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GDCE 2012: How four guys from Madfinger made Dead Trigger in five months

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GDCE 2012: How four guys from Madfinger made Dead Trigger in five months
Mobile game development is getting longer and more complex but this remains a relative term.

For example, Madfinger Games' zombie shooter Dead Trigger was developed by four full time staff in five months, without any crunch time.

The process was detailed at GDC Europe by senior programmer Petr Benysek, who only joined the company in February 2012 after 12 years in console development.

"We had three programmers new to mobile who had never used Unity or C#. So what did we do first? We went on holiday," Benysek said.

Cutting your cloth

As for the game, the short development time forced certain key decisions: short missions; a generic gameplay structure; and using motion capture for the animation.

Similarly Dead Trigger only shipped with four maps, each of which could be played through four modes - carry resources, kill zombies, protect objects, time defence in a small area.

This resulted in around 10 hours of gameplay, organised through a rank progression system that unlocked new zombie types, weapons, items, and character attributes.

Other technical areas that were pushed included a limb dismemberment system and a city-based environment - in terms of content creation tools and process and the mission structure.

Way to play

The game was also designed from the start to enable Madfinger to experiment with free-to-play business model.

However, the audience reception for IAP, especially in what was originally a 99c game, surprised Madfinger in terms of the number of one star reviews received.

The game has since become free-to-play, receiving 1.5 million downloads to-date.

This switch has also resulted in new updated features such as a daily reward system, casino options for winning new items and a wave-based Arena mode, access to which is controlled by a new 'currency'.
Contributing Editor

A Pocket Gamer co-founder, Jon is Contributing Editor at PG.biz which means he acts like a slightly confused uncle who's forgotten where he's left his glasses. As well as letters and cameras, he likes imaginary numbers and legumes.