The Buzz: Casual Connect

This week we finish up our summer retrospective with Casual Connect. Starting next week, we will have fresh new things to talk about, rather than going back in time any further.

Right at the end of July, some intrepid explorers from NinjaBee flew out to beautiful San Francisco to attend Casual Connect, a conference designed primarily for mobile game developers and their business partners. We enjoyed three days of panels and talks designed to help mobile veterans as well as scrappy newcomers. Coming from a different sphere of the industry, the whole experience was very new for us. The aims, metrics, and practices of traditional and mobile development are very distinct. Having primarily developed for traditional consoles, many of the values and models seemed very new and different.

Nutjitsu wasn't ready for release at the time, and we hoped to get some really great input on how to make our thieving little squirrel a true standout. We learned wisdom from top people behind mobile titans like Candy Crush, Fruit Ninja, and Royal Revolt. It was an awesome look behind the curtain at games played by millions of people every day on platforms we have not yet fully explored. We learned a lot, and we will continue to put the ideas and techniques we learned to good use in Nutjitsu as well as any other mobile titles we may create in the future.

Of course, we would be remiss in our tourist duty if we didn't hit the sights of San Francisco. We rode the trolley, ate crab in the shadow of Alcatraz, and took a gander at Lombard Street with the best of them. Business by day, tourism by night! After all that learning we flew merrily back home with dreams of app stores dancing in our heads. Casual Connect was a great experience that will help to shape our games for the better as we explore the mobile space with you.