Stephen Harris is the co-founder of Ninja Kiwi, a developer and publisher of flash web games and mobile games. He started Ninja Kiwi in 2006 with his brother Chris. Ninja Kiwi recently acquired Scottish mobile gaming studio Digital Goldfish, which increased Ninja Kiwi’s number to 34 full time people. As a game-maker, here are some of Stephen’s insights into how Bloons Tower Defense was created.

Bloons Tower Defense is a flash web game. We made it when it was just myself and my brother in the company back in late 2007. We took our popular Bloons game idea and worked a tower defense game around it. It was pretty successful straight away so we made a sequel, Bloons Tower Defense 2. A few months later we made Bloons Tower Defense 3 – and that became the first mobile version which was simply called Bloons Tower Defense. This is where things get kind of interesting! Bloons TD4 took much longer to make than the previous ones, given that the competition for eyeballs in the flash gaming space was really starting to ramp up. Production value and length of play was increasing all the time. Add to that our pride to make BTD4 much much better than the previous ones. It took many months but our small team put it together and it was a massive hit. I did all the coding and most of the game design but by then we had a full time artist to help make it look awesome. When it went over to mobile we knew the strength of the brand “Bloons TD4″ was so strong that we had to call it that on mobile even though it was technically only the second BTD to go to mobile. It was a huge hit on the  iPhone. I was somewhat creatively drained after btd4 so we waited a full year before starting on the next one (did other projects in between). The bar was pretty high at this point so there was huge pressure to make it bigger and better in every way. Luckily by then we had expanded our staff enough to be able to really get some quality in. December 2011 we finally got the web version out and it was again an instant hit. One year later it came out for iPhone, getting to #2 on the US charts inside of 9 hours with no Apple feature.

Each iteration of Bloons Tower Defense has been bigger, bolder, deeper and just plain better than the previous. Each version of the game has had innovations that made it stand out from other contemporary TD games, but each time it has become more difficult to come up with new stuff that people will find fun but is also innovative and interesting to work on. Early versions of BTD introduced “on track placeable” items like road spikes and monkey glue which allowed players to have more direct control over how and when they pop bloons, and to get them out of a sticky situation. Bloons TD4 introduced terrain specific towers (the monkey buccaneer) and moving/flying towers (the monkey ace). In Bloons TD5 we introduced tracks with dynamic moving parts, tunnels, special missions (with unique and interesting rule sets) and activated abilities (powerful abilities with cooldowns that are activated when you choose). In addition we added stuff like special agent towers, monkey lab upgrades and tower specialty buildings. Specialty buildings and Monkey Lab upgrades were a way for players to further customise and really own their BTD experience.

The original BTD aesthetic was based off of the original Bloons puzzle game art, which my brother Chris drew. That art style, although a bit dated and clumsy drove most of the brand for several years. By the time we made BTD4 it had evolved to a much slicker look, but still with those roots. For BTD5 we decided it was time for a fresh look. We wanted the art to remain bright and friendly, but it was time for the monkey to lose a few pounds (he was kind of round). We had Tamihana (artist) draw a few tower and monkey concepts and we finally settled on the current look. The rest of the game and the interface just followed from that look.

As a player, I love finding new tower combinations that work well unexpectedly. I love that even when I’ve played the game 100 times in 24 hours and I’m sick of it yet I still really have to test this one thing, I still end up just playing to win. As a designer, I love that everyone who likes the game feels their strategy is the best or that they have learned some secret knowledge on how to beat the game. The true secret is the game is actually pretty easy and all the towers are designed to be fun to play and to essentially kick butt, at least on the easier difficulty settings. The trick is to make the game feel like it’s really working you over pretty hard, but that you can still prevail.

We wanted to deliver masses of content and awesome stuff and basically just blow people’s socks off. From BTD4 we went from 4 upgrades per tower to 8, including the all new activated abilities. That said, regarding towers at least, I thought that might be enough and that adding new towers for new towers sake might cheapen the whole game. I realised though that the perception for our fans would be that we were lazy because we didn’t add new towers, and that they would not enjoy the depth of the game until they’d played it a fair bit (all 8 upgrades per tower). So I came to my senses that we needed at least 2 new towers. We added the Sniper and the Ninja Monkey, both of which are among the most popular and are now firmly rooted in the Bloon TD world. No one on the team was particularly pleased at this huge scope creep, but it was the right decision.

The original Bloons game concepts (in 2007) just had a disembodied dart and aiming arrow used to shoot bloons. Towards the end of the game development we threw in a character just to make it look more friendly, and naturally chose a monkey. The notion of monkeys popping bloons just exploded from there I guess.

I think BTD5 will continue the legacy of the Bloons Tower Defense series as a leader of the genre, at least regarding web and smart phone games. There are several notable tower defense games that are right up there (Kingdom Rush, and the exceptionally awesome Plants vs Zombies to name two) but I still feel BTD5 adds so much more content, depth and value than any other. I also believe our innovations in the genre often become standard for other TD and defense games that follow.

Matthieu Malot, lead artist of EDGE Extended, shares with us a bit of background and inside information on EDGE (Mobigame‘s multi-awarded and critically loved game) and EDGE Extended.

EDGE 2006

There is nothing narrative in EDGE, and it is difficult to talk about a genre for EDGE. With David, before the release we hesitated a lot between a puzzler and a platformer. Finally, journalists and comments in the store mostly call it a puzzler, I would more say platformer, because it’s a lot about instant reflex and synchro. The gameplay is very simple it’s just rolling a cube on it’s edges trying to find the final point inside dynamic mazes to unlock the next level.

The game design is really sharp so we decided to keep the aesthetic very pure. David loves the work of MC Esher and I love the work of Vasarely, but most of the artistic choices were decided by one rule: make it more simple, remove what you don’t need. I even removed the colors for the background…

EDGE 2007

The cube you play is multicolored and flashing, the first EDGE designed in 2008 was a java mobile game, and it was a nice trick to get a dynamic cycling colorful sprite with this limited technology, so we kept it and of course it is also a cool color effect used in lots of Nintendo games as a super power.

As a player, I like that the levels are difficult and sometimes really unfair for the player, I love to rage on a game. But some people give up because of that difficulty. So we put some cool sequences with animated blocks (like short interactive cutscenes) to reward the player during his progress.

Sometimes I play a level and I still enjoy it, we took our time but I think it’s nicely balanced.

The product that came to market didn’t differ that much from the first screenshot mock up I made, it was already isometric, but with a white background and a red cube.

Multi cube test

The game design has been improved while we were creating the engine. There was no original game design for this game just a really cheap demo were you could roll a cube on a grid and try to balance it on its edges, but the feeling was there.

The game realesed on iPhone in 2008 was a port of a java game, made only with 2D tiles and incredible code tricks. It was only bitmaps, there was no polygon at all. But now that we have retina displays and hi resolution screens the game is rendered in real 3D with antialiasing.

In 2008, our team of only two people, entered in the Barcelona Mobile World Congress to get in touch with the mobile gaming industry, but with only one entrance ticket and neck badges for the two of us. There were a lot of guards to filter entrance at each floor so it is a nice memory of an epic infiltration with cooperative challenge to avoid guards, however the gameplay was real.

Level Edition

I don’t know if EDGE Extended will/did have any influence in its game category, I hope its legacy will be that simple does not mean ugly or bad, and also that sometimes level designers are real jerks!

If you’re an iOS gamer, chances are you’ve played Cut the Rope (or seen and heard a lot about it at the very least). I know I have personally enjoyed playing Cut the Rope because it’s the type of game that you can play when you just need to kill a few minutes waiting for something (or you can play it for an hour–it’s fun either way). It’s easy enough for a small kid to enjoy while an adult can derive hours of enjoyment from it as well. Not many games can say that. Plus, Om Nom (need I say more?). As a fan of Cut the Rope I naturally wanted to learn more. That’s why I contacted ZeptoLabs’ Semyon Vionov to tell us how this famous game got it’s start in his own words. Be sure to scroll to the bottom to see some early Om Nom sketches.

There are just a few noticeable mobile games built around rope physics, and I think that Cut the Rope has succeeded in taking this very simple idea and perfecting it – without making it more complicated. That is what makes the gameplay unique. The only important tip any player needs to know before he (or she) starts to play the game is already written in the title. The rest of the game’s rules pretty much come from people’s instinctive knowledge of how the physical world works around them. Also, the idea of feeding a little cute creature (instead of just delivering some abstract object from point A to point B) created an emotional link between the game and the players, and it helped to make the game successful.

The visual inspiration for Cut the Rope came from wanting to make the game appealing to a wide variety of ages; we wanted it to look cute and casual, but not too childish. One of the main references for the art were the classic animated motion pictures.

As a player, I like the fact that each level requires both puzzle solving and arcade gameplay. It’s nice to exercise both your mind and reflexes.

Although we were lucky to lock-in the core gameplay quite early on, we had different options for the visual theme. Some of the original concepts did differ quite a bit from the way the game actually turned out, visually. One of the ideas was to have a wooden puppet on a stings, and a player would have to cut the stings to set the puppet free. I still think that was a cool and artsy idea, but it probably wouldn’t have equated to the same amount of success as the game had with the help of Om Nom.

I think people would probably be pretty surprised that I got an initial idea for the game while working out in a gym!

While we were in development, we showed the game to as many people as we could – our friends, family members, random people – and it proved to be extremely helpful! I would definitely recommend doing that for any game developer as it’s essential to understand how intuitive, appealing and addictive your game is. That’s something you shouldn’t just trust your gut with.

It’s cool to see how the game has affected the market overall. Sometimes I download some random game from the AppStore and I see some things in it which are clearly inspired by Cut the Rope – and it’s great. Our highest goal is to inspire people! Of course, the market has changed quite a lot since Cut the Rope was released two years ago, but we believe there’s still a space for a cute and addictive snack-like game. Our new game Pudding Monsters which was released Dec 20 is exactly that kind of a treat.

When it comes to iOS gaming, few games garner as much love from fans or are produced with such high quality/standards as the Galaxy on Fire series. The scope of the game is incredible, the graphics are tasty and the story is expansive. As it turns out, Michael Schade, the CEO and Co-Founder of Fishlabs Entertainment (the company behind GOF2), is a pretty interesting guy as well. Today he shares with DailyTekk readers the story of how GOF2 game into being. Theres a wealth of insights here any true fan will appreciate so I’m going to quit typing now and let you get to the good stuff…

The one thing that sets the Galaxy on Fire saga apart from pretty much every other sci-fi shooter on the App Store, is its unique mixture of story-based, mission-bound and sandbox gameplay. In our game, we grant the players way more freedom of choice than other titles do and hence they can freely choose between dozens of different ways to make progress. When they’re stuck in the main campaign, for example, they can take some time off whenever they want and either do some trading, hunt down space pirates or accept side missions. That way they can earn additional credits and ultimately buy a better ship and stronger weapons, which will hopefully allow them to finish the mission they’ve been stuck at before. And even after they’ve completed the main story line of GOF2 and its two add-ons Valkyrie and Supernova, the fun is still not over, because the galaxy still bears a thousand secrets that need to be unraveled and a thousand challenges that need to be taken on.

Since everyone who worked on Galaxy on Fire 2 is a huge science fiction buff, we drew visual inspiration from a very broad range of different media — ranging from TV shows like Star Trek and blockbusters like Star Wars to classic games like Wing Commander and bestselling novels like A Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. If you’re a sci-fi aficionado, you’ll surely discover a lot of homages and tributes to all kinds of fan favorites and genre classics while playing our game. One example would be the towels you could buy in the hangars of the space stations and another would be the so-called Grey, which are an alien race that looks a lot like the classic Area 54 aliens. Even their signature ship, the Vol Noor, bears a lot of resemblance to a flying saucer. But of course there’s also a lot of unique stuff to be found in the Galaxy on Fire 2 universe, such as the mysterious Void, whose home world and space ships look unlike anything you’ve ever seen before.

One thing that still amazes me to this day is the enormous replay value of Galaxy on Fire 2. Especially when you’ve got both add-ons unlocked, you can easily play the game for hours and hours on end without getting bored or fed up. Even after you’ve finished the last story mission, you can still go on and buy better ships and weapons, find secret star systems, wipe out pirate outposts, manufacture special items from blueprints, gain enormous riches, explore the most remote corners of the galaxy and so on. We have heard from many fans, which have played the game for more than a hundred (!!!) hours and still cannot put it away. And that’s something you don’t hear every day about a mobile game…

How did some of the original concepts differ from the product that came to market? In most cases, we’ve gone through quite a lot of different layouts and concepts before we ultimately ended up with the ships, weapons and space stations that you can now see in the game. A good example is the Terran carrier from the Supernova expansion, for example. Here we had almost half a dozen different approaches covering the whole span from unconventional and experimental to orthodox and conversant. We ultimately chose a design that was inspired by the aircraft carriers of the US Navy because it did not only look good but also seem authentic, believable and feasible.

We always try to be as open towards our community as possible and hence we’ve introduced almost every aspect of the game to our fans on our blog and website in a rather detailed way. Take the making of the Supernova add-on, for example. To fill the fans in on the latest happenings here in the Fishlabs office, we’ve published a total of 17 developer diaries about Supernova over a period of more than half a year. In the course of these exclusive behind-the-scenes-featurettes, we’ve covered almost every stage of the production — including story writing, game design, graphics design, art direction, marketing and so on. So I guess the only thing that still remains a mystery about GOF2 is the T. in the name of our protagonist Keith T. Maxwell… actually, it stands for… nah, I’d better not tell…

Our recording room is located right next to the conference room with our Xbox 360. During the voice recordings for Supernova, we had to put our internal FIFA 12 league on ice, because whenever someone scored a goal or got a red card, the yelling, cheering and screaming of the players was so loud that you could actually hear it on the recordings.

Of course, it would be a bit far-fetched to claim that Galaxy on Fire 2 reinvented the once-popular genre of the open space shooter in general. What it did, however, is blowing new life into these kinds of games and putting ‘em back into the limelight on the hottest and most spectacular gaming platform of the hour, namely mobile. Right now, there isn’t a single space game available on the App Store or Google Play that is on par with Galaxy on Fire 2 in terms of amplitude, immersiveness, production value and overall quality. Galaxy on Fire 2 has been one of the very first titles that managed to bring a console-quality gaming experience to a 3.5 inch iPhone screen… and we’re by far not done yet!

On a sidenote, I also have to say that it’s quite a funny coincidence that two of the biggest names in sci-fi gaming, namely Chris “Wing Commander” Roberts and David “Elite” Braben, have just recently re-discovered the space genre as well and started kickstarter campaigns to finance their next science fiction epics.

In this exciting edition of Game of Fame, DailyTekk gets the skinny on EPOCH, the popular touch-screen FPS game developed by a small group of talented game designers from Australia. Ed Orman, who has been developing games for 15 years, breaks down how EPOCH came into being. Whether you are a mobile game lover or an aspiring game developer, you’re sure to learn something useful, be entertained and come away with a new respect for iOS game development.

Gameplay-wise, in terms of innovations, we really wanted to try and do something on touch-screens that hadn’t been done before. That’s why we focused on the control scheme up front, so we could build something really fluid and intuitive, something that played to the platform’s strengths, and then use that to inform the rest of the game.

We had a “less is more” mentality. We wanted to make sure the player would have time to see the world and the characters we were creating, as well as time to think tactically. We achieved that by removing arbitrary movement and instead focusing on cinematic, spectacular movement within cover.

When it comes to a game’s style and visual aesthetics, we always start out by establishing the core ideas that we’re interested in. These are going to be the foundation that we will build the game on. Once we have that, it’s time to look for the inspiration we need to demonstrate to ourselves that these ideas can work.

We try to draw inspiration from as many different places as possible: we play games (Gears of War, Infinity Blade, Fallout), watch movies (Appleseed, Tetra Vaal, The Road), listen to music (Prodigy, Pendulum, the Inception score), and look at comics (Akira), architecture and art. It all goes into the melting pot.

But I’d say the single biggest influence on the visuals–aside from Andrew James’ implementation of it–was the excellent concept art provided by Andrew Ley. Andrew is a veteran concept artist, with credits that include Bioshock and Killzone, and he condensed all of that vibe and inspiration down into the touch-stone image; a single visual that defined the aesthetic of EPOCH.

As a player, my favorite part of the game is flipping Ninja gun robots! More seriously, I dig games that get me into a Zen frame of mind, and EPOCH has that sort of flow – after playing for a while, my brain just sort of meshes with the combat. I can play for hours when that happens.

I went back and had a look at the concepts just now, and the truth is that surprisingly little changed between the concept stage and the final product. That’s partly probably a product of the ludicrously short deadline we had for a project of this scope – we didn’t have time to change our minds once we’d started. But it’s also a testament to our experience as developers, because we were able to have a very clear idea of what we wanted from the get-go.

The user interface and HUD probably took us the longest to nail down – it went through a stack of revisions over the course of the project. UI and HUD are just … hard.

Something interesting that players probably would never realize is that the story of the A.I. that you uncover in the Arena mode is based on the ancient Greek myth of Sisyphus! It’s such a classic tale of hubris, and it fit the post-human robot world of EPOCH perfectly.

The day after we launched EPOCH, the three of us jumped in a car and drove 7 hours to Melbourne so we could speak at the Game Connect Asia Pacific conference, stayed one night and then drove the 7 hours home again. We were all completely knackered from the final month of development, and in hindsight it was a crazy thing to do. We literally fluked the drive home because we were so tired we didn’t realize we were on the right road–we were practically delirious.

And three days after that, I got married!

In developing EPOCK I hope we proved a few things; that you can create something great with a small team of focused, experienced people, that you can design a game that plays to a platform’s strengths rather than just port existing ideas and that the game development industry in Australia is alive and kicking

For the uninitiated, Scribblenauts is a way-outside-the-box puzzle game series that originated on the Nintendo DS platform and has now made the leap to the Wii U as Scribblenauts Unlimited. If you like creativity, it doesn’t get much more creative than Scribblenauts where nearly anything a player can dream up can become an interactive object in the game that can help solve each level. Truly, there is nothing else like Scribblenauts and the story behind the franchise is just as unique and interesting. Here to give you the inside scoop on how the game was born is Scribblenauts producer Brittany Aubert. 

There are a number of things that make the latest version of Scribblenauts unique and better than previous versions and other games in the genre. The move to new hardware was the biggest change. Scribblenauts Unlimited is, overall, a much bigger game than anything we’ve previously made, and the DS wouldn’t have been able to handle what we wanted to do. There’s a lot more content, many more objects and an object editor. All our environments are now hand painted and our objects are vector-based. We have tons of awesome shaders and visual effects–all things that allowed us to add more depth and personality to Maxwell and his world.

The first Scribblenauts game was on the DS, which had more technical limitations than consoles. When working on the original we were an incredibly small team (less than 15) but had to create art for every single object in the world. Because of that, you might imagine the importance of an art style that was very simple yet still iconic. These limitations helped guide our art style in a specific direction.

While translating Scribblenauts to the Wii U we’ve stayed true to these initial principles but we’re now able to branch out a lot more with color and detail. The overall style of objects hasn’t changed since the first game, but we’ve done things like change the art from texture to vector formats, so we don’t lose quality when scaling on massive TVs. We’re now able to add more detail to backgrounds because we can separate the tech between our tile-based collision and our hand drawn backgrounds. It’s made the whole game more beautiful.

As a player, the part of the game I enjoy the most is exploring all the different types of solutions. For instance, in the subway level there is a man next to a puddle of water. He asks you to help him clean it up. You can spawn a mop and clean it up no problem. Or you can think outside the box and apply the adjective ‘thirsty’ to the man and watch him drink the water. Scribblenauts allows itself to be played how you want to play it. If you want to find the quickest way through a puzzle, you can. If you want to see the full breadth of what the game will accept and react to, you can play that way too.

The original design for Scribblenauts Unlimited stayed primarily the same during the course of development. A lot of the features that you see now are things that we always wanted to include but couldn’t because of the limited power of a handheld device. We decided to develop Scribblenauts Unlimited for Wii so that we could include all the features we’d been hoping for since the beginning, but ran into a pretty sizable problem–how were we going to input words without a peripheral device? We spent quite a bit of time trying to figure it out. But luckily for us, Nintendo was just starting to show developers their new console, the WiiU. With help from Nintendo and WB, we moved the game from Wii to Wii U, and the GamePad solved all of our problems with word entry.

Interestingly enough, all of 5TH Cell’s employees appear in the game as spawnable objects and they are all scripted to do crazy stuff. One of the producers makes all developers stressed. One developer makes it rain hamsters. Another creates a robot army that destroys everything except cats. Some even have special interactions with each other. The full details of all the implementations are a secret and worth discovering as there are some pretty funny ones. Try out some names!

About two weeks before we shipped we needed to buckle down and work some extra hours. In solidarity, we all went to a local barber and got mohawks. All the men on the team shaved mohawks and the ladies got up-do’s so they could participate in spirit without cutting their hair. The barber shop didn’t really know how to respond to 20+ people all walking in at the same time, but the results were awesome.

The Scribblenauts legacy will be to make people think differently about puzzle games. Most puzzle games present you with a problem and a defined solution set. In Scribblenauts, the solution is totally up to you!