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At the NASSCOM Game Developer Conference, Mumbai-based Yellow Monkey Studios took centre stage to dissect their successful iOS and Android title Huebrix.
Studio founder Shailesh Prabhu started the session by talking about how they gathered funds for this project after winning the best original game idea award at hoPlay ‘11 for their previous game It’s Just a Thought.
After that, it was a matter of figuring out what their next game was going to be. All roads led to a puzzle game and the very first idea they came up with was called Osama’s Riddle. The game turned out to be too complicated to enjoy, but it laid down the ground work for the grid-based premise for Huebrix.
Shailesh was then joined on stage by fellow game designer Krishna Israney, who talked about how they played around with different art styles before they settled upon bricks. He then went head on into the game’s development, throwing up diagrams and charts to give us an in-depth look at how users solved and approached the game’s different puzzles. He then analysed all the aspects it takes to create a fun yet challenging puzzle game.
Prabhu came back to elaborate on the post-release PR campaign that included everything from sending out the game to various review publications to creating awareness across popular blogs and forums like Touch Arcade and NeoGAF.
Unfortunately, graphs showed that the post-release buzz never really translated into sales and the only time it really saw a spike in sales was when it got featured on the App Store.
All said and done, Huebrix still remains one of the most popular indie titles of 2012 and one of the Indian game development industry’s success stories, so you can bet your bottom dollar that Yellow Monkey will be back with more.
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