From Audio Post to iOS Apps: How the #1 Word Game W.E.L.D.E.R. Was Made in NYC

January 29th, 2012 by Trenton

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CHELSEA, MANHATTAN: Surfing the sea of apps that pour out of Apple’s store, it’s easy to overlook that they all actually come from somewhere. But dive in, look around, and you’ll see that at least one has NYC – and an audio post entrepreneur’s ambition – written all over it.

Britt Myers looked beyond the faders for his newest project.

Those enmeshed in Manhattan’s ultra-competitive mix-to-picture, sound design, and music production scene already know the name of Britt Myers quite well. His SSL Duality-endowed Great City Productions sports a Fran Manzella-designed studio, servicing post clients including HBO, Spike TV, and Comedy Central, as well as serious music artists such as Chairlift, Yeasayer, and Suzanne Vega (check out the SonicScoop 2009 feature on Britt Myers and Great City Productions here).

And although his rooms are constantly humming with activity, Myers refuses to take anything for granted. Hence, his hefty commitment in 2011 to stepping into a new arena and creating the all-iOS (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch) word game W.E.L.D.E.R. The addictive puzzler from Myers’ concern Highline Games plays out on your device like a combination of Bejeweled, Boggle and Scrabble — with a dose of Tetris thrown in for good measure — and has gotten its fair share of attention in the 500,000+ buffet of apps in the Store.

As evidence of its success consider these factoids: W.E.L.D.E.R. reached the #1 App on the iPad Paid App Store; gained over 250,000 users in its first 2 months; and earned “#1 iPad Game of 2011” accolades from Associated Press, Fox, Huffington Post, and more. In other words, the w.o.r.d. is out.

While it may seem like Myers wields a Midas touch, his forward motion stems from a sharp sense of business world realities. “Having all your eggs in one basket is something I work to avoid,” Myers says. “This is a very different business model from post. I wanted to make technology from a creative perspective, but also from a business perspective.

“Audio post is a contract-based business,” Myers continues. “I wanted to grow a business where I created a product, sold it and generated money over time. There are a lot of ups and downs you go through running your own business with a high overhead — things out of your control that can create big problems. So being able to control the content entirely is an exciting scenario.”

Although not a hardcore gamer, Myers had filled his fair share of minutes playing around with his iPhone on the subway.  Attracted to the iOS platform for its creative empowerment and fast distribution, Myers looked at games like Angry Birds and Cut the Rope and saw a market that he could put his own creative spin on.

Eyes on the prize: Gunning for an Angry Birds-sized achievement.

Beginning an iOS Game: Honing the Creative Concept

First, however, he would have to build W.E.L.D.E.R. — a process that, in retrospect, he compares to building a studio.

“It took twice the time and twice the money (as expected),” he explains. “Building our studio was a seemingly never-ending process that kept taking longer and longer, as the scope of the project expanded around the original plans to build what we called ‘a giant musical instrument.’

“The game was similar– what started as a simple project expanded in scope many times as we added more features and user enhancements.  We had very high standards for making a beautiful little piece of technology, and I found the studio construction very similar in this way.”

Next up for Myers and his colleagues at Highline Games was picking the style of game itself. While a driving adventure or shoot ‘em up may have had its appeal, top sellers in the word game category like Words with Friends, Scribblenauts, Jambalaya, and good ole’ Scrabble ultimately served as the inspiration. Genre identified, the next bit of heavy lifting would be to invent an entirely new word game that would actually be compelling enough to separate people from their $1.99.

Starting with a prototype called “Tumble Word”, Myers’ idea stemmed from combining the game mechanics of classic “match 3” games with the spelling of words.  After bringing the idea to his game development partners Eli Weissman and Anthony Litton (both formerly of Rockstar Games), the team developed the concept into a prototype.

“We were intent on not having a ‘submit’ button to make a word — we wanted the board to detect any formed words and pull them out for you,” Myers explains of W.E.L.D.E.R.’s. game play. “We felt this would create a fun rhythm and flow that didn’t exist in other word games.  Of course, this created a few challenges — there are many words you have never heard of that are in the Scrabble tournament word lists!  Behind the scenes we spec’d a very elaborate word engine for our developer to build, and we also spec’d an extensive development kit for ourselves so we could spend hours — on the subway, standing in line… — tuning the game.”

As the development unfolded, a process that took place between February and September of 2011, Highline began to see the game as a “word laboratory” rather than a “word machine” – an important distinction, in the light of the fact that the diversion would need an original name to stand out in the hectic App store. “We had been through a number of more generic game names, and been frustrated with how every word game name was taken,” Myers recalls. “We felt we needed something truly original, and thus spawned the acronym: the ‘Word Examination Laboratory for Dynamic Extraction and Reassessment.’  We imagined the dystopian society where words were becoming extinct and you were entrusted to save the world with your word machine.

“We had some fun with it. Dan Powell, the showrunner for Comedy Central’s “Ugly Americans” that we do the sound for at Great City, offered to write and direct the trailer, which was a fun extension of the game.  We felt the storyline added another fun dimension to the game, and the trailer really helped extend that.”

Digging In: The Game Gets Built

With a distinctive concept clearly in hand, Highline rounded out their team with a graphic artist and a developer who handled the heavy lifting on the coding side. After spending most of his recent career on “need-it-yesterday” audio post mixes that are dispatched in a few hours, the eight-month initial development arc for W.E.L.D.E.R. came as a tedious surprise to Myers.

“We never imagined it would take that long!” he says. “The basic gameplay and level structure was built between March and May, and the game had basically been the same experience since June. But from July to September, the majority of the hours poured into the project was spent honing the user experience.  It’s a fairly complicated game– in fact, most casual games have much more depth than a player might notice at first glance — and we had the difficult task of boiling down all the elements into smaller compartmentalized user experiences.

“Honestly it was not unlike mixing a song with 100 tracks and 8 different parts,” continues Myers. “It has to be molded into easily digestible bits for any first time user — from my mom to a hardcore game player– to enjoy.  The art took a long time to get right — we had about 10 different versions of the game’s tiles and background.  Every little aspect of the user interface was reworked over and over again until we felt we had gotten it right. Once the game came out in early November we continued to develop and add new features as the market responded to it.  We continue to develop it today, and will spend the rest of this year adding new features and new ways to play.”

Audio Advantage: Making W.E.L.D.E.R.’s Prime Sound Design

Fortunately for Myers, this was where his background in music production and audio post served him very well. “Being an audio engineer is a very detail-oriented job,” he notes. “You have a myriad of issues to keep track of, from technical to creative, and I found that creating this game and managing the scope of this project requires many of the same skills and attention to detail.”

Of course, those skills came directly into play in creating the ultra-satisfying sound design elements for W.E.L.D.E.R. – a crucial aspect of any successful game. “We created videos of the gameplay, and then sound designed the game like we would a TV show or film,” says Myers. “From a creative audio perspective, your approach is flip-flopped though — instead of trying to make everything sound natural and organic, the sound for the game is a real part of the experience.  It triggers your emotional reaction to the game, whether it makes a moment more tense, or a reward more satisfying, it has a huge impact.

An SSL Duality will do the trick for overacheiving on the sound design.

“But where in an animated series or film we would try to make sound that was more natural, in the game, at least this game, the repetitive audio triggers were really important.  It’s sort of like game show sound effects– you want it to be the same sound triggered over and over, to trigger the same reactions in the player. We spent a lot of time on the reward triggers:  The word formation sound and the word reward sound both change depending on the type of word and the bonuses achieved.  There was a lot of calculation to it, but ultimately what worked was the sounds that ‘felt’ the best, the triggered the right gut reaction while playing.

“Once we had laid out the scope of FX for various scenarios in the game, we had them put into the code, and then it became a little bit of trial and error.  It had to feel right as you played it, and it had to sound right whether it was through the tiny compressed iPhone speaker, or the tiny but more open iPad speaker, or if a player was wearing giant cans.  Definitely was a tough balance to mix for!”

Getting Onto the App Store: Highline Picks a Publisher

Once W.E.L.D.E.R. was coded, mixed, and playing like a dream, it was straight to the App Store, right? Wrong! While Highline could have gone the DIY route to get online, they ultimately decided that help would be necessary.

”We had always imagined releasing this ourselves,” Myers says. “Apple has an amazing distribution platform that significantly cuts down on traditional costs of sales, marketing, and distribution… but not as much as people might think.

“Yeah, you hear stories of just dropping it into the App Store and making good money on it, but that isn’t really how it works.  The App Store is a cold ruthless place for developers.  With over 90,000 games in the store, and hundreds of very viable games being released every month, the environment is highly competitive.

“As a consumer, it’s amazing.  Never before has so much content been available for so cheap.  It’s incredible.  For a developer, you’re pushing a rock up a hill.”

This epiphany ultimately led Highline to Ayopa Games, which would provide a megaboost in terms of connections, distribution and marketing expertise. “A friend of mine at EA used to work at Ubisoft with this guy Johnny, who used to be at Chillingo and had worked on Angry Birds’ launch,” Meyers says of the social signal path.  “Johnny and his business partner Elliot were starting up Ayopa Games, a game publishing company, and they were looking for titles.  We sent them the game and they were ecstatic about it.

“They sent us a ton of ideas and notes before we even signed with them, and before and after release have served as a crucial and invaluable resource for getting feedback on what we are doing and thinking about W.E.L.D.E.R.  The worked really hard pushing their contacts at Apple and in press to get the game noticed at launch.  Nothing can be guaranteed with Apple — no one can tell you, ‘I know the person at Apple who can get you featured,’ because it just isn’t true.  Apple works very hard to push the games that they think their customers will be into, and games that use their technology in cool and interesting ways.

W.E.L.D.E.R. arrived on the App Store in a big way.

“I have no idea how things would have gone without Ayopa, but we definitely were being naïve with our initial approach to how things worked. Ayopa has become a crucial part of our team, and continues to work really hard to get new promotions for the game.”

Big Breaks: How Apple Approval Sparks Sales

Any cut that Ayopa was taking was immediately justified when Apple named W.E.L.D.E.R “Game of the Week” upon its debut. It’s a distinction that can help make or break a young company like Highline.

“With so much competition, unless you are a big developer like EA or Zynga, you have to get featured in some way by Apple or it will be a tough road,” Myers states. “We spent a lot of time and money to create what we felt was a fantastic customer experience.  Sure, there were some bumps along the road and we have come out with updates to address them, but the core of the gameplay experience we wanted to be really refined and great.  It took a lot longer to get right than we had expected, but at the end of the day I think these are things that Apple notices.

“We added a bunch of features that were part of the iOS5 launch this fall — single sign-in Twitter support, iCloud support — as well as traditional technology uses that Apple likes such as retina display, GameCenter, universal support — but it’s hard to say if any of these things pushed us over the edge– many other games have this stuff too.”

Beyond the protracted process of W.E.L.D.E.R.’s initial development, the next surprise for Myers has been the ongoing work required for the game after it was “finished.” As he’s found out firsthand, the fantasy of rolling a piece of content out the door and sitting back for the rest of your life while the checks roll in is just that – a fantasy. In actuality, W.E.L.D.E.R. continues to require nonstop care and feeding to sustain its sales.

“There was some stuff people requested that we knew we needed but just didn’t have time to get to — undos were a big request,” Myers says of the post-launch phase. “There were also some people experiencing crashes, because they would touch and interact with the game differently than we laid out in the tutorials, and the game would crash.  So we spent a lot of time listening to people’s requests on iTunes and in the support emails, tracking down these bugs, fixing them, and implementing new features.

“We knew we needed a big feature update before Christmas, and the hope was to get featured again during the one-week holiday break for the App Store, so that we would be featured for two weeks instead of one.  We piled on a huge amount of new features, including two bonus modes.  Ayopa went to work telling everyone they knew at Apple about everything we were doing, and Apple featured us again as ‘New and Noteworthy.’

“It really was amazing to get that kind of response from Apple.  Combined with a holiday sales, we went from then-chart-obscurity, having fallen far down after the Game of the Week ended, into the Top 50 again.”

No Rest for the Weary: Ongoing Product Development Required

With 250,000 paid users forming a healthy fan base, it’s easy to think that Myers and his crew are set. But before you look for them sailing on the good yacht W.E.L.D.E.R., the competitive nature of the App Store means they’re not at the finish line just yet.

“Sales have been good — without these features from Apple it would probably be a very different place,” admits Myers. “We have about 250,000 users right now, and we have become profitable to a degree, but continuing to provide updates costs quite a bit of money. We’ve invested a year of our lives in this, and even with all the promotion and press accolades, we’ve just achieved Step One.  We have primed an aggressive development slate for this year, with new features, new platforms, and new iterations of WELDER, and we are excited about what we can achieve.

Keeping a game company on top really is serious business.

“We’ve learned a lot about sustaining sales: We weren’t really thinking ‘scale.’  We were just thinking how to get our ideas and our game out into the market fastest.  Ultimately that has come to bite us, in that now we are trying to scale up, and having to go back and clean things up to allow the code to work with a larger team.

“A single app on the App Store, for most independent developers, is no lottery ticket.  We had a nice run, and now we’ve settled further back into the charts, and we have a lot of work to do to sustain this success — new modes of play, new iterations of the game, and developing for other platforms — all of which we are working hard on this year.”

If You Can Make The Game Here…Advice for iOS App Developers in NYC and Beyond

While New York City has its share of video game developers and composers, including the aforementioned SoHo-headquartered Rockstar Games (publisher of Grand Theft Auto, Max Payne, and the Red Dead series, among others), it’s not necessarily known as a hub in this lucrative sector – either on the console or iOS app side. Still, Myers sees NYC as a good place to get video game visions going right now.

“From my limited investigation, there is a growing and thriving community of independent game developers, and we’re excited to be a part of that,” he observes. “New York has a ton of resources for pretty much every industry, and there is a lot here for developing games.  It’s been a great experience having everyone work and collaborate under one roof, and for me it’s the only way to really run these creative projects.”

For anyone who’s thinking of joining Britt Myers in the pursuit of iOS game app success – or competing with him on it – this young cross-platform entrepreneur offers up some valuable perspective.

“I’ve always had a real passion for great technology, and it has been a thrill to start building my own,” he reflects. “Working with music and audio post, it was always a thrill to see the work that I played a part in creating be seen and heard by thousands, if not millions, of people.  We’ve had some of that same thrill with W.E.L.D.E.R. with so much success right out of the gate.

“There were a number of bumps along the way as we figured out what we wanted to do and how we were going to go about doing it. Really, anyone starting out in this industry just needs to be prepared for that: Twice the time, twice the money — just like building a studio!”

— David Weiss