This story first appeared in Cult of Mac Magazine.
Your game may be great, but languish in a cobwebbed corner of the iTunes store. That was almost the fate of Little Inferno, an original downloadable game launched in 2012 by indie outfit Tomorrow Corporation. They made some mistakes — big and small — that all devs hope to avoid.
One of the many cool things at the Game Developers Conference each year is the post-mortem talk, a look at what a game did well, or not so well, by the developers who made the game. This year, we were lucky to hear a talk about Little Inferno and the mistakes the team made along the way.
Little Inferno is a great little indie game for iOS, Mac, and other consoles that has you burning toys in a fire to earn coins. It’s a biting commentary on how we spend a lot of our time doing repetitive tasks for no reason, and a fun game to boot.
Kyle Gray, one of the three masterminds behind the company, shared with GDC goers how the game overcame a number of mistakes to sell over a million copies. (Especially noteworthy since the game sells for $10.)
Here are the three main mistakes they made, according to Gray:
They put the coolest content in the last 10 percent of the game.
They over thought everything; it took two years to finish.
The game was too unique to easily talk about with consumers or the press – you always need an elevator pitch.
For such a simple game, said Gray, there’s a ton of innovative tech involved, which didn’t make development super easy.
What saved Little Inferno from an obscure death in the iTunes store?
Word-of-mouth buzz, Gray told the GDC crowd.
Learning how these great games are made can be a fascinating way to understand the games we all love to play.
Rob LeFebvre is an Anchorage, Alaska-based writer and editor who has contributed to various tech, gaming and iOS sites, including 148Apps, Creative Screenwriting, Shelf-Awareness, VentureBeat, and Paste Magazine. Feel free to find Rob on Twitter @roblef, and send him a cookie once in a while; he’ll really appreciate it.
One response to “Lessons From The Heavenly Rise Of Little Inferno”
I will give them kudos on how well the game worked from a dev perspective, but I was bored after like 5 mins of playing around. The only reason I kept playing was to reach the end. Perhaps I was disappointed because I loved World of Goo and comparatively speaking this game was a flop. Not worth the price I paid for it.