So Hall shelved it in favor of working on Crossy Road - although he said he’s started putting some work into Deck War once again and still plans to release it.įor Little Things, Hall decided to make a game for his mom. The things that he put into it that Suttner would like were not things his daughter necessarily would enjoy. For Suttner, a fan of deck-building games, Hall tried to make a deep battle system.īut Hall felt that Deck War didn’t work. For his daughter, he made a distinctive art style. For Deck War, Hall decided to pick two people to focus on as his core audience: his daughter and Sony Computer Entertainment America indie-gaming guru Nick Suttner. One is a card game that Hall is still making called Deck War and the other is a hidden-object game called Little Things. Hall gave two examples of games that didn’t perform well - at least at first - despite him sticking to “everything for someone” philosophy. Of course, this didn’t always lead to success. “All I have to do is make a game that is everything for someone.” “When I make a game this way, I don’t have to get bogged down in demographics or store trends,” said Hall. And that led him to repeat that philosophy for his future games. Hall credits picking a precise audience for Pony Friends as a big reason for its success. Pony Friends was a huge hit, and it sold over a million copies worldwide. So Hall took the picture of the smiling girl and her horse and printed out dozens of copies and gave one to everyone on the development team to help them understand the target market. “A rich girl who owns a pony probably doesn’t want a game about owning a pony,” Hall said. Instead, she just looked like every girl who loves horses, and that’s who Hall thought they should make the game for. The young woman didn’t look like the daughter of a rich family who owned horses and participated in equestrian sports. When Hall started working on the horse-owning simulator, he tried to figure out who his team should target. He found a picture of a girl with a horse. That started back when he was making the Nintendo DS game Pony Friends for Eidos. Instead, he looked to the gamers in his life and decided to make games for them. And for Hall, this didn’t mean looking at demographics and analytics to see what people are playing. He realized that he could only truly make a great game if he picked his audience - especially in the ultracompetitive mobile market. Matt Hall, the founder of indie studio Hipster Whale and creator of 2014’s mobile hit Crossy Road, used to want to make games for everybody, he explained during his talk at the Casual Connect Asia conference today (that’s Tuesday in Asia time, folks). That was his philosophy when he started his company, but it’s not the philosophy that he focused on.
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