Kitty Lander Postmortem

Hello world! Carson and Patrick here (Carson writing). This is a postmortem about the mobile game Kitty Lander we released in 2016. Haven’t heard of it? Few people have. The game was not the hit we desired and yet making it was an adventure full of surprises, heartbreaks, disappointments, and triumphs. 

First, the game

Kitty Lander is a game about rescuing stranded kittens from the surface of a hostile alien planet before they’re violently killed by a sky raining fire. Your personal lander is all you have to get to the surface, and flying it demands lightning fast reflexes and nerves of steel. The slightest mistake means death for you and the helpless kittens below. 

There are two controls, one to activate the left thruster on your lander and the other to activate the right. It is difficult and somewhat awkward to control, though admittedly fun once you get the hang of it. 

To describe how the game works (because I don't think the trailer explains it at all): you fly your lander to the planet surface in search of a kitten. There is always one, spawned somewhere randomly. If you hit the surface too hard, you die and your playthrough is over. This is hard enough given the delicate controls, but there are also flaming meteorites raining down from above. They do not kill you if they hit you, but they knock you hard enough that the terrain usually does. If they hit the kitten, it dies and another spawns somewhere else. If you manage to land close to the kitten, it enters your lander and you must fly it up to space, delivering it to a larger mothership.  Then a new planet surface generates with another single kitten and you repeat the process for as long as you can survive.

A 30 second trailer that  (supposedly) shows you what Kitty Lander is all about

About us

We are Patrick and Carson, two guys that love making games. We've never worked in the games industry, and everything we know about game development we learned online. Now that you're impressed, I must confess that we both have backgrounds in computer science, so the learning curve for making games was reasonable.

If you ask me on the street, I’ll tell you Kitty Lander was our first game. But it wasn’t really our first game. That title would belong to Zombie Shooter, a...learning experience...that I must explain to set the stage for Kitty Lander.

Zombie Shooter

It was fall 2015. Patrick and I were both 23 years old, recently graduated from college. We didn’t really know what we should do with our lives, and we realized it was a perfect chance to try making it as indie developers. It was our first time doing more than toying around with a game engine for a few hours. Guns are cool, so we started working on a top down shooter. We needed something to shoot, so we added zombies. We called it Zombie Shooter. 

A screenshot of Zombie Shooter early in development. 

We lived cheaply in a small town in Idaho, writing code separately and meeting up twice a week to share progress and figure out new tasks. It was a terrible system. I'm a poor self motivator, and I would do anything to procrastinate working. Then I would feel stressed about not working, making me avoid it further, until I finally gave up and resolved to try harder the next day and the cycle reset. I probably got an honest hour of work done on those days. 

We went on like this for 4 months, blindly charging forward on a game about...well, that was another problem. We had a top down shooter, but to this day I can't tell you much more about what it was supposed to be. First it was about surviving waves of zombies, then it became a roguelite. It was in a forest, then it was on another planet, and then it was in space. We didn't have a good story, or any idea how the game was supposed to make you feel. Worse yet, we had no idea of the scope of our game. Every time we talked about it it grew, with no end in sight. 

One day, after finishing up drawing a suit of space armor (I enjoy art more than Patrick and became the de facto artist) we sat down and did some math. It had taken me roughly eight hours to design and draw it. I considered all the other suits of armor I needed to draw. I didn’t even know how many there were (a bad sign). A dozen perhaps.  That’s 96 hours of work--more than two weeks working full time. There were enemies too. Each one probably took at least as long. And weapons. They had to be drawn from the top and the sides. What about all the animations? There were so many animations even trying to come up with a list sounded exhausting. There were also menus and title screens and tilesets and props and explosions and items and maps… The worst part was that I didn’t even know how many things there were. But just the list I had come up with would take me over a year and a half of 40 hour work weeks with no breaks. 

We realized instantly that it wasn’t going to work. A year and a half was too long, and we were smart enough to realize the estimate was still probably too low. We scrapped the game on the spot.

My evolution in drawing space armor over the course of a day. Zombie Shooter was now a roguelite in space rather than a zombie survival game in the woods. A (mostly) completed set of armor can be seen in the top right.

It was painful to throw out all our work, but also relieving, and I look back at our decision with pride. I think we had known the truth in the backs of our minds for a while, but we were in denial. It was easy to bury ourselves in development and hide from the big picture. But reality caught up with us. It was a hard lesson to learn but I’m glad it only cost a few months when it could have cost so much more. 

Along with scrapping the game we did one other thing right, and it surprised us both. Initially we worked separately, thinking the “freedom” of being autonomous would bring better balance to our lives. Instead, it did the opposite, leaving us constantly in work mode while also getting nothing done. Towards the end of our four months working on Zombie Shooter, we tried meeting up to work in the same place, for 8 hours a day, Monday through Friday. 

I scoffed at the idea initially. Being an entitled Millennial, I assumed full time work to be the ultimate failure and was completely surprised when it turned out to be better. It meant spending more time working on the game, but less time being in work mode. I stopped stressing about the project when we weren’t working and didn’t feel burned out. And I got as much done in a day as I used to get done in a week. Win win!

The dawn of Kitty Lander

As soon as we cancelled Zombie Shooter, we began brainstorming ideas for a new game. We had the idea for Kitty Lander within the hour and began working on it right away. 

We were determined not to make the same mistake, and thought we had a game we could build in less than a month. We launched in four. 

We were fooled again, but this time the error was acceptable. We could spare four months. It took longer than we expected, but it wasn’t the infinitely growing black hole of work that Zombie Shooter was. 

An early build of Kitty Lander. We focused on the core flight mechanic first, making sure it felt good before moving on to anything else. We built this prototype in just a few days, but finishing the game took several months more.

What went well

Keeping the game small. We were ruthless about cutting scope, shooting down ideas like unlockable ships and different planets. Nevertheless, there were still things that were added to the scope because we didn’t realize we needed them until they were missing. The tutorial level is an example of this.

Focusing on the core mechanic. Kitty Lander is all about the joy that comes from flying the lander around. The way it turns and accelerates, and how it responds dramatically to the slightest input. It is difficult to fly it well and there is a satisfaction that comes from mastering it. Everything else in the game exists to give you an excuse to fly around. 

Trying to reach the kitten while avoiding flaming meteorites. That's the whole game. Nice and simple.

What didn’t go well

Mismatch with our theme and audience. A mobile game about cats? Cute! Sounds like something many casual gamers might play on their bus ride home. A game with a punishing learning curve that requires fast reflexes and lots of skill? Sounds suited to a more serious gamer, who likely isn’t looking for a colorful cat game on their phone. 

Launch and marketing. This was an afterthought for us. Huge mistake. We didn’t dedicate any time to this and we paid for it dearly. We assumed we would post some gameplay GIFs to reddit, hit the front page and the rest would be history. I was scared when posting that people would criticize our game and say how awful it was, but what they actually did was much worse: nothing. It also didn’t help that our descriptions of it were generic and boring. We said it was “a fast paced arcade game” and claimed that it was “addicting”. 

Extra scope. I know I said this part went well. For the game itself, it did. But we added several things, including localizations in several languages, a high score system, an achievement system, and social media share buttons which added several weeks of work and wasn’t worth it considering the game only got a few thousand players. 

Anticipating non programming work. We are both programmers, and we saw that as the majority of the work for the game. To us, everything else was an afterthought, and we were caught by surprise when we had to “waste” a week making screenshots and a video trailer. 

Monetization. We used ads in our game. They popped up in between playthroughs every once in a while. We gave users the option to pay for the ads to go away forever, which a couple did. Not only were the ads annoying for users, but they don’t pay well unless your audience reaches a critical mass. Our average lifetime revenue for a user was a couple of cents. If we had ten million users, that would be $300,000! But we only had a few thousand users, and got less than $100 each. 

Conclusion

We spent eight months working on Kitty Lander and the road leading up to it. It didn’t pay like a traditional job might have, but I don’t regret it for an instant. The lessons we learned were invaluable, and launching a game is an honor not many get to share. 

Ultimately, Patrick and I went our separate ways and found more traditional software jobs. (Kitty Lander looked great on a resume!) We both moved cities and we forgot about games for a few years. Though as I write this, over three years after the release of Kitty Lander, we are nearly a month into working on a new project! We hope to learn from our past mistakes and make this our best project yet.

I hope our experiences might help someone else in their journey of game development. Or at the very least be an entertaining story.

Thanks for reading!

Carson and Patrick