Happy Birthday, Doppio!
Believe it or not, Doppio turned two years old last week! We thought it would be a good time to take a moment to both look back at what we’ve accomplished so far, and ahead to where we’re looking to go in the future.
Never settle
Two years in, we’ve been fortunate to have some success with our first two titles, The Vortex and The 3% Challenge, both of which approach the challenge of designing fun and engaging voice games from slightly different angles.
I wouldn’t say, however, that we’ve found the “perfect formula” for success here yet. We believe that falling into complacency with existing design patterns and limiting oneself to just building more of the same would be a terrible mistake to make in this space right now. The industry has been evolving so rapidly in the last few years, particularly in the area of adding new features for third-party developers, that playing it safe and not taking every opportunity to try out new and different things would inevitably lead to a massive, missed opportunity.
Stay connected
On our second birthday, we find ourselves in interesting times. With our physical offices closed since March, we’ve been fortunate to have been able to make the transition to remote work fairly seamlessly. But, as someone who has done a fair amount of remote work even before this global crisis, the key things that I’ve found helpful to consider have been:
Maintaining a set schedule. Even in the absence of a daily commute, I still try to wake up and get ready to go to the virtual office at roughly the same time every day, and make a point to “leave” the office around the same time at the end of the day. Game production schedules, particularly in a startup environment, sometimes don’t allow for this, but I’ve found it really helpful to keep the day organized like that.
Proactively over-communicating with the team. I’ve found it really helps to make a concerted effort to talk with people by voice, video or text throughout the day, in order to make up for the loss of the direct, passive communication you get by being the same physical space with people. We, fortunately, have really good tools to facilitate this nowadays; Slack and Google Meet, in particular, are heavily used at Doppio.
Supplement being remote with occasional face-to-face team meetings. Although Covid-19 has put this one on hold for the time being, whenever it’s possible to travel again, I have found it’s helpful to plan a few face-to-face meetings throughout the year, in order to get everyone on the team who’s ordinarily remote on the same page.
Learning from those around us
We’re so excited to be part of such a vibrant and dynamic part of the games business. Everyone in this space is constantly trying new and different things, putting us all in a great position to learn from what each other is doing. And with the platforms we’re building on evolving so rapidly, it’s even more important that we do so on a regular basis!
At Doppio we try to be active in community forums, Slacks etc., as well as at conferences and other events, so feel free to say hi if you see us around!
Keep looking ahead
As far as where we’re headed next? Well, we see things getting bigger and better in the voice gaming industry!
The market for voice-forward content keeps growing rapidly – smart speakers and smart displays continue to sell really well; TV-attached streaming devices are increasingly opting for a voice-based interface to aid with content discovery, while cars are doing the same to promote hands-free interaction while driving; and nearly everyone on the planet is carrying a smartphone that is itself a pretty capable voice-controlled device. We continue to see this growing market as a great opportunity to bring our games to a broad base of new players.
And we’ll continue pushing to build better, richer, and more dynamic games. One thing we’re really excited about right now is the ability to do more dynamic multimodal experiences, on devices with screens like smart displays, TV streaming boxes, and of course smartphones. We have dipped our toes in the water here a bit already – The Vortex was one of the first games to use Alexa Presentation Language to deliver rich visuals along with voice, and we recently updated The 3% Challenge so that it’s now using Google’s Interactive Canvas and Amazon’s Alexa Web API for Games to deliver an HTML-driven interface to players on smart displays.
We have some awesome new projects in the pipeline here that we think are really going to push voice-forward multimodal game design forward quite a bit – we’re looking forward to sharing these with you soon!
Thank you!
Wrapping up, I wanted to extend a sincere thank you from all of us at Doppio to everyone who has helped us along the way so far, and particularly to each and every person who has taken the time to play one of our games. Please keep sending us your feedback - we read all of it, and take everything into account as we plan our future games.
So, here’s to the next two years – we can’t wait to share what’s in store!
by Christopher Barnes, originally posted on May 8th, 2020 at Doppio News
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash