I’ll be flying out to the event in Culver City California next month to bring sunshine, love, and high-pitched screaming to a state famous for its short days and dreary cloud cover. While there, i’ll be able to try out some of the year’s most talked-about indie titles, and i’ll get to hang out with an absolutely stellar group of independent game developers, many of whom i’ll likely have regrettable and unfortunate sex with. i’m creeping all their Facebook photos right now, trying to weed out the ugly ones.

Also in the running are Toronto’s Capy/SuperBrothers with Sword & Sworcery, who developed the game directly across the hall from the Untold offices under our meddling eye. And you may not yet have heard of BigPants or their selected stereoscopic game The Depths to Which I Sink, but that’s another Toronto game by none other than Jim and emilie McGinley, co-founders of the weekend-long TOJam event where Cassie and i developed Ponycorns. Finally, Gamercamp co-founder Jaime Woo had his “real” game Gargoyles selected to be part of the expo.

And it won’t just be Toronto finalists attending – there’s a whole gaggle of us from the TDot flying out, including Mathew Kumar, the indie journalist behind EXP, Shawn McGrath, who’s currently building the trippy PS3 game Dyad, and indie dev Michael Todd, who gets a front row seat to my orgiastic debauchery because we’re splitting a hotel room. This just further solidifies Toronto’s reputation as the hub of indie game development in North America, and perhaps the world.

While i’d love to bring Cassie to the event, one of the drawbacks to being an indie is that you’re constantly down at the blood bank trying to sap enough haemoglobin to make rent. i could get her a plane ticket, but then of course i wouldn’t be able to act up at IndieCade, so i’d have to bring her mom … and if i brought Cheryl, i’d have to buy a ticket for Cassie’s little sister … and if you’ve ever seen our family pack for a 2-day stay at Grandma’s, you’d know that we couldn’t stop there – we’d have to charter our own cargo plane to transport all the “necessities” that two little girls require so that the day doesn’t devolve into a competition to see who can shriek the loudest. In short, i don’t have the means.

Ask Me About Loom™

While i’ll be happy to talk Ponycorns and its upcoming Japanese translation, i feel the game has about as much press and attention as any indie title will ever get. As IndieCade fast approaches, we’re working hard on playable demos of our upcoming games, Putty Crime: On the Trail of the Foxy Badger, a puzzle game modeled entirely in clay, and Spellirium, a post-apocalyptic word puzzle adventure game.

See you at IndieCade!

When Untold Entertainment Inc. turned three last year, we were reeling from the fallout of the global economic collapse. It’s been a slow, difficult recovery, and we still have a lot of work left to do, but i’m happy to say we’ve nosed out of the tailspin. This was a landmark year for Untold; we are poised to have an absolutely incredible fifth year going forward. If last year was our Empire, this year is our Jedi. Bring on the Ewoks, baby.

Here’s a look at the Year That Was.

2010

August

Last fiscal ended on a dark note. We were struggling through Spellirium, our post-apocalyptic puzzle adventure game, as various production problems saw the budget sapped with very little to show for our efforts. The year ahead had us planning to complete service projects in the hope that we’d bank enough margin to continue working on the game.

September

My book was published! Unity 3D Game Development by Example: A Beginner’s Guide is a great introduction to game development, computer programming, and Unity 3D itself, which is a super-powerful game engine for creating on a wide variety of platforms. Thanks to you all for buying a copy, or for recommending the book to your friends.

Fall

We launched Jinx 3: Escape from Area Fitty-Two on YTV.com. Jinx 3 was the first game to use UGAGS, the Untold Graphic Adventure Game System. It supported multiple playable characters, an inventory system, a subtitle system, game variable control, and a “puppet” guidance system, which enables the developer to write commands to build in-game cutscenes. Jinx 3 was the first UGAGS game we developed, but the second one to launch, after Heads.

i spoke about UGAGS at Gamercamp Level 2.0, a Toronto convention celebrating the joy of video games.

October saw the publication of a now-infamous article about the Vortex Game Development Competition, where the previous year’s winners were revealed to have never worked on the winning game.

i experimented with a feature called Linkbait Tuesdays, where i used the Linkbait Generator to spit out randomized titles for blog posts. It wasn’t much appreciated by my readership, and didn’t appreciably increase blog traffic, so i killed the feature.

On Hallowe’en, we launched our second free games portal called ZombieGameWorld.com. If you know the song about the old woman who swallowed the fly, you’ll understand our challenge with these portals. We built WordGameWorld.com in order to attract a word game-playing audience, so that we could control the site’s ad inventory and find an audience for Spellirium. When the site suffered from flagging traffic, i decided to build a network of game portals; ZombieGameWorld.com was ostensibly created to help drive traffic to WordGameWorld.com, which should drive traffic to Spellirium.

To round out the fall, i grew a beard to win hockey tickets, despite not enjoying hockey. i spoke at an interactiveontario luncheon. And i wrote an article for Mochiland.com on the disgraceful refusal by contracting companies to credit their Flash game developers.

Winter

As the cold weather set in, i took a position at a private college teaching Unity 3D game development. i had hoped for a better experience than i had at Hervé Velasquez School for the Digitally Inclined, but no such luck: halfway through the course, which was dubbed Programming II (the students had supposedly been taught Flash/Actionscript for four months prior to my arrival), i had to dial everything back and re-teach programming basics to them. And by basics, i mean stuff like “What does the ‘=’ symbol do?” and “What is a variable?”

The class was only eight students, but i had no fewer than two of those students’ parents call or email me to ask why little Billy was getting low grades on tests. YaRly.

In this, i further proved the thesis in my contentious What’s Wrong with Ontario Colleges articles (Part 1 and Part 2). Helicopter parenting and failure aversion have created a generation of non-functional kids, which i later dubbed The Most Useless Generation. My diagnosis is that many college undergrads have escaped high school without ever understanding How to Be a Student (an article i wrote while teaching last winter, which i’ve only just posted now that i’ve put some distance between myself and the situation).

In the interest of helping young people be more successful, i offered My Prescription for (More) Successful Students, which my students all ignored, and i wrote a serious of articles called Understanding Programming to explain programming basics, which my students also ignored. Oh well. As the saying goes, you can lead a horse to water, but sometimes you just have a retarded horse.

2011

Spring

In 2011, we launched an exciting blog series called Pimp My Portal, detailing our struggles to drive traffic to ZombieGameWorld.com and WordGameWorld.com. The hook here was The World’s Most Meager Marketing Budget, a pot of just $100 that i spent on Fiverr.com to buy testimonial videos to promote the site, the rationale being that search loves video. The Old Lady who Swallowed the Fly reared her ugly head again, as i found that i had no audience to watch the videos to go to the portal to go to the OTHER portal to find out about Spellirium. The Pimp My Portal series is ongoing.

Around this time, we were commissioned by The Centre for Skills Development and Training to produce a series of games to help teach workplace skills to 15-30-year-olds. The resulting game, Summer in Smallywood, enabled us to make a number of improvements to UGAGS, including auto-save, debug tools, navigation meshes, saved game profiles, and threaded conversations. We’re looking forward to working further with The Centre in the coming year to expand our educational gaming experience.

In March, i admit i was feeling a little bit desperate and squirrely. Work was trickling into the shop in fits and starts, and i was really wondering whether renewing our lease would be wise. Wild-eyed and hungry at GDC, i was overcome with the need to let the world know i am here, like the tiny Whos living on a speck on a clover stalk, who ultimately issue a resounding YOPP! to show the jungle animals that they exist (and to keep from getting boiled in beezlenut oil).

To that end, i pulled some shenanigans at the conference, which came to be known as the famous GDC Coin Stunt. The resulting press on most major online games sites greased the wheels for what was to be our greatest victory yet.

Over the years, we’ve found it so difficult to drive enough steady Flash game development work that we haven’t been able to bank enough time or enough money to do our own thing. To date, the only chance we seem to get is TOJam, an annual weekend-long Toronto game jam, during which we always produce a complete and original game. Indeed, nearly every title in the Original Games section of our portfolio is a TOJam game, completed in one weekend by me alone.

This year, we used UGAGS to create Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure. i worked on the game with my 5-year-old daughter Cassandra. It was no accident that i was wearing my “I have all the coins” T-Shirt in the TOJam group photo this year. After the game went live, it went viral, initially being featured on many of the same sites that covered the coin stunt. In the few months since its launch, the ponycorns game has gone on to become an international sensation (i just granted an interview to a Japanese newspaper this week!).

With the ponycorns game, we took a very important step to improving our viability as a dev studio by launching the game on the Apple iPad and the BlackBerry Playbook. On the third day of its launch week, Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure was featured by Apple in its New & Noteworthy section.

Ponycorns also drove us to develop our first alternate revenue stream based on our original IP. We launched the Untold Booty merchandise store with a number of different ponycorns-based SKUs, and have been very happy with the results.

Throughout the year, i remained active with the IGDA Toronto Chapter, organizing some well-received events including the speed dating-style Game.Set.Match, the Open Mic Night rant session, Straight Outta TOJam: Pint-sized Postmortems, and the Fund in the Sun workshop.

Through the spring, we developed a great puzzle/platformer game called Spladder, which currently runs on a number of kids’ broadcaster sites – YTV.com. TVO.org and CBBC.co.uk among them.

We launched a new games portal called TowerDefenseGameWorld.com and filled it with free tower defense games, because it’s difficult to prove a theory about a network of games portals lending each other traffic if you only have two portals. We also gave a major upgrade to ZombieGameWorld.com by expanding it to feature zombie games and goodies on other platforms.

i know an old lady who swallowed a horse. She’s dead, of course.

Summer. Future.

We’ve come full circle. Spellirium remains unfinished, but we’re finally spending time on it again. We poked Kahoots with a stick to see if it was still twitching. Thankfully, it is! We’ve made some creative changes to it to spare a fellow indie game dev company some unpleasant legal strife; look forward to a Kahoots-related announcement in the coming months.

i’m writing the 3.x update to my Unity 3D book, which will be ready shortly (send me an email and i’ll add you to our notification list when the update is released).

Going forward, our plan is to leverage the success of the ponycorns game to make major in-roads into game development and education for kids (see our article on CBC.ca). i’m preparing a pilot project with Cassie’s elementary school this fall. We’re preparing the unstoppable UGAGS engine for a business-to-business, and then consumer, release – expect it to have a kid-friendly interface. We’re polling people for their interest in an iPhone/iPod version of the game (send us an email!). i’ll be delivering my conference session Ponycorns: Lightning in a Jar at the Screens festival this fall, and at other conventions throughout the year. Ponycorns is being translated into Japanese in anticipation of the Sense of Wonder Night at the Tokyo Games Show.

Untold Entertainment’s fifth year will be filled with low-life panda bears, daily word puzzles, gamesByKids, and more great articles about game development and education, peppered with rude jokes and stolen LOLcat pictures. Thanks so much for your support, everyone! i’m really looking forward to writing an amazing recap next year.

1. Hitler Has Escaped and is Disguised as Sigmund Freud

According to Wikipedia’s Diguise entry, the United States secret service circulated a Wanted poster throughout Germany in 1945, depicting a newly made-over Adolph Hitler. The fear was that Hitler may escape capture or defeat by the Allies, and was one haircut away from getting away scott free. It’s amazing how much more like a bitter, angry college professor he looks with that altered mustache and haircut, rather than the … you know … mass murderer of millions of people.

2. Keeping a Stiff Upper Lip During the Zombie Apocalypse

YouTube user SimCal demonstrates the cheat code in Plants Vs. Zombies that gives all the zombies mustaches:

3. Former Con Man Helps the FBI Catch a Crook

Wired Magazine tells the tale of a former con man who ratted on a young hacker interested in defrauding automated teller machines. The FBI stepped in and, with the help of a fake mustache and the alias “Leo”, were able to catch the crook red-handed.

4. Hair Transplant Goes Horribly Wrong

As payback for some past pranks, this YouTube user fashions a mustache from his short n’ curlies and convinces his girlfriend to wear it.

5. Tiny Clay Hooligans Terrorize Fake England

Serendipitously, this randomly-generated headline dovetails nicely into one of our original projects. Kahoots is a fun crime-themed puzzle game modeled entirely in clay, in which tiny mustachioed villains commit modestly heinous acts.

Is there an outrageous mustache fraud i missed? It’s very likely. Let me know in the comments section!

For at least a decade, all my game development endeavors had one thing in common: none of them were ever finished.

With these words, indie game developer Jacob A. Stevens established himself as my soulmate, and endeared himself to my heart forever. From this point forward, i will be there to peer into his kitchen through the shrubbery outside his house, as if locked in a trance.

That is to say, i can’t recommend Jacob’s Gamedev.net article Practical Tips for Independent Game Development highly enough. Our experiences and opinions are so common, i have to wonder if he actually dug through my trash and assumed my identity to write the piece.

Hang on a tick …

Alright, i’ve just looked out my kitchen window and have discovered that Jacob is actually peering through my shrubbery at me. i’ve waved to indicate that he can come inside, but i think he just wants to watch. Oo-er, missus. Soul mates indeed.

Jacob drops so many truth bombs throughout the article that i believe he should be arrested and tried for truth crimes. Here are a few salient points that stood out while i read:

Build the Game, Not the Infrastructure

It’s easy to get distracted by tasks that don’t directly contribute to the final product, like building tools and editors. Hardcode the levels.

i’ve spoken to many a fledgling game developer who’s said “our engine is 75% complete!” Good for you. How’s your game doing? We technically-minded perfectionists (myself included) are often so caught up in making pretty, slick tools that by the time we burn out on a project, we haven’t actually produced something a person can play. It’s far better to have something tiny, playable and rough around the edges than a slick level editor that you abandoned at 75%.

Are You Sure You’re Cut Out For This?

Lots of people think they want to make games.

To quote Jack Black, “i’ve got sour news for you, Jack. It’s not that easy. Are you willing to make the commitment to rock-hard tasty abs WASHER-BOARD STYLE, glistening in the sun??” The classic fable of the little red hen comes to mind – everyone wants to play games, and everyone wants to have made games, but very few people are actually equipped to deal with the mental and physical anguish involved in making games. At the end of the day, most of us are ducks, cats and pigs, rather than little red hens.

“Who will help me code the user interface?”
“Not i,” said the practically everybody.

Just because you enjoy eating ice cream, doesn’t mean you’d enjoy working for minimum wage in an ice cream factory! Try on game development in small doses, and decide – really decide – whether you want to play games, or make them.

Self-Propulsion

In trying to find the right people to partner up with, even if those people have never made a game before, Jacob says:

The key is to look for demonstrated self-motivation.

We have a saying in our family: the drive is the talent. None of us are particularly good artists, musicians, programmers, businessmen, jugglers or bow-hunters, but we do possess a heaping helping of drive, or ambition. That drive is what possesses us to go ahead and learn bow-hunting when it’s called for. And though we may not emerge the world’s best bow-hunters on the other side, at the end of the day we got it done. We’re like those characters in Heroes who can absorb other superheroes’ abilities. Or we’re like the writers of Heroes who re-trained to become accountants just to escape their jobs on that show, because it friggin’ stinks.

When i got my first job in the games industry, i was hired for my drive. It certainly wasn’t for my artistic or programming talent – i had neither. And i had never made a game before in my life. But there’s a lot to be said for motivation. i don’t know if this is an ingrained quality in a person, or whether it can be practiced and improved upon. Either way, i’d be more likely to partner with, say, a decent and motivated artist than a fantastic artist who was somewhat of a slouch.

U Ay-yi-yi

A common misconception is that a great game starts with a great idea. StarCraft, Zelda, and Resident Evil are genius games because their creators painstakingly refined the details of the games until they were virtually flawless.

My opinion here may be due to the current struggles we’re facing with our games, but in my up-to-the-minute opinion, the very best strategy is this: start with a game concept so small, you figure there’s no possible way it could possibly stand on its own as a complete game. Then build it – that’s the easy part. Then go build the UI – the buttons, the title screen, the win and lose conditions, the log in, the sign-up, the high scores, the level selection screen, the error messages, the credits and the modal dialogues. If you fail anywhere, that’s where it’s gonna happen. You can always go back later and expand the game idea, but bear this in mind: 10% of the work is building the game, while 90% of the work is building everything surrounding the game.

i can tell whether i’m going to enjoy a free online game within the first three seconds. If care and attention have been paid to the intro logos, the title screen and the Play button, i know i’m in good hands. But if i see an unincluded font outline on that Play button, or an amateurish load bar, i don’t stick around long.

If you put together a complete game, with all the fixings that i mentioned above (registration and high scores are optional, of course), then you can go back and start building out your game’s features. In fact, if i were to teach game development to students, i’d be tempted to have them start with the front-of-house donut, and work in the actual gameplay once all that jazz was in place. Your appetite for feature creep will be a LOT lower once you consider all the UI you’ll need to support it.

Why Haven’t You Launched Any Games?

Case in point: both of our original games in our development queue, Kahoots™ and Interrupting Cow Trivia have been finished for months. We haven’t worked on the Kahoots™ gameplay since about February. This whole time, we’ve been programming the dozens of dialogue pop-ups and screens that facilitate the gameplay. And we just released a first look at ICT‘s graphics and theme yesterday – now we’re faced with the grim task of doodling up the scads of checkboxes, input fields, windows, prompts, scrollbars and messages that comprise the game’s visuals.

So you want to be a solo indie game dev? Start out by testing your passion for being an indie UI designer, and see where that takes you!

Well, oh ye of little faith – feast thine eyes on THIS!

We Need Your Help

Many months ago, we commissioned character artist Kelly Conley to draw a cow for our game. His only direction was to “draw a retarded cow”. After many revisions of cow facial expressions that ranged from inane to confused, and from bewildered to aloof, he finally nailed that elusive retarded cow look that everyone wants but no one can have.

We’ve been sitting on this cow design the whole time, wondering whether or not the world was ready for it – wondering whether society was willing to accept such a free-wheeling but intellectually-challenged bovine. So after much deliberation (and a desperate need for new content now that we’re writing daily posts), we decided to leave the deciding up to you.

If you feel passionately either way about this cow, please indicate on our poll whether you hold this cow character design to be totally Awesome, or udderly N’Awsome:

As with our previous poll about fake British town names for Kahoots™, your feedback could decide whether this cow becomes the unfortunate face of Interrupting Cow Trivia, or whether it’s back to the (literal) drawing board.

Not Your Father’s Cow?

And if you have played the game but don’t really like it, we don’t really care what you think! Go show the cow to someone who’s into trivia games … your dad, for instance. Yes – please show this cow to your 40+ year old father and ask him what he thinks, because we have a hunch he’s our target audience. You can go back to your tower-defending and zombie-shotgunning once you ask dear old dad to answer our cow poll.

(note: be sure you possess the strength to pry your laptop from your father’s white-knuckled death grip once he starts playing Interrupting Cow Trivia and gets hopelessly hooked, ’cause that’s gonna happen.)

Moo.

Enter New and Better Technologies

One of those technologies that you’ve likely heard of is Unity 3D. Unity (for short) is a game creation tool with a similar schtick as Flash – players accept a one-time download of a web player plugin, and from there they can download and display content created for the player. In this case, the content is THREE-DEE, baby. And i’m not talking about Flash 3D, which is like drinking non-alcoholic vodka, or even Papervision 3D and its ilk, which is like trying to turn a car into a plane by stapling cardboard wings to it. i’m talking all three dees, in glorious Technicolor, with … Blast Processing and 64 … i dunno … blytes of processing and render power. (Technical specs are not my strong suit. Could you tell?)

i love this post by Ethical Games, Confessions of a Flash Game Developer, which sums the situation up very nicely.

The Unity 3D Web Player, which i encourage you to download now in anticipation of all the awesome stuff we’ll be building, is currently 3.18MB. That’s only slightly larger than the Flash Player plugin at 1.87 MB. Penetration rate is the the real difference – i heard somewhere that Flash Player, with its various incarnations, is the most installed piece of software of all time. i think penetration is up somewhere around a thousand percent (all numbers approximated).

But What Does It Cost?

From a developer standpoint, price is a big difference. Unity rocks out on multiple platforms including Wii and iPhone, but it also rocks out on different prices. The product appears deceptively inexpensive at first, but when you look at purchasing a real software solution and the accompanying programs it requires, you’ll find yourself wondering which credit union or train you’ll have to rob to afford it. Leave it to penny-pinching me to give you the breakdown:

Product #1 Unity 3D core engine. You must purchase this engine to be able to develop on any other non-PC/Mac platform. (ie you can’t just skip ahead and buy Unity iPhone on its own)

• Unity Indie – $200
• Unity Pro – $1500

Next up is the iPhone license. The Pro version is pretty crucial as it gives you stripping rights, which means that you can disable large chunks of the Unity3D framework that you don’t need, freeing up space and memory for your game. You also don’t have to display the Unity logo in front of your game.

• Unity iPhone Basic – $400
• Unity iPhone Advanced – $1500

Then there’s the Wii license. i see a lot of people mentioning it when they talk about Unity, but they obviously haven’t done their research – otherwise, it wouldn’t be a thought in their minds. You’ll notice from the Unity 3D pricing page that you have to contact the company to ask about Wii license pricing, and that it’s also listed with the source code for their entire app. It’s the same rule as restaurants: if they don’t list the price, you can’t afford it. When i spoke with a Unity 3D rep at the Casual Connect conference in Seattle this year, he intimated that the then-current pricing was $10000.

Suffice it to say, Unity Wii is not part of our current strategy.

But That’s Not All

One of the biggest barriers to entry for us exploring the Unity 3D space is the 3D software we’d need. It’s all fine and dandy to have a great program like Unity with a smooth pipeline that integrates with a number of leading 3D software packages, but you need one of those 3D software packages, don’t you? The enormous cost of these packages has led us to explore various less expensive options – Cheetah3D, Blender, Sketch-Up … but in the end, none of them are as familiar or decent as the package i learned on in college, 3DStudio Max.

Here’s the trouble:

• Autodesk 3ds Max – $3495

Ouch. There used to be a lower-priced entry level program called gmax that the company discontinued, because they realized that they weren’t getting 3495 bloody dollars for it.

Putting It All Together

So let’s tally that all up. We have two developers, so we’d want two copies of Unity 3D core . But i figure we only need 1 pro license for deployment (i think?). We’d also only need 1 copy of Unity 3D iPhone, because we only have one Mac (and an Apple computer is required for iPhone deployment). Ideally, we’d buy two copies of 3ds Max, but unless and until the government approves gay marriage and i get hitched to Ritchie Rich, we’re looking at one copy.

So that’s:

• 1 Unity 3D Core Pro License – $1500
• 1 Unity 3D Indie License – $200
• 1 Unity 3D iPhone Pro License – $1500
• 1 Autodesk 3ds Max seat – 3495 friggin’ simoleans

Grand total: $6695

The Small Favour

i hope this has been an enjoyable learning experience, and a glimpse into the types of things that give a small business owner a grand mal seizure. The last time i spent over $7000 on something, it had a roof and indoor plumbing.

But you can help! The Unity 3D crew did a podcast interview wit the folks at Indie Game Dev Podcast Show. They gave the site a free Unity iPhone license to give away in a contest, which we entered. We very rarely enter contests, but in this case, all you had to do was write up a game idea. Preference will be given to the entrant who is the most likely to finish his project.

Well looky here … who’s got a perfectly AWESOME-LOOKING game in the works called Kahoots, which was modeled enirely in clay and built for the iPhone screen spec? (Answer: us.)

i get annoyed when people say “go here and vote for us!” What if their entry isn’t the best one? In this case, i’ll only say “Go here!” Click the link. Read the entries. And if you like what we have to offer the most, just leave a quick comment to tell the site owners you want to see us bring Kahoots™ to the iPhone.

According to the site, “Winner gets all the Unity tools needed to make an iPhone game using their platform.” i don’t know if this means they’re giving away the core engine along with the iPhone license, and whether they’re giving away pro or indie licenses (i suspect indie), but at the very least, it’ll knock $400 off the cost of our Unity 3D ambitions. And at the very most, it’ll cut the total down by $3000. Wowzers!

So search your heart! And if you find it in yourself to vote for us (we’re entry #8), i thank you very, very kindly. Voting ends today!

Update

1. We won … hooray! Thanks for voting.
2. A few quick questions to Tom Higgins from the Unity team cleared up some of my questions. Since a single company is not allowed to mix licenses (Pro and Indie), the cost of my software solution jumps up by a big $2400 to $9095. That’s almost ten-large for Unity3D iPhone for two people, and one copy of 3ds Max.

   By biting the bullet and learning Blender instead of buying 3ds Max, the price comes down to $5600. That still be one spicy meat-a-ball.

But i’m hoping that all of this research and planning and thinking and fretting will pay off for our company. One of our bidness goals this year is to release at least two products that will earn us some residual income. “Some” residual income is our barest minimum goal, with “lots” as a preferable target. (All estimates are approximated.)

If you’ve been with us all year, you’ll know that we’ve been working sporadically on a fun crime-themed puzzle game called Kahoots™, which we’ve modelled entirely in clay. After a lot of reading, attending conferences, and talking to you, our awesome readership, we’ve developed an ambitious publishing plan for Kahoots™ that is both revolutionary AND awesomepants. As many of the readers here are game developers themselves, i encourage and entreat you all to comment on this release strategy, give us your feedback and input, and help us handle the launch of Kahoots™ later this year with the utmost amazingosity.

Our Three-fold Release Strategy

With Kahoots™, we’re attempting something that i think no one’s ever done before. If i’m wrong, please correct me. i’m not trying to get into Guiness or anything – i’m just trying to maximize our ability to profit from the game. We’re going to try to make Kahoots™ available in three forms at launch:

1. On casual downloadable portals
2. On free-to-play Flash portals
3. Via direct sales on the Untold Entertainment website

Casual What-Now?

A casual downloadable portal is one where players download a time-limited trial version of the game – usually an executable (exe) file. At the end of the hour-long trial, the player can opt to purchase a license to play the remaining x hours. The big players in the casual downloadable space include Big Fish Games, iWin, WildTangent and RealArcade.

The big fish in that pond is definitely Big Fish. After a recent price war with Amazon Games, Big Fish has tuned its pricing down to $6.99 for all of the titles it distributes. (BFG also has a free-to-play section on the site, but let’s keep this simple.)

Since BFG has such enormous distribution, they should be a major factor in any release strategy in the casual downloadable space. When i heard the gents from 2D Boy (World of Goo) speak at the Game Developers’ Conference 2009, they strongly advocated a worldwide simultaneous launch with a consistent price tag. Since BFG are rock-solid on their pricing, that means that for better or for worse, the full version of Kahoots™ will cost $6.99 USD, everywhere.

(Naturally, we’ll have to develop a different release strategy when Kahoots™ is published to the iPhone, as gamers there refuse to pay more than seven cents per title)

(Formerly) Free-to-Play

Why not have our cake and eat it, too? Since companies like GamerSafe, MochiMedia and HeyZap have released virtual payment platforms specifically for Flash games, we can also monetize Kahoots through the free-to-play networks.

The process on free-to-play portals will look identical to the casual downloadable portals, except without the exe download: play a limited version of the game, and pay a one-time fee of $6.99 for the full version of the game using a Flash virtual currency transaction. i cooked up this plan when it dawned on me that microtransactions didn’t actually have to be micro.

One of our readers, Paolo (AKA GameDevigner), gave me the idea of building a downloadable AIR app to better mirror the experience players would have on the casual downloadable portals. Pay your seven bucks, and you can “have” the game. This is certainly something worth considering.

Direct Sales

Kahoots™ will be available on UntoldEntertainment.com for $6.99 USD. i’m still not sure how to pull this off. The trouble is with DRM (digital rights management). i can very easily just provide the exe link and put the game behind a PayPal wall, but that does nothing for me if people want to share that exe around.

So there are a number of companies who offer “wrappers”, which are like digital soft taco shells that you roll around your content, and they take care of the whole serial number/version lock/DRM thing for you. The trouble is that these wrappers are either

• hella expensive in the short run, requiring large up-front fees
• hella expensive in the long run, taking a 6-10% cut of profits (in addition to the payment provider’s fee)
• both. Some products charge the fee AND take the cut. Then they slap your mama in the face.

Another intriguing and inflammatory thing the 2D Boy guys said was that you should not worry about DRMing your game. They said you shouldn’t waste precious time and money cooking up a protection scheme, because every game in the history of foreverville has been pirated, and once the protection layer is cracked, it’s like having your unprotected exe floating around out there anyway, so why waste your time?

When i see the business models for a lot of these sharky wrapper companies, i’m tempted to follow 2D Boys’ advice.

i’ll Buy THAT for $1.00 (plus $5.99 USD)

So the other part of the direct sales equation is payment provision. There are a great many payment providers out there who will hook you up, enabling you to offer a myriad more payment options to your site beyond your standard PayPal offering (and those of you who aren’t in North America can attest to the fact that PayPal is not an international phenomenon). The trick with these payment providers is, again, money. The percentage they take on each purchase starts high, and goes down as you sell lots of stuff, but between the wrapper sharks and the payment sharks, you can wind up giving away a good chunk of your gross income before the money even hits your account.

If you don’t go with a payment provider, the other option is to roll your own service by getting an Authorize.net account and an SSL certificate. But the problem there, again, is money. i know i want players to be able to buy Kahoots™ right off my site, but i’m obviously struggling with the logistics. If you want to chime in on this, now is the time!

Value Add

Big Fish rules state that your game has to exist within their “walled garden” – that means no injected ads, and no server calls. And no server calls means local (same computer) high scores only.

If i play my cards right, people who buy Kahoots™ from our site will be funnelling more money directly to us. So there’s an incentive to make a direct sale worthwhile for our customers. Since it’s our site, and we can do as we please, we can offer a version of the game with high scores in it. Come to it, we can offer the same to customers on the free-to-play sites as well.

Ads

There’s no reason why the demo version on the free-to-play sites shouldn’t be prefaced with CPMStar or MochiMedia ads. It’s not going to pay any big bills for us, but it makes sense to include ads.

True Microtransactions

As long as we’re implementing one or more microtransaction services into Kahoots™, we may as well add a few more ways for players to pay. As it plays out, it appears that games that make the most money on microtransactions are the ones that a) offer multiple items at varying price points and b) sell items transparently, and at the moment when engagement and investment are at their highest.

The currency in Kahoots™ is called munnypence. You earn munnypence by playing levels, and you can spend munnypence on items in the Curio Shop. These items are essentially cheats that help you get through the more difficult levels (if you need the help). A lousy player won’t be able to beat the more difficult levels, so he’ll be forced to grind earlier levels for more munnypence to buy cheats.

OR ….

He can buy munnypence.

And dig this: Kahoots™ also has “QuickPlay” modes, which are the same game types that you find in Story Mode, except the rules are tweaked slightly and the games are tied to high scores. i want prospective players to experience all the relevant content in the game, so i don’t want to lock them out of QuickPlay. So i’ll make QuickPlay cost munnypence. And each time you play a QuickPlay mode, it gets exponentially more expensive to play next time. So the non-purchasing players (or “hobos“, as i like to call them) can either

• grind the early levels in the demo to earn munnypence to play QuickPlay modes
• pay their $6.99 USD to unlock the whole game and play the QuickPlay modes for free
• buy munnypence with real-world dollars so that they can keep playing the QuickPlay modes

Multiple Languages

Kahoots™ was designed from Day One to support EFIGS languages – English, French, Italian, German and Spanish. (No Southeast Asian languages, because they frighten and confuse me). This will enable us to get a much wider reach for the game than an English-only version.

Multiple Platforms

Since Kahoots™ is being developed in Flash, we can produce Mac and Linux downloadable versions fairly easily (he said, never having done it before). Multiple platforms and multiple languages will hopefully translate to multiple money.

Charity

i want to donate 10% of the profits on the game to charity. It’s partly because customers may be more likely to buy a game if some of the cash goes to charity, and partly because i’m a Christian and i want to help the helpless. But to that end, i don’t really know how to handle the charity-choosing … i don’t want to offend or scare people off by choosing a Christian charity, but i’m also uncomfortable sending the money to DonorsChoose.org, where the it could go God-knows-where. (For example, i’m far more sympathetic to charitable causes that benefit humans rather than animals. Sorry, puppies and kitties.) i would likely want to send money to an organization like Compassion International, a child sponsorship program.

<RANT-O-RAMA>

And let me just say this: if folks are so hung up despising Christianity that they’d rather see a child starve to death than see him clothed, fed, and taught Bible lessons once a week, it’s all up for humanity. Many opponents of Christianity themselves were clothed, fed, and taught Bible lessons once a week, and they somehow managed to escape the seductive power of a faith that demands a difficult, disciplined lifestyle. Don’t worry: sponsored children in Haiti have all their lives to reject Christianity just like you have. Let’s please make sure they survive to see that day. Buy them some rice, for God’s sake.

</RANT-O-RAMA>

Please note, lest i be accused of shady dealings, that i’m committing 10% of profits on Kahoots™ to charity. The game has to break even first. 10% of any money we receive after that point will go towards charity. If we break even, we live to code another day, and can pull in more money for charity with our next game.

The Game is Afoot

So that’s the publishing plan in a nutshell. i’ve kept my cards close to my chest regarding numbers, because as it turns out, Kahoots™ really was a rather expensive game to build. i don’t want people to see the budget and to say “for what??” Suffice it to say that our Art Director was very fond of gold-dipped fruit, and that i would commute two blocks to work every day in my private jet because city sidewalks make my feet itchy.

But when Kahoots™ is released, i am committed to maintaining a thermometer on the site to keep you abreast of how close the game has come to hitting the break-even point.

A simultaneous release across casual downloadable and free-to-play portals, with an identical price tag attached to both streams. Has that ever been done before? If it has, please clue me in! i’d love to know whether it was a good idea or a bad idea, and whether we’re marching to meet our doom.

And if you have anything to say about or plan, for good or for ill, please speak up! Now’s the time for you lurkers who have their Masters degrees in finance to come out of the woodwork and post.

To read more about Kahoots™, be sure to check out the Kahoots™ Designer Diary.

We auditioned a half-dozen actors for the role of the Chief Inspector. As soon as we heard Gray Gleason’s read, we knew we’d found The One. His voice was an exact match for the voice in my head (one of the voices in my head, anyway :) Give Gray a shot if you need v/o work. He’s quick, professional, and his low range “trailer guy” voice can lend a lot of gravity to your next high fantasy epic.

The intro was built over a series of very late nights leading up to Casual Connect. We had run into some opposition from the portals claiming that the game wasn’t high quality enough, and i had to explain that the big blank gaps on the title screen and intro scene (you beta testers know what i’m talking about) were not actually final. Sheesh. i figured that having a completed title screen and intro would go a long way towards convincing a portal to sell my game and claim 65% of the proceeds.

Anyway, the strategy worked out, and now a number of outlets are excited about the game. i actually got the chance to meet a few people on submissions duty who had seen the first playable, and dismissed it as Yet Another Match-3 Game. Those of you who have played Kahoots™ know that although you are selecting groups of three, the game has as much to do with Bejewelled as chevre has to do with Cheez Whiz.

Either way, the game is still pretty cheesy.

You can find the article in this month’s edition of KidScreen. Or, if you’ve become so accustomed to reading your computer screen that your eyeballs can no longer make sense of words on printed paper, check out the digital version of the article here:

KidScreen June 2009: iPhone game innovates with stop motion

Feeling Testy?

The first round of the Kahoots Closed Public Beta is over, and we’re working dilligently to get the next version up online for our testers. We’ll likely extend a fresh invitation to help us test at that point; all beta testers get their names in the credits of the final version of Kahoots, and eternal life in heaven with Jesus. (No guarantees on that one – please consult your holy scriptures for up-to-the-minute information). Keep up with our daily Kahoots progress on our message boards:

Thrill to the Spectacle of: Kahoots Beta Tests Updates

We’ve been building Kahoots™, our fun crime-themed puzzle game (which we’ve modeled entirely in clay) to the iPhone/iPod Touch screen spec, which is approximately 478 x effin’ tiny. i even went out and got one of those Apple tattoos, because that’s supposed to count for something. The one thing we haven’t done is to actually learn Objective-C and deploy something to the iPhone. Pfft. A minor detail.

With every step i take towards learning this new (to me) technology, it feels like a wall erupts out of the ground and up into my face:

1. An industry pal told me that the CoreAnimation libraries for the iPhone were very, very slow, and that even the simplest game slowed to a crawl. i would need to learn to program in openGL-ES.
2. Terrified by the prospect of having to learn the square bracket-crazy OBJ-C and openGL-ES (whatever THAT was), i was seduced by the apparent C#/javascript-based simplicity of Unity3D, a game engine for creating browser-based and iPhone games
3. While evaluating Unity, every time i tried to access the software’s online documentation, their website was down
4. With Unity’s site proving unreliable, i resolved again to learn OBJ-C
5. At a recent iPhone developers meeting here in Toronto, devs told me that OBJ-C is mixed in with C++, so i should learn C++ while i’m at it
6. At the same meeting, other devs mentioned that the whole thing is hung on C. Now i was faced with the prospect of learning Objective-C, C++, C and openGL-ES (whatever THAT was)

Fine. If that was my lot in life, then so be it. i’m not a stupid guy. i can learn things, like words and junk. And sometimes stuff. Sometimes i can learn stuff. And i wanted to program things for the iPhone, so if i had to learn four new languages in my off-hours, i was prepared to do that.

Free Smarts from the Stanf’

Fellow devs mentioned repeatedly that i could audit a new publicly-available Stanford iPhone development course. The lectures are all recorded and posted for free on iTunes, and the assignments are all available online. Great! And the only pre-requisite was familiarity with Object-Oriented Programming, which i have under my belt since learning ActionScript 3 this past year. So off i went.

i watched the first two lectures, and then turned my attention to the assignments. Assignment #1a had me dragging things around the screen and breathing with my mouth open. No problem. i sailed right through it.

Assignment #1b asked me to write a few methods. Okay … no biggie. i know what a method is. i just didn’t know the OBJ-C format for writing a method. i know it starts with a minus sign, and you put the return type in there first, or some junk …

Assignment #1b asked me to open the documentation. So i did. Assignment #1b wanted me to look up the path-finding method for an NSString. i wanted to know how to write a method first. So i searched “method”. And then “method structure.” Nothing. Of course not – language references don’t exist to tell you how to build a car, or even to provide pictures of what a finished car looks like. They’re just encyclopedias of nuts and bolts you’ve never heard of.

To Google!

i started looking up OBJ-C code examples. Everything i found was needlessly complex. i just wanted the basic structure for a basic method with no arguments and no return types, and Google was all “but then you can flim-wang your fozzbuster!” And i was all “no thanks, Google! Just passing through.” And then i backed away slowly, trying not to make any sudden movements.

What was my last resort for help, short of asking my 60+-year-old mother for programming advice?

To IRC!

Internet Relay Chat is a magical place filled with verbally-abusive and generally terrible people who will sometimes help you with your problems if you appeal to their supposedly superior intellect and delusions of grandeur. i asked some folks in a related channel if they could refer me to a clean code example that would show me how to write a function. They copy/pasted exactly what i had written in XCode, which was throwing me errors.

One IRC person said that knowledge of OBJ-C was a pre-req for the Stanford course. i respectfully disagreed: the course syllabus only required a knowledge of Object Oriented Programming. Then he said something unkind about my 60+-year-old mother. i won’t repeat it.

Another person suggested that i go through Apple’s tutorial. So off i went to the Apple Developer Site, and found the Your First iPhone Application tutorial. Now i was getting somewhere!

“First” Apparently Has a Number of Meanings

The preamble to the tutorial mentioned that i should have both Objective-C knowledge AND Object-Oriented Programming knowledge before proceeding. It linked me to two different whitepapers. Somewhat afeared, i decided to take Apple’s advice and read up. One of the links was broken. Almost completely out of options by this point, i started in on the other link:Object-Oriented Programming with Objective-C”.

i made it about 3/4 of the way down the page before looking around to see if i was on hidden camera or something. If this was it – if THIS was the most basic, square-one starting point that Apple recommended for someone in their iPhone Developer Program, then clearly i’d have to think about evolving into a new species so i could fly off of this planet and nuke the site from orbit.

Here’s a taste of what the whitepaper offered:

A programming language can be judged by the kinds of abstractions that it enables you to encode. You shouldn’t be distracted by extraneous matters or forced to express yourself using a vocabulary that doesn’t match the reality you’re trying to capture.

i read that sentence, and then i noticed a little feedback box at the bottom of the page. It asked “Hey. How ya doin? Are you digging the article so far? Hey? Has it met your needs, kiddo? If not, click here.”

i clicked so hard on that button that i dented my web browser.

What followed was somewhat of a tirade. The feedback went something like:

Are you serious? Did you guys proofread this before publishing it? It sounds like it was written by Little Lord Fauntleroy.

i called the whitepaper heady and pretentious. And then, for good measure, i threw in something about Apple’s 60+-year-old-mother. That bit was fresh in my mind already.

But if this is the starting point, this is the starting point. Apparently, against my best wishes and hope for my own sanity, i somehow need to learn three new programming languages across two paradigms in reverse order of development AND openGL-ES (whatever THAT is) if i want to build games for the iPhone … which i do, because i’ve heard you can make like NINETY MILLION DOLLARS on a FART APP.

Or i can save myself some pain and suffering and eat a chimichanga. (** FRAAAPP! **) Ninety million dollars please?

What i said to parents who were watching was “get involved in kids’ stuff”. The gist was that it’s not difficult to sit on the couch and watch what your kids are playing. i think a lot of parents worry that they won’t understand what’s going on. “Ooh! Video games? No – not for me. i mean, Daniel certainly seems to enjoy them, and i let him play them with his friends sometimes, but i’m usually out here in the dining room knitting toilet paper cozies.”

Survey Says … ?

Enter Microsoft with a survey where 60% of the youthful respondents say they wish their parents would become more involved with gaming:

http://www.joystiq.com/2009/03/06/study-kids-want-their-folks-involved-in-gaming/

This is obviously one of those surveys that Microsoft commissioned hoping it would translate into better XBox 360 game sales for the family demographic they’ve been pursuing (see Family Lame Night, XBox 360 Markets to Stay-At-Home Moms). But it punctuates a persistent peeve of mine. Count the number of times you’ve heard something like this:

i took my kids to see that new movie [Heavy Metal/Watership Down/Fritz the Cat/South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut/Final Fantasy/The Simpsons Movie], and i couldn’t believe that it contained [swearing/nudity/violence]. i mean, it’s a cartoon, right? It’s supposed to be for kids.

It reminds me of the time i went to see Taking Care of Business with Charles Grodin and James Belushi (i wasn’t actually with Charles Grodin and James Belushi … they were in the movie). A local radio DJ announced during the afternoon drive that there was nudity in the flick, so the theatre was packed with 12-year-old boys that night. One of them was sitting in front of me, and when Loryn Locklin took off her bikini top and i heard the sound of a hundred tiny erections springing up all around me like popcorn, the kid’s aunt/mother/babysitter shot him a furious look. i heard him whisper, defensively, “What?? i thought it was a comedy!”

It annoys me that people are dumb and confuse the medium with the message. Yes, you can film a claymation porno. Yes, you can print a Bible tract that drops the F-bomb. And yes, you can cram as much gratuitous gore and digital dry-humping and exploding faces into a video game as you can pack onto a DVD. No, you should not take your family to see The Watchmen just because it’s about superheroes, a subject which has traditionally been the territory of pre-pubescent boys. And would you like to know why? Because those boys grow into adulthood and start making cartoons and comic books and video games, yet they somehow haven’t left that pre-pubescent boy mentality behind.

That’s why we have a sequel to Crank, where the protagonist has to continually electrocute himself to keep from dying.

That’s why we have Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories, where you have to bribe picketing factory workers with prostitutes to appease a mob boss.

And that’s why your little boys are growing up borderline mentally retarded, worshipping gun violence and idolizing criminals: because you won’t sit your stupid ass down on the couch and watch what they’re playing.

Don’t let little boys raise your little boys. Get involved in kids’ stuff.

Step 1: The Sketch

The Captain – the blustery, jowly, and slightly daft head of Londonton’s Spotland Pond municipal police force – began his life as a sketch on our office whiteboard. From there, our Art Director Mark created a doodle to use as a placeholder in the game:

i didn’t feel like this rendition was quite on the money, so i offered my own take:

What i meant to convey with this stellar rendition is that the captain should be older, with a big white poofy moustache. The brown-moustachioed Captain was too young-looking and friendly. Mark took another crack at it:

This sketch was much closer to what i pictured the captain looking like. But the eyebrows seemed too meek, and the moustache looked like it had given up all hope and was about to jump off his face and out of a fifth-story window. Still, we worked with this sketch in the game for a few weeks and got pretty used to it.

Step 2: The First Model

When it came time to model the Captain in clay, blue was an obvious choice for a police officer. We used a different, lighter blue than the one we used for the criminals. Mark also suggested the bullet body shape for the Captain and the two other irregular characters, again to distinguish them from the rabble who appeared in the rest of the game. We modelled the Captain long before we were ready to use him, most likely because we were sick of modelling interface pieces. The interface stuff was very straight-edged and meticulous. You can really stretch out your legs when you model a character or a prop.

This was our first clay version of the Captain:

He sat on our props shelf for weeks on end while we modelled, photographed and integrated the interface and props. At long last, once most of the essential game elements were complete and integrated, it was time to build the Spotland Pond HQ set that would house the Captain. (We’ll do a separate diary entry to tell you all about the sets!)

i had a few problems with our first clay Captain:

1. Too much blue – i decided i wanted a black cap.
2. The moustache was too flat and not billowy enough. (It’s hard to see here, but from other angles, the moustache became a pancake)
3. The eye-to-moustache-to-eyebrow ratio, and the gap between the eyes, were off. Eye placement is absolutely crucial to my concept of good character design, and there was no way i could convey this to someone else. It’s just a very personal, particular thing.
4. The eyebrows were too stern.
5. Overall, the Captain was too angry and not appealing enough.

The sternness issue came up again as we auditioned voice actors for the role of the Captain. Many of the vocie tests came back sounding angry and unfun. The type of character i wanted was comically gruff – a kind of vaguely silly Monty Python-esque bag of hot air that you couldn’t take too seriously. Finally, one of the voice actors we auditioned came back with the PERFECT take on the Captain. His read actually inspired me to remodel the character to suit the voice. Here’s what we came up with:

This was the Captain i wanted for Kahoots. His eyebrows are somewhat stern, but you can’t take him too seriously with that poofy moustache. The enormous star on the cap is more cartoonish. And the eye-to-moustache-to-eyebrow ratio was just what i pictured. This is the Captain who will appear in the final version of the game.

End Cap

Here’s the evolution of the Captain seen all together:

For more insider info on the creation of Kahoots, be sure the check out the Kahoots™ Designer Diary! You can talk about Kahoots™ on our Message Boards.

Listen Closely

FACT: Kahoots™, is entering its CLOSED PUBLIC BETA.

FACT: Untold Entertainment Inc. just launched their SHINY NEW VIRGIN MESSAGE BOARDS.

These two facts may seem ENTIRELY UNRELATED, but they are not. These facts compel you to act. Here is what you must do:

1. Go get an account on the boards
2. Cruise over to the Kahoots™ forum.
3. Click on the Beta Sign-Up sub-forum and post a new topic, indicating that you wish to be included in the Kahoots™ Closed Public Beta
4. Wait patiently.

Behind the scenes, we will collect the usernames of those who are interested. Once Kahoots™ is ready to test (and lo, that day is nigh), we will provide you with a TOP SECRET GAME LINK where you can be among the first on OUR PLANET EARTH to play Kahoots.

If you test the game, talk about it on the boards, and sign a waiver saying that you’re testing out of the goodness of your heart and not for any monetary recompense, we will be happy to give you a credit as a tester in the final product.

What’d He Say??

That’s right. Your own game credit. In a published game. And all you gotta do is play the game and spout off on it. Pretty sweet, huh?

Tell your friends, tell your dog (though who knows what your dog will care about it? i mean, dogs don’t even speak English), and conscript your family members to take part in this once in a lifetime offer.

But Wait – There’s More!

There actually isn’t any more, but i felt compelled to say that. Just go sign up – we can’t guarantee your participation past the cut-off date.

What Good is a Game Credit?

You may have heard that game testing is one sure-fire way to break into the games industry. Whether that’s true or not, many large game companies require applicants to list titles they have worked on, and some specify that you need to be credited on those titles. Even so-called entry-level testing positions are harder and harder to come by. Any experience you have in the industry on a launched title is going to give you a leg up over someone with no experience on a launched title. Dig?

And even if you don’t care a fig about getting into the industry, at the very least you can show the game to grandma and say “Well GOLL-EEE, grandma!! Lookit whut i did!!” Then you must point at the game where your name shows up. That’ll teach grandma to sass-talk you all the damned day.

Canadian game studio strives for something different

TORONTO, ON – March 17 2009 – Untold Entertainment Inc., a Canadian game studio specializing in online casual games for kids, happily announces the development of Kahoots™. Kahoots™ is a challenging game of nonsensical crime and silly intrigue, modelled entirely from plasticine.

The game is set in Londonton, a fictional and foolish vision of London England. Drawing its inspiration from British board games like Cluedo (AKA “Clue”), and absurdly humorous series like Monty Python’s Flying Circus and The League of Gentlemen, Kahoots™ immerses the player in sepia-tinged Edwardian (fake) England at the height of a crime wave. As Spotland Pond’s newest detective, the player must track down cabals of criminals, all in pursuit of the evil mastermind behind their reign of (mostly harmless) terror.

A Very Hands-On Approach

Kahoots™ is being modelled from top to bottom in plasticine. Every character, set and prop is lovingly (and squishingly) hand-crafted by the team at Untold Entertainment. The world of Londonton is being brought to life through careful photography and digital image manipulation, resulting in a seamless (but smudgy) game experience. The creators hope that the game’s clay graphics will set it apart in the unfaltering flood of casual game titles. Kahoots™ is set to launch online and on the iPhone and iPod Touch in Q2 2009.

About Untold Entertainment Inc.

Untold Entertainment is a fresh new venture formed by Toronto’s leading casual kids’ game experts. Primarily an interactive service shop catering to kids’ television production studios, Untold Entertainment is thrilled to be embarking on its first original casual game title with Kahoots™. Untold Entertainment privately owned, proudly Canadian, and seeking distribution partnership for its wonderful and wholly-owned IP, including Kahoots™. The company is also seeking strategic partnership with an equally energetic television production team.

To follow the Kahoots™ developer diary, or to learn about Unold Entertainment’s interactive services, visit http://www.untoldentertainment.com.

###

Worldwide Media Contact:

Ryan Henson Creighton
(416) 944-8290 x5281
info *at* untoldentertainment *dot* com

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