Tag Games' Paul Farley on treating TV shows to great companion apps

Paul Farley is MD of Tag Games, a Dundee-based developer behind the likes of Doctor Who: The Mazes of Time on iOS and Funpark Friends for iOS and Android.

Given the success of a number of TV and film properties in mobile gaming, it's no surprise broadcasters and producers are commissioning mobile games in ever increasing numbers.

The interesting aspect is that they not only see our medium as a means to promote their content, but also as a significant potential revenue stream in its own right.

Working with non-games companies can provide a number of challenges for studios that are used to the traditional developer/publisher relationship, but there are numerous benefits to working with these partners as well.

Checking in

Event driven entertainment formats such as television and film have an impressive and proven ability to drive huge audience numbers to their content for short periods of time.

What they sometimes struggle to do is to engage and maintain that audience between releases/broadcasts. That's something games do incredibly well.

We were recently fortunate to be able to reprise our working relationship with UK broadcaster Channel 4 on a new format television show called Hotel GB. The show ran each night for a week and was set in a boutique hotel, wherein a group of unemployed young trainees were competing to earn a job at the end of the week.

With a range of Channel 4 talent including Gordon Ramsay and Mary Portas on board, the show mixed entertaining television with a good cause using both recorded and live segments.

Tag was commissioned to develop a companion game to sit alongside the TV experience.

Ready to transmit

The project was quite challenging, not least because it had a very short development cycle of around three months, but also due to the hard and fast transmission date.

We needed to have both iOS and Android versions of the game live on the app stores ahead of the broadcast.

It was certainly a motivator knowing that, while some things on the project were flexible, time was not!

Here I'll share a few of the lessons we've taken away from the project and trust that they help you on your next multi-format project:

Get real!

Given the short timescale and the hard deadline, it was important that whatever game concept we came up with could be implemented and balanced within those constraints.

It helped that the commissioning team at Channel 4 had lots of previous experience in games development and came to the project with a clear vision for the project and an understanding of the time challenge.

The game didn't deviate much from their initial vision and gave the development team strong reference points to work from.

It was a relatively straightforward game concept, but one that we understood and knew would resonate well with the target TV audience. Most importantly of all, though, it was achievable with the resources we had available.

The importance of trust

Tag's prior working relationship with Channel 4 was of great benefit given the fact the project would be run on a razors edge from the start.

The team needed to spend time at the start of the project building the relevant technical and game mechanic frameworks without there being visible progress.

Channel 4 has hired games industry talent into their team and at times like these it was a massive benefit being able to communicate our rationale knowing they had a clear appreciation for what we were trying to do and why.

This fundamental trust in each other empowered quick and decisive decision making and was key to a successful project outcome.

Working with 'talent'

When the team at Channel 4 referred to the 'talent,' we thought they were talking about us.

You can imagine the disappointment when we found out that 'talent' is actually TV parlance for the onscreen celebs.

Hotel GB was fortunate in that in this case the talent – Gordon Ramsay and Mary Portas – was very open to what we were doing with the game and therefore approvals for elements like image likeness was very straightforward.

To their credit Gordon and Mary were very accommodating and made our life easy. Gordon even used his personal twitter account to promote the game.

Resist the urge to crunch

All the evidence backs up the fact that extended crunch is bad for good game development and so, at Tag, we simply don't do it.

What we have been experimenting with however is one or two intense weeks of work during a project. On this project this intensive week of work was co-ordinated with the visit of the Channel 4 commissioner.

I'm sure many studios wouldn't be comfortable having a client spend a week working closely with one of their development teams, but in this case it had a huge positive impact in taking an average game and making it great.

The timing and length of this push need to be managed carefully. On this project it occurred close to the end mainly because the game only became truly playable a couple of weeks before the upload deadline.

We have also found working in this manner for more than a week is counterproductive.

The value of tried and tested tools and process

We simply could not have made such a good game, in such a short period of time, with a relatively small team and launch simultaneously on iOS and Android without the benefit of our proprietary technology stack.

Knowing that the game would compile on both platforms instantly via moFlow allowed the team to focus almost entirely on the game.

We also found that our agile development process and the use of data analysis in the production team workflow to be another positive factor in allowing rapid iteration of content, while providing detail project progress reporting back to the client.

TV driving installs

At the end of each nightly broadcast, the game was mentioned in a short voiceover and Hotel GB reached #18 in the UK games free chart.

We found a hard ceiling in the chart where upwards movement was limited as we realised many of the games above would be spending large amounts of customer acquisition.

Hotel GB went live on both the App Store and Google Play just ahead of broadcast and achieved an average review score of 4.5/5.

With these strong review scores and metrics showing we had good long term engagement and retention the game certainly seemed to resonate well with the audience of the TV show.

Now that we've established the mutual benefits of linking television and mobile game content perhaps we'll see not only more companion games, but also television using more game properties as the basis of their programming.

Personally I can't wait for I'm an Angry Bird Get Me Out of Here and Cut the Cord live from your local maternity ward!