Press-to-Play by Sick Rabbit Studios

[Psychokiller1888]

Hey everyone!

As some might know, after Project Spark died, we, meaning Wertandrew, DankerP3 and me, Psycho, sticked together and kept in touch through Skype and other means. Creating games is our passion. We met on Project Spark. We had ideas and a need to create and share them.

Not later than last september an idea emerged in our group and at the same time a game contest started. So we decided to take part in it. The game contest was held by AirConsole, a very cool idea that let's you use your computer as a console and your mobile devices as the controllers! So we jumped in, with a nice game idea, that would let people have fun when having friends over.

After a while developping and presenting the idea to some of our contacts in the game industry, it became clear that we needed to create our own entity, our own studio, to brand our games. In december 2016 Sick Rabbit Studios was born. We work for free, by passion. We pushed our game as far as we could in the given time and submitted it to the AirConsole contest. And we made it to the third place! Amongst all other submissions, by indie devs and professional studios, our first game made it!

Our game released yesterday, april 6th, after I went visiting AirConsole's office in Zurich Switzerland. A bunch of nice guys working there, nice atmosphere, good work!

We all started in a fun way, be it on Project Spark or even before and that's where our passion led us. Everything is possible if you have that burning passion and invest yourselves in your projects! I wanted to share with you a couple of links, but also provide you with the link to our game you can play for free! (yes, free as free, no subscriptions, no one time payment, no royalties etc etc)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFVJXqRh5nA

Play Press-to-Play: https://www.airconsole.com/play/party-games/press-to-play

Also, if you want to follow us and our coming games (two projects rolling ), make sure to visit us on https://sickrabbitstudios.com. Apply to our newsletter, subscribe to our blog and/or follow us on facebook/twitter/youtube!

Visit AirConsole as well, it's a really cool plateform that guarantees you a lot of fun with your friends! https://www.airconsole.com

[LucidStew]

So this is totally F2P start to finish? How is AirConsole doing as a platform? How's your guys game doing as far as usage/plays go? What was your development process like? How did you decide which mini-games to use? How are you advertising? Have you considered recruiting people to help you spread the word, like a street team? I know I'D be willing to help you guys. Sorry, I have a lot of questions, as I've taken some classes on development, so the process is of interest to me.

[Psychokiller1888]

Woohoo, a lot of questions, thank you for your interest

I'm gonna try to answer them all, might look formal, but it ain't

- Yes, it's totally free, from start to finish. AirConsole proposes AirConsole Hero subscription to get rid of the 30sec break you get after 5 minutes play and 5 minutes break after 30 minutes gameplay. This is not on us, we get a smal rev share from it. We were against that, but AC imposes this so...

- AirConsole is a Swiss company that started that idea that your screen could be the console and your mobile devices couldbe your controllers. It work very well, they have spread over the world using servers around the globe, to guarantee no latency.

- Press-to-Play is doing great. Released on arpil 6th around 10h45, we are up to 3600 minigames played so far. Not the moon, but definitly the sky for a first game

- As I said, we three only knew each others through skype calls and our personal work. Wertandrew is totally the artist, I'm totally a coder with no artistic idea and DankP3 is a a mix of us both which is damn handy. I presented them to the modern tools for collaboration, like Git/SVN, Kanban, team organisation tools. We went on my all time favorite (members since over 15 years), Assembla. The project is hosted their privately and we can post tickets, write wikis, use the svn repository to work together. The developement went first on a GDD that we discussed together and we started splitting work.

- Minigames were decided in GDD phase first as we did not really know the AirConsole limitations. With time making them we quickly came to the conclusion AirConsole plugin wasn't good enough so I developped it to a state it allowed us to do whatever we wanted. Mini games ideas came in almost everyday, and their fates were decided by us three according to our ideas.

-Advertising is the good point. It's hard nowadays to emerge as the scene is really cluttered. We have built our website, facebook page, twitter, linkedin, youtube etc. We have been present to some game events like Ludicious in Zurich, White Nights in Prague, 3 events in Greece, and are planning to attend to White Nights in St-Petersbourg, Nordic Games in Malmö Sweden, letting people try early stages of our game, distributing flyers and some home made t-shirts. After our nomination we have contacted the press. After our release Wert has contacted the Greek press. I have to say, advertising is a hard point when you have almost no budget.

- We have not really planned recruiting people to help spread the words. For now, we can at best offer a t-shirt or two and some flyers. AirConsole is helping as we came third, by asking their official beam.pro streamers to stream about Press-to-Play. We haven't even talked about welcoming people in our tensionfull but so cool "family" yet. We have nothing to offer but our passion and maybe, at the end of the road, success? Helping us is always possible for one that believes in us, by spreading the word, streamer, showing, talking about us and we are more than grateful for those who do

[Jesse]

Hi there,

I will try your game with my students. They can spread the "word"

[Psychokiller1888]

That's very nice from you, thank you so much! Keep telling your students that what matters is your dreams and your will to make them true! OK, moderate that a little of course, but yes, if you want it hard enough and invest yourself in it, you will make it!

[LucidStew]

One thing I can think of that you can do to garner some press is write an article for Gamasutra. The process of starting with a hobbyist platform, meeting everyone there, forming as a developer, and then actually releasing something is a fascinating story I'm sure the development community would love to hear. I think your guys' story is fairly unique. If Kotaku is willing to do any article about Payback122 making little Star Wars games with PS, they should be really into this idea. The author of that Kotaku piece was Steven Totilo, btw.

[Psychokiller1888]

Thanks for the idea, gonna dig further into it!