Академический Документы
Профессиональный Документы
Культура Документы
SEARCH LOGIN GAME JOBS
GO
UPDATES BLOGS CONTRACTORS NEWSLETTER STORE SEARCH GO
ALL CONSOLE/PC SMARTPHONE/TABLET INDEPENDENT VR/AR SOCIAL/ONLINE
The imperfect science of Falcon Age's
Member Login
Email:
Password:
baby birdbased social media marketing
Forgot Password? Sign Up
PROGRAMMING
ART
AUDIO
DESIGN
April 19, 2019 | By Bryant Francis
PRODUCTION
Outerloop Games' Falcon Age has made waves on April 19, 2019 | By Bryant Francis
BIZ/MARKETING Twitter not just for its unique gameplay tailored for
Post A Comment
both PSVR and nonVR players, but also because it's
a game that's just so dang pleasant to look at.
Latest Jobs More: VR, Console/PC, Design
View All RSS A couple of weeks ago on the GDC Twitch channel,
Chandana "Eka" Ekanayake took the time to break
April 21, 2019
down the creative decisions on Falcon Age. As
Ekanayake put it, a lot of choices for Falcon Age were
Sucker Punch
Productions made in order to help the game stand out in a sea of
Narrative Writer heavyweight competitors.
DigiPen Institute of
Technology Here are our (lightly edited) choice cuts from our chat with Ekanayake.
Assistant Profesor
DigiPen Institute of Standing out in a sea of great games
Technology
Assistant Profesor Ekanayake: We’re a small studio. I think we’ve got about nine people on this game, at one point or
another. Seven to nine people. So when we make a game we always think about: “How does this
Deep Silver Volition
Lighting Artist game stand out against the Ubisofts, the Bethesdas of the world?”
Deep Silver FISHLABS
Lead Combat Designer
You know, players have a choice of what kind of games they can play and there’s a lot of choices,
(m/f/d) right? There are games released every week and tons of choices, so...one of our design decisions
early on was “how do we stand out?” And also, the bird mechanic worked out well, so having the bird
Deep Silver FISHLABS
Senior 3D Artist (m/f/d) as really the main mechanic, the main hook, in our game which we could do at the scale we are, was an
important thing...
Referencing Objects:
Names vs GUIDs [1]
Video game music
composer gives lecture
at the Library of
Congress [2]
How I found my style on
YouTube
Showing And
Announcing We Are The
Caretakers At PAX East
At The Same Time
My thoughts on difficulty
in games [6]
Press Releases
April 21, 2019
Games Press
Basebuilding puzzler
"Puzzle Pelago" has...
HEROES & GENERALS
WWII
NOW ON DISCORD
Theatre Tales – a fairy
tale game for children...
About
2,089 people are talking about this
EditorInChief:
Kris Graft
I mean the most common way is to put a game out and see if it sells which is a pretty risky way of
Editor:
testing the market. But there are free ways to test the market, which is social media. So, like I’ve
Alex Wawro
taken part in #ScreenshotSaturdays for multiple projects, or just throw a gif out there and see
Contributors: what hits.
Chris Kerr
Alissa McAloon
Emma Kidwell
And certainly, the social feedback has changed the design of it. To the imprint mode, to adding more baby
Bryant Francis [bird] stuff...I’ll do a gif every week at different times of the day to test it out. And the things that’ve
Katherine Cross hit have always been the baby bird related things. Based on that I’ll generate other things,
Advertising: outfits...every project's different. Not everything’s gonna hit.
sales@gamasutra.com
But for us, the baby bird thing kind of blew up after PAX and we’ve been trying other things that are
Contact Gamasutra related to that on social media. So I think for us, marketing on social media has been super, super
super big. We just happen to have a thing that is interesting for Twitter.
Report a Problem
Submit News
How does that translate to sales? I have no idea. Maybe I’ll talk about it next GDC.
Comment Guidelines I used to think that maybe I’m tweeting too much about this game, and now I think certainly
not enough, because there’s so much content depending on your Twitter circle on what you follow.
Blogging Guidelines
Every time you tweet something, someone new will be like “hey, is this a game? Is this VR or not VR?”
How We Work
But that’s the other thing we had to kind of figure out because we’re doing both, people just assumed it
Advertise with Gamasutra would be just VR or not VR because some of the gifs showed that that’s always a constant thing to
reinforce.
Download Media Kit
I’ve done sidebyside gifs where we show what the bird looks like in VR and nonVR, things like that. In
terms of times of day, man...I don’t know. Sometimes it hits big in Europe, sometimes it hits big in Asia.
I just did something the other night at midnight and it just blew up because somebody happened to see it
and then they shared with their followers, and that kept going, so I don’t know. The data tells me that if
Gama Network people are interested, they’ll share it.
If you enjoy reading this site,
you might also want to check
out these UBM Tech sites:
Game Career Guide
Indie Games
PlayStation
@PlayStation
Time to go owl out
In the beginning of the game, we have sort of these debug motivational posters in the colonizer prison.
So one of the posters is “go offworld, earn a pet” as a way to like be part of the outer ring company,
being a worker for the company. And we put some friends and family pet photos on it and it’s like an
airport ad, it cycles through pet photos.
We got a handful of them, and then I was like “why don’t I just tweet about it, see if people on Twitter
want to submit images.” We had like five or six, Twitter sent us like 350 photos. People love their pets.
Again, that’s not some great marketing plan right? It’s just like “hey, this would be nice to throw out to
Twitter and see what happens."
Making Falcon Age a pleasant playground
The world [of Falcon Age] is the scale of Disneyland. I know there’s been GDC talks about this. The design
and layout of Disneyland is like the best thing for a level designer to study.
There’s always a point of interest, like the castle in the middle. When you’re in an area, it's all
encompassing. And as you transition between areas, it’s really really satisfying. So in our Disneyland,
there are areas like this where it’s completely chill, you have NPCs, you can go hunting, do this and
then there’s more aggressive areas where you know that when you walk into them, the colors change and
the music changes and those are the refineries.
So there are areas of high conflict, areas of low conflict...There're enough things, hopefully, to do;
things to find, [in places] where you don’t have to engage with the enemies.
And for me, it’s like a six to eighthour experience, depending. If you play noncombat it’s probably
shorter because you can just breeze through areas, but we wanted an area where you can just hang out
here. I watch streamers and they just want to go hunting, go hang out, go make snacks.
We certainly didn’t design it for streamers, but it’s more of like, how I, as a designer, would like to enjoy
this game and the world. Watching people playtest at Pax East recently, GDC and Pax West and Day of
the Devs, they just wanted to hang out with the bird. I think having areas where you could do that. The
design of this came out of having these elements.
You had a bird, and you have a playercharacter and you need spaces for them to explore and do things
together, which also means “oh hey, what if we buff up the bird with these snacks?” which is very similar
to Zelda's cooking, right?
So if you’re going to have a cooking area, you can’t have enemies attack you while you’re cooking. I
guess you could, but we didn’t want to, so when you start combining those elements in designing, it kind
of feeds into itself and ends up having these chill areas and not chill areas.
It’s kind of a natural progression of the design.
Related Jobs
DigiPen Institute of DigiPen Institute of
Sucker Punch
Technology — Technology —
Productions — Deep Silver Volition
Redmond, Redmond,
Bellevue, — Champaign,
Washington, United Washington, United
Washington, United Illinois, United
States States
States States
[04.19.19] [04.19.19]
[04.19.19] [04.19.19]
Assistant Profesor Assistant Profesor
Narrative Writer Lighting Artist
[View All Jobs]
Top Stories
The imperfect Take me to the hole: China's game Street Fighter II
science of Falcon Loss and triumph in approval rules will designer walks
Age's baby bird Astroneer soon apply to HTML5 through the creation
based social media and WeChat mini of the game's
marketing games stranger fighters
[Next News Story] [View All]
Comments