The development of Cyborg Mice Arena

Mark talks about Cyborg Mice Arena, an Xbox game

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/engage-expo-cyber-mice-areana-interview.mp3

Or listen to it here…

[wp_youtube]JDL7FxTrOvU[/wp_youtube]

Show Notes:
Interviewer: I’m here at an IGDA meeting and with me today is a special guest. How about you introduce yourself?

Martin: I’m Martin Robaszewski, the developer of Cyborg Mice Arena that’s currently on Xbox Live Indie Games.

Interviewer: What is Cyborg Mice Arena about?

Martin: Cyborg Mice Arena is a virtual training simulator for the cyber mice. It’s how they learn to fight before they go in the real world. So, it’s a four player arcade shooter that’s really fast paced, and it has a lot of upgrades to the system where you kill stuff. You make money. You can buy more stuff to kill more stuff. And you can unlock maps and cool weapons and stuff like that.

Interviewer: So, do you play four player at the same time then, or is it…

Martin: It’s one through four players, yeah. So, you can be a single player. You can play with your friends locally. It’s a local game, and the cool thing is the map scales to keep all the players on the screen together at once.

Interviewer: Is there more than four players? Is it like an MMO where you can walk around and kind of chat with other mice?

Martin: No, no. This one is just limited to four players locally.

Interviewer: What inspired you with the idea?

Martin: I guess you weren’t here for the recitation, but what I talked about was back in school I used to own mice, when I was a young kid. I had two mice, and it ended up being 40 and I had to get rid of them – give them away to a pet store.

Interviewer: Sure.

Martin: But I always loved mice and I loved technology and sci-fi. And this idea came up in school. I even showed up during my presentation as one of the pictures which I kept from high school that I drew all the mice. I always wanted to do something with them, so it was just this universe I had in my mind, and I said, OK let’s try and do a video game.

Since it was going to be a shooter and it was going to be abstract, it had to be a simulation because if they were in the real world environment it would have been a much different game. To keep it like a fun, fast game, we decided to make it the virtual training simulator, sort of their own matrix. That’s how they learn.

Interviewer: Let’s talk about the development process. What were some of the challenges and some of the benefits of developing for Xbox for the indie game? Did they specifically reach out to you, or did you go through the Creator’s Club or what?

Martin: It’s really the Creator’s Club. It’s set up so people can go on their own. You pay the yearly membership fee, and you do it. The challenges were – well, I guess, doing it by myself.

What I released first at last year’s San Diego Comicon Conference, it was prototyping and let’s see what people thought. The response was good, so we continued to go with that. But then there were times when I tried to make the game too complicated, and it went in a different direction and I ended up actually scrapping that.

So, there was about two months lost where I decided to say: screw it, let’s go back because if I went down this path it would require way more content. It would have set the game back, and I wanted to be out by the next Comicon.

So, I said let’s just keep it the simple fun shooter. That’s what people like. Let’s just set the goals. We need to finish it, and that’s what we did. I stopped the goals, and we worked backwards and what do we need at certain points and got it done.

Interviewer: What were some of the challenges when you submitted it to Xbox Live and getting it approved and stuff like that?

Martin: Well, the system… You first submit the play test, and we submitted about eight betas to play test. And we get feedback on it. That was really good. The first beta, everyone was like, oh my God, this game is so difficult. So, we toned it down dramatically for the second beta, and then each beta just has some minor… I think the biggest changes were between the first and second beta. After that, it was just more minor and more visual improvements of the game. I just wanted to polish it here and there.

And then, we went to peer review, and it took a couple weeks. The first time we submitted it there was a bug somebody found right away which I totally overlooked. So, I pulled it, fixed it and had to wait 10 days. That’s a challenge, also. The purity, you can pull stuff off and put it back up when you need to for play test review.

But peer review, if you pull it or it gets rejected, you have to wait 10 days from the date you originally submitted it. You can’t resubmit it right there, so you’ve got to make sure you’ve got it a pretty polished version if you want to get it out on time. Luckily, I resubmitted it and I got enough people to review it and got it out on time for the Comicon.

The week of Comicon the game was out and available. We were able to load it, and we had people coming that were there the previous year that played the early prototype, and they were excited to see the final game and stuff and play it.

Interviewer: So, you had a booth at Comicon. Can you talk about the benefits of promoting your game at Comicon? That’s a little different, you know. If you’re doing an online game, one would think that you would try to do it mainly an online promotion, but I’ve heard of other people that have used these Comicon festivals to promote their games. Can you talk about the benefits?

Martin: Well, the benefits so far are pretty small because if you’re small you’re basically relying on the face time of people spinning the game, playing the game at the same time, liking it and then blogging about it.

So, actually Wondercon, before our final release, we actually had quite a few Bay area bloggers post about it. It was cool and gave us more exposure. It was good to get extra exposure, but there’s also a cost associated with that. So, that’s why we have merchandise like t-shirts and stuff that we sell that helps us cover the cost of the booth.

Because it’s a downloadable game, we cannot sell the game there. We can’t make money there, but we just promote it so, at least, people get to play for free and you get that exposure.

Interviewer: Where t-shirts even popular at this booth because they couldn’t actually buy the game there?

Martin: Yeah, the t-shirts are doing well where they pretty much, sometimes, cover the cost of most of the convention. So, our first batch of t-shirts we were close to breaking even. We did such a small batch, and it was expensive so we had to do bigger batches of shirts, but people really like them.

Sometimes, the crazy thing is people come, at least, one person at every convention says, oh my God, this is the best shirt of the convention. I mean, it’s flattering to hear that. I’m was, OK, cool. So, somebody really likes it and people wear it. They put them on. I see them walking around the next day or whatever. So, we’re definitely using that merchandise. So, it’s also free advertising. It’s a walking billboard.

Interviewer: Sure.

Martin: What is this thing because it’s pretty unique? So, I think that