Without further ado, check it out to learn more about Happy Labs and our views on the local game development scene!
https://redharegames.wordpress.com/2018/03/29/spotlight-interview-jeffrey-chee-from-happy-labs/
We also reproduced the article in its entirety here. Click on Read More to check it out!
Spotlight Interview: Jeffrey Chee from Happy Labs
Check out their site – https://happylabs.weebly.com/
Q: Give the readers a short introduction about yourself and your company. What is your role? What is your company about? What is your “origin” story?
Happy Labs games are distributed on Google Play and App Store to countries all over the world. To date, we have launched 15 games with a combined download volume of over 55 million. I (Jeffrey Chee) lead the company in terms of vision and direction for our games.
Being from a gamer background, it was difficult to deliver games that are easy to pick up for casual players. We found our niche by pulling inspiration from playing more casual games, listening actively to customers and also from our past experiences on making simulation games in our previous jobs at Nubee.
Q: What are some of the common challenges your company face when developing or releasing a project? How are resources allocated or distributed?
It takes a lot of time to polish something to the best of our satisfaction, but sometimes we have to make a compromise between perfecting something, adding more features, or even cutting some specs that we think is fun. It’s a delicate balance that we have to constantly measure ourselves against.
We’re entirely bootstrapped and recruit from word of mouth.
Q: How does your company conduct user testing?
We use Google Play’s Beta Release and Early Access program to easily reach out to relevant users who are interested in our genre of games (no we’re not paid to say that).
A large part of our users come in organically. Apart from disbursing game news from our website, we also actively use social media channels to reach out to our audiences. From time to time, we run UA (user acquisition) campaigns on channels like Facebook and Google Adwords.
Q: What is your company’s work environment like? Any quirks or interesting stories you would like to share?
Contrary to our ‘happy’ brand, the Happy Labs office is utilitarian and simple with a bunch of hard-working people in their thirties chugging out work round the clock.
We think that the industry has come a long way since the time we started in 2013, but the mobile market we’re in now is becoming saturated and mobile game developers must now come up with quality work that can beat other games on an international level to really succeed.
Q: Do you have any tips for aspiring entrepreneurs who want to enter the local game industry?
As mentioned, go global or go home! 😀
Credits: Ho Qing Xiang @ Red Hare Studios