Xavier Agulló

There was a time when I wasn’t very satisfied at work. I felt that big teams, tangled in endless meetings and stiff (despite their name) work procedures weren’t competitive compared to smaller indie teams. I wanted to prove that with a project of my own: “The Toy Factory” which later became “Toys & Goblins”.

With “Mystery Puzzle” I realized managing a team while on a full time job was a big overhead for my little bandwidth. So I took a sequential process where first I created the design of the systems, UI screens and even balancing in a spreadsheet. Once that was closed I contacted my talented friend Jordi and together we did all the graphical assets of the game under his art direction. And later we got the help of Isabel, an awesome programmer who implemented the base of the game (architecture, saving/loading, config by JSONs etc.). Unfortunately she had to quit after a while, and I learned C# to “spagetti-code” my way through the end. When the mechanics were ready, we got in touch with Caramel Animation (see “Mystery Puzzle”) who helped us with the animations and made a wonderful trailer for the game.

The “Toy Factory” ended up much better than I could ever imagine. It was a crafting game that took a few shortcuts (no map editing, no social, no liveops etc.) but contained all the basic mechanics to work, including in-app purchases and video-ads. The game had lots of eye-candy with a consistent art style and colorful, glossy icons. And it didn’t lack content either, with 22 different workshops and almost 100 different toys to craft.

Thanks to this project I could experiment the whole development cycle, from early drafts to store publishing. Dabbled in new areas for me like the setup of Unity Analytics, Unity Ads or ASO. I also acquired users in cheap markets like Mexico and Singapur in what I pompously called “soft launch stage” (200$ total xD). All localized in 8 different languages.

My original premise was almost right but also wrong, I could develop a full game (if scaled down a bit) on my own by not having to argue about every single pixel and semicolon that goes into the project. However, I found it impossible to acquire users, analyze, iterate and, ultimately, turn it into a profitable F2P venture. When all that was clear, just a few months after release, I decided to remove the game from the stores. The whole adventure took almost 2 years, with a couple pause periods in-between.

I’m very in love with this one, sometimes I think of resurrecting it. But then I think of the opportunity cost against other projects and I decide to simply move on.