Cobra Mobile

18/08/2024

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗦𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘆 𝗼𝗳 𝗶𝗕𝗼𝗺𝗯𝗲𝗿 - 𝗣𝗮𝗿𝘁 𝗧𝗵𝗿𝗲𝗲

iBomber Attack. This was a game that looks and plays amazing, a real tour de-force of action. The core audience loved it but the wider market was now really moving to a more free-to-play model and Attack suffered from this (right product, wrong time). So, on mobile we had a tough choice, leave it be or tweak it into a free-to-play model?

We tweaked it, added a currency and a weapons system. You win currency in-game or you can buy it and go upgrade crazy. It actually worked well. In hindsight was it the best move - we’ll never know.

After Attack we took a few years off from iBomber where we made a proper free-to-play game, Pocket Garden (a real gem of a game). It played great, had a proper currency model, engaging mini-games but iBomber was still calling.

By 2014, phones and screens had got bigger, plus Metal was coming. iBomber 3 was one of the very first games to be written to show off Apple’s new Metal API. The games launch trailer doubled down on this and used Moterhead - Ace of Spades as it’s soundtrack. note, iBomber 3 looked amazing and it did well and brought in new players to the world of iBomber.

After iBomber 3 we made Let’s Go Rocket, this was what we now call a hyper-casual game. Let’s Go Rocket was amazing in its simplicity, ex*****on and addictive nature.

iBomber 3 had sold and we had wanted to make an update/iAP add-on, however once we started, we realised that because of some technical changes we wanted to make to our game engine, this update was probably more of a stand-alone game, and iBomber Winter Warfare was made.

Winter Warfare continued the stunning visual level we got to on iBomber 3 but flipped it so you could play as a Luftwaffe pilot or Russian "Night Witch", it even included missions over the UK.

And that’s how we made a lot of iBomber games. Making anymore? probably not right now. The golden era of premium games is over plus audience tastes have moved on. That’s not to say a “world of iBomber” game would not work….

iBomber Trivia
• There was a J2ME java game build for Nokia phones. This was made under license which still to this day we haven’t seen any royalties for, the J2ME version did really well on piracy websites though.
• There was a Nintendo Gameboy DS prototype of iBomber that was built and played really well, we just couldn’t find decent publishing partner.
• There was a custom version of iBomber made under license for PapayaMobile in China.
• We we’re asked if we could make a version of iBomber so you could bomb a specific Asian country, we thought this was a joke, it wasn’t, we turned it down.
• We did experiment with a pirate themed version called Pirate Bomber, it was a so-so idea, and wasn’t a good fit, demo got shelved.
• iBomber proved hugely popular on Free App A Day, it helped prove and drive FAAD’s business model and helped get iBomber in a lot more players hands.

17/08/2024

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗦𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘆 𝗼𝗳 𝗶𝗕𝗼𝗺𝗯𝗲𝗿 - 𝗣𝗮𝗿𝘁 𝗧𝘄𝗼

iBomber 2 added new locations, bomb types, mission types, torpedo’s, artillery strikes and even gave you a fighter wing es**rt. It was bigger & better. iBomber 2 whilst a better game than the original sold well but just not as well as the original.

After iBomber 2 launched we sat down to discuss the potential of an iBomber 3. In a big boardroom, everyone had ideas for what will make it bigger, what will make it better but we just kept going round in circles and nothing being said made for a better game experience. Players liked flying, dropping bombs and completing missions.

I ended the meeting and needed some time to think about a clear way forward for a potential 3rd title in the series. That night I decided on a way forward, the following day I proposed, let’s keep the world we’ve created but change the game genre and direction.

How about an iBomber based Tower Defense game?

Just like the original, we spent a few days doing a quick prototype to see how it may look and play. It looked and played really well. So off we went and into development of our 3rd iBomber game - iBomber Defense.

During the development of iBomber Defence, a guy at Chillingo reached out to me about an anti-piracy library we had previously written for Apple based App Store apps (back when App piracy was an annoying thing), we licensed this library to them. This started a general conversation with Chris at Chillingo (this was Chris Byatte who had founded Chillingo with Joe Wee). One thing led to another, we let them see a game we we’re making - Defense, they liked it, they wanted to publish it, they showed us what they could do and we said yes.

The great thing about iBomber Defense was that whilst it launched on iPhone we also managed to release the game on Steam (and Mac App Store) which opened up new platforms.

iBomber Defense did well, Chillingo loved it and players loved it.

The next game we we’re making wasn’t an iBomber game but the amazing platform game, “Storm in a Teacup” which Chillingo also loved and published.

Once Storm was released, we started on 2 new iBomber games with Chillingo as publisher - iBomber Defence Pacific and iBomber Attack. As Defense had sold well, Pacific was a direct sequel to that and Attack was a whole new game in the iBomber world, a high-octane twin-stick shooter.

iBomber Defence Pacific was a bit rushed, the success of iBomber Defence meant we we’re keen to capitalise with the next instalment. During development we had to make some tough calls and eventually push the game launch by 3-4 months to give us the time make the game just better all-round, tweak gameplay and give the visuals a really good polish. That decision worked, it worked well. When iBomber Defence Pacific launched it went down really well with players, it sold across multiple platforms and won lots of awards and praise, it was a great game - "Oldschool tower defense tactics, tuned to perfection." – IGN.

16/08/2024

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗦𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘆 𝗼𝗳 𝗶𝗕𝗼𝗺𝗯𝗲𝗿 - 𝗣𝗮𝗿𝘁 𝗢𝗻𝗲

Back in the early days of mobile (the smart phone era not the java/brew based mobile nonsense) we we’re lucky to make a game which spawned a seven game series and managed to step from mobile to other platforms with relative ease. This is the lite story of that - iBomber.

The iPhone launched in 2007 but the App Store didn’t launch until 2008 and as they say, that’s when the real revolution started.

In 2008 and early into 2009, we had made and released some really good and notable iPhone games - Numba, Mouse About and Low Grav Racer being the real stand-outs.

In early 2009 I was walking through my local supermarket at the weekend and just out of the blue I had this idea about dropping bombs on targets and using the phone (gyroscope/accelerometer) to fly about
overhead – simple enough idea. On the Monday morning, I chatted over the basic outline idea with a few team leads. Both thought it might work so we made a quick prototype to test it. On Wednesday the prototype was playable and whilst it was in a very basic form there was defiantly something there. We added some graphics and a few tweaks and by the Friday we had something playable that showed great potential. The game was green lit that day and 12 weeks later it launched on the App Store.

How to name a game? One of the hardest parts of making any game is getting the name right. We had originally thought to call the game “Bombs Away” (which you can still see on the side of the plane in the
games front-end menu). Bombs Away whilst very apt, somehow didn’t feel right (for the time), we tried a lot of other names to try and get something snappy. This was before the days of A*O and spending
months working on how a name can increase discovery metrics.

We settled on iBomber as a lot of games we’re using the “i” prefix and as you we’re flying a WW2 bomber plane the name just felt right, it was distinct, it was one word, it was simple to say and therefore hopefully to discover on App Store.

The iBomber icon has been featured in a lot of books as a stellar example of a modern, clean app icon design. Getting the icon right on this took a long time but in the end with more A-B testing than you’d think, we really got it right, it stood out and drew your eye to it - even on the pretty medium res. screens that iPhones had back in 2009.

The game launched, it did well, it worked, the audience liked it, mobile gamers liked it. We launched a “lite” version to entice players. For those too young to remember 😊 before the world of mobile went all free and ad based, people paid for what we now call premium games (in 2009 we just called them games). We did updates, we added new maps and as iAP had just arrived we added an exclusive Mission Pack that you could unlock with an iAP purchase.

iBomber did well, it got to #1 in the charts, had great reviews, so like any good developer, we thought there’s an audience for this - so let’s do iBomber 2, and so we did…

07/08/2024

𝐅𝐮𝐥𝐥 𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐨𝐟 𝐋𝐢𝐧𝐤𝐞𝐝𝐢𝐧 𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐥𝐞 - 𝐁𝐚𝐜𝐤𝐠𝐚𝐦𝐦𝐨𝐧 𝐍𝐨𝐰 – 𝐬𝐨𝐥𝐯𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐛𝐥𝐞𝐦 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐠𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐢𝐭 𝐫𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭.

We made Backgammon Now to solve a simple problem: I couldn’t find a single player Backgammon game that I really liked to play.

I was trying to play Backgammon on my phone and I literally couldn’t find a good single player game that just played well and felt right. There were lots of games - I tried them all - but they either didn’t feel good to play, were way too hard to play or just way too “meh” to bother with (also, I don’t want to start a backgammon game then have to watch 3 Ads). I wanted something quick to get into and something I could easily play on the go, on the bus or on the couch. I guess if I wanted that I’d have to build it myself.

So I did.

Once the basic gameplay had been given some thought and the problem I wanted to solve was defined we set to work. The whole game in its basic form was laid out on a single whiteboard: every
menu, splash screen, options screen, etc. so the team (a small team of 3 people) could always see how everything would flow.

We had previously made a Backgammon game for Roku (smart TV platform) so we used the basic mechanics as a reference but mobile is a far different platform.

The plan was to make something in 6 weeks but we ended up taking 12 weeks. Why?
Polish - The game needed to look right and have the right feeling – we needed to A-B test a lot of that.
Control - We made sure both popular play controls were included (and not just the one I preferred to play with!)
Dice roll - The game is all about the dice, so can we make some awesome looking dice that really feel solid? Yes! So let’s do that.
Help - We wanted to make something simple and quick to play, but what about new players? Can we better add some help pages to on-board them in? Yes! So let’s add that.
Stats - Can we visualize stats in an easy to understand and appealing format? Yes! So let’s do that.
Monetization - Banner Ads and Video Ads are all fine, but could we make use of Subscriptions and also add value with them? Yes! So let’s add that.

Also, probably the weirdest part of making any game that involves dice is understanding the simple random nature of dice. Players can easily feel cheated if the nature of dice feels wrong.
Our dice rolling algorithm is incredibly unique, as far as I’m aware. What we’re doing is pretty advanced and actually represents real world completely random dice rolling (patent pending!).
We don’t use lookup tables (they're okay but they're not the best), we also don’t fake rolls, etc.

Players however tend to forget that when you roll dice you only have a 1 in 6 chance of getting the individual number you want. So if you need a 6 and the Ai opponent needs a 6, players often get mad if they don’t roll it and the Ai does. I’ve read so many reviews of dice based games where the dice rolling is always an issue of contention and it turns out there’s not much you can do about it as human nature always seems to kick in. We created one of the best dice rolling systems in the history of dice rolling systems and players still sometimes think it’s not right! You live, you learn, and you roll with it.

How does it perform?
Pretty awesome. Average session lengths are measured in hours, not minutes. We see iAP and Subscription attachment rates up at 10%. But most important, it’s my go-to game when I need 5-10 minutes of relaxation with a little strategy thrown in for good measure.

And that’s pretty much how we made Backgammon Now – get it on Apple App Store and Google Play. It’s free to play (with some light Ads). It’s the perfect entry into the world of Backgammon.

📲 Google Play - https://bit.ly/2GACO7V
📲 iOS - https://apple.co/2IiuT0p

28/07/2024

What Everyone’s Playing - here's the back story and how we made it,

Whilst we have lots of games in different stages of development, the first from this is a super addictive, one touch title, made by a small team of two.

QA was doing some research and having fun with one touch games and asked if we could make a new one. After having some pretty awesome success with Let’s Go Rocket I explained to
QA that creating and crafting something fresh in the one touch/casual space is super difficult - it can be super rewarding, but it's difficult.

But hey: we always like a challenge!

A very short while later (and after a whole lot of whiteboard sketches) we had something simple, elegant and maybe - just maybe - lots of fun... so we assembled a 2-man rapid prototype
team (basically me and one other) and we went to work turning those rudimentary whiteboard sketches from something that we thought might be fun, into something that was a whole
lot of fun, compelling and super challenging - What Everyone’s Playing.

The prototype was pretty basic but it worked and was a quite addictive. Once we added Leaderboards so you could see where you placed globally or against your friends, it really came to
life. And that was with one game mode, we tested quite a few but settled on five for the final game. Test point, it wasn’t until we focus/soft launch tested that the data showed us we had some of the game modes in the wrong order, that was a quick 10 minute fix and made the game just felt better all-round and better weighted for players.

The game was initially quite visually flat - not uninteresting, but just very flat to give it that clean minimal aesthetic. At first you were controlling a ball, quite a non-descript object. This needed to change to bring more fun and life to proceedings. As soon as we added Poe the Panda we immediately found the right gear and level of fun for the game. Instead of a non-descript ball we could have characters that had life and could look around with their big expressive eyes - they could look about, they could see the walls closing in.

And in a very short way, that is how we made What Everyone’s Playing with a very small team. It’s super fun, it’s available on App Store and Google Play Store right now and it’s free to download and play.

See you on the Leaderboards…

26/07/2024

What Everyone's Playing is a new hypercasual mobile game from Dundee's Cobra Mobile, offering simple pick-up-and-play fun for iOS & Android

24/07/2024

After a long stretch of R&D work and making a lot of cool new things we’re back and on the game release trail once again adding new twists to genre’s, creating new worlds and adventures for players to go on.

Making games isn’t easy, it’s a lot of fun but not always easy. As I always try to say, making a bad game is hard, making a good game, well that’s just really hard and a lot of the time and effort – sometimes it can just be a really hard lift. Sometimes you just have to spend some time making, breaking stuff and taking some risks to find out what works, what doesn’t quite work and what is so simple it just works really well...

16/09/2022

A more comic book look...

31/08/2022

A new look Captain...

19/08/2022

Someone is coming for you!

10/08/2022

We’ve been busy working on a lot of exciting things the past year, some we can show and some we can’t. Here’s a brief look at a new direction for Tower Defense…

02/08/2022

At Cobra, we’ve been busy working on a lot of exciting things the past year. Some we can show and some we can’t. Something we can show (and you can play) is a playable demo level from Captain and the Kid, a 2.5D Metroidvania action platformer we made. Currently available to download and play on PC on itch.io

Welcome to the world of Captain and the Kid!Features action from the very early test prototype level. Try it out for yourself on PC. Download and play for fr...