Last Thursday we welcomed Chris and Stephen Harris of Ninja Kiwi as the latest in our series of live chats with Flash game developers. Just like we did before with Nitrome, I’ve summed up all of the questions posed to Ninja Kiwi across the chatroom, forums and blogs and put them all together for your reading pleasure! If you’d like to see the raw log (so you can know which of them said what), you can get that here.

So behold, the master index for all things Ninja Kiwi! Enjoy it below and thanks again to Chris and Stephen for generously sharing their time. They are exemplars of the Flash games community and I think we all have a lot to learn from their experiences. :)

All About Ninja Kiwi

Game Design & Development

Mochi Coins Experience and SAS: Zombie Assault 2

The Business and Industry of Flash Games

Ninja Kiwi on iPhone

All About Ninja Kiwi

Whats the average day like for a full time flash game creator/genius? <Happyfat>

Lounging in the sun drinking umbrella drinks :)

Where can i get official bloons tshirts from? <Happyfat>

I think there are some (not very good ones sorry) at www.printmojo.com

How many are you now and how many started ninjakiwi? <ozdy>

We started as 2, me and Stephen, we’re brothers. We’re now 5 going up to 6 on Monday.

Now that your development team has grown…do you guy operate out of an office or do you do everything virtually? <BrightWave>

All of us are in an office, trying to direct peoples work virtually is really hard. It’s way better than doing stuff virtually. You can’t sit on someones shoulder and tell them to make little tweaks otherwise, plus we LAN at the end of each day. we have contracted art out of the country on two occasions but it’s less than ideal

How old are you guys? <Digital_Vizions>

In our 30’s

Whats flash games are you addicted to at the moment? that you didnt make yourself. <Happyfat>   

I don’t get quite enough time to play many flash games other than our own, I always have time for fancypants. I played farm town yesterday and found myself playing it for a while (not farmville by the way, I can’t stand facebook games). I just now got hooked on a new Armor Games one called turn based game or something, but it was too short :) We look at loads of games but try to avoid getting hooked on anything. The guys here recently got stuck into PLants vs Zombies, not flash but similar scope, oh yeah PVZ has lots to answer for.

What keeps you going besides money? (But who doesn’t love making games here anyway right?) <forums-webmaster3000>

You got it, making games for a job, dude that’s it’s own reward. For that very reason you need to take the money side seriously. You can altruistically and artistically shun things like ads and coins, but you are unlikely to be  able to enjoy doing it fulltime as a job.

What are your favorite games to make, and what were your favorite games to play growing up? <cartoon64>

We grew up with Macs! Games? Jeez. We played a lot of Dark Castle, Might and Magic. Actually, our game Sinta: Escape from Ixerron Keep wa sa bit of an homage to that. Bard’s Tale, Lode Runner. Basically every game that was available on the mac. We played to death. I think Stephen got a console at one point. Shuffle puck cafe. Favourite games to make: They’re all fun to make but I especially had fun on BTD and guns n angel

In 5 years, do you see your company more as a publisher, portal or a developer? <forums-JGOware>

All 3, I like having a hand in all the pies. Developing is what makes it fun, gives me a sense of contrul over our destiny. Developing drives the others, to us they really are inextricable now.

What came first? the monkey and baloons or the games engine? <cartoon64>

The engine. Steve’s wife mentioned in passing that popping balloons was fun. Within a few hours he had a concept. I can be blamed for the monkey, I’m no artist :) – Chris.

Whats your long term plan for ninja kiwi? where do you see yourself in 5 years? <Happyfat>

Ah jeez, 5 years, that’s a hard one. Mainly still able to do it full time would be great. We might be 10 people by then or more. I’d like to think we’d had another Bloons sized hit in that time.

What do you think about future of flash games? Don’t you think the market is getting overcrowded with games? <ozdy>

The player base is growing and I don’t think it’s getting overcrowded with games. I don’t forsee a time where an unknown indie can’t make it with a crackerjack game. The opportunities will be there for a long time. I think Mochi Coins will enable some talent to stay making games instead of moving into database administration to pay the rent, not that there is anything wrong with that but it seems a shame if you’re a talented developer.

Game Design & Development

When you’re writing the code do you first flow chart everything or code as you go? <forums-mike950>

A bit of both, We try to get a POC going within a couple of days though

Have you developed any games on other platforms besides Flash? <forums-JGOware>

We’ve only developed in flash to date. The Ninja Kiwi Downloads link that someone posted was a failed attempt to sell Bloons games as an .exe.

What was your first flash game? (linky please) <forums-JGOware>

http://ninjakiwi.com/Games/Racing/Play/Replay-Racer.html. I hope it still works!

I see you release like almost one game monthly, how can you keep that average? are you a team, you re-use game engines, you use a framework? <mochiland-cicla>

We’re a team and we do re-use bit’s and pieces. There are 6 of us in the office full-time now so I hope to see that get up to 2/month

To what do you attribute the wild success of the Bloons series? The graphics are very simple and the gameplay isn’t very different from many other games. What is it that makes your games stand apart? <mochiland-cowboyrobot>

I think it was fairly original in gameplay. Some people likened the popping to bubble wrap. Sort of therapeutic like. If we knew the secret formula though by jove we would have replicated it by now!

what computer spec do you target as a min requirement when developing processor intensive games? <BrightWave>

Ah, good question. We have a range of computers in the office to test things on, from an eee pc and an old mac g4 laptop. Recently we’ve done some things with caching of bitmaps for games with lots of monsters. Guns n Angel was the first.  We aim to get more than 15fps on the g4 lap top. It was the only way to get the numbers we wanted, those games (SAS2 is another example) are memory heavy

What keeps you guys developing new games? What’s your inspirations? <forums-webmaster3000>

We’re inspired by any great games, new ideas come from all around really. For a long time we basically stuck to  puzzle/action games but we’ve recently been going through a more violent phase. I guess you could say we’re  driven by whimsy a bit :)  Making games for a living is incredibly fun, thats all the motivation I need. 

How long did it take to develop the 1st bloons. <BrightWave>

Let’s say the hourly rate was pretty good :) Bloons took about a month. Oddly we started it and then didn’t finish it for a while after that. yeah it was a bit piecemeal. Actually that was a month part time evenings/weekends.

Was flash your first endeavor into programming seriously? <BrightWave>

I learned C++ then went into AS a couple of years back (Stephen).

What’s your dev process, agile scrumming or something less formal? <CC-DavidScott>

We’ll leave agile scrumming to Tony Woodcock :) less formal

AS2 or AS3? <Happyfat>

All AS3 now, I miss some parts of AS2 that AS3 just doesn’t do well in my opinion.

How smooth was your transition from as2 to as3? <BrightWave>

Transition from AS2 to 3 was fairly smooth, one day we made as2 games, the next we made as3 games.

Are you guys ever going to do anything with 3D and flash? sharikura rules!! too bad its not available how do you feel about 3D and flash? <Digital_Vizions>

2D rocks, I’m not convinced 3D ads enough value over and above the extra dev time.  If people want 3d they’ll play xbox. still, there is some scope there for original stuff that you can’t get on xbox. but for us, just not yet.

Do you guys have dedicated programmers and artists or do people tend to be more generalists? <deflogic>

We have both, dedicated + generalist. Someone who can do both is incredibly valuable. We’re very much still finding our way in terms of hiring people managing a bigger team etc
<Digital_Vizions>    i have experienced frowns when i claimed to be a hybrid devr..art/programmer, how do you feel about that?
Frown back!

Do you guys collaborate with other studios? <deflogic>

No, not yet.

Since you are still deving in flash and outsourcing for other platforms would you consider flash as rapid prototyping? <Digital_Vizions>

Absolutely, king of rapid prototyping. Flash is awesome, except cs4 I want to punch adobe for that one. Except for the help in CS4 right?

Advice for Flash coders: Fun short games, or longer more robust games? <forums-JGOware> and How do you feel about making large, deeper games like sonny vs. casual titles? <benologist>

Both! Really good short games can be great virally and driving traffic back to your site, bigger games equate to more risk, make sure the potential upside is worth it. Our trend this year has been for longer development times, with mochi coins I think we’ll probably level out at around 3-4 man months per game.

What do you consider a long development time? <deflogic>

I consider anything more than 2 months or so as long

You looking for game testers? <Happyfat>

Sure, PM me if you’re keen!

How do you handle beta testing? Who play tests your games? <forums-JGOware>

Beta testing we’re getting more serious about now. We tend to get friends and family to give it a crack over the end of the dev timeframe, then once we have what we beleive to be a bug free game it has a life on NK where users feedback in the blog about any bugs/sploits.

While making bloons were you inspired at all by the graphical style of the pogo.com game “poppit”? <cartoon64>

We discovered poppit later, we didn’t know it existed. For a sickening moment I thought the game was the same, but its completely different thankfully.

Mochi Coins Experience and SAS: Zombie Assault 2


Can you share some stats on SAS’s performance with Mochi Coins?

SAS2 has had about 5.7M plays and 700k plays from the expansion pack SAS2: Asylum. We’ve “sold” 237,000 items, of which about 17,000 are paid items. About 5% convert to buying an item, and less than 1% to buying a paid item. In terms of CPM, it’s a bit deceptive because we have a lot of plays in Asia.  Our English-speaking cpm is $11+ , and our overall cpm is hovering around $3.50 because of all the international traffic. Instead of focusing on cpm what really matters is the total amount of money you can make from micro-transactions. We’d take a quarter of the total amount of traffic if it was US gamers! The game was launched in mid-June and since then has made us over $20k and is still making more every day. This is only our first outing with Mochi Coins and we’re really excited about how other genres perform and, as the idea of selling content to willing consumers settles in our mind, exploring the options that that opens up. The game was 4 months full time for a developer so not a small undertaking but that this is the opportunity afforded to developers by Micro Trans.

I would like to ask is if they could give some rough numbers on how many item purchases with coins their SAS2 game has seen? Can you share your play to purchase ratio? <ArcadeJunky>   

Here are some numbers. 237000 item purchases, 220000 are free items like nades and free rifle. So 17000 paid purchases it seems.

ARPU please :) ARPU and ARPPU? <CC-DavidScott>

Might have to come back to you on that David, I don’t want to spend the whole time doing calculations.

Will you still do non-exclusives for Coins-enabled games, and do you treat them any differently (in terms of priority or price etc)?<forums-Gordon>

Not completely sure of the question about non-exclusives for coins enabled games. If you mean will we rip the coins out then I dunno, it’d be time consuming and therefore probably prohibitively expensive for prospective licensors. If you mean license as is with apis etc, I think that would be problematic so it’d probably fall into the too hard therefore too expensive basket.

What are the shares of the SAS 2 revenue from ads/coins/other streams? <forums-romank>

80-90% is coins, the rest is ads.

Hi…my question is about mochicoins and sas zombie assault2, great game btw… your main users are probably 11-16 years old (male i guess – the same as we had with ultrakillz). You’re selling upgrades in-game. Seeing as most people in this age range don’t have credit cards or paypal, you’d expect them to use other payment mechanisms… in particular i’m interested to know if people are using SMS payments more than paypal / creditcard eve<mbxgames>

That question has to go back to Mochi, I have no idea about ages or who is paying by what means :)

What was the development time for SAS2 (graphics + code)? <CC-DavidScott>

SAS2 including the expansion Asylum was about 4 man months I think

Any plans on adding MochiCoins to the next Bloons sequel? <forums-romank>

Indeed, BTD4 in the works now.

Was there anything you think you did wrong with the Coins integration in SAS2? <forums-Gordon>

I think we did it pretty well there was a lot of noise about the continue pay-for, however I stand by our decision there. We’ll continue to learn of  course about better ways to do things, but I think this was a pretty good first shot at it. It’s a change of mindset for us devs as well as players. Making that value proposition is the key. One hard thing was making sure people knew that bought items were kept from game to game, whereas the guns you find around the map have to be unlocked each game.

What were your best selling item types <NPGames>

The Zombie Popping Compendium Party Pack has brought in the most $. My advice is if you make a coins game, have a purchase that wraps up everything in one hit for a discount.

So in your experience with the mochicoins do you think buying extra levels or buying cheats is more profitable? <Happyfat>

We haven’t tried the levels side yet. The “cheats” in SAS have done well.

A while back H&K was sending takedown notices to flash games using their guns in games, did they ever contact you about using the MP5 in SAS2 <benologist>

Yeah I saw that. I told the guys my concerns, in the end we figured if they did get in touch we’d change it. I think one of our guns we changed to the N&K 417 as opposed to H&K… we were tempted of that lunacy to call it the Heckler and Cock…

What about offering something for free but only available using the mochicoin system to get them logged in? <Happyfat>

Do it do it do it :) Free stuff gets people familiar with how the buying process works

What percent of a game should be free in a coins enabled game? <NPGames>

As I mentioned at the beginning of the chat, we’ve “sold” 237000 items, but only about 17000 are paid items. Just enough! Basically I think you should deliver a comprehensive experience for free. I don’t want players hamstrung into being required to pay.

In short, has mochicoins doubled your income from one game? or more or less? <Happyfat>

In short, no. Thats in response to the doubled income question. If ALL our games were retroactively fitted with equally compelling and comprehensive mochi stores then yeah, life would be good

So people are really trusting the mochicoin system? <Happyfat>

Some people obviously do trust it, an interesting observation from our end is people do seem to have a higher degree of trust in the process if they start out on our site already.

Can you ask if they expect mochicoins to long-term double or more their income? <benologist>

I don’t expect it will double our total revenue as we have a future that includes royalties from mobile etc

Will you attempt retro fits? <CerebralFix>

I don’t think so. It’s complicated enough to make the coins stuff work well, retroactively shoehirning it in I think is risky for the time it might take to do it you could be halfway through a new game. But our thinking now is by default any new game we make we’ll hope to get mochi coins in, mochi coins are an important part of our future.

Why did you guys choose MochiCoins above HeyZap or GamerSafe? <mochi_user____>

We know the mochi guys well, trust is a big thing. By proxy you are making a trust decision on behalf of your players. Mochi have some bright guys and a big engineering team, support is outstanding.

How many plays did SAS2 get? <benologist>

SAS2 has had… loading stats.. 5.7M + 700k from asylum.

Do you think creating a flash game with a high production value and decent funding (e.g. $20k) is a viable strategy now that there’s MochiCoins (provided they are used wisely)? Or monetizing (via ads and/or coins) simple ideas but with highly addictive gameplay is still a better way to go? <forums-romank>

There is definitely a much stronger argument for higher production values now that MochiCoins are around, however you still need to vreate a game that people will enjoy. I think bigger budgets (even just bigger time budgets) don’t always produce better gameplay. One could consider taking an old game that was popular but maybe had limited exposure and fairly limited play-time and expand on that. The other thing is I personally think about examples that have worked in the genre you are developing. I’m not saying don’t be a pioneer but have open eyes about the higher risks if you are. Think about what you would pay for in any game. I immediately think of Call of Duty modern Warfare. I’d totally pay for a new gun…:)

How did the expansion pack work out (in terms of say distribution/Coins)? <forums-Gordon>

Hard to tell Gordon. Because Asylum shares the store ID with SAS2 we can only get a vague sense as to what it has contributed to the overall My hunch is it’s not quite done as much as we’d hoped in terms of lifting revenue, but I also think it will have given the game a little more long tail. Come to think of it there was possibly a better way of telling people how that all worked, but I know the fans of SAS2 were happy to get the expansion. The idea really was to give those that we’re buying stuff another whole  scenario, but also those that hadn’t bought might take a looks and say, well heck if ther are two games, maybe 1000 coins isn’t too bad to pay for X… – We’ve only developed in flash

How did you decide the price of the items? <NPGames>

Yeah, that was an interesting process. We wanted to put prices that would encourage people to buy, I don’t know if we were too high or too low. Throughout the development process we tweaked it a bit until we felt it was right. A good rule of thumb we thought was to peg the total cost of everything about halfway to a $19.95 casual downloadable title

How much impact and what kind of (positive/negative) have you experienced with SAS series being not casual (e.g. compared to Bloons)? <forums-romank>

Yeah that’s interesting, when it was released just on NK the support from people on my blog was mostly positive, but that’s a fairly captive crowd possibly afraid to offend me :) I guessed that we’d get about 3.5 on NG.  It started out high but then crashed to about 3.5 after it front paged. For a while the comments page on NG was a big string of zeroes. But they can be a funny crowd, eventually the negativity was hedged with reason. As much as it might hurt to read those comments I encourage people going through the same thing to do so. You still need the feedback, just ignore the “You guys are such f***** c**** for doing this I hope you burn miserably ina fire” type comments

How important are including level editors within games nowadays? <Happyfat>

Level editors are cool, players love them even if it’s just to create huge ridiculous chain reactions. And now if it’s worth it, there is an easy way to get people to pay for it :)

Will you remove the mochicoins for kongregate or just ignore them (for now) <benologist>

Our first reaction was ignore them, but we’re going to give integrating Kreds a go. It’s worth exploring, it just means we lose about 3-4 days dev time working through it. We put sas 2 on kong and they took it down :) PM me if you want my opinion on that in 3 months time :)

The Business and Industry of Flash Games

Have you been approached by any big names out there to create a game, like Pepsi or someone? <Happyfat>

Yes. We declined. We want to own all our IP ourselves.

Do you draw inspiration from games from say 15 years ago? <forums-mike950>

Yes, old mac games :)

Did all your initial money come from adverts? <Happyfat>

Yeah I think so :)

Where do you see the flash market in 5 years? <forums-JGOware>

Bigger and better.

Are the bloons spinoffs still generating renewed interest in the franchise or are they appealing to the same core audience? <benologist>

Bloons has magnificent legs! I think at this stage in the game I think further player packs etc might just be hitting  the core fans, but by gum there are a lot of them. Put it into perspective, Bloons alone, including More Bloons Even More Bloons and the 5 Player packs is essentially 8 iterations of the same game, with relatively little changed in the way of gameplay or graphics. That’s excluding the voracious appetite for BTD. I think BTD opened up a whole new audience.

How many plays does you most successful game get monthly and how much it earn during that same time period via mochiads? <BrightWave>

Hm, Bloons would be the most highly played – still. Get around 170k plays per day

So when you guys release a new game, at what level of plays do you consider it to be successful?

that depends a little on a few things, how long it took to develop and whether or not it has coins in it :) My rule of thumb is 1 million plays in its first week, and those games are few and far between :) That said, I’d like to see any game we’ve worked hard on and that is in distribution to peak at over 150k plays per day. That’d be it’s first week in distro

170k plays a day, is that for the first one of all of the BTD series combined? Is it holding at that now or trending up/down? <CC-DavidScott>
How do you distribute to get 1 million a week? <ozdy>

David – the 170k is mochi paid impressions per day for bloons, and thats not trending up or down particularly much. That’s Bloons itself David, I guess it’s trending down over time.

How long did it take for you to see profits and how long did it take you to get a good handle on publishing with success? <Digital_Vizions>

gosh, Profit as people have mentioned before is hard to determine. if you exclude our own time put in then profitablility came pretty quickly. Bloons was a hit in our first 6 months, we were full-time in the biz within a couple of months of Bloons release.

How much money total? <NPGames>

pfft, pass :)

When publishing a game what is your distribution process? how many sites do you handson submit to? <BrightWave>

We used to go nuts emailing a bunch of sites. Now it’s 2 phase mostly, exclusive on NK for about a month, then we put it in distro. that involves checking the box on mochi, submitting to NG and Kong (maybe). NG and Kong can be ok if they get a decent rating that day. because I think webmasters do check those sites for whats new and hot

So is publishing close to an art form? do you guys go gunho on publishing or are you selective? <Digital_Vizions>
Which portals/networks generate the most plays for your games? <darkmoon>

We’re fortunate to have a failry decent userbase on NK to start things off with. Mochi is a pretty good way to distribute games now.

Did bloonsworld.com have a positive or neutral effect on bloons and will you make websites dedicated to specific games like that again? <benologist>

Yes, positive, and we have made meeblingsworld.com, boombotworld.com. Bloonsworld is where most of the playerpacks came from.

1) What’s your daily active user number for the NK site? 2)How many new accounts do you see a day? thx <CC-DavidScott>

we don’t have an account sign up process on NK, we get about 140k unique visitors off the top of my head.

Was bloons just right place / right time or did you launch it with a particular strategy that led to it becoming such a huge success <benologist> (and tied to that) what would you advice a person who would like to start self-sponsoring but who obviously can’t produce bloons success? <ozdy>

Take it seriously! put effort into the game, and treat it like a serious business. that said I think it’s harder now, more sites competing. aking a hit was not in our plan, but making a successful biz was. still if you make a cracker of a game, you can start to build a business on that. so bloons or no bloons we would still be living off what we make – we might not have 6 people yet but its a matter of time and determination in my opinion. it was our intention since the beginning to work fulltime on the games.  if you make something good, think very carefully about how you manage the IP.

So its been just over 2 years now since you released bloons to the world and your still getting 170K a day gameplays. is most the traffic coming from NK, or just simply that bloons is on every game site in the world? Is the bloons brand bigger than the ninjakiwi brand?) <Happyfat>

Except the iPhone stuff we’ve done recently, but that’s just licensing really. Most of those plays are elsewhere. Bloons is everywhere… Bloons brings in a lot of traffic, but not the majority. To keep traffic coming in you need to have more new content

I’m wanting to become a flash game maker full time, I have my own website but im just starting out. How important is it to keep my brand in my games for the long term? ) <Happyfat>

Do all you can, obviously you need to jusggle that with making ends meet.

What are your thoughts on getting games sponsored? <Happyfat> and How do you feel about FGL? <Digital_Vizions>

Some sponsorship $ these days are impressive, but, try to take a long term view. FGL serves a need. They are an open marketplace for sponsorships. That said, I’m not a big fan of sponsorships as a rule, because the traffic (and therefore the power) stays with the big sites

Do you know any better servises than FGL? <Digital_Vizions>

For licensing? No. That said, I don’t know that much about the space

Your revenue is mainly from ads, which ad networks have done most for you? can you give tips about monetizing a website, I mean you’re not the regular stick adsense above and below swf site… <ozdy>, You’ve been succesfully pulling out games now for over 2 years, have a great site, and making great use of monetisation. any top tips or secrets that you have learnt in your time? <Happyfat>

We’ve looked at sponsoring games ourselves but we can’t really see a clear way to get a return at some prices, which is ulitmately good for developers I suppose. On site ads are a constant headache :) We like tribal fusion, and Hi5 are pretty good too, adsense lost it’s mojo for us a while ago. As far as ad placements, do  experiment, see what works and what doesn’t, it always changes around so keep an eye on things.

What’s your typical budget for a flash game? And could you break that down for us? <forums-JGOware>

For a while at the start we were making 1 day games – Tabuto, straight dice etc. Maybe $100-$150 for sound assets. Of that time it’s probably two thirds coding and one third art, game design and teting would be additional to that. Our only budget really now is time. Steve and I still pretty much own the design/idea process, we recently re-looked at multiplayer for SAS2.

Ninja Kiwi on iPhone

How did you guys find the transition to iPhone from Flash? <deflogic>

Very easy, we made someone else do it :)

With the success you had with bloons on the iPhone, do you plan to port any more of your games to the iPhone or other platforms? <CC-DavidScott>

We’d like to get more on iPhone, just need to find more developers in that area

What tools do you use to port to iPhone? Wouldn’t you love a flash like toul that would generate objective c code? <mike950>

Maybe, we’re keeping half an eye on this HaXe development

How many downloads has bloons had on the iphone to date? <Happyfat>

Gee, off the top of my head I think it’s around 300k

Do you export artwork directly from flash and use that for the iphone game? i notice you can export png’s that is why i asked <Digital_Vizions>

We gave the scottish developers the .fla, they worked from there.

If your into the iPhone space now do you have intentions to move into other spaces like PSP DSi Wii-Ware? <CerebralFix>

We’ve licensed the rights to Bloons to a company called Hands-On. They are bringing it to all mobile, PSP, DSi and XBLA. Doing that sort of deal leaves us free to keep making games in flash. I don’t desperately want to get directly involved in developing for other platforms.

Have you seen how apple orders new games? ..alphabetically..what do you think of that..it encourages naming games like aaaamygame..yes? <mike950f>

Remember, spaces come before letters in the alphabet, so “a mygame” would be first.

Do you have plans to port any of your other titles to iPhone in the future? <ada>

Apple is an idiosyncratic animal indeed, BTD is being ported to iPhone now.

Re: handson: what percentage do they take from your games? <Happyfat>

Re:Hands On %, I think I won’t answer that here, we have an NDA there.