February 23, 2016 at 20:32How did Angry Birds: the story of designer and programmer Rovio
In 2003, three students from the University of Helsinki took part in the Nokia and HP mobile game development competition at Assembly and won the King of the Cabbage World project. Then they founded Relude, and sold the game to Sumea Studios. The team worked on games on J2ME, developed Burnout, Need for Speed and SWAT. In 2005, Relude received the first round of investment from a business angel and changed its name to Rovio Mobile.
In 2009, Rovio had money to create one game. And they did it! Like Square with Last Fantasy, Rovio made Angry Birds, which secured the company's profit in the following years.
Jaakko Iisalo was the only Rovio designer in 2009. Since the company had money for one game, Jaakko began to prepare options. He always managed to draw animals, so he sat down at a computer and drew a group of birds with beaks, a rounded body and evil eyebrows - so he realized the idea of angry birds that destroy things.
The first version was very different from the now known Angry Birds, Iisalo recalls . The bird had to be pressed so that it jumped and attacked simple structures. Even by the time the prototype was created, there was no catapult in the game - the birds simply jumped, for example, onto the castle.
“When we gave the game to people, they did not understand what to do. A recognizable mechanism was needed to launch the birds. I immediately thought about the slingshot, but it was too obvious, too simple a solution, so we tried a number of other things, even a sling. But it was precisely at the sight of a slingshot that the players immediately understood what needed to be done, ”says Iisalo.
After that, it was necessary to come up with enemies. Jaakko Iisalo painted pigs from the age of ten. All the characters had to be very simple, so for each of the birds they chose the main color. The main feathered character was red - so they chose green for the enemies. Green pigs were supposed to steal eggs from the birds and take cover behind structures.
Three months after Angry Birds appeared on the App Store, Apple gave developers a small banner on the store’s main page - and the game became viral. At first, people came to the office and said that the toy was downloaded a million times.
“When Shigeru Miyamoto, the Super Mario Bros designer, was asked what game he would like to make, he called Angry Birds,” adds Jaakko Iisalo.
Programmer Tuomo Lehtinen worked on a mechanism in the game that allowed the balls to be launched, and added blocks into which these balls crashed. Then the developers got the birds from the designer and the picture began to take shape. But there was a problem with the aiming mechanism - the birds did not fly where users wanted. Players needed to know why they miss.
Block constructions should not have collapsed too easily and fluctuated too much from impacts. It was also necessary to consider the distance from the slingshot to the castle-structure - increasing this distance increased the time of the game and made it more interesting.
The whole team of developers played a game in the office, they even had a list with the records of each of them.
After some time, the game became the first in Finland. “But this market is so small that it was enough for us to simply tell our friends about the game and ask them to download it, and we would come out on top,” says Lehtinen. In Sweden, the game came to first place thanks to an interview with skier Ane Parson, in which she said that she plays Angry Birds to relax before the competition.
In April 2010, the game topped the US charts. Now it remained to take first place in the global App Store. This happened at Angry Birds after a couple of months. And in August 2010, the game came out on a new platform - on Android.
Within the framework of Angry Birds, many versions of the game were released, including those based on films and cartoons - Seasons, Rio, Star Wars, Transformers, Space. “I remember how we drank champagne and celebrated a million, and then ten million downloads. Then these were huge numbers. And now we have our own movie coming out. Who would have thought that a mobile game could become so massive? This is amazing, ”says Lehtinen.
The first trailer for the Angry Birds animated film appeared on September 23, 2015 .
Trailer in Russian:
In 2009, Rovio had money to create one game. And they did it! Like Square with Last Fantasy, Rovio made Angry Birds, which secured the company's profit in the following years.
Jaakko Iisalo was the only Rovio designer in 2009. Since the company had money for one game, Jaakko began to prepare options. He always managed to draw animals, so he sat down at a computer and drew a group of birds with beaks, a rounded body and evil eyebrows - so he realized the idea of angry birds that destroy things.
The first version was very different from the now known Angry Birds, Iisalo recalls . The bird had to be pressed so that it jumped and attacked simple structures. Even by the time the prototype was created, there was no catapult in the game - the birds simply jumped, for example, onto the castle.
“When we gave the game to people, they did not understand what to do. A recognizable mechanism was needed to launch the birds. I immediately thought about the slingshot, but it was too obvious, too simple a solution, so we tried a number of other things, even a sling. But it was precisely at the sight of a slingshot that the players immediately understood what needed to be done, ”says Iisalo.
After that, it was necessary to come up with enemies. Jaakko Iisalo painted pigs from the age of ten. All the characters had to be very simple, so for each of the birds they chose the main color. The main feathered character was red - so they chose green for the enemies. Green pigs were supposed to steal eggs from the birds and take cover behind structures.
Three months after Angry Birds appeared on the App Store, Apple gave developers a small banner on the store’s main page - and the game became viral. At first, people came to the office and said that the toy was downloaded a million times.
“When Shigeru Miyamoto, the Super Mario Bros designer, was asked what game he would like to make, he called Angry Birds,” adds Jaakko Iisalo.
Programmer Tuomo Lehtinen worked on a mechanism in the game that allowed the balls to be launched, and added blocks into which these balls crashed. Then the developers got the birds from the designer and the picture began to take shape. But there was a problem with the aiming mechanism - the birds did not fly where users wanted. Players needed to know why they miss.
Block constructions should not have collapsed too easily and fluctuated too much from impacts. It was also necessary to consider the distance from the slingshot to the castle-structure - increasing this distance increased the time of the game and made it more interesting.
The whole team of developers played a game in the office, they even had a list with the records of each of them.
After some time, the game became the first in Finland. “But this market is so small that it was enough for us to simply tell our friends about the game and ask them to download it, and we would come out on top,” says Lehtinen. In Sweden, the game came to first place thanks to an interview with skier Ane Parson, in which she said that she plays Angry Birds to relax before the competition.
In April 2010, the game topped the US charts. Now it remained to take first place in the global App Store. This happened at Angry Birds after a couple of months. And in August 2010, the game came out on a new platform - on Android.
Within the framework of Angry Birds, many versions of the game were released, including those based on films and cartoons - Seasons, Rio, Star Wars, Transformers, Space. “I remember how we drank champagne and celebrated a million, and then ten million downloads. Then these were huge numbers. And now we have our own movie coming out. Who would have thought that a mobile game could become so massive? This is amazing, ”says Lehtinen.
The first trailer for the Angry Birds animated film appeared on September 23, 2015 .
Trailer in Russian: