Matthew Hall
Founder and Director, KlickTock and Hipster Whale
Where to hear and read about Matthew Hall1 episode or test
Matthew Hall is an Australian indie developer who runs KlickTock and Hipster Whale and made Crossy Road, which passed 20 million iOS downloads with no paid advertising. The thing most worth learning from him is to borrow the feel of a proven hit, add a fresh twist, build it fast, and design for retention and sharing before money.
ideas are nothing and execution is everything
Crossy Road Creator Matthew Hall (Audio Masterclass)
Matthew Hall: the story and the lessons
1Matthew Hall's path from a flop to Crossy Road
Hall began making games at age 8 on a Commodore 64. He had one game and a manual, and he rebuilt a motorcycle-jumping arcade game from them.
His first PC game flopped because he made it for the wrong people. Little Things took a year and earned about $3,000 in its first month. It was a hidden-object game aimed at Big Fish players, who dislike any change to the formula.
Hall's own verdict: "I sort of made it for the wrong for the wrong people".
The same game became a hit on iPad in 2009. It launched in the second week the iPad was available, reaching people who were discovering touch screens for the first time.
Apple reached out to him about it because it was well designed for the iPad and used the touchscreen well.
Crossy Road was Hall's fourth number-one game, so Apple already knew him. It was featured on release day and passed 20 million iOS downloads without paid ads. Android passed three million downloads within weeks.
2How Hall built Crossy Road in 12 weeks
Hall kept the feel of Flappy Bird and added Frogger. He wanted instant death and a high score that rises with nearly every tap. It took about three months of thinking to land on the mix.
The Frogger idea came as a shower idea. When he pitched his co-developer Andy, Andy was already building a matching prototype.
Hall studied why Flappy Bird clones failed and borrowed only the feeling. Timberman, Dexterous and Crossy Road did well by taking the core feeling and making something new, while straight clones did not.
Hall says the variety in Crossy Road tackles boredom from a few different fronts, which Flappy Bird lacked.
Hall fixed the look and camera angle in the first week. The first demo, made days later, had the same camera angle as the final game. The voxel models were made in Qubicle, a tool he had found about two years earlier.
He skipped conference demos and rounds of friends' feedback, the opposite of what Timberman's creator did.
Hall kept a remote two-person team moving by working daily. He and Andy lived an hour and a half apart, worked over Skype and never met during development. Hall sometimes stayed up until 3 a.m.
"Momentum is really important for me because if I get lost on a game I might slow down and then stop."
Hall capped the project at 12 weeks to limit financial risk. The plan was six weeks and it stretched to 12. He says a year on each game can leave you in financial trouble, since nobody knows what will succeed.
A friend's voxel animals inspired the game. At a game jam, a friend used the same 3D tool and made better work than Hall. He posted funny voxel animals on Twitter, and Hall wanted a game that featured them.
3Designing Crossy Road for retention, sharing and light monetization
Hall put retention and virality first and monetization second. The goal was reaching number one. The team did think about monetization, but it stayed secondary.
His reasoning: "it doesn't matter how well you monetize a game if no one's playing it you are in trouble". Once a game is popular you can tweak monetization and prove what works.
Free gifts on a timer give players a reason to return. Players can claim coins about every six hours, 50 to 500 per return, or 100 to 1,000 without the piggy bank. The coins unlock one to ten characters.
The last characters are much harder to unlock, so players keep coming back to see what is next.
Hall made characters play differently instead of being reskins. Some characters make the game harder and some are funny. Alongside the generated world of roads, water and trains, curiosity about the next creature keeps people playing.
Hall says every character moves at the same speed, even though one interviewer felt the vampire made him lose faster.
Hall built several separate reasons to share into the game. People share high scores, crazy characters and the pride of being first to find a game. Free characters also create goodwill.
People avoid sharing things they don't enjoy, since they don't want to ruin a friend's day.
Hall used opt-in rewarded video ads, with no banners or interstitials. Each video pays 20 coins and runs about 15 to 30 seconds. Ads come through Unity Ads, and Hipster Whale earns more from them than from in-app purchases.
"You don't have to see a single ad if you don't want to."
Hall kept in-app purchases light and permanent. There are no $99 transactions and no major content gates. A restore button brings purchases back.
4How Hall earned Apple's feature and press
Hall starts by making a game Apple is comfortable promoting. Apple features games that make its devices look and feel good. Curators choose the featured pages, while category pages are more automatic.
"The first step is trying to make a game that Apple feel comfortable sharing."
Hall emails Apple's territory reps before launch. Each territory has assigned reps. He emailed his contacts before release, simply saying he had made games before and here was his next one.
Without contact you probably won't get a launch feature, and there are no guarantees. Timberman's feature came about three months after release.
Hall optimizes icon, screenshots and description before anything else. Players judge in that order and only then play. He browsed every new game on App Shopper for about a month and picked Apple's featured games seven times out of ten.
He bought an iPod Touch for the experiment, then checked the App Store to see which games were featured.
Hall named the game as a joke on hit games. Crossy Road is a made-up word echoing Flappy Bird and Angry Birds. The chicken crossing the road gag came second.
Hall doubts many people got the joke.
For the first time, press came to Hall. He had pitched TouchArcade, Gamezebo and Pocket Gamer before. Press spotted Crossy Road early as not normal.
His rule is that press needs an unusual story, and it matters less than the game's own pull. The team did some outreach, but less than people assume.
5Matthew Hall's rules for judging games and ideas
Hall treats ideas as cheap and execution as everything. "Frogger plus Flappy Bird" would get you laughed out of the office. If you can't make the idea as good as it can be, it doesn't matter how good it reads.
Tiny Wings is his favorite app because one person made all the art and music and executed it perfectly. His reaction was that he had to up his game.
Hall studies bad games as hard as hits. He asks why people play even games he dislikes, such as Candy Crush Saga, looking at piece movement, session length and art.
"Too many people just look at the good stuff." Flops show what they do wrong that a good game does right.
Hall says programmer art tanks games. Every game he saw with programmer art tanked, and bad icons were the worst offender.
In his view, great programmers who are bad artists never make a hit unless they bring in an artist or learn art. Apple's culture is design and art focused.
Hall trains his instinct for games through deliberate study. His picks of Apple's featured games matched Apple's seven times out of ten, which he took as a sign Apple curates well.
The longer he makes games, the more factors he sees.
Crossy Road Creator Matthew Hall (Audio Masterclass)
Matthew Hall explains how Crossy Road was built in 12 weeks by combining the core feel of Flappy Bird with Frogger, and grew organically through Apple featuring and built-in sharing. The game passed 20 million iOS downloads with no paid advertising, and it earned more from opt-in video ads than from in-app purchases.
Hall began making games at age 8 on a Commodore 64. He had one game and a manual, and he rebuilt a motorcycle-jumping arcade game from them.
His first PC game flopped because he made it for the wrong people. Little Things took a year and earned about $3,000 in its first month. It was a hidden-object game aimed at Big Fish players, who dislike any change to the formula.
Hall's own verdict: "I sort of made it for the wrong for the wrong people".
The same game became a hit on iPad in 2009. It launched in the second week the iPad was available, reaching people who were discovering touch screens for the first time.
Apple reached out to him about it because it was well designed for the iPad and used the touchscreen well.
Crossy Road was Hall's fourth number-one game, so Apple already knew him. It was featured on release day and passed 20 million iOS downloads without paid ads. Android passed three million downloads within weeks.
Hall kept the feel of Flappy Bird and added Frogger. He wanted instant death and a high score that rises with nearly every tap. It took about three months of thinking to land on the mix.
The Frogger idea came as a shower idea. When he pitched his co-developer Andy, Andy was already building a matching prototype.
Hall studied why Flappy Bird clones failed and borrowed only the feeling. Timberman, Dexterous and Crossy Road did well by taking the core feeling and making something new, while straight clones did not.
Hall says the variety in Crossy Road tackles boredom from a few different fronts, which Flappy Bird lacked.
Hall fixed the look and camera angle in the first week. The first demo, made days later, had the same camera angle as the final game. The voxel models were made in Qubicle, a tool he had found about two years earlier.
He skipped conference demos and rounds of friends' feedback, the opposite of what Timberman's creator did.
Hall kept a remote two-person team moving by working daily. He and Andy lived an hour and a half apart, worked over Skype and never met during development. Hall sometimes stayed up until 3 a.m.
"Momentum is really important for me because if I get lost on a game I might slow down and then stop."
Hall capped the project at 12 weeks to limit financial risk. The plan was six weeks and it stretched to 12. He says a year on each game can leave you in financial trouble, since nobody knows what will succeed.
A friend's voxel animals inspired the game. At a game jam, a friend used the same 3D tool and made better work than Hall. He posted funny voxel animals on Twitter, and Hall wanted a game that featured them.
Hall put retention and virality first and monetization second. The goal was reaching number one. The team did think about monetization, but it stayed secondary.
His reasoning: "it doesn't matter how well you monetize a game if no one's playing it you are in trouble". Once a game is popular you can tweak monetization and prove what works.
Free gifts on a timer give players a reason to return. Players can claim coins about every six hours, 50 to 500 per return, or 100 to 1,000 without the piggy bank. The coins unlock one to ten characters.
The last characters are much harder to unlock, so players keep coming back to see what is next.
Hall made characters play differently instead of being reskins. Some characters make the game harder and some are funny. Alongside the generated world of roads, water and trains, curiosity about the next creature keeps people playing.
Hall says every character moves at the same speed, even though one interviewer felt the vampire made him lose faster.
Hall built several separate reasons to share into the game. People share high scores, crazy characters and the pride of being first to find a game. Free characters also create goodwill.
People avoid sharing things they don't enjoy, since they don't want to ruin a friend's day.
Hall used opt-in rewarded video ads, with no banners or interstitials. Each video pays 20 coins and runs about 15 to 30 seconds. Ads come through Unity Ads, and Hipster Whale earns more from them than from in-app purchases.
"You don't have to see a single ad if you don't want to."
Hall kept in-app purchases light and permanent. There are no $99 transactions and no major content gates. A restore button brings purchases back.
Hall starts by making a game Apple is comfortable promoting. Apple features games that make its devices look and feel good. Curators choose the featured pages, while category pages are more automatic.
"The first step is trying to make a game that Apple feel comfortable sharing."
Hall emails Apple's territory reps before launch. Each territory has assigned reps. He emailed his contacts before release, simply saying he had made games before and here was his next one.
Without contact you probably won't get a launch feature, and there are no guarantees. Timberman's feature came about three months after release.
Hall optimizes icon, screenshots and description before anything else. Players judge in that order and only then play. He browsed every new game on App Shopper for about a month and picked Apple's featured games seven times out of ten.
He bought an iPod Touch for the experiment, then checked the App Store to see which games were featured.
Hall named the game as a joke on hit games. Crossy Road is a made-up word echoing Flappy Bird and Angry Birds. The chicken crossing the road gag came second.
Hall doubts many people got the joke.
For the first time, press came to Hall. He had pitched TouchArcade, Gamezebo and Pocket Gamer before. Press spotted Crossy Road early as not normal.
His rule is that press needs an unusual story, and it matters less than the game's own pull. The team did some outreach, but less than people assume.
Hall treats ideas as cheap and execution as everything. "Frogger plus Flappy Bird" would get you laughed out of the office. If you can't make the idea as good as it can be, it doesn't matter how good it reads.
Tiny Wings is his favorite app because one person made all the art and music and executed it perfectly. His reaction was that he had to up his game.
Hall studies bad games as hard as hits. He asks why people play even games he dislikes, such as Candy Crush Saga, looking at piece movement, session length and art.
"Too many people just look at the good stuff." Flops show what they do wrong that a good game does right.
Hall says programmer art tanks games. Every game he saw with programmer art tanked, and bad icons were the worst offender.
In his view, great programmers who are bad artists never make a hit unless they bring in an artist or learn art. Apple's culture is design and art focused.
Hall trains his instinct for games through deliberate study. His picks of Apple's featured games matched Apple's seven times out of ten, which he took as a sign Apple curates well.
The longer he makes games, the more factors he sees.