I will launch Kickabout for iPhone & iPad on June 2nd! In this month’s newsletter I share more on the App Store plan, metagame design, and more; so grab a drink and let’s dive in.

SUMMER OF SOCCER

Kickabout’s June 2nd launch is just 10 days before the World Cup kicks off. The 8 English speaking launch countries will be USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, United Kingdom, Ireland, Singapore, and South Africa. It’ll be a universal app for iPad and iPhone, free to play and ad-supported, with a single in-app purchase to remove ads and directly support indie development.

I informed Apple of my release plans early so they can consider writing a feature, and nominated Kickabout for release coverage. Part of this process involved setting up my App Store page; this won’t go live until June, but here’s a sneak peek at the iPhone screenshots I submitted (combined for this newsletter into one image).
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You can see a lot of my recent work in these grabs, which included:

• National Team Kits (e.g. Brazil, England, Spain, Mexico)
• Background tabletop scene around the miniature pitch
• Stadium stand pieces (fully assembled in these shots)
• 7-a-side play!

Why the change to 7-a-side? Well, I’m all ears to player feedback, and several playtesters told me 11-a-side felt a little cramped. Speaking with EA’s Mike Jones at GDC cemented this for me, as he observed that only 2 players per zone have clear utility (which I’ve heard from others too). Switching to 2 players per zone (+ goal keeper) was easy to test, and immediately felt right to me. So 7 a side it is 🙂

To create the team kits, I created a system to update the color of shirt, shorts, and socks, as well as the HUD’s background color. The HUD also show’s the chosen country’s flags. My initial test teams are Brazil, England, Spain, and Mexico. I’ve also made a carefully chosen list of 32 launch teams, which I’ll reveal a little closer to launch.

An incomplete looking aspect of my GDC demo was the grey grid surrounding the pitch. So I prioritized “getting rid of the grey”, as my former colleague and environment artist extraordinaire Bob Archibald puts it.

The surrounding scene for Kickabout is doubly important as it visually communicates the miniature scale of the scene; and foreshadows Kickabout as a ‘toy collection’ game. Players find their starting pitch sat atop an empty tabletop, which they then get to fill with stadium pieces and other toys. More on that in the metagame section to come.

I prioritized kits, tabletop, stadium pieces, and 7-a-side play features as they’re highly visible in screenshots/footage, and I wanted to give Apple a glimpse of the final form as they consider Kickabout for launch coverage. I also made a gameplay footage trailer video for them with music!

MUSIC

I knew I wanted a theme song for Kickabout that evoked an international “summer of soccer” vibe. So I stayed up late one evening, listening to a bunch of candidate tracks on Epidemic Sound. I immediately fell in love with the energy of this track.

🎵 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Vu58dHqGhRtzrvHLbUynz5ZnhJW5an_c/view?usp=sharing​

They say “music tells you what to feel”, and this music has all the international football energy that I wanted, plus has an expressivity which fits Kickabout’s expressive gameplay perfectly. Add in the the fact it's title is 'El Equipo Del Norte' (english translation: "Team of the North") and I was sold! 😉 I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

METAGAME

As a planning nerd I love spreadsheets. I’ve been diligently roadmapping and prioritizing my path to launch so I can go heads down and build out my metagame. This of course required a design, which I’ve now plotted out for myself.

As I mentioned in a previous newsletter, the tried and true approach to building a game is “inside out”. i.e. you build core gameplay first, rapidly iterate and validate this through playtesting; and then move to the outer layers of “meta-game” which build return motivation layers on top of a fun core loop. I’ve been designing and starting to build that bigger outer layer of the game and all the content it delivers players.

Having hundreds of players downloading my GDC demo for themselves, allowed me to collect some rough baseline retention numbers. E.g. the percentage that came back 1 day after they installed the app (Day 1 retention), a week after (day 7 retention), and a month later (day 30 retention)... with suitably large margins of error for the low sample size. Day 1 retention was very good, affirming what I’d already observed - my core gameplay is easy to pick up and fun. Day 7 and 30 retention were significantly lower, which is to be expected from a core gameplay demo with no progression features or content yet. So I now have a solid baseline set of retention numbers to watch as I layer in the metagame features.

My meta design thinking is based on two primary motivations:

1. COMPETITION with yourself and other players
2. COLLECTION of miniature soccer toys

Kickabout is inherently a skill based game, and so the primary progression is raising your own skill level. This is familiar territory for me, as Guitar Hero, Slope, and most of my other games are skill based games too.

Your skill playing Kickabout is tested against CPU teams in single player, and reflected through your points score. As explained in my previous newsletter this also factors in difficulty level, to motivate playing at the edge of your ability as you try to maximize points. I’ll be further exploiting this competitive motivation in the launch design, adding more granularity to CPU difficulty and upping the skill ceiling, all wrapped up in varied national teams with their own behaviors.

Players will also find their daily points total tracked across multiple games, with daily milestones to hit that grant customization token rewards. You can then spend these tokens on new toys, such as stadium pieces, teams, and balls. At GDC Miniclip’s Alex Rietveld advised me to make a daily retention mechanism central, and after playing a lot of the Subway Surfers City and A Slight Chance of Sawblades, I took inspiration from their systems design in my own. I'm excited to play the design myself, and see how it pans out with my players.

I've gone heads down working on all this, as it’s a lot of work! Thankfully it’s work I really enjoy, the "meat 'n potatoes" of game development. I’ve been wearing a lot of hats, as I sketch out user interface, content and system details. I’ve also begun on pieces of the implementation, which I now have fully road mapped out to launch.

Chipping away at my to-do list each day, I’m feeling a growing sense of momentum and really do enjoy the craft of making games with my own hands. This “production” stage of development is where I get to do that most, even if as a team-first game designer for most of my career, it feels like a guilty pleasure! It also reminds me of this classic meme.

Yep, I’m drawing the rest of the f’ing owl LOL. See you next month!

Bye for now,

ob
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P.S. Enjoy this newsletter? Why not checkout my previous newsletters, social channels, and more over at robkay.com​