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By Flipline_Tony, January 26, 2016 9:41 am

Introduction

The date was August 5, 2011 when Papa’s Freezeria launched on Flipline.com. It had been over a year since our huge MMO game Remnants of Skystone had launched and quickly failed. We were frantically working on games during this period, doing everything we could to keep Flipline afloat. During this small window of time, we managed to launch seven Flash games including Papa’s Freezeria.

Work on Papa’s Freezeria started immediately after the successful launch of Papa’s Taco Mia! Once it was completed, we started looking for someone to sponsor the game before it was released. Around this time, large gaming portals would sponsor your game by giving you upfront money in exchange for their links and branding to appear in the game. This also usually included some period of exclusivity, where the game would only appear on the sponsor’s website before being available anywhere else.

We were lucky enough to have Armor Games sponsor Papa’s Freezeria, who had also sponsored our platformer “Steak and Jake” the previous year.

What Went Right

1: Sundaes + Concretes

The idea for an ice cream based Gameria actually arose while brainstorming Papa’s Burgeria, though we made Papa’s Taco Mia next instead because we were still uncertain how ice cream would work. But with fresh eyes, we came up with the idea of combining two tasty ice cream treats: the sundae and the concrete. For those not familiar, a concrete is a treat in the US that is like a milk-less milkshake, blended with larger toppings, and eaten with a spoon.

Concretes are great, but when put into the context of a game, it’s just mixing a few ingredients and blending. We decided to add an additional step where you are placing toppings on top of the concrete like a traditional ice cream sundae. From that idea, we created a perfect “blend” of sundaes and concretes that made the gameplay more entertaining, and the orders even more tasty and unique.

2. Customizable Lobby

Papa’s Freezeria’s big addition was the customizable lobby. Our previous Gamerias did have furniture, but the lobbies were pre-designed, and you were simply unlocking the hidden furniture.
The problem with that system was the limited amount of furniture that could be brought. Once again, people found themselves late in the game, with tons of tips and nothing to spend them on.

Now that the lobby was customizable, we could design a huge catalogue of decorations to put in the shop. Players could then pick and choose what furniture and posters they wanted to display. This ended up being a hit, and people were posting pictures, showing off their own unique lobbies in their games.

What Went Wrong

1. Working on the Build Station

This was by far the trickiest station to figure out. We spent a lot of time, testing different mechanics to get the blendable ingredients in the cup. At first, all the mixables and syrups were laid out on the screen, and you had to manually pick them up and squirt them into the cup. Initially we had a very complicated portioning system, where the larger the cup size was, the more scoops you had to put in. It was tedious, confusing, and was too similar to the Topping Station.

We decided to scrap everything and speed up the process with the use of push-button machines. We added moving meters so that you had to time the button press in order to get the perfect portion of ingredients. And as a bonus, if you timed it just right, you would get extra tips from the machine.

This added a unique and fun gameplay experience for the Build Station while speeding up the overall build time.

Early Prototype of the Build Station with Taco Mia place-holders. At one point we thought it would be fun to draw on the cups.

2. Hackers + Exclusivity

When Papa’s Freezeria successfully found a sponsor, we created a special version of the game that would be featured on their site. As was common at the time, the sponsor would have the game exclusively on their site for a while before other websites could show it. After this exclusivity period was over, we would release a second version of the game (called the “viral version”) that could be spread across the other major gaming sites and could be played anywhere. This viral version would also feature MochiAds in the game, which was an ad system we used at the time and was our primary source of income.

Of course we didn’t want the sponsor’s version of the game spreading across the internet early, so we programmed the game to only work on the sponsor’s website. If someone tried to copy this game onto another website it just wouldn’t work, and they would have to wait until we released the “viral version” if they wanted a copy for their website.

Unfortunately, as soon as the game launched on our sponsor’s site, a Chinese gaming site stole the game and hacked into it. They removed our site-locking code, so that the game would now work on any website (including their own) instead of being exclusive. This version immediately went viral, and spread across the internet. Even worse, we realized that while the hackers were removing our site-locking code, they also removed all of the MochiAds that would normally be shown in the game. We made Papa’s Freezeria with the intent that the ads in the viral version of the game would help pay for the time spent making it, and help pay towards us making other games.

We were devastated. Within a day, the game was on thousands of sites illegally, and we were losing out on all the ad revenue we desperately needed to make. During this time we worked like crazy to contact each and every site owner, and inform them that they had an illegal version of the game and they needed to wait until August 5th to get a copy of the viral version. Some sites were really cooperative and removed it, but a good majority simply ignored us.

Conclusion

Papa’s Freezeria turned out to be a fan-favorite Gameria. It was our first foray into sweet foods, and proved to be immensely popular. However, the launch of Papa’s Freezeria was disastrous thanks to the hackers, with tons of lost revenue and tons of stress. The launching of a game is the most critical part of game development, and Papa’s Freezeria’s taught us a lot.

Papa’s Freezeria was the last time we looked for a sponsor (Cactus McCoy 2 sponsorship was already set up, even though the game launched later). After our experience with Papa’s Freezeria, we decided the whole process was far too risky for us. We wanted our future games to be released virally from the start, so the official game with ads could be spread immediately instead of giving hackers an opportunity to exploit a site-locked version, and cut us out of the equation.

For the next Gameria release of Papa’s Pancakeria, we decided to go it alone and self-sponsor the game. At the time, this idea seemed crazy to other developers (and sponsors), but it ended up being the single best move we have ever made. When we started self-sponsoring, our website traffic grew exponentially, and the ads on our website were finally able to cover our development costs. This was huge because we were able to be truly independent. We didn’t have to worry about finding interested sponsors, or make adver-games for other companies. Now we could focus on creating the games we love to make and our fans love to play!

Play Papa’s Freezeria!

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By Flipline Matt, December 18, 2014 3:11 pm

Introduction

Since the release of our casual game Rock Garden, we had been interested in ways to combine casual gameplay with more traditional video game genres, especially with the platforming gameplay seen in our earlier Papa Louie game. We went through a lot of different ways to make that happen, and eventually focused on the color-based gameplay we see in Steak and Jake, where the matches you make in the puzzle affect what you can do in the platforming world. There were a lot of challenges we overcame in making a game of this style, and some unforeseen stumbles were made along the way as we developed the game and saw it release to the public.

 

What Went Right

Balance Between Puzzle and Platforming

When we started designing the game, we knew we wanted the gameplay split into two sections: A platforming section where you’re guiding a character through the level, and a puzzle area where your actions would help the character in the platforming level. It took a while for us to figure out exactly how to combine these two elements, and what form the puzzle portion of the game would take. Some early versions of the game had a match-3 style of puzzle where you would slide rows and columns to make matches, and an alternate version where you would slide blocks around the screen like in our game Rock Garden.

We quickly realized that if you had to spend too long interacting with the puzzle, it was hard to keep up with the action in the platforming level, and the puzzle aspect of the game was just getting in the way. Rather than simplify the platforming part of the game, we decided to reduce the puzzle down to a simple matching-bubble style of puzzle. This way you could quickly glance down and see if there were any matches, and with a single click would be ready to interact with the main platforming game again. Having this simple mechanic for matching colors let players focus on the platforming experience and deciding how best to use their color matches.

 


 

Packed with Tons of Variety

We wanted to keep presenting the player with new things in each level, so we created many different challenges and special levels that would appear as you continue to play. Some levels have you defending Steak from multicolored Milk Bandits that require multiple hits to stop, and other levels have bosses attacking in helicopters which throw dangerous mines in your path. Players will occasionally race against the rival Cocoa Cow to the finish, and other times will be collecting balloons along the path or guiding a troop of Cookie Scouts to the barn. Along with these races and challenges, we also created dozens of areas and enemies that would automatically appear the further you get into the game. Within the levels themselves we also created a tons of objects that Steak and Jake can interact with, including stretchy worm bridges, moving platforms, springboards, and the ever-present blocks and ramps.

Platformer with Endless Play

Rather than having a set amount of levels or puzzles, we set out to create a platformer that could continue indefinitely by generating new levels on its own. The game combines a number of pre-made trail sections to build each level, and keeps things fresh by including boss battles, races, and other challenges in these generated trails. New content is revealed over the course of over 170 trails, so there’s always something new around the corner. The game will continue to generate new levels after this point as well, so players can continue playing as long as they like.

Created a System of Reusable Trails

To allow for the endless levels in the game, we first had to create a large number of individual “chunks” of levels that could be connected and remixed to create the trails. We developed a level editor to design these sections, which would automatically be reskinned with new tiles and new enemies based on whichever area it was used in. Every section was designed a certain way so that its endpoints would match up with the next room, and so Steak wouldn’t get stuck when a trail was generated. Some sections would also allow for branching paths at different heights which would connect to other similar sections — so even if you’re seen that same level chunk before, you may be on the top half instead of the bottom half. Though some levels (like Cookie Scout and Milk Race levels) were laid out by hand, most of the rest of the game is generated from all of the reusable parts.

 

What Went Wrong

Harsh Difficulty Level

As we were developing the game and playing levels over and over, we eventually reached a point where we had gotten so good at keeping up with the color-matching and platforming that it didn’t feel challenging anymore. Feeling that the game had gotten too easy, we kept adding more and more enemies and obstacles to the game, so you had to really pay attention and move quickly to keep Steak out of harm’s way. At the time we didn’t realize that we had tailored the difficulty for ourselves as now-expert players, but after it was released we quickly found out the game was very difficult for beginning players. If we had done further playtesting with other new players we may have caught this issue earlier, but after the game was released and spread virally it was unfortunately too late to do much about this harsh difficulty.

Restarting Trail is a Heavy Penalty

Another issue with the game’s difficulty is when Steak fails in a level and has to restart the entire trail from the beginning. Since the game is structured with roughly 6-minute trails, if you miss an enemy or bump into a wall right at the very end of the trail, you’re forced to repeat the entire 6-minute trail all over again, which became very frustrating for players. This could have been improved with some sort of checkpoint system, or multiple “lives” where it could restart Steak back on a safe section of the path, though unfortunately the game wasn’t designed with this in mind. In our newer platformers such as Cactus McCoy 2 and Papa Louie 2 we’ve added checkpoints to help with this issue.

 

Lulls in the Action

Despite filling the trails with enemies and obstacles to increase the difficulty, there were still times where there was nothing for Steak or Jake to do at the moment, aside from just watching Steak plod along at his constant pace until the screen reveals something new to do. Originally, we only had the speed-boosting speedometer available during the Milk Race levels in the game, and during the rest of the game you were stuck at the same slow pace. Thankfully before the game was released we decided to keep the speedometer in the game full-time to help with these lulls in the action, which did improve the pacing quite a bit.

 

Disconnect between Visuals and Gameplay

After working on Remnants of Skystone with its dark and gritty art direction, we wanted to create something at the opposite end of the spectrum which was bright and playful. We did achieve this look in the game, with its cartoonish characters and saturated colors, but with the difficulty level spiking in the game we ended up in a situation where the visuals no longer matched the gameplay. At first glance, one may expect this colorful game to be easy to casually play (especially for a younger crowd), only to be caught off-guard by the harsh difficulty.

 

Time Spent on Unseen Content

Unfortunately with the difficulty level of the game, many players may not stick around to keep playing and seeing everything included in the game. As the game continues we introduce a ton of new areas and enemy designs, though frustrated players may miss out on seeing all of this content unless they stick with the game. All 60 of the Challenges and Milk Races were also carefully crafted, and players will need to keep playing for quite a while to experience all of these levels. When we later decided to create a Halloween-themed spin-off of the game, we were able to adapt some of the Cookie Scout levels into “Midnight March” so players could get another way to experience them.

Conclusion

In the end, Steak and Jake turned out to be a bright and colorful platformer which incorporates puzzle gameplay in a way we hadn’t seen before. Though there were missteps along the way, we were able to create a new type of hybrid game with a great amount of gameplay and challenges, as long as you can survive the difficulty!

Play Steak and Jake!

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By Flipline_Tony, May 1, 2014 10:31 am

Introduction

After finishing our first proper game “Papa Louie” in 2006, we wanted to use the same characters and universe that we established in that game and branch out into making other types of games. Instead of focusing on Papa Louie, we were curious what would be happening at the pizzeria while he was off on his adventures, and imagined that “Delivery Boy” Roy would get promoted and have to run the pizzeria all by himself. We had multiple options of how we could turn this into a game, but we were interested in if we could somehow create hands-on gameplay of carefully building pizzas, and blend that with a time-management game where you would have to keep juggling different tasks at the same time.

The final product ended up defining an entire series of games for us, and there were a handful of reasons why the game worked well and was popular with its fans. There were also a variety of problems that impacted the gameplay or made things too confusing for players, which we’ve tried to fix in later games in the series.

What Went Right

1. Hands-on Gameplay

Even though Roy started as a delivery boy, we wanted him to step into the kitchen and run the entire pizzeria for this new game, and we needed a way for players to help Roy in his new job. Instead of one-click operations like other time-management games, we decided each part of the game would involve hands-on gameplay that would grade you on how you perform each task. We focused on ways to turn each task into mouse-based actions that involved either some degree of skill (like dragging a dotted line at just the right angle for cutting the pizza) or some amount of planning and arrangement (like placing the correct amount of toppings on the correct section of the pizza.)

This type of hands-on pizza crafting was unique to Papa’s Pizzeria when it was released, and offered an experience that just wasn’t found in other restaurant games.

2. Balancing Realism and Gameplay

It was the first time we had faced the challenge of designing a “restaurant game”, and we had to find the right balance between those two elements — keeping the hands-on nature of food prep in a restaurant feeling realistic, but also sacrificing realism when needed so it was still fun to play as a game.

We knew we wanted multitasking and the hectic feeling that brings, and we wanted the player to be involved in each step as much as possible. We’re always disappointed with food games where you click a button and a pizza is automatically topped with pepperoni perfectly, so we knew that individually placing each item was going to be a part of the game. Instead of order tickets magically appearing, we intentionally designed the game where Roy has to stop and take a customer’s order and wait for them to say what they want, while the clock is still running and pizzas are still cooking (and possibly burning unattended). That was a very real part of working solo in a pizzeria which made multitasking a challenge — both in real-life and in the game — and we thought it tied in well with our focus on time-management.

Along the way we had to take some liberties to make certain tasks more interesting or make things flow better as a game. Nobody orders a specific number of pepperoni on a specific quarter of a pizza in real-life, but this helped players understand how many toppings they should be using in that station, and challenged them to arrange the items just right. This extreme pickiness became a theme in all of the future Gamerias, with customers always being very particular about what they’re ordering. We also made some changes to the oven (real pizzas take much longer to cook of course) and with how many ways customers could ask for their pizza to be cooked. Most pizzerias can do regular and well-done pizzas at best, but the other time options added some more variety and more challenge to the oven, so players would have to keep an eye on tickets to know when each was ready. Also, most people wouldn’t stand around all day in the lobby waiting for their food to cook!

We constantly have to find just the right amount of realism in our Gamerias and know when to make changes for gameplay, but Papa’s Pizzeria proved we were on the right track and gave us a good idea of how to approach this in future games.

3. Unique Customers and Orders

When we looked at other restaurant games, most had only a few graphics for the customers who visit the shop, so the restaurant would soon be filled with clones of the same three characters over and over. We’ve always been interested in developing unique characters, so we decided to go the extra mile with Papa’s Pizzeria and create an entire cast of customers who would visit.

We wanted players to connect with each customer as an individual character, so we started with giving each person a unique look and name, and had the game keep track of everyone who visits in a customer file rolodex. We also made certain to include and expand upon all the pixelated customers who appeared in Papa Louie. Instead of having customers order a random meal, we gave each customer a unique pizza that they always ordered as their favorite. Players could get used to these orders, and recognize and remember them as the customers come in and keep asking for the same thing, helping players make a stronger connection with these characters.

In later games we would sometimes remove some characters when we introduced new customers, but we’d often get complaints from players that their favorite customer was missing from a certain game. We now include the full lineup of customers in all of the newest Gamerias, so when players really get attached to a certain character, they can look forward to being reunited and serving them again in the next game.

4. Embraced Multitasking

Most food games have you prepare one meal at a time, going through each step before moving on to the next and finishing the order. With Papa’s Pizzeria, we wanted to bring an element of realism to the restaurant, where one worker all by himself wouldn’t have the luxury of only doing one thing at a time. Roy would need to multitask to be able to handle topping, baking, cutting, and serving as the orders start piling up. We were confident we could make this work in a food game, offering up a challenge to players without getting unbearably frustrating. Seven years later, this element of multitasking is still one of the hallmarks of the Gameria series.

5. Releasing as a Web Game

After working on “Rock Garden” as a paid downloadable casual game, we originally thought we would do the same for Papa’s Pizzeria, where players would buy the game and play it on their desktops. There were a handful of popular time-management games as paid downloads at the time, and the casual download market was much larger than it is now.

After having some success with “Papa Louie” as a web game and earning money from ad revenue, we decided to change our plans and try making Papa’s Pizzeria playable on the web and see if the same model would work for a time-management restaurant game. The game quickly became very popular once it was released, easily finding an audience since anyone could play it for free. In the end this was definitely the right decision for the game, and we were able to reach a wider fan-base (and earn more from ad revenue) than we could have done if it was a downloadable game.

What Went Wrong

1. Confusing Ticket System

In Papa’s Pizzeria, we thought of the side panel as the main interface for dealing with orders. You would need to drag a ticket onto that panel for buttons to appear in each station, and when you clicked the button to serve an order it would automatically serve it to whomever’s ticket was sitting on the side panel at that moment.

We didn’t explain the specifics of this during training, and while you’re busy multitasking on multiple orders it’s easy to mix up tickets and have the wrong ticket on the panel when you click to serve the pizza. Players would end up serving pizzas to the wrong customers, and didn’t realize why it was happening. We cleared this up in later Gamerias, but the system in Papa’s Pizzeria was much too confusing for players.

2. Multiple Topping Confusion

One of the most common questions from players was what to do when a customer orders two pizzas. At first we didn’t understand why this would even be a question, since customers never order two pizzas at once! We eventually realized why players were confused: We never explained that multiple toppings on a ticket should all go on the same pizza.

During training, the first two orders only dealt with pepperoni as a single topping, so some players expected all pizzas to only have one topping. When customers started ordering multiple toppings, they thought each topping was supposed to go on its own separate pizza, and they didn’t understand what to do with those orders. We thought it was obvious that everything would go on the same pizza, but since training didn’t prepare them for this we could see why it could be confusing for some people. We learned our lesson from this, and in all of the later Gamerias, we make sure that training covers what to do with multiple ingredients.

3. Waited Too Long for a Followup

We released Papa’s Pizzeria in August of 2007, and within a few months we noticed how popular the game had become both on our site and across the web. Around the same time, we had started on our large-scale MMO “Remnants of Skystone” for Kongregate, and with the scale and scope of that game we needed to work on it full-time until it was completed. We ended up working on Skystone for over two and a half years, and throughout that development period we didn’t have time to release any other games. Even though we knew that Papa’s Pizzeria was popular and that fans would love a sequel or spin-off, there was nothing we could do until our schedule was finally open again in 2010. When we finally released Papa’s Burgeria in late 2010, we were thrilled to find out the fans were still there, though we wished we could have followed up with a sequel earlier instead of having a three-year gap between the games.

4. Using Money for your Score

Instead of earning points for each meal served, we decided that customers would give Roy tips based on how well he had done. As Roy earned more tips, he would gradually level up and unlock more customers for the restaurant. This worked fine as a leveling system, but all of the focus on earning money made players disappointed that they couldn’t actually spend this money on anything in the game. Starting with Papa’s Burgeria, we added a separate tally of points that would determine leveling up, and added an in-game shop where players could spend their hard-earned tips on upgrades and lobby decorations. In newer games we’ve also added clothing that can be purchased with the players’ earned tips.

5. Not Enough Features

Beyond unlocking new customers and building pizzas, there weren’t a lot of additional features for players in Papa’s Pizzeria. At the time we weren’t even sure if players would be interested in a restaurant sim game, so we kept things simple and focused on the food preparation in the game. Since the release of Papa’s Pizzeria we’ve gradually added more and more features to each of the sequels, where players can now customize their experience with clothing and lobby decorations, play mini-games, design their own workers, unlock new ingredients, and celebrate holidays with unlockable ingredients and decorations. Papa’s Pizzeria feels a bit lacking today without all of these features, but it provided a great starting point to build on for the rest of the series.

Conclusion

Papa’s Pizzeria was the first in our series of restaurant games, and it helped define our unique brand of time-management games blended with hands-on food preparation. The gameplay and design proved to be popular and built a large fanbase craving more games in the series, and focusing on unique customers helped set us apart from other restaurant games. We learned from our mistakes in the first game to make the user interaction much clearer in the sequels, and by combining the original’s winning formula with an array of new features, we’ve built a series of games that are still enjoyed by millions today.

Play Papa’s Pizzeria!