Interview: Community Games - Colosseum

In the Feburary Issue of OXM (on sale this Thursday) you'll find a feature about how to make a community game and make money from it using Xbox Live Marketplace.

One of the biggest success stories so far is Shortfuse Games' beat 'em up Colosseum. It's one of the most polished community games out there, and one of the few to use 3D character models and stages. We caught up with Shortfuse CEO Johan Hermerén to ask about the challenges in developing an independent game.

What kind of feeling do you get from being one of the most popular community games?

It's cool, no, it's awesome really! The dev team has put a lot of effort and love into developing Colosseum, turning it to what it is. Funny thing though, we're not completley satisfied really, but one never seems to be in this industry. It must be some kind of curse really. Back to the question again, competing with great games as Weapon of Choice, Word Soup, and others is not a walk in the park, they're awesome. Anyway, we're really happy that gamers enjoy our game and actually buy it. It's major.

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As an independent developer do you have to work to strict deadlines, and if so, what's it like when you reach crunch time?

Yes and no. As an indie developer you're always short on dough. We're all into Shortfuse full time as we really don't have enough time to do side jobs. Games just takes a lot of time to develop. It should also be added that we don't really want to work with anything else thann games. This boils down to that we do have to adapt our projects to the budget as everybody else. For Community Games, our deadline was to catch the November 19 release in order to get at least some attention.

Okey, crunch time then, it's a magic hate love thing working 24 hours a day in a week or two with your dear friends and collegues. Don't know how explain that really, but it's close to purple haze. Don't try it unless you really have to.


What factors did you take into account when deciding on the price of the game?

Guessing mostly. I've tried to figure out a good pricing strategy for over a month. We got a lot of indications that 400 points would be the sweet spot and an equally huge amount of other indications saying 800 points is the way to go. In the end we all decided to **** the market analysis and pricing theories, and we went for 800 points, as we thought Colosseum is worth that amount of cash. And yes, we do have got some complaints about the high price and we will take that cricism into consideration.

Top row: Sebastian Badylak, Tobias Sjögren, Johan Hermeren Ladder: Tord Axelsson, Niklas Åkerblad Floor: Henrik Törnqvist, Oscar Tvingstedt, Jonas Nilsson, Pontus Birgersson, Johan Gustafsson, Lars Håhus

Do you peer review other people's games on the XNA website?

Yes we do. Community Games is all about devs helping each others out. That's the best thing with Community Games really. So far we've established good relations with a handful of other devs. That's cool, and that's how it's supposed to be.


Is it possible for you to tell how many people are playing the game on Xbox Live, or is this data something that Microsoft sends back to you?
We don't know nothing really. The only thing we know is that Colosseum is rakning high on the populary lists, and yesterday Major Nelson officially stated that Colosseum was the 4th best selling game November 24-30. That's cool. We're looking forward to the Swedish release so our friends can actually get the game.


When it comes to the peer review system, are the reviewers more, or less critical than the general public?

I don't want to offend anybody in the community but the peer reviewers' criticisms do generally include more details and substance. This is good because then we devs really get to know what's wrong. Simply saying "it's shit" doesn't make games better. Dev to dev critcisms exist to help each other out. On the other hand, it might be good for us devs to get the hard truth slammed in our faces, delievered by the actual gamers.


Following the success of your community game, have you been approached to create a title for Xbox Live Arcade?

We do have good relations with Microsoft, but one does not simply walk into Xbox LIVE Arcade. I really think we have to wait a little longer, come up with some cool concepts and prototypes meanwhile, before getting such a straight offer. I should add that we'll probably develop our next coming game on the XNA platform targeting Community Games again.

For the benefit of first-time developers using XNA, is there much money to be made from community games or do you do it for the enjoyment factor?

We don't know anything about money yet. As long as we cash in enough money to support our next title we're happy. Talking money $200.000 would be good and anything above awesome. After all, we're 11 guys who want to eat, sleep, and have a beer time to time. Making games are fun and frustrating, but that's what we want to do. If it wasn't enjoyable we wouldn't invest 2-3 years to start up our own company living on salery checks containing only zeroes.

Colosseum is now available in trial and full versions (800MP) from Xbox Live Marketplace. The new issue of OXM features all the best community games out there at the moment, plus advice from many of the top developers.

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Ben Talbot