This appetite for risk meant we could experiment with all areas of the game,“ says Sum. Because if we failed it only meant we would waste a fraction of our lives and not years. “Because of the short time frame we were having to take big risks.
This helped the team (which also includes artist Ben Weatherall) focus on what was important and encouraged some bold choices. To fit the new project in with their other commitments a development time of six weeks was planned. “I got quite far with prototyping the game but I just never released it. Coincidentally, Sum had been working on something similar back in 2011. “When we said we wanted to make the next Flappy Bird we really wanted to make a phenomenon”.Īfter a period of planning Matt Hall settled on idea of updating the classic game Frogger into a one-touch game. We wanted to make something in the spirit of Flappy Bird, rather than just recreate it,” says Sum “Probably over a thousand other developers have tried their clone of Flappy Bird but we didn’t want to make the same game again. For Hipster Whale it wasn’t a case of copying Flappy Bird but of capturing its spirit and attempting to emulate its success. Every successful title, from Flappy Bird to Threes, has seen a raft of imitators nibble at their heels. And when people get a really good score, they want to share with friends and challenge them to beat the score.”Ĭloning is rife in the mobile market. You can tell exactly how good someone is just by hearing the score. “There’s a purity in Flappy Bird’s score system. “Matt had been meditating on this idea of why Flappy Bird was so popular?” says Sum. They started with a ground-up analysis of what makes a good mobile game work, both in terms of gameplay, plus the mechanics and triggers that make a game successful through recommendation and sharing. The game began life as quick project that Sum and Hall deliberately wanted to develop over a short period.
There is another way to free-to-play, it seems.Īt GDC last month Hipster Whale’s Andy Sum and Matt Hall spoke about how they crafted the experience and how they wanted to make it a phenomenon. Yet, Crossy Road has been well received and widely acclaimed for its addictive gameplay and considerate monetisation techniques. It’s derivative of an old game, it’s monetised, and its name is a brazen call back to Flappy Bird – itself a magpie of old mechanics and assets. It certainly ticks all the boxes that make traditional gamers roll their eyes.
On first appearance it might be tempting to include Hipster Whale’s Crossy Road in that group. Eschewing great gameplay in pursuit of the digital gold rush. It’s sometimes easy to characterise all mobile games as money grabbing, shallow and greedy.
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