The Israeli Independent Game Developers Panel

This event was my turn on the stage. Being one of the leading independent developers, I moderated the panel of Israeli game developers who independently released games by themselves.

I've introduced myself and my company, Corbomite games, and showed some never before seen content from our upcoming game series “Pizza Morgana”, which tells, episodically, the story of a young girl that's teleported into a magical dimension with daemons and monsters and vampires and who are all pizza delivery guys.

I've raised a bunch of questions for the panelists to consider (while showing some pictures from Icanhascheezburger and Xkcd).

What are independent games ? What makes an independent game developer one ? Are they more experimental in nature ? Is it a matter of budget ? Of creativity ? why are independent games important?

But most important, why Israel ? Why is Israel a good place for independent game development?

Each panelist got the stage for 7 minutes.

Making games yourself in the garage

The first panelists who took the stage were Jonathan Yalon and Ori Wachtel who talked about their adventure game “Boundless Osher”. It's an adventure game done with the AGS engine over the course of several years. It features real life actors on a photographed background and tells the story of an Israeli who gets an overly high bill payment request from social security and decides to run for president so he can change the laws and nullify his bill.

The game was done in Hebrew and the two are working on an English version.

Zoopaloola and Warsheep – The fine line between art and code.

Uri have been making Interactive content and Casual games for 15 years, and best known for his game Warsheep that was featured in the popular Israeli messenger client ICQ.

Uri talked about developing in Flash, and showed the step-by-step creation proccess of his game Zoopaloola from prototyping to finished product. He talked about independent as not being suitable for everyone, that you have to know your strengths and weaknesses when you become one, and that it's not bad to “branch” a little, and so he did some greeting cards for a while.

On the other hand – Indy game devs can create in their garage, with a small team of two like his great games that people actually want to play.

Israel and casual games

Yuval Bayrav from Vgames.co.il and Dudi Peles from QuizArt showed that (by their definition) most of the Israeli game companies are making Casual games, and talked about why they think it is.

Their definition of casual games are games that don't require preliminary gaming knowledge, have a very flat learning curve and offer a wide comfort zone to the player. The two listed the various existing casual game business models :

Trial to Purchase – 750,000 downlaods a day with 1-2% conversion rate. 42% of the market.
Advertising Supported - 34% of internet users play free games
Subscription: club pogo and club penguin were given as examples.
Skill-based Games - King.com - 190 million games played a month (Feb 2008).
Microtransactions: Kart rider and Maple Story $16 million per month
Mobile
Retail Boxes
In-Game Advertising & Advergaming

Yuval Bayrav, who is the editor of one of Israels largest game related websites quoted some figures about casual gameplay in Israel, saying 50-75% of Israeli Internet users play games online – that’s 1.75-2.8M users - and 75% of casual israeli games are male, and 69% are under 35. (which is contrary to the world's demographics)

While there are many players in Israel, the income from casual games is small, however there have been a lot of advergames produced by interactive companies targeted at young audiences.

Yuval and Dudi showed that the majority of game development companies in Israel create casual games and talked about why there it is.

Due to the latent arrival of consoles to Israel, Israeli gamers and game develpoers are predominate PC gamers, and the casual market in israel is closer to the global casual market than the non-casual market.

According to them, there is a great untapped potential in Israel as a casual game market and it's only in its infancy.

The portal for success

“Hello. I'm Ido. I'm 16 years old. I'm a high school student, and I created 'Portal: The Flash version' together with Hen Mazolski.”

I think that was one of the best lines I've heard on stage in a long time.

Ido is certainly the “wonderkid” of the Israeli game industry. Along with Hen (who is young himself - only 19 years old) they created one of the most popular Internet games of all times.

Portal – The Flash version was Played over 5 million times worldwide (estimation)

breakdown:

Newgrounds: 2,000,000 plays
Kongregate: 500,000 plays
Armor Games: 500,000 plays
Other Flash sites: > 2,000,000 plays

Not bad for a game that was developed during high school's summer break !

Ido talked about the game's creation process, which was created entirely by watching Portal's trailer and never having played it. PTFV was created with Flash 8, coded in actionscript 2.0 from scratch, and only took a couple of months to develop. It included the game engine, phsyics, art, animation, scripts and maps.

Ido showed some sketch arts for the game's levels and step-by-step screenshots of creating a level from initial map sketch to a complete level.

Ido later showed his next game he and Hen are working on – Codenamed “Galil” which is a combination of RTS and side-scroller done in flash.

Ido's short lecture left the jaw-opened audience captive and he received a standing ovation.

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