PikPok's very happy to continue its collaboration with Adult Swim Games with the latest of our joint developments, Extinction Squad. This universal iOS title offers self-destructive blue wales, plummeting pandas, and gorillas who have lost their grip, and you have to save them from themselves. It's the dodos you see. They smell funny.

Extinction Squad is available from the iTunes App Store for 99c, and may contain sharks. You can read more about it and check out the media here.

WELLINGTON, New Zealand – 4 May, 2012 – Leading Smartphone games publisher PikPok® and DreamWorks Animation SKG, Inc. (Nasdaq: DWA) today announced the release of DreamWorks Dragons: TapDragonDrop, a new app available for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.

Available now on the App Store, TapDragonDrop takes players to the Viking island of Berk, where a great storm has struck the village and sheep are now scattered throughout the land. The goal of the game is to save the day by using wit and your new dragon friends to solve puzzles throughout the dangerously funny, sheep-unfriendly world of Berk. Tap, Drag and Drop your dragon’s powerful abilities to rescue the flock, and use catapults, drawbridges and much more to your advantage.

"We're excited to share TapDragonDrop with iOS gamers and fans of the How to Train Your Dragon franchise," said Chris Hewish, Head of Global Interactive for DreamWorks Animation. "In addition to the fun gameplay and beautiful design of this title, we also plan to continue expanding our exciting world of legendary creatures."

Features in the DreamWorks Dragons: TapDragonDrop game include:

• Play as characters, Toothless and Hiccup.

• Explore more than 40 challenging levels from the boundless Dragon world.

• Rescue sheep by using a wide variety of items, from catapults and drawbridges to haystacks, boulders, and more.

• Collect scattered Viking treasure to unlock secret hero levels.

• Additional levels and characters available through In-App Purchase.

The DreamWorks Dragons: TapDragonDrop App is available for $1.99 from the App Store on iPhone, iPad and iPod touch, or at www.itunes.com/appstore.

The launch trailer for the game can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtAX--Jv4yw

I caught up with him (not easy – he’s always pedal to the metal) to find out more about his little corner of PikPok.

I started by asking for details of his team:

There are currently four people in the team I work with.  We’re an amalgamation of visual effects, cinematics/previs, and character animation.  Most of my daily work involves the first two and less of the third, sadly (unless you include previsualization).  Our talents and capabilities extend to every game project in the studio.  Given the variety of games we develop, we’re constantly challenged to meet the visual style for each project which can range anywhere from realistic to cartoon to somewhere in-between.  Either as a team or as individuals, we work in direct collaboration with the project Art Lead, Programmers, and the studio Art Director.

A lot of the skills and technology behind the film industry is applicable in games development, and these days the film industry borrows a lot from games. Michael and his team are a good illustration of the overlap between these two industries, though in our case the scale is a little less megalithic. I mentioned to him that in film pretty much anything computer generated is considered SFX.

What might be considered a special effect in a game?

Visual Effects, as they relate to games, usually refers to dynamic visual changes that occur within the game world.  In purely visual terms, effects done well often serve the basic idea of making Players respond “ooooh, pretty!”  Digging a little deeper, visual effects are often more than just window dressing.  They are also used to communicate the current state of action or being.   For example, the blood splatter that results from your hero’s axe swing, the bright muzzle flashes from a machine gun or even the raging inferno that threatens to engulf your character and the ship you’re sailing on – these are all examples of visual effects that reinforce the notion that something is or has happened.  While they may look cool, visual effects are at their most useful when they’re telling us something.  The blood splatter tells us that we’ve hit something, the muzzle flash tells us that our gun has fired a bullet, and the raging fire tells us that our situation is extremely dangerous.  And looking great in the process doesn’t hurt, either.

Under what circumstances is previsualisation called for, and what is achieved by having one?

Our use of previsualization is the animated equivalent of sketching out ideas.  When we’re in early pre-production for a game, we sometimes find that Programmers aren’t immediately available to help us test out the basic idea behind a particular game.  With previsualization, using programs like Maya, 3D Studio Max, and After Effects, we can quickly mock-up the “look and feel” of a game to evaluate or validate how good the idea is.  While you can’t interact with a movie like a game, a good previsualization can still help to answer important game design questions and unify the direction in a short period of time.

How long does the creation of a trailer take and which skills are needed?

The creation time for a trailer varies greatly.  The effort involved is dictated primarily by the content desired.  If we’re creating a trailer for one of our own games, we can generate a great trailer in just a few days.  If the trailer is for a licensed game, like Rugby Challenge, then we have to go through multiple approval processes with the different Rugby organizations.  It’s not unusual in these situations for trailers to take weeks to reach final approval.

Most of our trailers are completed by one person.  On occasion, however, the expertise of the wider team is needed.  For example, when we were set to release Monsters Ate My Condo last year, Adult Swim (the publisher) asked for some animated monster sequences to showcase in their commercial.  Everyone in our aptly named CineAnimFX team pooled together and, from start to finish, knocked out almost 40 seconds worth of fun, animated sequences in five days.  I think the final commercial used a total of 8 seconds.

Which  aspect of your role do you most enjoy on a personal level, and which skills does that call on?

If I had to choose my favourite role, it would definitely be cinematography.  I love creating strong, effective in-game camera work.  With Rugby Challenge, we were privileged enough to feature the All Blacks performing their traditional “Haka”.  Capturing the intensity of this display and connecting the viewer to the experience was extremely important.  Breaking from broadcast tradition, I set up our shots with more variety so that we were closer to the action and more involved.  This approach carried over into all of our cut-scenes for Rugby Challenge.  Whether we’re watching Rugby players celebrating a try or getting sent off for a penalty, we want you there on the field experiencing everything.

In-game cinematography calls upon a lot of traditional camera fundamentals.  Knowing how different cameras can (and should) move in the real world provides structure and discipline for great camera work.  Understanding lens focal length and depth-of-field and how to use them effectively can add the right amount of drama, focus, or scope to any scene.  And a solid grasp of the principles of light and how it affects surfaces, textures, and the overall scene is equally important.

Additionally, the music of Monsters Ate My Condo is available on Bandcamp, to stream for free, or to purchase and download, here, along with the Hello How R U single from Monster Flip, here.

The PikPok team includes talented designers and as easy as it would be for us to rely on their instincts we endeavour to make our titles as user-friendly as possible from day one. This calls for testing, reporting, discussion of issues, and devising and selection of solutions, from early in the development process right up until the day the game goes live, and sometimes beyond.

Rather than engage external consultants we have our own in-house usability lab, run by Hadley Bellam. Hadley may be involved in the design process as early as preproduction, sharing his thoughts on the possible pitfalls he sees in the design document. A kickoff meeting to get the ball rolling may see him present, discussing the likely UI elements, and higher level issues associated with the title in question.

I asked Hadley what involvement the lab might have early in production:

“Outside of UI considerations, early usability is usually focused on input methods and camera/orientation, which are closely related. Whether the game uses landscape or portrait orientation will affect how the user interacts with the device. We need to consider left and right handed players as well as players who play with their finger(s) or thumb(s).”

“Will the game require users to play with multitouch or will it be playable using only one digit? Will input work as well on tablets as it will on phones? These are accessibility questions we aim to answer early to ensure playing the game is not uncomfortable for users. You may notice many PikPok games can be played with a single digit, thumb or finger, on either hand.”

“During frantic moments in Monsters Ate My Condo we wanted players to be making game decisions and creating strategies, not thinking about how to control the game or making accidental input mistakes. Input should be learned quickly and then feel natural.”

In some instances Hadley may not have a substantial role in the title’s development until later, when particular questions need to be answered. To address some Hadley is able to take advantage of the fact that we have several teams in the studio, using our own staff as testers for the lab.

Under which circumstances might you use PikPok staff to test?

“Testing on our own staff can be useful for quickly answering design and usability questions about specific issues. I’ve used this type of testing for paper walk-throughs of screen flows to assist designers with menu naming or ordering, or when trying to determine the friendliest terminology for a tip or tutorial step.”

“We sometimes use this testing for HUD item appearance and positioning. We might ask players an unexpected question such as “now pause the game” to see how efficiently they can carry out the task. We’d then move the pause button to a different corner and change its size or colour, and observe the results on new users. This process was used for HUD elements in Slam Dunk King such as the mascot power button, which requires good visibility and easy access during chaotic gameplay moments.”

Additionally, Hadley has a pretty good idea of the studio staff’s biases as a sample source, and can work with those:

“Testing difficulty balancing on our staff can be useful too, as their skill tends to skew towards being high. We know a game is too hard (or not communicating something correctly) if our own team really struggle with the difficulty in their first few plays.”

Other questions require members of the general public fitting a particular demographic to come in.

I asked Hadley to tell me about external test subjects:

“The bulk of our usability testing work is carried out on real world users; I recruit users as close to the title’s intended demographic as possible, puzzle fans for puzzle games, kids for kid’s games. However the skill of these users can vary greatly. We have users who play games every other month and users who play for hours each day. I test users who are new to mobile gaming and users who have been gaming for years. We ultimately want our games to be intuitive and usable by everyone.”

“For a test cycle I’ll bring three to six users into our lab, one at a time (unless it’s multiplayer) for each milestone of a game. By milestone we mean a significant stage in the development, e.g. Prototype, Alpha, Beta etc. This allows us to follow up on the success of implemented solutions from the previous test round as well as testing new content.”

Of course, testing doesn’t always turn up the results you’d expect. Hadley has a lot of knowledge about what will and won’t work, how to test for particular information, and how to interpret data, but sometimes entirely new phenomena are found in a sample group, and completely new design questions may develop.

“I ask users to complete a questionnaire at the end of their test to uncover additional understanding of issues I may or may not have noted during gameplay. These results can surprise in the sense they sometimes contradict the observations from the test, but often unknowingly so. A user may write in the questionnaire that the game was easy to learn, even though they totally missed a key gameplay function during the test, never noticing. This is why we can’t rely exclusively on feedback or mail out test copies to users for their comments – we must watch user’s interactions first hand in a controlled test to make neutral observations.”

“In terms of total surprise – I have seen users literally “Flick” the screen in our Flick Kick titles, I have seen users get stuck and comment “I would have quit by now...” on what we thought were the simplest of tutorial steps and users who pause and restart levels because they believe they’ve done something wrong or failed (when they haven’t).

“Of course the most pleasing finding is when a user asks if they can continue to play when the test session has ended. ”