Team Cooper Blog

Maybe it’s the time of year but we’ve really been feeling the love recently.

Last Friday I attended We Love Technology which kicked of Sheffield’s lovebytes festival this year and I came away from it all giddy with techno joy. There was lots of talk about a convergence of ideas between the many different fields of design, craft, diy and technology. James B’s talk about social friction has given our ideas around social gaming new life. I love the idea of open hardware and as a big instructables fan I think defining an open source style process for hardware is a great idea. There were a few generative artists, an electronic log and my most loved things of the day were the thought provoking items made by Mr Jones.

Tim had an adventure to the Casual Connect conference in Hamburg and came home with the fire of social gaming burning in his eyes. We’ve generally been moving our gaming ideas in that direction, starting to focus more on social gaming (watch this space for a Beastie Burger Facebook version) and having spent 3 days hearing other developer’s love for social gaming, it’s opportunities and it’s benefits we feel reassured and motivated to move our plans forward.

And then yesterday we found out we’d made the short list of 45 companies to join in the BBC @ North project. It’s a great opportunity for us as one of the smaller companies on the list, being in a group with some of the north’s best digital and creative agencies makes us feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

Over the holidays and in the last few weeks Tim and I have been putting the finishing touches to our business plan. It’s something that we’ve only ever got halfway through and have been meaning to finish for ages.

Two things finally kicked us in to gear. The first being that while the business is doing very nicely at the moment we really want to grow and to develop more of our own content. We feel that if we don’t do something pro-active about it now we’ll keep coasting as we are and before we know it another year will have passed with no real change. The second was getting a great advisor from Business Link, we’ve had a few false starts with them but finally we’re dealing with someone who is actually helping us. We keep talking about how we would like to take on another developer and make more of our own games and she has helped us stop talking about it, make an action plan and just get on with it. We’ve bags of ideas for games and after the success of Beastie Burgers we’re really excited about getting on with another project.

It may sound a little stupid but the process of writing the business plan has helped us firm up what the actual plan is. I think the plan has only ever been a discussion, a virtual plan – now it’s a document it feels a lot more tangible. An added bonus is that through the process I’ve learned a lot about the casual games market, as I’ve mentioned before this is a bit of a new world for me personally. Writing the plan has made us do lots of research to back up what we think is a good idea with some hard facts. Until now we’ve had a vague idea of how things are, Tim reads a lot of industry blogs and magazines and I’ve been ‘working hard’ (or playing) absorbing myself in casual games seeing how the portals work, what works, what doesn’t and what’s popular with the audience. Now we feel we’re in an excellent position to get some funding and get our next game into development. We’re all feeling really hopeful and excited about the coming year.

Hello Team Cooper blog, its been a while, I’m sorry but we’ve been really busy. The launch of Beastie Burgers did exactly what we needed it to do – it generated a lot of interest and ultimately has won us some top new clients. Beasties has had over a million plays now and is proving to be a brilliant ambassador for the company.

It feels like Christmas and the new year has become our busiest time of year. It’s possible this is beacause of the increased number of businesses sending their clients seasonal greetings digitally rather than the considerably more expensive, less sustainable and pretty old fashioned Christmas card. I’m quite excited about Christmas and in the last few weeks we’ve been creating a few animated cards plus a couple of seasonal games. We’ve made an extremely cute game to help Watford Palace Theatre promote their panto Cinderella. And at the moment we’re putting the finishing touches on a winter rally game which is extremely addictive - it had most of us in the office fighting for the top score during development.

When we get back in the new year we’ve lots of work to get on with for some new clients and a couple of well know brands. Exciting stuff!

A very Merry Christmas to all our clients, suppliers and blog readers – see you in the New Year.

It’s been a long time coming, but we have finally released our Flash game, Beastie Burgers! Hoorah!

If you haven’t seen it already, you can play the game on the Robot / Lizard website. We have also released our Facebook app, the Beastie Builder which you can play with here.

Having completed it, we are now in the process of licensing it to a few Flash game portals. We have a primary sponsorship agreement with gamesfree.com which has been good to help claw back some of the development cost as well as help with distribution. We are also talking to some other portals about secondary sponsorships to be implemented once the primary sponsorships exclusive period is over.

The main reason for developing the game, was to help promote ourselves, and raise awareness of our Robot / Lizard Productions moniker in the hope that we might get some further game development work off the back of it. So far it seems to be doing pretty well at spreading itself around the interweb. In the past three days it’s been played about 80,000 times which is more than I had expected (for some reason, most of those players have been based in Spain) and the number of hits seems to be accelerating which is good news.

I’ll probably post a bit more about the development process behind the game on the Robot / Lizard blog in the coming weeks, for now though we’re still wrapping a few things up, and I’m going to wait until we’ve got a bit more data before I decide how much of a success it’s been.

I’d just like to give a quick shout out to the few people who have put up with my random ramblings and helped me produce this piece of work.
Those people are: Kyle (for all his hard work coding the thing), Phil (for making it look so good with his wonderful illustrations), Emma (for her moral support, animations, and for testing it), and Jean-Marc (for the narration on the introduction). Thanks guys! It wouldn’t have got this far without you and I am incredibly proud of the end result.

Amazingly, it’s now been just over six months since we moved in to Electric Works which is weird because it still feels like we only just moved in. I guess thats because the building is still so shiny and new. That and the fact we’ve been pretty busy with various projects and bringing up our two kids.

We originally said to ourselves that six months in we would re-assess the situation and check that it was working out for us.  As the past six months have flown by, it’s been difficult to say if we’ve been better off here or whether we would be in the same position anywhere else. We decided we’re going to give it another six before we properly evaluate whether the move has paid off. Regardless of success, it is nice being here and walking up to the building in the morning still makes us feel good and that things are moving forward for us. The reality of the slide is that most of us in the office don’t use it much as the novelty has worn off. It’s actually quite a shock to the system as it’s very fast – however, Tim uses it every chance he can. When he was a kid Tim used to dream of having a helter-skelter in his house. Now there’s one at work it makes him very happy. I think if your work environment has the power to make you happy then that can only be a good thing.

When we moved into this building we’d hoped that being in such quirky new place would help generate interest and ultimately work. Recently that hope became a reality as we have had a mention in Creative Review’s November issue! This issue is focused on creative workspaces and one of the articles is about the emergence of creative hub’s around the country. They’d asked us for our opinion of working in the Electirc Works so this week we were very excited to recieve our copy in the post. For the business this is brilliant – a mention, for free, in a popular industry magazine for our target market. Maybe it’s not that amazing, but to me it felt worthy of a small interpretive dance.

For those of you who are interested, you can see some more photos of our workspace and the building taken by Gavin Cockrem (who rents a desk from us).

It has been going through a process of bidding for sponsorship. For those not familiar with the Flash games industry we’ve put the game up for sponsorship to game portals. We’re offering them a licence to have the game on their sites. The licences vary between exclusive, primary (there is an initial period of exclusivity plus they get their branding in the game on their site) and secondary (the game will simply be licenced for use on the site). As we have further plans for the game and it’s complimentary application  ’Beastie Builder’ on social networking sites it’s unlikely we’re going to go for an exclusive deal – that’s unless the price is right. It’s going really well, we’ve had a few good offers and it will definately be getting sponsored. We expect to be launching it any day now!

We put it through its second round of independent user testing and we received some excellent feedback. We also got some pretty average feedback but nothing really too negative so going on the basis that when asked for an opinion some people will always try to find fault we are extremely pleased. Our favourite comment is:

“This game is fun as heck, I got sucked in for an hour and a half!”

… and that is exactly what we were aiming for. Making other people happy. Distracting them with nonsense. I shall be slapping that quote on every bit marketing I can. Whats even more satisfying is that people seem to have really understood where we’re coming from.

The fantastic graphics were created by our great friend Phil Alderson who we have done a lot of work with. A lot of the feedback we had commented that they loved our twist on the cooking frenzy theme and a large part of that is Phil’s graphics. Here is a screen grab as a taster.

Mmm a Chilli Chicken Slime Burger

I spent last week testing our game, Beastie Burgers, and working on the release plan. I’ve really enjoyed playing it and can’t wait to get on with the launch. I’ve written my first ever press release, with a little help from Google, I’m hoping it hits the mark. I’d love to pay someone to do it as I’m great believer in giving work to people with the right skills but we’re trying to save expediture where possible; so for now, the PR hat is on my head.

I missed out on a lot of the main development of Beasties so all the little details and quirks were a briliant surprise and made me chuckle frequently. I love it, but then I would. My input on it so far has been a little bit of animation, a few graphic fixes and a lot of testing, I love that I get to play games and call it work.

I’m a newbie to the games world, I guess I fit in to the demographic of the new casual gaming revolution. I’ve always been remotley interested in computer games but until very recently nowhere near the level of say Tim or Kyle. With the advent of the Playstation Eyetoy and Singstar it’s like games started to speak to me in a way I could understand and then we got a Wii. I can easily say I play it as much, if not more than Tim does. In very general terms I think it’s interesting the male/female divde on the way we think about, react to, and interact with games. I love the dress up style games that are all over Facebook at the moment, I especically love my farm in Farmville. We’re talking through ideas for our next game project and I keep steering things in that direction. To work as part of this industry is, currently, much fun.

However Beastie Burgers is so very close to being finished it’s frustrating. We’re constantly fighting the battle of when to take time working on our own things and when to take on client work. Unfortunately we’re not quite at the point yet where we feel safe enough to turn work down, but feel that if we could just get this finished then we’d have an excellent showcase for our talents. The nature of working for agencies is that we’re often tied by confidentiality clauses so our best work  is not up for discussion when I’m trying to promote us and get us new clients.

We are starting to learn that being in buisness for yourselves is a big balancing act. A lot of the decision making feels very chicken and egg; Do we have enough work to take on another developer? How are we going to take on more work unless we’ve got the bums on seats to get it done? Do we say no to client work this month to get our own projects finished so we can use them to get more work in?

There doesn’t seem to be a magic pill and in most cases we’ve just taken a deep breath and done what feels best for us. So far it seems to be working.

Tim and Kyle are at Flash on the Beach for the next few days and to say I’m jealous would be an understatement. This is the 3rd one Tim’s been to and every time he comes home he’s always bouncing full of energy and new found love for our work and industry. Plus I love Brighton (not as much as Sheffield though) but our family life is just too hectic at the moment to allow both of us to go down. Maybe next year I’ll get chance to join in the fun. Watch this space for a report from one or both of the boys.

This leaves me in the office, almost, alone to get my head down and do loads of work …

… although as it’s September it feels a little like going back to school after the summer holidays.

Important things out the way first, the new addition to our team at home, Kirsty, was born a little later than expected, but all was good and she’s now happily joining her brother at nursery 2 days a week while I get back in to the world of work.

Kirsty Cooper

I’ve been set the slightly daunting task of getting us new business. Not something I’ve ever done before but this is the joy of working for yourselves getting a chance to get your hands dirty at different tasks. I’ve accepted the challenge and will be blogging, emailing and phoning up a storm over the next few months.

I missed the office move as I was on maternity leave so I feel like it’s a completly fresh start. The Electric Works building is brilliant, its a great environment to be working in. Plus we have quite a view from our office, I love Sheffield, ask anyone who knows me and they’ll tell you how I’m constantly evangelising the city’s many amazing qualities, but everyday I come in here it strengthens those feelings. I can confirm the slide in the entrance is awesome, very fast, it makes me cackle all the way down, not great in such an echoey space.

Our view of Sheffield

The rest of Team Cooper are very busy working on various client projects and trying to find time to finish our own work, our ‘Beasite Burger’ game (2nd version) is so very nearly finished it’s painful to leave it while we’re so busy. Hopefully I’ll be letting you know in the next few months that it’s live and ready to play. We hope to maintain this level of working so that we can finally take on another developer and continue our growth.

Haven’t posted for a while as things have been a bit hectic for us over the past couple of months.

Aside from our client work here at Team Cooper HQ, Emma and I have been working on another special project for the past 9 months – another baby!

Over the past couple of months we have had some building work done on the house, moved the bedrooms around in preparation and I have been spending my evenings decorating and DIY’ing (Time that would normally be spent writing blog posts or playing around with new ideas). I am relieved to say that our house in now finished (It’s been a work in progress for the past 5 years) and we are ready for our new arrival, who is now two days overdue!

I’ll post a little more about life in our new offices and the new projects we have been working on soon. For now though I’ve got a few bits of work to finish off and a few cases of flat pack furniture to assemble before I’m off the radar on paternity leave.