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Award-winning Monument Valley recouped costs in one week
Monument Valley, winner of an Apple Design Award and an all-around beautiful brain-buster, made back its development costs after just one week on the App Store, Lead Designer Ken Wong said during a presentation at GDC Europe. Even though it's a $4 app and it launched alongside other premium games, including Hitman: Go, FTL and Leo's Fortune, Monument Valley crested 1 million sales within four months. "Now, that doesn't make us rich by any measure, but we made our money back and it means that the team can stay together and make another creative, crazy project with complete creative freedom," Wong said. "This is all we ever really wanted, not to get rich, but to be sustainable."
Hit List Q&A: Monument Valley designer Ken Wong
In the "Hit List" from the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences, the video game industry's top talents describe their current gaming addictions, their most anticipated releases and more. This week: Ken Wong, lead designer of Monument Valley. Ken Wong served as lead designer on ustwo's recent mobile hit Monument Valley. An Australian living in London, his previous work also includes the art direction of Alice: Madness Returns at Spicy Horse and his solo indie project, Hackycat. Wong will be presenting at the upcoming D.I.C.E. Europe conference in a session titled, "Games without gamers." He will discuss how core gamers have supported the games industry and pushed it into new territory for decades, but fresh opportunities and challenges await if designers try to attract new audiences. In creating Monument Valley ustwo sought to create a meaningful, rich experience for audiences beyond the 'gamer' by replacing tropes and overused patterns with a focus on user experience.
Daily iPhone App: Hackycat makes kicking the cat fun
Stick with me on this: Hackycat is basically a game about kicking cats. In real life, of course, I love cats, and would never want to kick one. But Hackycat, designed by a very talented artist named Ken Wong, is all about playing hackeysack with a bevy of cartoony, colorful and surprisingly serene cats, kicking them in mid-air by tapping on your iPhone's screen to keep them up ... and letting them grab cheeseburgers along the way. Yes, as you might have figured already, Hackycat is a silly game, but it is a lot of fun. The gameplay itself is relatively simple, as all you'll need to do is tap the screen to keep the cats bouncing where you want them to go. If any of them falls to the bottom of the screen (or if you hit a bird bomb as it flies by), it's game over. The game's progression system is very well-designed, however: as you collect cheeseburgers, you can use them as currency to unlock more cats to play with, open up new heroes or powerups, or help yourself to completing certain goals. And since the game uses Wong's great art, all of the designs are very slick and fun. Hackycat is not extremely complicated, but then again that's part of the charm. It's a solid game with an unlock system that will keep you playing for quite a while if you want to open up everything. You can grab a universal version on the App Store now for just US$0.99.
