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Crossy Road Creator Matthew Hall (Audio Masterclass)

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The bottom line

A mobile hit takes the proven feel of an existing game, adds a fresh twist, and executes it well enough to keep players returning and sharing. That earns Apple's feature, which drives downloads without paid ads.

Key takeaways

  • A hit keeps the core feel of a proven game and adds something new. 6:26
    • Crossy Road combines Flappy Bird's instant death and high score with Frogger. It took about three months of thinking to find that mix.
    • Copying Flappy Bird fails. Timberman, Dexterous and Crossy Road did well by borrowing the feeling and making something new.
  • Building fast and putting retention and sharing before money protects a small team. 9:21
    • The game took 12 weeks, planned as six. A year on each game risks financial trouble, since nobody knows what will succeed.
    • Monetization came second. Ads earn more than purchases, and the ads are optional rewarded videos with no banners or interstitials.
  • Free gifts and surprising characters give players reasons to return and to share. 16:37
    • Every six hours players can claim free coins, which unlock one to ten new characters. Some characters play harder than others, so people want to see what's next.
    • People share high scores, crazy characters, and the pride of being the first to find a game.
  • Apple's feature, not paid advertising, drove the downloads. 20:31
    • Apple promotes games that make its devices look and feel good. Hall emailed his Apple contacts before launch, and Crossy Road was featured on release day.
    • Crossy Road is his fourth number-one game, so Apple already knew him. The game passed 20 million downloads.
  • Studying why games win and lose, bad ones included, builds the skill to make a good one. 26:24
    • Hall spent a month browsing every new App Store game on App Shopper. He picked Apple's featured games seven times out of ten.
    • Players judge the icon first, then the screenshots, the description, and only then the game. Programmer art and bad icons sink games.

If you can't make that idea as good as it can be, it really doesn't matter how good the idea reads.

Matthew Hall

Chapter summaries

0:00 A flop, then a hit on the iPad

A game built for the wrong audience flopped, and the same game found its fit on a new platform.

  • Little Things flopped on PC and then hit big on iPad. 2:25
    • A year of work earned about $3,000 in its first month.
    • It was a hidden-object game made for Big Fish players, who dislike any change to the formula.
    • On iPad it reached people discovering touch screens for the first time.
    • It launched in 2009, in the second week the iPad was available.
    • Hall started at age 8 on a Commodore 64. He had one game and a manual, and he rebuilt a motorcycle-jumping arcade game from it.

4:37 Where Crossy Road came from

A ready partner and built-in variety turned a Flappy Bird feel into a game with staying power.

  • Hall and his co-developer Andy aligned fast because Andy already had a matching prototype. 5:50
    • They met a year earlier at GCAP, the Australian game developers conference.
    • Hall wanted a high score that rises with nearly every tap.
    • The Frogger idea arrived as a "shower idea".
    • Hall pitched Andy flappy bird plus Frogger plus some other stuff, and Andy was already building it.
  • Variety gives Crossy Road the longevity Flappy Bird lacked. 8:26
    • The world is generated as you play, so you must react to what comes next.
    • Roads, water and trains each play differently.
    • Curiosity about the next creature keeps players going.
    • Flappy Bird had almost no variety. Timberman only went left and right.
    • Hall says the game tackles boredom from a few different fronts.

9:21 Building fast and remote

Early decisions and daily momentum let two people far apart finish quickly.

  • The 3D look and camera angle were set in the first week. 9:46
    • The first demo, made days later, had the same camera angle as the final game.
    • They did not show the game at conferences or iterate through friends' feedback.
    • Timberman's creator went through several rounds of friend feedback and conference demos. Hall chose the opposite.
  • Momentum kept a remote two-person team moving. 10:52
    • Hall says that if he loses momentum, he slows and stops. Restarting is nearly impossible.
    • They worked daily over Skype, living an hour and a half apart, and never met during development.
    • Hall sometimes stayed up until 3 a.m., helped by caffeine.
    • The 3D models were made in Qubicle by Minddesk. He found it about two years earlier, looking for a tool to make 3D art alone.

12:02 From voxel animals to a retention-first game

Easy 3D tools gave the game its look, and keeping players coming back mattered more than early money.

  • A quick 3D tool made the voxel look possible. 12:02
    • It let Hall mock up 3D games fast, with no need to learn 3ds Max, Maya or Modo.
    • A friend tried it at a game jam, made better work than Hall, and kept using it.
    • The friend posted funny voxel animals on Twitter, and Hall wanted a game that featured them.
    • Hall tried the tool himself first, and the friend's results beat his.
  • The goal was reaching number one, so money came later. 13:00
    • Retention and word of mouth drove every decision.
    • A well-monetized game still fails if nobody plays it.
    • Once a game is popular, you can tweak monetization and prove what works.
    • The team did think about monetization, but it stayed secondary.
  • Light monetization keeps the game friendly to players. 14:15
    • Each rewarded video pays 20 coins, and the ads run about 15 to 30 seconds.
    • Purchases are permanent, and a restore button brings them back.
    • There are no $99 transactions.
    • The ads come from Unity Ads, once called Applifier and then Everyplay. They were easy to add through the Unity asset store.

16:21 Gifts, characters and reasons to share

Steady gifts and varied characters bring players back, and several different motives make them share.

  • Gift sizes and character variety pull players back. 16:37
    • Each return gives 50 to 500 coins, or 100 to 1,000 without the piggy bank.
    • The characters are not simple skins, and some change how the game plays.
    • The last characters are much harder to unlock.
    • No character is easier than the others. The vampire is one of the harder ones.
    • The interviewer felt the vampire made him lose faster. Hall says every character moves at the same speed.
  • People share for many reasons, not just one. 18:20
    • A high score is one trigger. The interviewer shared after beating his son's score.
    • Free characters create goodwill, and odd ones like the text-covered dog get passed around.
    • People avoid sharing things they don't enjoy, since they don't want to ruin a friend's day.
    • The interviewer links the free gifts to reciprocity, the idea from Cialdini's book on influence.

12:12 How to get Apple's attention

Apple features games that show off its devices, and a good relationship with its reps opens the door.

  • Apple's curators choose the featured games. 22:27
    • Hall's first game, Little Things, was one Apple reached out about. It was well designed for the iPad and used the touchscreen well.
    • Featured pages are curated, while category pages are more automatic.
    • Apple spends a large amount of time on curation, since many weekly releases come from first-time developers.
    • Reviewers recommend games up the chain.
  • Contact Apple early, once you have something good. 23:03
    • Each territory has assigned reps, and you email them before the game launches.
    • Without contact, you probably won't get a launch feature.
    • There are no guarantees. Hall just says he has made games before and here is his next one.
    • Timberman's feature came about three months after release, a different path from Crossy Road's.

23:59 A joke name and little press outreach

The name is a joke on hit games, and press mattered less than the game's own pull.

  • Crossy Road is a made-up word that echoes Flappy Bird and Angry Birds. 24:02
    • They invented a word to fit that "Flappy Angry" pattern.
    • The chicken crossing the road gag came second.
    • The team laughed at how ridiculous the name was.
    • Hall doubts many people got the joke.
  • For the first time, the press came to Hall. 25:15
    • He had pitched TouchArcade, Gamezebo and Pocket Gamer before.
    • Press spotted Crossy Road early as not normal.
    • Press needs an unusual story to run.
    • They did some outreach, but less than people assume.

26:05 Learn from games that fail

Dissecting both hits and flops builds the instinct for what makes a game compelling.

  • Ask why people play a game, even one you dislike. 26:24
    • Candy Crush Saga divides people, yet many love it.
    • Many factors matter: how pieces move, session length, whether the art appeals.
    • The longer you make games, the more of these factors you see.
    • Bad games show what they do wrong that a good one does right.
  • Hall's eye for a game is largely instinct, trained by study. 27:39
    • Early on, he wanted to know if Apple's featuring followed any method.
    • His picks matched Apple's, which showed it curates well.
    • He bought an iPod Touch for the experiment.
    • He then checked the App Store to see which games were featured.
  • Looking only at hits hides your own mistakes. 29:47
    • The flops tell you whether you need an artist.
    • Great programmers who are bad artists never make a hit.
    • Apple's culture is design and art focused.

30:27 Tiny Wings, ideas and results

Flawless execution beats a clever idea, and Crossy Road's numbers keep growing.

  • Tiny Wings is Hall's favorite app because one person executed it perfectly. 30:47
    • One man made all the art and music.
    • It drew on an earlier game, yet it hit the top of the charts through word of mouth.
    • It came before any Apple feature.
    • Hall's reaction was I gotta up my game.
  • Ideas are cheap and execution is everything. 31:50
    • "Frogger plus Flappy Bird" would get you laughed out of the office.
    • Hall's own unbuilt idea is a proofreading game where you spot spelling mistakes in flying text.
    • His advice is to study bad apps too, so you don't repeat their mistakes.
  • Crossy Road keeps drawing players, even after high scores. 34:00
    • Top scores reach the early thousands, in about five minutes.
    • Android passed three million downloads within weeks.
    • Difficulty ramps up past about 300 points.
    • Hall's best score is 360-something.
    • The team has not celebrated yet, as they are too busy.

In the growth library

Matthew Hall, Founder and Director, KlickTock and Hipster Whale. 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.

More from App Masters · The whole library, and ask it anything

Transcript935 lines
0:00

the most action-packed content from the top mobile experts yes is the app masters podcast with Steve Young welcome ladies and gentlemen this is the app masters podcast and I am Steve P young founder of at masters dokko where I bring on awesome people in the mobile space to tell their story so that we can learn from their journey and we could use it in our business and hopefully you'll join me on this podcast and I get to interview you and you know there's one thing that I love to do I love to get down and dirty to the nitty gritty so that we could figure out exactly all the different strategies that worked and today I am honored I'm excited because he's we woke up early even though he's dead tired he's here with me Matt Hall he's the founder and director at click talk and hipster whale and you probably know his app they created the top hat app right now Crossy Road Matt welcome to the show thanks for having me on yes

1:02

I am a little tired 7 a.m. yeah yeah in Australia and you said you were just releasing just submitted the second version of Crossy Road right that's what you're submitting today yeah oh cool wrapping it up so I was up really late last night to Holly man 4 hours of sleep 3 hours it would it be about that yeah I think goes to 30 are you went to sleep Wow well thanks for doing this I really appreciate it yeah pain I'm having a little bit of pain that's three push through Matt let's see so I want to kind of start off this conversation so for the listener out there we're gonna talk all about marketing we're gonna talk about how you create an awesome game and talk about all the different questions that I got from the community as well let's turn off the story with the launch of your first game mmm if the first game of clicked up I mean I've been making games for a really long time my very first

1:55

game I think I made when I was eight or nine years old but my first game I launched a click TOC was in 2009 and it was little things which was actually a really big hit on iPad he was one of the very first get launched like the second week of the iPad iPads availability it was a huge he but prior to that I'd release it on PC and I'd worked on that game for a year and it flopped flopped massively I think the you know I'd worked all year on it and I made something like $3,000 in its first opening month that was quite a shock how much time and money have you had you invested in it a full year though you know that year was very busy because when we know my wife and I just had a baby so it was it was quite a lot of time though yeah it's pretty scary definitely more than three thousand dollars worth of time well why do you think it worked on the iPad and on the PC was the game by the way little things

2:53

okay yeah so as a hidden-object game um I sort of made it for the wrong for the wrong people I made it for the big fish portal and I think I just understood the types of players they had I knew they had mostly all the women on there so I tried to make a game that would appeal to that all the women that I knew of course that all the women on big fish games are essentially hardcore hidden object game errs in any deviation from the formula that they do not appreciate yeah but but in making it been trying to make a game that that anyone could play I think that was why it was such a great feat for iPad because instead of selling it game to hardcore gamers the iPad was people discovering how to use touch screens for the first time so it's an absolutely perfect fit mmm what shoe it's a perfect fit and how long have you been developed making games I'm 39 now and I started when I was 8 so a long time did you learn how to program back

3:53

then as well yeah so I had a Commodore 64 yeah we do I love that so we were fairly we were fairly poor so I got given one game and a manual that game was finished pretty quickly and then I had nothing to do but I remember my mind is like this motorcycle that you had to like you know jump over these barriers hearse things and that was it like that was the first game from the manual that I that I built it was called the Pete so it's this really obscure arcade game so I've actually played it in the arcade once when I was very very little yep but I've never seen it seems and never anyone heard of it it's very rare all right so this is the question that I'm dying to know and somebody in the community let me see who exactly who asked this question but Marko asked his question something I had I wanted to ask you as well it's like where did you come up with this idea for Crossy Road Crossy Road there's a combination of a few

4:53

things so Andy and I the co developer met probably a year before at at gcapp which is an Australian it's essentially like Australian GDC mm-hmm Game Developers Conference and we were talking all year about something we wanted to make together then we kept like floating all these our ideas and yeah that's that's okay you know once that one's all right and then we want I wanted to make something that was like flappy bird mm-hmm as in something that you would die from the very first moment you could die for the very first moment can you play and then want to just have a high score counter which went up as you you know pretty much each time you tap the screen and the idea of combining flappy bird with Frogger was a shower ideas so to speak mm-hmm I like it so what's the first step you take after you had this initial idea I called him I called Andy not long afterwards I said so how about this flappy bird plus

5:58

Frogger plus some other stuff and he already had been working on a prototype almost exactly like that so yeah yeah and so from that point on it was fairly easy we both sort of knew what we wanted to make yep you know you're my second guess cuz I interviewed the guy who created Timberman and he said ya wanted to create something that was sort of like flappy bird and then he went about a different angle obviously than you did yeah but what what sort of does complicated because so many people look at the success of flappy bird and they say that's amazing I'm gonna make flappy bird again whereas it's you know people it's games like Timmerman and dexterous and Crossy road where it's it's taking the call feeling and then making something new are the ones that have done well yes oh yeah and that's what I want that's why I'm excited to talk to you and I was excited back then to talk to him because it is trying to

6:51

figure out like what you guys think those core features are because I think a lot of people have tried to clone it right like they would make the same exact version but when you put a different unique spin on like Timmerman date and like Crossy Road did what is that core feature that you felt that you're you're like okay this is what flappy bird does really well but I'm gonna put my spin on it now well there's no one thing I mean you just have to spend time thinking about it that took it took it took probably three months sitting there going I want to make something a bit like flappy bird before I came up with the answer yep what were you thinking when you said a bit like flappy bird what are those things I guess you mentioned one of them was like exactly what I said before I only got ya direly something that's ridiculous enough that people will share with their friends you know high score

7:36

feature just the just the basic core tenets there's different for every game but and I think what I really like about your game is that I don't know if this is part of like when you think about game design this is something has to go into it is that there's a variable right like there's variety inside whereas flappy bird like things the mmm had none right yeah there wasn't too much variety and even Timmerman we didn't have too much variety just had to go left and right left and right but here it's like you have water right you have the the streets you have trains that are coming a little bit faster you have cars are a little bit slower you have this variety in there that makes it feel I don't know like I guess for me was more engaging like I could continually play this where's timber man and flappy bird is like okay great let's see how I can get but then I don't know if there's yeah you know look longevity towards those

8:22

type of games the will the longevity so that comes from a couple of places it's not only from as you say the presage lee generated world which you never quite know what's gonna happen next like you actually have to react to it people it sort of has that whether the little holes go up and down right it's it's like a really really small part of that but the other thing with the variety is that maybe people get bored of the game but in sitting what crazy creature they're going to click next and what's it gonna do yep right so we tried to tackle it from a few different fronts what what other fronts are you kind of thinking about that that is what like variety tackling him from a couple of different ways god I like it and the how actually the other thing I want to talk to about talk to you about is how long did it take you from when you guys initially had the idea to actually you know feeling like

9:15

you it was something that you could submit to the app store and what were was that sort of journey looked like where that journey looked like it was 12 weeks so pretty quick Wow we're going to do it in six and then once we got to that midpoint we went you know what this is shaping out to be pretty good we're gonna take extra time to make it really good yeah and was the 3d thing one of the different different graphic elements like we had a change in like they they had like Pixar but we're gonna go 3d we're gonna make it like futuristic type of looking that was always in my mind I think we did that and I did that the first week yeah not in the cat that camera angle yeah very first very first gay you know demo version made just a couple of days afterwards has exactly that same camera angle that remain throughout development you know I remember timber man saying that he showed it to a bunch of his

10:06

friends and you know they went through a couple of different iterations before finally deciding like okay this is it and he went to like game conferences to show it off to the other people did you guys do anything like that as well when you're kind of developing it no so we won't think we wanted to spend as little time as possible why is that just because it's dangerous on the App Store you never know whether something's gonna succeed or fair if you a year on each game you can find yourself in a lot of trouble financially yeah I like it I like that approach it sound so easy like hey we took 12 weeks we get in the App Store we're hit number one we're making tons of money and here's Crossy road yeah with with development its momentum is really important like this that's a personal thing momentum is really important for me because if I get lost on a game I might slow down and then stop and then

11:00

starting back up again isn't she's near impossibility yeah how do you keep that momentum going caffeine staying up today 3:00 a.m. just to make sure it gets done just working on the game everyday during that period yeah and do you and Emily live close to each other are you guys kind of constantly talking no I would constantly talking through skype we actually leave an hour and a half away from one another and we didn't catch it we didn't meet up the entire duration of the game it was entirely remotely yep okay I got a question from Johan he says which software did you guys use to make the 3d meshes yeah so I found it's called cubicles so it's qub icle it's my company called mind desk and I discovered it got while ago now I think that's two years ago because I was looking for a 3d tool I could use to create 3d art by myself so I could mock-up things very quickly and start creating 3d games without having to

12:06

learn the ins and outs of a package like 3d studio max or mayor or modo and not long after that I we did a game gym and my I wanted to make a game in this style but and my friend is working on another game with mine called dick war I said do you wanna have a go at this try this 3d package and the stuff he produced was like way better than mine and he's run with the tool he's been using it ever since and was drawing all these funny voxel 3d animals on his Twitter I was like you know I'd really like to make a game that features those yeah I like that Matt so I also want to talk about let's see I mean there's so many directions I won't ask you everything I know it's early all right so what's in terms of monetization what's really working well for you guys so the game wasn't actually designed to be monetization first the entire point of the game was actually to be to have really high retention so that people

13:12

keep coming back and really high morality so that people want to tell their friends about it and monetization of course we put thought into it but it was secondary yeah it was more important that the game made it to number one so to speak yeah and all their efforts were based on that if you you know it doesn't matter how well you monetize a game if no one's playing it you are in trouble so you gotta have a lot it seems to me if I'm kind of hearing you correctly like you had this long-term for you like hey wouldn't spend a little time on it if it takes off we're gonna focus on four out by out Fri ality and then keeping retention and we're not gonna spend too much time on it because frankly we want to get it out in apps or see if it's actually gonna stick there and then if it does stick then we know that hey we've thought about the two things and if those two things hit then we could think about monetization

14:00

because people will continue to play on Play it we can tweak monetization is a better way to put right but obviously I've put some thought into it but whether it worked or it didn't it doesn't matter so too much because as long as your games popular you can you'll figure it out you can prove things that's right yeah great what about monetizing the best for you right now I can't talk about percentages or anything like that but we definitely make more from ads than we do from in-app purchases so our game is really light on the wallet doesn't have $99 in out transactions and it doesn't have major contentions in it at all like all the purchases are permanent if you buy something you can just hit that restore purchases button and it'll come back yep and there's this there's this Business Insider article and I'm sure you saw it but they said yeah dollars so far from the ads from the clever video ads yeah

14:55

from unity it's yeah so is this the you get virtual currency for watching a couple of video ads is that what if this is that's right yeah you get you twenty coins every time you watch that yep yeah I know fun run does this for exception well because I watched so many stinking hands for this game and it's just like yeah I want some coins and so I'm willing to watch 30 seconds of I know that's like no problem for me it seems like the a generalization yeah generally it's 15 seconds as well right exactly because it's good because like was ours they you don't have to see a single ad if you don't want to like lots of people don't like ads when I totally respect that and you can see we haven't put any interstitials or banners yeah for that reason but yeah there's heads there to watch if you want to and yes people are watching them so when you're thinking about retention actually you know what you're using unity unity video

15:46

ads I didn't hear that they had there did you guys build this on top of unity as well that's right yeah no unity ads is a well they were called APLA fire you may have heard them they were I think they became everyplay ads and now they're just unity ads I think that's the I've had a few name changes okay it's the same team they've been around for a little while yeah I didn't know that so it's just it's the same platform right it's a unity platform to build the games and then they have the ads already integrated with it there's the unity asset store so it's just on there but it was you know it's it worked it worked really well yeah okay easy to integrate the I think I want to talk to you about is when you're thinking about retention we are thinking about virality what are some of the things that really worked well for you in terms of those two aspects there with retention you need to give people a reason to come back to the

16:39

game later so in our case you know the characters and the free gifts that's that's what it is so every time you come back you're going to get somewhere between 50 and 500 coins or if you are not buying the piggy bank it's between 100 and a thousand coins roughly and so every six hours you're going to be able to get you know one problem probably one to ten creatures depends on how how through the game you are at the end it's much harder to unlock those final characters um in the fact that the like once you start seeing the characters and you realize wow these are actually really interesting they're not just simple skins and playing with one could be much harder or could be really funny then people want to see what's next yep are they are there like different difficulty in the different characters that none of them easier than any of the others but there are some that are definitely harder yep every virtue of

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the year that whether it's dark and it's nighttime or etc the vampire like we had the vampire was really difficult you still think it long and I feel like you lose mu slower maybe it's just my mind everyone moves the same speed it is the size I love that see I love the brilliant for I love the the variety of things that you guys put onto it and I used to think to myself like when I was playing it that I mean you're just giving me all these gifts about these characters like I get to unlock them all the time that's right did you tell anyone about the game I did right now of course of course yes I think I did share the Twitter and I yeah well this is great but you know I think I've got why did you do that why did you shake receiver and not another game I think it was because I love the game design and I think what I actually shared was the top scorer like I was like finally like I beat my son's toxic allure yeah you had

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me beat for so long and I said finally I'd beaten him and so that's that's why I shared it yeah so there are a lot of different ways to share like people aren't going to share some they're not gonna show you something they're not enjoying because they don't want to tear down their friends day so it's important like all that goodwill with all those characters were giving away it creates a situation where people say man you've got to check this out as well as there's also the crazy characters like people might really feel like sharing Wow have you seen those this is craziness dog than there's texts all over the screen I don't understand what's going on and then of course the high score this you know there's a few different ways to get people to press that tweet button what are some other ways that that's the other three ways yes that mean there's more to like people just might some some people what's a good way of putting it

19:33

like being the one that discovers things first and so I found this really cool game and I'm the first one to discover it and that and that's sort of a nice fun feeling when you you're the one who introduced the game to your entire network of friends you know there's lots of reasons why people share yeah I think that's a brilliant move I think you know there's this great book about influence and he talks a lot about reciprocity and I think Yuki is giving so much guess into the point where I started feeling like wow there's a lot of gifts being gift I give in and sort of bills that reference so that we as a user would are more well more willing to share the app itself as well I think it's a great strategy yeah the so let's talk about marketing so I mean you guys have done phenomenally well top charts everything what what does really works what was sort of your strategy from an over let's talk it from like a high level of you

20:26

like what was sort of the strategy with getting the app the word out there well I mean we sort of already talked about that so the app is the app is the hunter is in organic so we don't actually pay for ads like we don't although we have ads in our game we don't advertise ours Apple of course gave us a really great feature and that the first step is trying to make a game that Apple feel comfortable sharing you want to make something happily and that that's a fairly nebulous thing to say but it's actually a pretty good mantra like why why do a pelear the apps that they do yeah well I mean promoting this one over the thousands of others that came out that week yeah did you do any type of outreach to get them to be aware of the app so yes so the crusty road is actually my fourth number-one game so Apple know who I am this morning so once we had once I have the game ready I'm able to reach out to

21:26

them but then initially when I did my first ever game I didn't know anyone I didn't know anyone had happen of course yeah and little things was the first one they they reached out to me with because it was a game you know well designed for the platform you know it was early to iPad it used the touchscreen well if you do those things if you make a game that makes the Apple device look and feel good they're probably going to feed to you because they have they have teams of people like all the reviewers I believe I think they recommend up the chain that each week this generally two-thirds one-third of the games on the App Store have never that the people have never released an app before and the only way they can do that is if Apple are spending a large amount of time on curation and identifying those cool games you're right it seems to be like the the feature page is the one that's curated and the sub the category

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pages are more like automatic yeah that's right stuff you know I love that and so I guess it is about that I mean sort of timber around said that like hey look we just built the game and then it was for him it was like three months down the road which was an interesting story because it was his first hit app that got featured I'm not kind of like when little things for you and so now is it just more like you just email somebody from Apple and say hey I'm working on this game here's sort of like the first version is that what you're gonna do with this well they're there absolutely no guarantees it's just like hey I'm you know I've made stuff before he's my next thing yep is it a somebody that manages the app in pray there's people all over the place so each territory has there has has reps assigned for this Judy yeah and do you just have their email addresses like hey I'm submitting it when do you make that

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contact the email you make it as soon as you have something good to show because you want to start that process not early early early you want to make sure it's good but early enough but before you it actually hits the App Store is that enough of course you okay otherwise you're not going to get a launch if they don't know about it I know you guys got featured right when it got released right yeah that's right yeah that's awesome that's fantastic all right cool let's see you let me just go sift through these so what what how did you come up the name cross your heart yeah yeah it was originally called like roadkill a roadkill see me later or something that was Mike that was my first draft I don't which wasn't good at all so we just set it one day and just came out with some and of course Crossy road is an alliteration of flappy bird Angry Birds and all those apps once once I said it we just we just started

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laughing because of the ridiculousness of it I don't know how many people got the joke but um I thought it was more because like a chicken character I mean did you guys have the name and then thought about you only give the chicken cross the road that's all I thought yes let me see this did you know if the chicken was the lead character based on the that popular joke right but we need are crossing the road but yeah the I to invent a word to try and fit that flappy angry paradigm we thought that was really funny yeah I love that I love that anything else you want to cover Matt I think I mean there's a lot of stuff and I don't want the listener the thing about me is like I don't want to listen to thinking like I wish you Steve you should asked about this but definitely too early for me to come up with a question to all of it that's great so I'm sure you guys did you guys do any type of outreach as well

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in terms of you got featured by Apple that was great but did you do anything else in terms like to reach nuts like sites like I'm or these other app review sites yeah it's gonna sound a bit mean to say that the press is less important these days yeah I definitely like I like I like the press because I like reading it so I'm always interested in you know I probably spend more time reading about games and I do playing them whether it's you know old print magazines or or on the web I just find that really exciting so I have people who I reached out to a year like touch okay and in game Zeebo and Pocket Gamer lots of others but we've crossed erode it's the first time where people have come to me mmm-hmm it's people are wood up you know the press identified it really early as something that was not normal but of course with press you need a story that was something out of the unusual yep so you need to any other way

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which we did but not not as much as you think okay cool well that's great the other thing I want to hit on is for the listen out there who sort of like me standby games like I told you before and but you really don't have a clear understanding of how to make a really compelling game what would you say to that person how does it make a compelling game Wow I think you just have to recite like I see a lot of people trying to make games that that play them but don't try to dissect them like why why does this game work even the games that people that you think a crap like why does people play like a lot of people really don't like candy crush saga for example but a lot of people do so you just sort of sit down and say why do people like this yeah what's compelling about it and there's a thousand things right yeah like whether it's the way the little bits move or how long do I have to spend it in each

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session is that what does the art appealing at all this soap there's so many factors yep the longer you spend making games the more you'll understand those factors it helps to play some really bad games too and you can see what is this game doing wrong that this one is doing right right yeah why is a lot of stuff play there are a lot of terrible games out there particularly on the App Store yep yeah I like that lots of great reference material do you I mean can you almost look at a game now if a developer came up to you and said hey check out my game would you almost be instantly be able to say like here's what's wrong with it here's here's what I would change here's how DX there's a large element of the instinct day so that I have an interesting story there yeah so when I first started on the App Store it was very early and there's I mean there's a lot of games that's probably within the first six months to

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a year and those stories of people having pretty big successes on there and so I wanted to know who was being featured and who wasn't because obviously being featured to see if you get featured by Apple you're going to win so I wanted to see if there's any any method to it so what I did is like winner and grabbed an iPod Touch at the time and then I went on to this website called app shopper an app shopper just runs a completely clear channel like if a game comes out on the App Store they'll scrape it and put it up on our shopper so what I would do is I spend a month like each for four weeks I would go through and I just look at every single game every game they hit the App Store and that's and I eventually say oh this one looks kind of interesting and then I'd click on it and then look at the screenshots I win oh yeah this one maybe this one looks kind of cool and then I'd play it for a little bit

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download it and play it I go yes I enjoyed that game or no I didn't and I was able to pick the winners probably seven times out of ten you know the people who were being featured that week which proved that Apple were doing a good job of curation and then through that process I realized okay first I'm looking at the icon then I'm looking at the screenshots then I'm reading the description and then I'm playing the game and that's how people approach your game like it doesn't matter if you've got the best game ever if your screenshots icon and description aren't good no one's going to download it off the cuff on a whim yeah an apple certainly had yep oh I love that so you didn't even look at the App Store you kind of looked at app shopper yeah I said yeah which one download for the month yeah and then you would go back into the App Store and see which ones got featured how they'll be employed yep

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no I was very accurate I loved that man that's a great strategy no we're good it's good to learn like because if people look at the great games on the App Store and they don't look at the turkeys and looking at the turkeys is a great way of understanding am I doing this maybe I should hire an artist because every game on here that hasn't that as programmer art has tanked yes yes or event I can't bad icons are the for the worst one yeah and a lot of people you know they might be great programmers and bad artists and you'll never get anywhere you might go into program but you'll never actually make a hit unless you understand art yep yeah I love Apple a very design art focused yeah I love that map this has been absolutely amazing my friend but let's go to the Big Finish what is your favorite mobile app Wow out of the 200 million probably the one that made the biggest impact for me where I was like wow that is that is

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really something was tiny wings look when I first downloaded that it's like man I gotta up my game well especially because it was made by one guy and he did all the art and all the music and big I mean the game was sort of was was based on this game called wave 4 but it was absolutely perfectly executed and then it made it even before it was Apple he hasn't started their feature run it jumps straight to the top of the charts like the word of mouth on that game was absolutely astonishing yeah it's like two word two word games you gotta have a to Gordon game Cross heroes I think tiny thanks to the Bulls once a little first little Anton why yep you're right you're right I love that just for fun give us a half-baked idea for an app something you wouldn't mind someone else working on yeah I I have this saying that sort of like IDs nothing and execution is everything so if I said to you you know Frogger plus flappy bird

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you'd probably laugh you laugh me out of the office the idea of course an idea is important and as I said we didn't start on that until the idea was good but if you can't make that idea as good as it can be it really doesn't matter how good the idea reads I do have this idea for one thing I've been working on for a while I'm not working on it's just been in my mind forever which is a game where you have to proofread text is like a you play the spell checker uh-huh so all this takes flies pass and you have to spot the spelling mistakes as quickly as you can oh I know my wife would love that game because she's spot checks a bunch of my stuff like you misspelled this sounds like why do you care yeah I like that yeah like I know you kind of touched on this but I'll ask it anyways just in case something else comes out of this but what if ice would give anyone looking to build a mobile app advice for makings it we've talked

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that about that a little bit during this interview but making sure you understand not only the good games with the bad games as well yeah well the bad apps as well like what what does that I've done wrong and make sure that you don't repeat that mistake well too many people just look at the good stuff I love it and if the audience wants and learn more about you and your products and say thank you for coming on where would they go Crossy Road comm is probably the best the best kickoff point yeah from there you can get to our Twitter's so there's Andy me and then Ben is our artist so if you Joe if you follow us all on Twitter then you can you know learn a bit more about us and that's the Twitter's cry at Crossy Road right now so you get to if you go to Crossy Road calm you'll see the Twitter of Andy OH yep all the relevant links who go to cross the road calm nice and see if you can beat my top score of 70s something

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but that what was your top score you don't even for a record 360 something yeah and what's the top score the that did the top top top top top is it like a thousand something early thousands yeah I think a friend asked me like takes about five minutes yeah five minutes that's it for a thousand I'm thinking about so much more no it gets it slightly ramped up so once you start getting to that 300 point mark it starts getting a little bit difficult his videos out there as well so have a look at some of those top scoring people being prepared to be scared how's that make you feel man like when there's actually video YouTube videos created based on a game that you created I be odd who having a hard time coming to terms with a little bit let me end with 20 to 20 million downloads so far 20 million Congrats man that's great and I know you just came out the Android version on the day recording is yeah we could go a couple

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of weeks ago that I saw that press castle that's got three million downloads now so it's probably it's well in excess of twenty that's three million there and then I think nineteen eighteen nineteen twenty million on the iOS side have you done anything to celebrate no [Laughter] too busy yep I love it well Matt come back anytime anytime you got another game coming up I would love to pick your brain brain on some more cuz there's some valuable content that you've already imparted so thank you so much and if you got anything out of this you the audience member you Gary you Romeo if you got anything out of this find a way to think the guess like I'm about to do like I'm up I'm about to do now Matt thank you so much for waking up early for me breath waking up early sorry I'm not enough there for a moment thank y'all for listening we'll see you at the next Jack thanks for listening to the AB masters

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