Ben Triola of Happy Badger Studio will be join three other St. Louis Kickstarter veterans on an IGDA panel at Lab 1500. We’ll be sharing our experiences with crowdfunding, and providing deep insight into the process from varying perspectives. We’ll discuss specifically what we learned, what we felt we did right, and where we felt we could have improved. If you’re curious about crowdfunding or have been interested in starting a Kickstarter campaign, this will be a really helpful event to attend.

For more information, check out the IGDASTL.org website.

Tags: ben triola, igda, kickstarter
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Happy Badger Studio will be joining a handful of other St. Louis independent game developers at an indie game dev panel at Washington University on September 25. We’ll discuss our experience starting an independent studio, as well as the process by which we develop our mobile games. We’ll talk about our successes, failures, and important lessons from our time in the industry.

Tags: igda
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Happy Badger Studio is participating in this weekend’s Game Jam here in St. Louis. The theme this round is “reticulation,” and we’re pretty excited about our game “Reticulating Skies.” Inspired a bit by pachinko, this retro-style weather game forces you to choose your own path from the clouds to the earth, in order to hit the highest-earning target. Check out our title artwork, and keep an eye open for the game soon!

Tags: game jam, reticulating skies
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Cupcake Carnage was born out of my love of sweets and my need to learn game software (GameSalad). I didn’t want to reinvent the wheel while learning new software, so I went with a proven game mechanic of Space Invaders. But I didn’t want to do Space Invaders as everyone knows it, I wanted it to be obnoxiously adorable. Adorable to the point of disgustion. (Disgustion is one of my favorite words). With Carol on board to do art and sound, we jumped in and let the cuteness flow. 6 months of part time development later, we had a great kids game that we were proud of, and we learned a lot.

Launch day was a blast. Cupcake Carnage was a cute game that we were excited to share, so we figured that the best way to do that was by giving away free cupcakes. Who wouldn’t enjoy that? Emily from Then There Was Cake generously donated cupcakes to our cause. The rules for the giveaway were simple: follow @HappyBadgers on twitter, download Cupcake Carnage, and tweet the link to the game. We tweeted our rules for the giveaway in the morning and started our deliveries as the responses came in.

So what did we learn? Cute sells. The icon is arguably the most important aspect of your game, as it’s the first impression for users. If it’s not interesting nobody will download it. The game then of course needs to be good, but the initial download is important. An overwhelming majority of our launch day downloads came from iOS. Nearly 3,500 downloads on iOS vs. less than 20 Android downloads on our first day.

What else did we learn? Playtesting is important. We held a playtesting event a few weeks prior to launch to really polish the game and make sure we weren’t overlooking anything important. We got great feedback, made the necessary modifications, and were happy with our final product.

 

– Dana

Tags: cupcake carnage, postmortem
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Jeff Weigel, author and illustrator of STOP MATH, will be presenting at the St. Louis Artist’s guild on September 10. Jeff will talk about his experience writing, illustrating, and finding a developer, Ed Brown will discuss the development process, and Happy Badger Studio will discuss the process of publishing, playtesting, and marketing. It will be a very educational panel for anyone interested in developing a storybook as software!

The event is free and open to the public. We’d love to see you there!

For more information about the event, visit the St. Louis Artist’s Guild Website.

Tags: stop math
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We’re going to be speaking as panelists at NatsuCon 2013, right here in St. Louis. Come see our panel on “Getting Started in Video Games” at 12:30 pm on Saturday, July 13 in Panel Room 1 at the Gateway Center. We’re going to talk about getting your feet wet in game development, present some of our latest games (including unpublished titles!) and answer any questions that new developers may have.

Come see the panel and say hi to get a shirt, poster, or stickers! We’d love to see you and hear about your experiences with our games.

Dana and Carol are both planning on attending the Animal Crossing meetup afterward, so if you want to add our houses to your Happy Home Showcase, bring your 3DS!

Tags: conventions, natsucon
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This weekend we had the opportunity to participate in MolyJam, an international Game Jam event inspired by the quotes of Peter Molyneux (and his twitter parody, Peter Molydeux). This year, participants were asked to find inspiration from a selection of Molyneux quotes, then take the weekend to develop a game around the idea.

We chose:

“Some people leave artwork, some people do rude things, other people then turn those rude things into nice things.”

…And decided to turn it into a nice thing. We’re introducing our game, “Box,” an online multiplayer experience playing with the idea of patience, greed, and kind favors, with some crudity and poetry thrown in there for good measure.

The game is totally free, runs in your browser, and takes just a few seconds to get started. The rules are simple: Get a box, pass the box to increase its value for the next player, or open the box to keep its contents for your collection. The longer a box stays in circulation, the more valuable its contents become. Plus, you have the opportunity to see and modify notes that each player leaves as he or she passes the box along. It’s a simple concept, but our whole office has gotten enthralled with reading other peoples’ notes. We can’t wait for you to experience Box!

Play it Now!

Tags: box, game jam, molyjam
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We’re almost done with The Flip! We have some openings for anyone who is interested in playtesting. We’d love to have your honest feedback.

Our number of testers is limited by apple, so it’s first come first serve – sign up with TestFlight below:

Sign up for Testflight

The flip is a super-minimalist memory game that challenges your super short term memory. If you think you have a photographic memory, or can speed read, this game will put you to the test.

We’re looking for feedback in these areas:

• What’s fun?
• What’s not fun?
• What’s confusing or frustrating?
• What could be improved

Tags: the flip
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Check out our latest release, Cat Communicator! Have you ever wondered what your cat is telling you when it meows? Have you ever wished you had a human-to-cat translator so that you could communicate with each other? Do you wish your cat could talk? Do you wish you knew how to meow? Cat Communicator can instantly make YOU a cat expert!

Cat Communicator is a free, playful little app that’s just for fun — our favorite kind of thing! You can download it now from iTunes.

Tags: cat communicator, launch
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Well friends, unfortunately we did not reach our Kickstarter goal. But has that gotten us down? Hell no! We’re still super pumped to keep working on Something Fragile, and the support and kindness we’ve gotten from all of you has pushed us even harder.

We want to take this moment to thank all of you who helped us during the campaign – your support means worlds to us, and we love you for it! We still have the opportunity available to back the game in return for beta access and other cool rewards at our Something Fragile Website.

Tags: kickstarter, something fragile
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