DEMONSTRATION MAN
TOBIAS GRAFF, CEO and co-founder of Mooneye Studios, on making a game demo
While studying computer science with an emphasis on game development, Tobias Graff worked part-time for some of Germany’s biggest mobile gaming companies. Soon after that, he founded Mooneye with some friends from university, entering the industry full time; and later, the company branched out into publishing games from other developers.
In 2016, Mooneye launched a Kickstarter for its first game, Lost Ember. It was successful, and so other people came to Graff and the team for advice on building a successful campaign. They were happy to help, but there was only so much they could do. “We were basically working nonstop on the game; we couldn’t really afford to take time off to help other developers,” says Graff. After Lost Ember’s release, which was also a success, Mooneye immediately started putting money into “a publishing pot” until it reached an amount that allowed it to look into game publishing.
Long before that however, it had its own debut game to complete and promote. This involved building a demo. The demo was however only released to streamers and YouTubers. “We wanted to minimize the bug reports and support requests and all that, because that’s not really what we were looking for back then,” Graff explains. “We [only] decided to have a demo at all because we were four students with no gaming credit, and we had to convince people, ‘These people can actually make games!’”
Building a demo presented significant challenges. For one thing, many aspects of a game are subject to change early in development. For another, many games can’t simply take the first 20 minutes or so and put it out as a demo, because—as with Lost Ember—the start of the game is an intentionally slow build up to something. For this reason, the Lost Ember demo was an amalgamation of sections from the start and middle of the game; a bespoke experience. “Doing that meant working for a couple of months on things we already knew we would throw away and wouldn’t really need for the final game, because we had to change everything again to stretch it out”.
SAMPLE MINDS
Lost Ember is a slow and thoughtful game telling an emotional story, something that’s very difficult to convey in a brief demo. Mooneye’s new game currently in development follows a similar path, and so a demo is hoped for but not guaranteed.
The plan was to release Lost
Ember in 2018, but for various reasons this was delayed to 2019. With approximately three years between the demo and the final game, some things inevitably changed. Graff gives a few examples.
“The color of the main character, the wolf, changed. One of the main reasons was giving a better contrast with the environment; the initial one blended into a lot of things. In the demo, the main featured animal was a parrot, and a huge open area you could play around in; but for the final game, we wanted to save the parrot as a highlight for later.”
Haven Park from 2021 was Mooneye’s first experience publishing a game and the debut of Fabien Weibel as a developer. They worked together on the demo. Again, it was a bespoke experience, but this time one that was released to the public… for just a few weeks at a time, on a few different occasions. But why?
“We wanted to have these kind of focus groups,” Graff explains. “We only published a new demo when we changed a big feature, or had something new in the game that we wanted feedback on”.
A demo can be an effective piece of interactive or passive PR, a beta test, a self-contained experience all its own, or all three. One thing it can never be, it seems, is simple to make.
LOST EMBER IS A SLOW AND THOUGHTFUL GAME TELLING AN EMOTIONAL STORY