Mediatonic: growing a creative games company
Murder By Numbers game director Ed Fear talks how Mediatonic strives to push boundaries with every new project
Game director Ed Fear discusses Mediatonic’s latest projects
Okay, so we’ll admit it – until recently, you might not have heard of Mediatonic. But the truth is, we’ve been quietly growing into one of the UK’S biggest independent game developers – now with over 230 people across four studios in London, Brighton, Leamington Spa and sunny Madrid.
Platform-agnostic, our games range from top-grossing mobile titles like Yahtzee With Buddies to upcoming Pc/console partyroyale Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout. What’s inspired us and challenged us has led us down a weird and wonderful path that we’re glad to have pursued.
Over those past 14 years, we’ve learned a few things and are eager to share our advice, so here are our thoughts on setting out your stall as a studio and what you can do to grow it sustainably.
GAMES YOU NEVER KNEW YOU WANTED
There are countless studios in the world that can make games – and more with each day that passes – so it’s important to work out what makes you stand out: what makes you special and what ingredient you can put in that no-one else can.
We spent a lot of time thinking about what makes a Mediatonic game: what DNA threads our early off beat titles like Amateur Surgeon together with what we’re currently working on at the moment. And the best answer we’ve come up with is that there’s always a twist – something a little different from the norm.
“Wait,” you’re probably thinking. “You just said we need to find the difference, but your difference is that you’re different?”
Well, yeah. Game budgets everywhere are increasing, and with that increase comes an intense aversion to risk. At the same time, with mobile gaming reaching billions of people who traditionally wouldn’t have described themselves as ‘gamers’, the desire to reach the widest possible audience has led to an intense blandification of games. Everything is focus-tested to appeal to the widest possible demographic, and anything that has the slightest chance of causing a negative reaction, no matter how small, is avoided like the plague.
That’s not how we do things at Mediatonic. First and foremost, we’re players of games, and we want to make things that surprise people, things that catch them unguarded. Things they never knew they wanted. Things that stand out from the thousands of games released every month by virtue of what they are.
It might be an unusual combination of game mechanics, like making a narrative-driven Picross-style game by
infusing detective elements. It might be a thematic twist: for example, our upcoming multiplayer party game Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout is a non-violent take on the popular battle-royale genre, replacing guns and grit with gameshow assault courses in the style of classic TV show Takeshi’s Castle. Or it might be a unique visual treatment – mixing the worlds of the ultraviolent Gears Of War with the adorable cuteness of Funko Pops in our mobile title Gears POP! (trust us, the first time you see a Funko Pop slice another’s head off with a gun-chainsaw hybrid is something you won’t forget.)
As a bonus, this also helps us attract talent. In many of the cities and towns that we have studios in, there are countless other developers that people could work at. We want our games to be what helps make that choice for people: that they can only do this here.
SOLVING THE MYSTERY OF GAME DEVELOPMENT
Murder By Numbers is a good example of Mediatonic’s holistic approach to ‘difference’. It starts with a gameplay concept that had never been done before: nonogram logic puzzles (think Sudoku, except you’re filling in a grid with shaded squares rather than numbers, in order to make pixel art), combined with a detective visual novel.
When it came to the visuals too, we wanted to find our difference. If you’ve ever played a visual novel – traditionally a Japanese genre – they all tend to look quite similar: two characters, a backdrop and a text box. It can sometimes be hard to tell one from another. We had a goal of ensuring that if you saw a screenshot of Murder By Numbers amongst other VNS, you’d know which was ours instantly.
We chose a bright, poppy colour palette. We enlisted the help of Hato Moa, creator of Hatoful Boyfriend, to design our characters, and fuse her anime sensibilities with a shading style reminiscent of American comics. And we set the game in the 90s, so that we could play with the garish clashing fashions of the times.
The setting – a Hollywood actress turned amateur detective, complete with robot sidekick buddy – again has a strong element of difference about it, while still evoking the high-concept madness of 90s TV shows. And we set one of the cases in a drag club, not for token inclusivity, but because we thought it would be fun.
All of these differences combine to make a game with a unique style, a fresh atmosphere, and a clear distinction from the competition. And that is what makes a Mediatonic game.
MIRACLE GROW FOR GAMES
We often get asked how we grew from a studio founded as a side-hustle for two university students into the company we are today, and the answer’s actually fairly simple: by pushing our boundaries a little further with each project, we’ve been able to grow in capability and become a studio that can take on a huge variety of projects.
It started with games that could be made by a few people: simple Flash web games that kept people coming back, and that built up our reputation with the countless game portal websites around in the late 00s. From there, we expanded our horizons to create connected experiences: games that used servers to store data and facilitate interactions between players.
We were able to work on games that became incredibly popular and that pushed us to develop much of the strong server technology base that serves us so well today, delivering content to millions of users and customising it by market. That enabled us to work with Square Enix Japan on Heavenstrike Rivals, an original mobile PVP battler, where we learned how to deliver multiple content updates a week and release over 900 fully animated units in three years
– helping cement our processes for operating live service games. That, in turn, led to us working on some of the most popular mobile games and biggest licences in the world.
Our focus in recent years has been taking that experience and pushing it even further into new avenues and new markets and new original titles. Fall Guys, for instance, is a natural progression of our server technology into large-scale simultaneous multiplayer games. Murder By Numbers builds upon our experience writing countless mystery stories for the Fantastic Beasts: Cases From The Wizarding World, but putting it into a ‘complete package’ with an overarching story, and Gears POP! builds on all our experiences working with huge IP to bring two quite diverse brands together in a unique and exciting way. By building on our experience and pushing ourselves beyond our comfort zones, we’ve been able to grow from 2 people to 230 and we’re excited about what the future holds.
THAT’S A WRAP
It’s not easy finding your path and then building on it – if it was, everyone would do it. But we think if you find your style, don’t be afraid to take risks in being creative, and push yourself into new territories while building upon your successes, you’ll build a brand and a company that can withstand the test of time. Good luck!
“FIND YOUR STYLE, DON’T BE AFRAID TO TAKE RISKS IN BEING CREATIVE, AND PUSH YOURSELF INTO NEW TERRITORIES”