“The Moops: Combos of Joy” was an online flash game published back in early 2011 in several game portals ( you can still play it in Kongregate if technical issues permit), and its commercial underperformance inevitably informed many of the decisions taken by the company in subsequent years. The second game HeavyBoat ever released was actually based on original characters. Bear with me while we take a very quick tour back in time. Well, the fact is, we did give it a try once… years ago.
Nevertheless, the appeal of creating your own characters and developing your own fictional world is so strong that many people still view the work-for-hire model we adopted as a kind of consolation prize, almost as if we were all secretly dreaming of the day we would be finally be “free to do our own thing” but couldn’t openly admit it. Clients have always let us play around with their toys with as much freedom as we could hope to get, and we were never put in the position of having to simply execute someone else’s design.Īll the international IPs we’ve made games for. Yet the single question we’ve been asked the most in five years has always been the same: “when are you going to do something of your own creation?" The answer has never changed: all our games have been our own creations.
Snow bros 2 game on kongregate tv#
Our association with CN and Disney has allowed us to work with some of the most coveted TV IPs for young audiences today. so here it is: the story of why we stopped trying to create our own IPs years ago, why we’re coming back to it now, and what the real odds of our studio still existing by year’s end are.
At the end of the previous article I promised I’d eventually check in to tell you how we’re doing.
Snow bros 2 game on kongregate free#
Well, it’s been four months since and we’ve just released “Winter Fugitives” ( Android, iOS) and “Bouncy Kingdom” ( Android, iOS), two free mobile games which happen to be the product of our second attempt ever at creating original IPs. That particular piece of writing saw the light just as a small group of HeavyBoat’s “surviving” members were picking up the pieces from the failed experiment, and moving back to our previous, smaller office… unsure of how things would work out from that point on and how long we could actually sustain the company.
Back in April I published an article here at Gamasutra about the bittersweet end of HeavyBoat’s year-and-a-half long expansion experiment, which coincided with the development of our latest Regular Show mobile game, “Grudgeball: Enter the Chaosphere”.