Fantastic Contraption by Colin Northway

Colin easily had one of the most entertaining panels of the day.  His panel focused on a Post Mortem of his Flash game: Fantastic Contraption and how he made a ton of money off of it.

Northway woke up one night and wrote down on a piece of paper his “Cool Shit Idea” which evolved into Fantastic Contraption.  Inspired by games like, The Incredible Machine, World of Goo, Armadillo Run, and Bridge Builder, Colin spent 4 months iterating through his Flash game.  The whole presentation was done in Flash and included a lot of his prototypes along the way.  Some of his key points about his development are as follows:

• Simpler is always Better – Elegance
• Flash has low barriers to entry – you must get players playing immediately
• User Testing (Watching 5 people play the game will catch 90% of the problems)
• Use a Mental Model of the world for your game not a realisic one (Double Jump feels right in games, but isn’t even possible in the real world)
• Pride Based Marketing – People want to share something they made with their friends
• Flash has some great free tools – use them

Colin did a few key things right that made him successful without doing a lot of marketing.

1. He coded/embedded a very easy way to buy the premium version of the game for $10 from paypal.
2. All game saves and replays are given a URL that points back to his site/game so that when people share their movies/contraptions their friends head back to his site.

Another interesting fact came from his traffic sources.  Northway quoted JayisGames and StumpleUpon as critical and substantial traffic generators.

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