"In hindsight, it's obvious that people from other countries aren't gonna know the Lake District." But also spooky, dark and mysterious at the same time, with the potential for fairies and goblins and all sorts." "It's a beautifully romantic, rainy, green, lush, mountainous, strange and uplifting place. The area had personal significance for the brothers, being "a place which held a huge nostalgic appeal because that's where we went on holidays as kids," John says. I couldn't name half the flowers, well, 90% of the flowers in my garden John Donkin Turns out, Scafell Pike and Bootle are perfectly real locations in the Lake District-though Undermere is called Windermere in the real world. I didn't realize it was a real part of England until an hour or so in. Some of the plants had magical properties, and the place names on the map, which you use to find new plants, seemed impossibly whimsical. When I was playing Strange Horticulture, at first I thought it was taking place in a pseudo-Edwardian fantasy world. (Image credit: Iceberg Interactive) Thyme for a change The overlap of those is this tiny little dot in the middle." "If you look at the Venn diagram," Rob says, "you've got: what you would like to make what you're capable of making what your skill set says that you can make and then what is gonna be commercially viable. While Flash had been forgiving, with its low cost and short development times, now they were facing the dilemma common to indie developers: finding a project that would be creatively satisfying and sell enough to make it worthwhile. And so they made a singleplayer game instead. "Especially competitive multiplayer," Rob adds. You don't get much positivity in the community. "After Broken Ground we were very jaded with multiplayer in general," John says. The experience turned them off making another game in the same vein. It wasn't like that, but people didn't see it that way." "We tried to just make it variety-based, rather than 'you can buy overpowered weapons'. They don't like microtransactions." A free-to-play game, it featured weapon packs for sale, which made players accuse it of being 'pay-to-win'. "We took what we'd learned from Bad Eggs and we tried to apply it to a Steam market," John says, "and the backlash there was huge. Broken Ground was their first real failure. It launched in April of 2018, and exactly five months later they announced they were shutting down the servers. "It was basically like Bad Eggs, but a bit more grown up." "We wanted to try to handle a PC game for the Steam market, because we hadn't released anything on Steam." Their first attempt was another artillery game, this time with a straightforward military theme, called Broken Ground. "I guess we wanted to do something a bit bigger as well," Rob says. What they knew was PC gaming, which also seemed like a perfect place to attempt something a little more ambitious. "We brought them over to mobile and then it grew from that," Rob says,"but we didn't really know how to put a game on mobile and have it grow organically, or market it or anything like that." Though the brothers could have continued making mobile games, they attribute the success of Bad Eggs Online 2 on phones to the fact the first game found an audience on Flash. They were motivated to look at other platforms when, as Rob puts it, "the Flash game market started drying up." Adobe and Microsoft stopped supporting it at the end of 2020, and Chrome stopped supporting it at the start of 2021. They followed it with a sequel for mobile, Bad Eggs Online 2, and despite Rob's comment about the difficulty of competing in the mobile market, John notes that people "are still people playing it to this day." "I guess you can look at the mobile market and, yes, you can churn stuff out quickly there, but to actually compete with anyone…"īad Viking's first "big success" was Bad Eggs Online, a multiplayer game about eggs at war, "an artillery game based on Worms, essentially," John says. "There's nothing comparable really to that now," Rob goes on. Pondskater took only weeks to make, and even the more advanced games the two made together were completed and released quickly enough they could pay for themselves in a short amount of time. "Now, if you want to make money from games, starting out, I don't know how you do it because there isn't that model of 'make stuff in a couple of months, put something out there'." "In those days it was so much easier," Rob says. we didn't really know how to put a game on mobile and have it grow organically Rob Donkin "We're still here 10 years later, which is remarkable really." "We just sort of stuck with it and started making more Flash games and then set up our company together," John says. It racked up a decent player count and suggested they made a good team. Their first joint release was The Adventures of Red, an adventure game where you solved puzzles on a quest for a chocolate muffin.
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