SpeedRunner Postmortem

So it’s been exactly a month since we’ve released the flash version of Speedrunner on the web. Time for a post-mortem! In this post, we’ll discuss a few points that went right and wrong during the development process, we’ll discuss the financial picture behind Speedrunner, and to top it off we have a couple of exciting announcements! We don’t post often; but when we do, it’s filled with lots of goodies!

Stats

First, let’s start with discussing Speedrunner’s successes. As of now, the game has been played well over 3 million times, which by my standards makes it a definitive success. By comparison, we like to look at Steambirds’ numbers for a benchmark, and although we’re not as successful as they were, our play numbers are quite close. Here’s a fancy looking graph detailing he game’s views:

Currently, the game is steadily attracting a little over 50,000 views a day. Another interesting stat is the average play time, which clocks in at just over 10 minutes. To put that number in more perspective; we have quite a high bounce rate, around 13%. This means that 13% of the ...

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SpeedRunner Released!

We are excited to announce that the free web version of SpeedRunner has been released today! Woohoo! Champagne for everyone!

You can play the game at www.speedrunner-game.com or at our sponsor’s site: www.maxgame.com, where you’ll be able to play three extra bonus levels, offering an additional challenge.

If you’re not convinced yet that this is an awesome game full of speedrunning goodness, check out the trailer:

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SpeedRunner at Indigo

Great news! Upcoming weekend (the 13th and 14th of May) DoubleDutch Games will be present at the Indigo showcase in Utrecht.

Indigo is a presentation of innovative and independent video-game design in the Netherlands. During Indigo, visitors join in the celebration of Dutch innovative games by playing the games and by talking to the makers themselves.

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SpeedRunner Dev Story 01: “Art”

In our last post we promised new blog posts revealing more of our soon to be released game: SpeedRunner. Now two and a half month later we are ready to deliver on that promise.

The reason it has been so long is that we have been really busy to get the game ready for release. Gerrit, Jonathan and Frank have been working hard on sound, art and animation while Casper has had his hands full with implementing the new assets in the game, while also tweaking the levels and fixing a whole lot of bugs.

Back on topic: What we want to present now is the main menu screen of the game as drawn by Gerrit. This menu screen features the main character, our local superhero: SpeedRunner. We made a short time-lapse video of the process so you can get an idea in what goes into all of this. The music of this video has been made by Jonathan exclusively for the game.

Enjoy!

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Introducing: the team

The last blog we wrote about how DoubleDutch Games came to be, and how we envision our future. This time we want to elaborate on the team that is working on our first project; SpeedRunner.

SpeedRunner is a 2D Platformer-Racing game. The idea is based on Speedruns; getting from the start to the finish of a level as quickly as possible, by finding the most efficient route.

As we mentioned before, our goal with DoubleDutch is to produce high quality games. So when Casper started working on this project, he realised that he would not be able to bring the quality of the game to the level he would like, all by himself. Casper is a great game designer and a decent programmer, but creating high quality art, animation and audio could be problematic.

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A brief history of DoubleDutch Games

So today, we’d like to share the story of how DoubleDutch Games was formed.

The story begins back in 2008, when the Dutch game development studio Coded Illusions, while working on an Xbox360 title, went bankrupt at the beginning of the financial crisis. We, Casper and Gert-Jan, were both working at Coded Illusions at that time as a Game Designer and a Programmer respectively. Casper was quickly able to find a new job at the Serious Gaming and Simulation Lab at Delft University of Technology, where he also started working on his Computer Sience Master thesis. Gert-Jan was recommended by Casper to the Game Lab and soon started working there as well.

At this time, we started sharing ideas about making games and turning this into a profitable business. Inspired by the successes of a number of small indie developers and the rise of digital download markets such as Xbox Live Indie Games and the App Store, a business plan emerged which focused on small, high quality downloadable games.

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