Cobra Mobile, the Dundee-based studio behind hit games such as the iBomber franchise, Towers Of Everland, Storm In A Teacup, Cobi Hoops 2 and Let’s Go Rocket is back, with the bite-sized hypercasual mobile game: What Everyone’s Playing.
With five game modes and a ‘ton’ of fun characters to unlock, the game promises instant pick-up-and-play fun, with compelling gameplay and real-time leaderboards.
What Everyone Is Playing is the first of four original new games coming from Cobra Mobile in the near future. While details on the others are scarce, we reached out to Cobra’s founder and MD, Mark Ettle to ask about the design and development of WEIP and the studio’s approach to hypercasual games.
Scottish Games Network: Tell us more about the idea behind What Everyone Is Playing?
Mark Ettle: Whilst we have 4 titles in different stages of development, the first from this is a super addictive, one-touch title, made by a small team of two.
QA was doing some research and having fun with one-touch games and asked if we could make a new one. After having some pretty awesome success with Let’s Go Rocket I explained to QA that creating and crafting something fresh in the one-touch/casual space is super difficult – it can be rewarding, but it’s difficult.
But hey! We always like a challenge…
A short while later (and after a whole lot of whiteboard sketches) we had something simple, elegant and maybe – just maybe – lots of fun… so we assembled a 2-man rapid prototype team (basically me and one other) and we went to work turning those rudimentary whiteboard sketches from something that we thought might be fun, into something that was a whole lot of fun, compelling and super challenging – What Everyone’s Playing.
SGN: Does the final game differ much from your original design?
Mark Ettle: The prototype was pretty basic but it worked and was quite addictive. It really came to life once we added Leaderboards to see where you placed globally or against your friends.
And that was with one game mode, we tested quite a few but settled on five for the final game. Test point, it wasn’t until we focused/soft launch tested that the data showed us we had some of the game modes in the wrong order. That was a quick 10-minute fix and the game just felt better weighted for players and more fun all round.
SGN: What gave you the idea to have so many fun, friendly characters?
Mark Ettle: The game was initially quite visually flat – not uninteresting, but just very flat to give it that clean minimal aesthetic. At first, you were controlling a ball, quite a non-descript object. This needed to change to bring more fun and life to proceedings. As soon as we added Poe the Panda we immediately found the right gear and level of fun for the game.
Instead of a non-descript ball, we could have characters that had life and could look around with their big expressive eyes – they could look about, they could see the walls closing in.
So in a nutshell, that’s how we made What Everyone’s Playing with a very small (two-man) team. It’s super fun, it’s available on App Store and Google Play Store right now and it’s free to download and play. See you on the Leaderboards…
Go play What Everyone’s Playing…
What Everyone Is Playing is entirely free to download and play. It’s available for iOS and Android devices. Find it using the links below.
- What Everyone’s Playing (iOS)
- What Everyone’s Playing (Android)