of IRL Team, a mobile free-to-play studio based in Toulouse.
1.Why did you think about making mobile games?
(Antoine) So why go into mobile games specifically? First, we started with a week-long workshop. We worked as a team with the three of us in addition to one other person. And we were able to discover during this workshop the field of mobile games thanks to one of our teachers Teddy Bouziat.
So we developed a mobile game (e.n. named Postman) and we could see how does it work on several points, such as optimization and also adaptability because there are a lot of screens, a lot of phone models with Android and iOS. It is already a first approach on mobile games. The cool thing is that you really have to make the game fun immediately. So, you need a super clear idea to purify the design of the game, and we were delighted to have been able to finish the prototype of the game in a week.
We continued afterwards, we refined it, it was already playable and quite fun.And that’s what made us tick. We said OK. A team of three students who were not experienced enough and not technical enough, successfully created a game quickly. So we ended up in there and we were all thrilled to be able to finish a full project. So, little by little, Teddy, our workshop teacher told us that the game was super cool and that we could put it on the store to test and try, it costs nothing. And if we were even more motivated, we could try to contact a game publisher.
A publisher will test the game, who will put money to see a bit the potential, the marketability and the profitability of the game. So that’s what we did : we contacted several publishers, and we had a lot of positive responses only with our prototype. One of them called Ketchapp contacted us. We were thrilled when we started to work with Ketchapp.
This experience was super cool but unfortunately it could have discouraged us when we realized that it was going far too slowly. We sent an email every three weeks to fix insignificant details … We felt that we were in the background on their schedule.
It was a first experience with positive and negative sides, and we decided that we were going to stop working with them. We were in the right timing because, just after, we got a response from Green Panda Games, another publisher specialized in Idle games. As a result, this is what we are currently doing and which we continue to do : Idle games.
“We contacted several publishers, and we had a lot of positive responses only with our prototype.
2. What is an Idle game?
(Antoine) It’s a kind of structure management game, like to manage a zoo, a casino, a parking, or whatever. And the goal is to make your structure grow. You will be able to have more customers, to have more resources. Everything revolves around your business that you expand, you earn more money and you reinvest. It is often like that.
(Liam) It’s always with very limited interaction, it’s just about pressing buttons to improve different things. Our first game, Postman, is not an Idle but an arcade.
3. Ah yes that’s why there the word Idle is not present in the name, while all your other games have always written Idle before the name …
(Antoine) Yes that’s it, Idle is even a reference term for players who are looking for this kind of games.
4. How did Green Panda Games (GPG) contact you?
(Liam) GPG contacted us because they saw Postman on the Store. You should know that publishers go a lot on the Store. They watch a lot to check what is new, how to adapt to it.
(Antoine) We didn’t know them at all, and we didn’t know the market at all. We didn’t even know that there could be specialized publishers, publishers can be specialized in puzzle games, Idle games, arcade games. We fell in there by chance, and we gained experience little by little.
5. Have you signed a contract? How did you give a framework to this relationship with GPG?
(Antoine) What we have to say is that a developer and a publisher are like two companies that will join together to work on a project, even on several repetitive projects over the long term. It’s a partnership between two entities and it’s not a hiring.
So, at the beginning we did this to learn, to see if we had our chances of succeeding. And the more we gained experience more they were confident in finally offering us a contract based on prototypes. That is to say that we are paid by prototype that we deliver to them and that we test with them.
(Liam) You should know that without this contract there, we would make prototypes for free, without having a guarantee if it will work, and we would seek investors to buy advertising. In fact, we started to get paid by prototype when we started to have a more developed relationship with our publisher.
“And the more we gained experience more they were confident in finally offering us a contract based on prototypes.”
6. How many prototypes have you made?
(Hugo) We released 8 games.
7. What is the difference between a prototype and a full game?
(Antoine) In fact a prototype can be more or less completed. It is better to do the essentials, the basis of the game, by setting up only a few levels at the start, and if already the people who are going to play it can project themselves into the game and imagine what will happen next, we can talk about a prototype that is viable.
The goal is not to release a prototype as quickly as possible and which does not really correspond to the image you have in mind. That means that you will have tested a prototype for nothing because people will not know towards where you direct them. It is better to build a strong base and a short-time game experience, but which is already presentable. The small essential packaging for testing a game is a playable, pretty prototype, without bugs. Even if it’s a short experience of 2, 3 hours of play, it’s already good.
“The goal is not to release a prototype as quickly as possible and which does not really correspond to the image you have in mind.”
8. Are you still working on your eight prototypes to improve them?
(Antoine) No, that would be a waste of time. Once we’ve tested them, it’s over. It can happen to us to test a prototype and improve it a little later to try to retest it if the market is fit, but generally it is quite rare. Sometimes it’s at the request of some publishers who contact us to relaunch old prototypes. It can happen, but it’s very rare.
9. So now are you working on a ninth prototype?
(Antoine) Yes we are working on a ninth prototype and in addition, Hugo is working on an arcade game closer to Postman. For his part, since these are simpler games to prototype, he can be alone. And I’m on both projects, I sometimes help him a bit with graphics, 3D, UI. We are currently testing this production model. In fact Hugo has optimized his work so much that his part takes a lot less time, and he started to create this new game. It’s cool, it allows us to use our resources in an efficient way.
10. How do you distribute the tasks? What is your creative process?
(Antoine) If we have to distribute the tasks : Liam is on the Code side of the game, I on the graphics side and Hugo will integrate everything that is analysis tool to know the behavior of the player in the game. “Will the player click on this button?”, “What will he do ?” It is Hugo who sets up all these parameters.
(Hugo) I also set up monetization to manage the frequency of ads or decide what type of rewards we will give to players. And I manage also the balancing, it is to set up the difficulty of a game.
(Antoine) Well, basically there are several stages in our production process. Ideation is the first step. Then there is the computer code that will intervene throughout, the graphics also with the UI and the UX, and finally, the part of Hugo that usually comes a little more towards the end with balancing and analysis.
11. What tools do you use for the last part?
(Hugo) The use of the tools, called SDK (Sotfware Development Kit) also depend on our publisher. For advertisements one can use GoogleAds or AppLovin. For analysis tools, for example, there are Tenjin, “AppsFlyer” “Flury”, it’s at the request of the publisher in general.
12. Do you use Unity for the game engine?
(Liam) On all the prototypes we used Unity from the start. During our studies, we tested another engine which was Unreal Engine. We only know these two, we went to Unity because we found it to be more flexible and more optimized for mobiles. And also because I already had experience in Unity code too, so I felt more comfortable going there. I think pretty much every mobile game is on Unity, and it’s free so it’s cool.
13. How do you create graphics?
(Antoine) I think that if I had to imagine the graphics : it’s like a cake. For example, the first layer of the cake is 3D, meaning the base. We have software to create our characters, our decorations in 3D. For the moment I am using Maya, but why not test Blender in the future.
Then we will put a layer of cream which would be the texture we will apply on the 3D. It would be the colors, all the little details that the characters have.
Then, if we had to embellish this 3D even more, we would add a touch of Chantilly, it could be all that Liam will integrate afterwards in Unity. We can apply Lightnings or a Shader (this is how objects will react to light). We can tweak the game, we can make more or less realistic shadows, we can make things in a cartoon style. This is what gives a specific style to a game.
(Liam) And then there’s the animation, which is most often done in Unity.
(Antoine) This would correspond to the candles on the cake, the more festive side.
(Liam) And there’s also the whole FX side. For example it can be fire, smoke, ambient particles like the sun ‘s rays … etc.
“I think that if I had to imagine the graphics : it’s like a cake.”
14. What takes the most time among these “layers”?
(Liam) I would say it’s roughly equivalent. In fact what will reduce the total time depends on how we will think it from the beginning. The first step will be to take time to reflect on the workflow and thus decide what will be the different objects to create.
15. We see that the mobile game market has exploded in recent years? What can you say about it? Does that show us anything about the society we live in?
(Liam) Already more and more people have access to mobile phones.
(Antoine) Afterwards, there is a new way of consuming too. People, for example, consume serials while doing something else. They are on the networks…etc. It’s the same for games. You can watch a movie and play one. We see it in the comments, people play it at the same time as they do another task. That’s why the game doesn’t have to be overly immersive, it’s to allow the player to do other things.
And prices have dropped, now we have a mid-range phone from 150 euros, whereas before it was a fortune. The Asian and Latin American market is expanding, the African market is coming. Lots of people are discovering the phone and what can you do on a mobile? Call, take photos and play. So, necessarily, I think it’s instinctive, everyone will try to download an app at least once.
16. Last question… how do you see your future? Are you thinking of creating a more complex game?
(Antoine) We are in the mobile game market now, we have to consolidate in there because we are off to a good start. I think we left to stay together, time to grow, to be able to gain experience. Surely hire people who may later be more competent than us, who still have things to teach us. I think we should take it slow, even if, unlike the mobile market where everything goes very fast, we must take our time to think about it.
If we wanted to make a game a little more complex with a longer gaming experience, whether on PC or on mobile, we would have to ask ourselves how we will set it up. We would be extremely happy to spend a time on more ambitious projects, but with the necessary funds to be able to keep the project going until the end.
