Our New Developer Interview Series: The Cooldown! First Episode with Anthony Fudd - Senior Producer

We’re excited to present the first interview from our new initiative of highlighting and sharing the stories of amazing people that make up our studio. The Cooldown will feature developers from each of our studio’s skill disciplines, and today we’re starting with our Head of Production, Senior Producer Anthony Fudd. Anthony has lots to share from his career working in toys, robotics, and educational games. He’s an easy guy to talk to, a great leader, and contributes so much to our ongoing projects with clear communication and creative development ideas. We thoroughly enjoyed our conversation with Anthony and hope you do too!

Funomena's Roblox R&D Recap: Project Magic Beanstalk

Hello Internet! The R&D team at Funomena, FunomenaLabs, has been working in Roblox to build our capabilities in designing and developing unique content across platforms. While we have unannounced partnerships going on behind the scenes, we’d like to recap our R&D project that started it all last year, Magic Beanstalk!

One of the strongest elements of Roblox to us is the built-in social MMO experience of the platform, and combining that with Funomena gameplay led us to develop a collaborative gathering and building game, a whimsical fairytale community garden in the sky.

In the world of Magic Beanstalk, players explore the environment, grow an obby-style beanstalk towering up to the clouds, and discover secrets through a variety of minigame activities.

We wanted to try combining light elements from many of Roblox’s most popular game genres to create a pleasant and engaging space for social hangouts and goofing around with your friends.

The core of our minigames and gameplay was rapid and hectic character mobility, adding a sprint, double (and triple) jumping, climbing, and flight during special gameplay events.

Our minigames were designed for collaborative social play but don’t exclude solo players. Players dash to collect bouncing magma balls, dive into a lake to find hidden pearls, roll up dropping fruit, or dance in sync to earn the game’s resource: seeds. 

Our tutorialization process and info character (scarecrow) were designed as smooth, minimally obtrusive onboarding to accommodate learning readers. They teach players about planting seeds, growing the beanstalk, the characters that can help out, and where they can explore next!

One special character, Coco, was added for a unique role as a live-controlled community leader, a dev who leads guided play sessions with unique minigames and rewards. Coco helped encourage prosocial behavior during playtests and was an R&D study on importing custom player character rigs/models.

After gardening seeds to flowers, players can use these materials to craft “beans” that customize the leaves of the beanstalk. Beans change the color, aesthetic, and platforming functionality of the leaves. Players coordinate to make a unique jungle gym obby during each session.
Building this mechanic taught us about modular terrain editing, using welds to allow players to change a dynamic scaling structure.

This resource collection, conversion, and crafting loop was a useful testbed for designing social multiplayer game economies at scale. We aim to design any premium purchases for monetization as ability upgrades and resource boosts that ramp up the pace and excitement of the otherwise still engaging and fully-featured free-to-play gameplay. These purchases should also have shared multiplayer benefits, opportunities for generous players to benefit both other players on the server and the development of the game. While we only scratched the surface of craftable items, each was designed for combinatorial gameplay additions.

Magic Beanstalk also provided useful opportunities to work out our art pipelines in the Roblox engine. We started greyboxing with the inbuilt terrain and part systems, and moved up over time to importing custom models and level environments. We learned VFX, UI/UX, and animation workflows best suited to the platform.

Alongside those UI learnings, we introduced custom chat systems for Coco and the NPCs, and an asynchronous mail inbox system to give individual players updates and gameplay rewards.

During the development of the game, we partnered with Jonathan Geffen, a graduate student at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, studying methods of improving co-play between parents and children. He was provided access to develop alongside us in the project, modify our designs, and receive design feedback on prototypes relevant to the thesis. He ran playtests for his research using these modified minigames: one with asymmetrical roles for chicken wrangling, and another where players coordinate to paint together with large pixels on a dance floor. We learned a lot from Jonathan’s research and development, which align with our goals of creating games and experiences that help players better connect with themselves and each other!

Here are some excerpts from his thesis presentation:

Leaning the quirks of Roblox as a platform has been a super fulfilling process, and each playtest with the young people that love these experiences taught us so much about the future of the medium. We’ll be excited to share more about our work in Roblox and other social UGC-centered platforms quite soon!

If you’d like to try the Magic Beanstalk as we left it, it can be found here. Have fun and explore!

Fun at the Luna: Moondust Garden Ship Party

We held our ship party for Luna: Moondust Garden for the Magic Leap One a week ago!
With Moondust Garden being our first major augmented reality endeavor, it’s been a challenging, yet fruitful experience. The game don’t have a specific release date yet, but it will be out soon!

Also, Luna, Wattam, and Stickies were all playable at the party, and we had some great eats from Bi-Rite.

We’re definitely going to have to do this again soon. ;)

Wattam Wins Grand Prix Award in Busan

We showed Wattam at the Busan Indie Connect Festival in South Korea a couple weeks ago and were shocked when Wattam won the Grand Prix award.

There were so many amazing games from all over the world, so we were honored that Wattam picked up this prize.

But the best part was seeing all of the people in Busan who never heard of Wattam before playing it with their friends, laughing, and just having a great time. Many people were staring at the trailer, afraid of what to do, but got a hold on what the game is about pretty quickly once the controllers were in their hands.

We hope to be at next year’s Busan Indie Connect!

Awesome Day: 2018

Today marks Funomena’s 6th anniversary - as signified by our annual holiday: Awesome Day.

When we started the studio, Martin and I had just finished taking a break. We’d been traveling the world, accepting awards for Journey with our old team, and… I won’t lie. I had second thoughts.

I remember wondering: are we crazy? Should we have done this brash thing… moving from LA to SF, starting a studio with basically no experience running a business? Maybe we should have chosen the easy route and taken jobs at big corporations, or joined more established teams, where the financing and structure of the business were more solid? Maybe it was all … too much?

Looking back, while I can definitely say we had no idea what we were getting into… I’m also very grateful that we took the risk and struck out on our own. We have had the chance to learn so much, to work with so many amazing people, and I am so proud of what we’ve built.

As recent events at fellow Bay Area developer Telltale have shown, the games industry is a turbulent and unstable place. To lead under such uncertainty, you have to accept that running a game studio often means teetering on the edge of a cliff. Nothing is guaranteed. And as a result, it’s important to make each day the best it can be, and never take good fortune for granted.

And while no one can say for sure what the future will hold, looking forward is how we design. It’s the fundamental difference between humans and all other living creatures. We can imagine futures and then build them, together. Martin and I spent a lot of time thinking about this when we founded Funomena, and we wrote out our Values, Mission & Goals as part of that conversation. Today, we’d like to share them with you:

Funomena: Vision & Mission

What breakdown (challenge) in the world do we feel passionate about addressing?

People are not connected/present to themselves or the joy of life around them. Often, the entertainment we create exacerbates this problem instead of helping fix it. We would like to change that.

What Skills do we bring?

We can create art/games/experiences that revive this connection to the self and the universe, inspiring others to do the same. We can expose people to the beauty of natural and computational systems, in ways that encourage them to think differently about their impact and place in the world.

How will the world be changed as a result?

People touched by our work will feel a greater sense of purpose & understanding towards themselves and one another. They experience their innate playfulness, curiosity and creativity as powerful, positive & connecting force.

Primary Goals

1. A healthy, creatively-fulfilling business that supports our families.  

2. A team of likeminded individuals who expand the reach of our ideas.

3. A series of products that unites people across cultures, through play.

4. A recognized, sustainable process that inspires others.

5. A consistently rewarding relationship with young talent & new ideas.

6. A sustainable relationship with universities and foundations for good.

7. A positive impact on the mental and physical well-being of this planet.

Looking over this list, I remember thinking that it was ambitious. I remember thinking that it sounded high-minded, maybe even a little academic… free of buzzwords so popular in Bay-area start up manifestos.

Now when I read it… what stands out most is the implicit aspect of our stated values.

• To build the kind of team we wanted to be around and make the games we wanted to make - we would hire diversely.

• To reach our goal of being sustainable, we would find partners that paid us fairly for good work.

• To build a strong studio, we’d work on innovative titles for both established & emerging platforms, with both experienced and young talent.

• We would support a culture of humane, person-first work, and build a deliberately developmental culture.

• And in that culture, all of us would be able to admit when we were struggling, ask for help, and work outside of our day jobs to give back as teachers, mentors, family and friends.

Year 6 was a big one for us. We shipped Luna, we began working on the Magic Leap. We also began to wrap up Wattam. We hired several new people (we’re now 28 strong!) and we had not one, but TWO funomenal babies. We were featured in Edge twice (once on the cover!), won several awards, moved into a nice new office, and travelled the world sharing our games with all of you.

This leads to the most important fact: we would not be where we are today without your support. Thank you for believing in us, cheering us on, and most importantly, for playing.

Here’s to year 7!