Kaiju Defense Club Teaser

Kaiju Defense Club is a retro arcade shooter where the hook is a literal hook. We’ll save some of the fun narrative details for later, but a lot of our initial focus is on making the controls and game feel really solid.

When I’m writing the newsletter, I get to brag about Foge and he can’t stop me: Foge’s an extremely gifted tuner. He can take a basic mechanical implementation of a gameplay feature and dial all the knobs for all of the parameters until they’re resonating with each other. That’s not a skillset we’ve been able to bring to the foreground as much in our other first experiments, so I’m really excited to put out an experiment where that’s going to shine through particularly clearly.

Combine that with Adeline’s super nostalgic pixel art, Giorgio’s always-amazing music and SFX, and our newest team member Jordan’s killer physics implementation, and I think we’ll have something special.

Next steps

We were almost ready to share a first playable build this week but have decided to take a little extra time after some unexpected delays (thanks, covid… now the little badguys remind me of coronavirus particles).

We did want to go ahead and show some work-in-progress footage, though; hence the teaser above. We’re looking forward to getting the first playable build in your hands soon!

Making a good teaser

As soon as we shipped our first experiment, Homestretch Bet, we realized we were going to have to figure out a good solution for distribution - we want to get our experiments in front of a bunch of people. The 2weeks Fun Club community is an amazing source of feedback (It’s been fantastic getting feedback and bug reports on Vapor Solitaire the past couple of weeks) but we want to be testing our ideas with a wide audience and growing our community.

There are a handful of big web portals out there that get a lot of daily traffic that could help us do that. Some of the biggest ones (like poki.com and crazygames.com) are quite sophisticated and operate like lightweight traditional platform holders, with SDKs for you to integrate, content submission guidelines, and platform support requirements. We’re still working on a few additional “tech tree” investments in our engine before we’re able to check all of these boxes.

We do want to shout out iogames.space, though; they host a wider range of more experimental games, and were already ready to host experiments like Homestretch Bet (and gave us some great feedback in the submission process).

The “extra” thing we needed to do for submission was to make a thumbnail video. Check out the requirements:

Video thumbnail which displays when the user hovers over the game thumbnail with their mouse. Should be 275x157 pixels, or the same aspect ratio. We strongly recommend speeding the footage up 2x and zooming in, if necessary, to see the action.

Files must be less than 500KB. Allowed file types: mp4.

Tight constraints! That’s just a few seconds of footage, at a tiny postage-stamp size, and needs to communicate why you might want to check the game out basically instantly.

But we realized it was a good constraint for us. It immediately shifted our thinking on how we approach experiments.

The point of the experiment is to test out a tiny slice of a game to see if it resonates with people. Thinking about the tiny slice of the experiment we want to capture for the thumbnail is a really helpful lens to think about what to prioritize for the prototype itself.

Let us know what you think of the teaser in the 2weeks Fun Club discord server!