Wicked Witch Software

9/381 Bayswater Rd, Bayswater, Vic, Australia, 3153
Office +613 97200597 - www.wicked-witch.com.au

Presenter
Daniel Visser

Presenter Outline
Daniel refers to himself as a typical nerdy kid, at 8 he got his first 8bit computer, installed with basic. Later in life he joined clubs to gain information on computer programming. He began working/playing on MUD games, Atari, Intel 386’s and progressed all the way up through the technology chain being an early adopter of technologies such as the Internet and 3D video cards.

After TAFE, Daniel continued on to program games at home and release as shareware. He discussed the problems with cobalt as a programming language for games, and remarked that it was the only language suitable 10-15 years ago. Daniel touched on assembler, and mentioned how important problem solving is within his business.

Entering the games industry as a programmer, Daniel is constantly updating his skills and speaks passionately about the importance of learning maths.

Career Highlights

• At Torus games he was the 4th employee programmer and designer on Gameboy Color and PC CDROM.
• Beam Software Melbourne house: programmer on PSX shooter and 3dfx PC LAN multi-player game.
• Freelanced with Gameboy games, worked with friends, working on 3D PC games and mobile.
• Moved to larger office, working with team of 10-14 programmers and artists working on PC ports, XBOX 360 games and other development studios
• Moved into a factory after PSP, DSI games and during Wii title team of 26-30 programmers, artists and testers

Mobile games boosted Wicked Witches business, through what sounded like a tough time.
They make games from all levels and frequently assist in just one section or category of the project. This work includes platform conversations which consist primarily of programming work.
Other tasks include consultations of ideas, project management, training games, kiosk interfaces and survey enquiry’s however I have the feeling that they have the flexibility to help any entities interactive needs.  Example “Greenseas Tuna”, requested a Facebook game which requires players from a young audience to befriend the environment that tuna lives in.

How does the topic relate to the Games Industry?
Daniel believes 3D is going to play a major role in the future of computer games and interactivity.

An interesting note Daniel made was the indicator of how long, and how many people were required to produce a completed project:

• 4-8 weeks for a mobile game with 2-4 people (1 programmer and 1 artist) results in a small 3D game on the Nintendo DS
• 6 months with a 20 member team, with a  50% split of artist and programmers
• 20% of the project requires admin tasks, including quality assurance and customer relations to name a few.

Pony club 2’s was targeting girls as the audience which make up about 50% of the market share. The psychology for creating games for the female gender is centred on changing or observing the game space surroundings. When asked, Daniel found inspiration for girls games within the stereotypes and clichés of early female interests. This changed the direction on the projects. Resulting in games that allowed the user to play “dressing up”. Crush course a game which required the player to take affection of boys, collecting hearts along the way.

Pony friends 1 was a hit, with a hundred thousand plus units moved grossing 2 million AUD, however too many pony games killed off the popularity and demand of this genre.

Daniel mentioned that a female targeted game built purely by a team of males around 10 years ago, left a clear realisation that more female intervention was needed to generate a more successful and profitable outcome.

A problem encountered by Wicked Witch working on and releasing AFL for the Wii console found a lot of unknowns within the development cycle and was forced to consider to either cut features out or work more to produce the end result. Daniel commented that “nothing goes to plan” and the team worked really hard with their limited budget and timeline. The main crux was found to be that they were competing with the proven and well established FIFA and NBA game types that set the bar out of reach. The companies who operate these titles have high budgets and a huge audience. Naturally a new game cannot reach such great heights so quickly, however Daniel has a lot of faith in the competitiveness of the Australian game industry. Although there is no market for AFL games overseas.

How does the topic relate to my own ambitions in the Games Industry?
One of my big ambitions is to work on a big budget website to produce an immersive and interactive website product experience, such as the Adidas website that Daniel worked on which allowed visitors to customise a shoes to their liking.

Version control and asset management tool sub version SVN needs to be considered when working on a project with numerous people to keep track of file merging.

Daniel confirmed the following for me:

• The development budget is often the same as the marketing budget.
• Development life cycle:

1. Design and Pre production (This can be a lot of fun)
2. Core production, involves prototyping and feature re-iteration
3. Alpha milestone, all content and features in game, revision needed. first round approval
4. Beta milestone, all features and assets complete, bugs present. Final approval (often underestimated and time consuming)
5. QA testing phase. Internal and external bugs fixed, submission build prepared
6. Release! may include patches

• Career paths to games:
  • Education with tertitary courses and home projects
  • Work experience, placement and internships
  • Volunteering and sub contracting
  • Industry activity and events
  • job applications
  • Indie start up or online collaborations

I look forward to further discussions in the future with Daniel regarding his data management, servers and networking requirements.

Bridh Athanatos