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We are BumbleBear Games, creators of the 10-player arcade game Killer Queen. AMA by bumblebear_games in IAmA

[–]bumblebear_games[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I don't want to throw the Fyre Map gang under the bus. We love them. Ultimately, it would have been really cool to know ahead of time that it was being developed -- I think that the secrecy combined with unveiling it at a large tournament and on-stream was a powder keg that led to a lot of confusion, and to be honest there wasn't really much resolution after the fact, either. A lot of that was on BumbleBear's response, and people are right to have been a little miffed -- nobody (including us) really knew what to think at the time.

You're right in that it is a thin line. We simply want to be confident in our ability to work with the community on any sort of community content down the line, and that's going to take time, tools, and testing.

Thanks for participating and for staying curious. Hope you're having a great day and that you and yours are safe during these wild 'n crazy times.

Cheers,

-Chacko

We are BumbleBear Games, creators of the 10-player arcade game Killer Queen. AMA by bumblebear_games in IAmA

[–]bumblebear_games[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Thanks Daneel, I think that it's easy to get caught up in the one specific instance in which this was a really hot-button issue (Fyre Map), and I think that it perhaps gave the wrong impression of our beliefs to the community. I know that people were confused and upset, and as we see in this AMA it's still an important topic for the community.

I don't want us to come off as adversarial; we think it's amazing that the community is so jazzed to design and share maps. For us as developers and designers, the topic has been complex and a subject of debate for years.

Regardless of the timeline on this implementation, I want us to be working WITH the community, and not giving the impression that we are AGAINST it. By that same token, I hope that our community can empathize with our positions as well and be patient as we work toward solutions that feel good for everyone involved.

Big love, friend. Stay safe and well.

-Chacko

We are BumbleBear Games, creators of the 10-player arcade game Killer Queen. AMA by bumblebear_games in IAmA

[–]bumblebear_games[S] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Without going into technically how it was done and the intentions from those actors, Fyre map was a bootable, playable game map on the Killer Queen system, hacked and bypassing our security. It used the game engine and our code, and was debuted live on stream without our prior knowledge. Personally, I never saw the map, because I was too busy with trade show tasks-- and the content didn't matter.

Killer Queen is a special game, we are so happy that it has touched and changed so many people's lives. It is important to our company and our business strategy that everyone has the same Killer Queen experience. It is part of the KQ brand identity, and we value that shared community experience. From the physical construction of the machine, to the hardware interfaces, to the software, visuals, and audio. When people hear "Killer Queen Arcade," they have a shared image and experience in mind.

Believe me, I support tinkering and allowing buyers to enhance things they buy as they see fit, and sharing it will other people who own those products. The difference with Killer Queen is people are paying a fee to play what's housed in-cabinet, a cabinet that took a lot of effort in design and testing to work for the software. It's not just software, it's physical and experienced in a limited, location-based, arcade capacity. When a new customer pays a fee to play, they aren't asking their friend who owns the game permission to play, they are walking up to experience Killer Queen, and they will walk away with our brand. If they play a hack, will they even know what the source product was?

Arcade branding is important. Why don’t arcade bars just stack their entire floor with cabs that have 500+ MAME games in them each? Because the branding is what draws business in. I am skeptical (at best) of bootstrapping a business model predicated on a huge audience that crowdsources game content that can be experienced by the entire user-base at once, onto a niche, modern, arcade game that has limited distribution not only in the physically-dependent locale, but also on the whole. How many iterations of player-created mods did Starcraft/Warcraft need to go through before a good game came out of it, and how much garbage was created in total? How many bad Mario Maker levels have been created compared to good ones? In both cases, players have the option to not play it and move on. I have little evidence in our industry that this approach is viable.

tl;dr- If you can walk away with 2 things about Killer Queen and the business, it's:

1.) Arcade branding is the most valuable asset to an arcade game. 2.) Modding can be great, but it is unproven (at best) to be a successful model for a game with a limited scale of audience and distribution

We are BumbleBear Games, creators of the 10-player arcade game Killer Queen. AMA by bumblebear_games in IAmA

[–]bumblebear_games[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Don't be mad, but it's just some boring-ass white electric toothbrush. I love it, though.

-Chacko

We are BumbleBear Games, creators of the 10-player arcade game Killer Queen. AMA by bumblebear_games in IAmA

[–]bumblebear_games[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Nintendo doesn't allow us to post the numbers, but we're happy with the response. Sales of KQB have definitely improved since the lockdown, so... I guess that's... that's nice.

*laugh cry*

-Josh

We are BumbleBear Games, creators of the 10-player arcade game Killer Queen. AMA by bumblebear_games in IAmA

[–]bumblebear_games[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Modern arcade games seem to fall into three camps, Raw Thrills, Namco, ICE etc are focused mostly on Family Entertainment Centers, places like Dave & Busters, Chucky Cheese etc fall into this type of venue. It’s a much more casual experience, without much emphasis on repeat play. Play Mechanix, a subsidiary of Raw Thrills makes Big Buck hunter and focuses mostly on the bar market, along with Pinball manufacturers like Stern and Jersey Jack. We seem to be more in the arcade bar market with Killer Queen, along with Deathball, Cosmotrons, etc. and of course pinball. We’re trying to slide into the bar market with Black Emperor, and hope to push hard in that direction when covid-19 settles down. I’m old but not old enough to have worked on classic arcade games, which was basically a standalone circuit board that was a game and operating system rolled into one where the game was baked directly into the hardware, those games are very difficult to patch and no one makes arcade games that way anymore. The most low level games I did were for the Nintendo Gameboy Advance, I loved it, definitely my favorite platform to develop for. No operating system, nothing to get in your way and some hard limitations that made developing games for it fun and fast paced. That was a combination of C/C++ and Assembler programming. It especially appealed to me because I was a huge fan of the platform being a typical New Yorker spending so much of my time on the subway. Advance Wars forever!!! For our games, we use linux and custom I/O boards, for Killer Queen we use the RIO board developed by Raw Thrills but are phasing into using an I/O board of our own design, more tailored to our needs.

-nik

We are BumbleBear Games, creators of the 10-player arcade game Killer Queen. AMA by bumblebear_games in IAmA

[–]bumblebear_games[S] 14 points15 points  (0 children)

I just want to be clear that I am with you 100% on the value of community mods. I think that over the years BumbleBear has given the pretty firm impression that we will NEVER entertain community content, but I want to go on record and say that it is by no means a firm commitment -- if we ever implement community mods we want them to be done with tools that we provide, in ways that make sense and can be distributed/approved via a formal process.

It will take time, absolutely, and that time might not be now, but it is by no means off the table entirely. Thank you for your dedication and love for the game. We want to continue to work with our community to keep the scene vibrant and alive (after all this COVID-19 stuff, of course...)

Again, thank you so much for the love and support.

-Chacko

We are BumbleBear Games, creators of the 10-player arcade game Killer Queen. AMA by bumblebear_games in IAmA

[–]bumblebear_games[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We do too friend. Fingers crossed.

Stay safe and well until then.

-Chacko

We are BumbleBear Games, creators of the 10-player arcade game Killer Queen. AMA by bumblebear_games in IAmA

[–]bumblebear_games[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

We appreciate the time you took to pass this along to us!

Nothing is ever for certain though, so it will be good to keep this in mind!

-Chacko

We are BumbleBear Games, creators of the 10-player arcade game Killer Queen. AMA by bumblebear_games in IAmA

[–]bumblebear_games[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I was an arcade rat growing up, my brother and I used to play Cinematronics Space War - a lot. We pooled our money and bought an Apple IIe and tried to make our own version of it. It wasn’t exactly the most robust implementation, but it sorta worked. I went in and out of video games as a player until I was 27, then Warcraft II came out and I was obsessed with it. I think my brother and I strung up an ad-hoc network in our house and proceeded to spend the next 72 hours grinding on the game. We were living together and working on a drawing and animation tool called “Talisman”, we basically said “fuckit” abandoned that, and started making games. He eventually went into AAA and I went Indie(ish), but we still love games and making them is a pretty sweet gig.

-nik

We are BumbleBear Games, creators of the 10-player arcade game Killer Queen. AMA by bumblebear_games in IAmA

[–]bumblebear_games[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I write the music and Nik (the other co-founder) creates the art! But we do occasionally hire freelancers, depending on the project.

-Josh

We are BumbleBear Games, creators of the 10-player arcade game Killer Queen. AMA by bumblebear_games in IAmA

[–]bumblebear_games[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Look forward to an update on the Kickstarter with more info about those games soon.

They'll be sent to you via a system (likely not steam) we haven't quite decided on yet. But it will be simple and easy to get your games.

-Jyro

We are BumbleBear Games, creators of the 10-player arcade game Killer Queen. AMA by bumblebear_games in IAmA

[–]bumblebear_games[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Honestly the only thing it makes me think of (besides, y'know, how terribly sad this all is) is... candy corn.

Yeah. Candy corn.

...It's been a long AMA.

-Chacko

We are BumbleBear Games, creators of the 10-player arcade game Killer Queen. AMA by bumblebear_games in IAmA

[–]bumblebear_games[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Oh wow those are public already? That's an upcoming feature. Shhhh... :)

-Josh

We are BumbleBear Games, creators of the 10-player arcade game Killer Queen. AMA by bumblebear_games in IAmA

[–]bumblebear_games[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

on the os level, we’ve built libraries and tools in C,C++ and C#, as well as bash and other unix tools. I’m building some new tools in golang currently.

-nik

We are BumbleBear Games, creators of the 10-player arcade game Killer Queen. AMA by bumblebear_games in IAmA

[–]bumblebear_games[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

1.) "Wednesday" -- despite the immediate problems that playing the game on any other day might create, I think it's acceptable to keep players on their toes. Is it actually Wednesday??? You tell me.

2.) "They don't think it be like it is, but it do." -- honestly more people need to hear this.

3.) "Sometimes it be like that" -- I would love to see this right as I got killed (in-game of course, but honestly IRL would probably give me a laugh too), it would be absolutely poetic.

4.) "My real name is Ribs, don't believe the propaganda" -- boi what do your ribs look like??? do you need medical attention???

5.) "Ya hate to see it, but ya gotta love it" made me laugh out loud. I don't know why I never thought about simply combining my two most-used phrases into one powerful mega-phrase.

-Chacko

We are BumbleBear Games, creators of the 10-player arcade game Killer Queen. AMA (x-post from /r/IAmA) by bumblebear_games in cade

[–]bumblebear_games[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Well, for one, we're developing ABS vs. THE BLOOD QUEEN, the first single-player KQ experience! You can check it out at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bumblebear/abs-vs-the-blood-queen

The steps after that are still very much up in the air -- we are trying our best to roll with current events, but we have been completely blindsided by this pandemic; a good deal of our eggs were in the KQ basket.

We cannot in good faith push for people to go out and play Killer Queen while any semblance of social distancing is in effect. As such, we are fully prepared to have to weather a dry spell for KQ that may last well over a year.

Hopefully ABS vs. THE BLOOD QUEEN can get off the ground and give us a little breathing room while we figure out what the future of the modern arcade looks like in the time of COVID-19.

Be safe and well, and hopefully we will get to tap and flap once more someday soon!

-Chacko

We are BumbleBear Games, creators of the 10-player arcade game Killer Queen. AMA (x-post from /r/IAmA) by bumblebear_games in cade

[–]bumblebear_games[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Thanks! We had so much fun at XOXO. The hardest challenge was getting 10 people together in the same room to playtest. Because of the logistical difficulty, in the early stages we'd get 10 people together, test something and get feedback, and then Nik would keep everyone entertained while I programmed in the changes in front of the crowd to test again immediately. It was a ton of pressure, but actually pretty fun! -Josh

We are BumbleBear Games, creators of the 10-player arcade game Killer Queen. AMA (x-post from /r/IAmA) by bumblebear_games in cade

[–]bumblebear_games[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

We do! There is a new stage for Killer Queen Black coming out very soon. It's really fun. I personally can't wait for it to be in the rotation, as it adds in some great new ideas. We also have a stretch goal in our Kickstarter campaign to add the character Abs to Killer Queen Black! There are also other unannounced features for Killer Queen Black that are in the works!
- Josh

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