Doodad Games Newsletter - Issue #2

Viking Trickshot full release coming June 30 7pm PDT, after more than 2 years of Early Access 😮

Ethan Close and Bilal Akil (myself) started Viking Trickshot (formerly Kubblammo) with a commitment to working 2 weeks on it, and then releasing it. We did succeed, and released Kubblammo to Steam, iOS and Android as Early Access over 2 years ago.

However, for whatever reason, we didn’t stop there, and there’s been a slow but persistent flow of progress over the months. We learned that retention was a big issue in the initial release, and went through a phase of heavy play-testing in trying to address it, before shifting gears to pumping out more content and working on other colossal features like online multiplayer (which itself consumed more than half a year of development attention).

I definitely struggled, in a motivation and discipline sense, to continue working on this project for so long. Ethan’s creativity, ambition and passion helped me persevere, but I must say I’m thrilled to feel the end finally being in arm’s reach.

Lonely Birds was recently released as our first fully premium game, and lots was learned from that.

Viking Trickshot has taken a different path, where the game is free to download and play, but 1 player progression (which in turn drives all other character/level/achievement unlocks) is barred at a relatively early stage, requiring a one-time payment to unlock the entire game’s content.

The hope here is that players will be able to get a good feeling of the game and whether they like it, with an hour or two’s worth of 1P, and unlimited 2P (including online), before deciding whether they want to spend their hard-earned money on it. It seems fair to me!

This involved working with in-app purchase systems for iOS and Android, and DLC purchasing for Steam, which was a first for Doodad Games. Hopefully we’ve done it all right!