As many of you know I am a regular listener (and occasional guest host) of 148Apps’ weekly iOS podcast, The Portable Podcast.
On last week’s episode of the show, host Carter Dotson discussed the upcoming Tower Defense game, OfficAttacks! with Eli Cymet, the PR Director at the game’s development studio, Arctic Empire.
If you haven’t listened to the show, I highly recommend you do so, as there were some engaging discussions regarding Free To Play models and iOS game cloning as well. After listening to the show, I had a number of follow-up questions for Eli which he does a fantastic job of answering quite candidly and thoroughly below.
However I may be getting a bit ahead of myself, so for those of you who are unfamiliar with OfficAttacks!, let’s start a quick overview:
You’ve been there. Working for a boss you can’t stand. With people you don’t like. Wishing you could just push a button and make all the stress disappear. Well now you can.
Say hello to Office Attacks.
Set in the world of the 9-to-5 grind, Office Attacks is a tower defence game for lovers of video game culture, tinkering, and creativity. Playing the role of Steve – a good-natured employee pushed to the brink by terrible colleagues at his dream job – you’ll rig up office equipment create living apps, and wage warfare on co-workers who have only one thing in mind: to stress you out!
Now onto the Q&A…
Arctic Empire plans to launch OfficeAttacks! on July 23rd. It is a rather ambitious title, so I’m curious as to how long the game has been in development?
Eli: In one of life’s great coincidences, the day you sent this over, we just finished hunkering down and having an all-hands on deck meeting about the release date of OfficeAttacks! We’re in a closed friends&family beta this week, in the process of entering an open beta in the next 7 – 10 days, and the feedback from the group so far is great, but understandably insular. In order to ensure we’re shipping the game with the level of polish necessary, we’ve decided to extend the public beta process / tweaking phase to make sure everything gels, and is – above all – extremely fun. As a result, the game will release in early – Mid August, something we just posted today to our ongoing Gamezebo blog series. We’re targeting the “early” end of the spectrum, but welcome the extra time to generate excitement among the iOS gaming community, and deliver on all our promises.
OfficeAttacks has been in development for nearly six months now with a team of about seven people. There’s a big emphasis in the startup world to release a “minimum viable product” and iterate on it based on feedback, which we think is one of the single best things about the App Store development ecosystem. With that said, we think there’s something in between “minimum viable” and too-long-delayed; “minimum awesome product” is what I like to refer to it as. Instead of just asking, “what is the most basic, working version of this we can put in users’ hands,” we’ve spent our time with OfficeAttacks saying, “how can we launch with the basic version of some really epic bells and whistles, so we have a platform to grow?” We have some really exciting plans for our trading system, user challenges, tower building, and mini-games, but would rather take the extra time launching with solid versions of awesome stuff, instead of launching with something minimal and promising awesome stuff later.
In a market with over 650,000 apps, you always have to be asking yourself what is going to make this game stand out. For lack of a better metric, would this game be at home alongside the types of games Apple features? And for us, we can’t put OfficeAttacks! out there until that answer is yes.
