“I wasn’t sharp enough to say cut!”

Zaxis Games recently released their game “Harry the Fairy” in the App store and as it seems to be doing pretty well in sales, soon an Android version will come out too. We talked with the CEO Jacob Honore about Harry and other “fairies”.

By Katarina Prevelianaki

There were so many changes in the character, how did you decide the current character was “the one”­?

There are actually 2 different reasons why it ended up: one was we had to create a likable character. And since it became too difficult to make the snail crawl around, we needed a character that could actually fly, so it was not intentionally going that way, it kind of evolved. Then we ended up with a character that is very likable and also it could navigate in the environment that we wanted the game to take place in.

How do you think your experience so far will help you develop your next game?

We learnt so many things, and if I were to do it again I’d probably do most things in a different way. First of all, I think it was good (or maybe I was lucky) putting together a team that really worked well, on that side I wouldn’t really change anything. In terms of the game, I think we could make it in maybe 25% of the time because we had so many iterations and we hadn’t done a lot of testing on the technical side. So what we set out to do was actually maybe 2 years too far out in the future (on the technical side) so we had to change it a lot of times to make it workable game which was kind of really annoying.  I think I wasn’t sharp enough to say “ok cut, now we take all this out”, so we tried to make it work and it took way too long time to actually realize that it wasn’t a way we could pursue.

Harry the fairy looks like a game that could be played by all ages. Did you have a specific audience in mind while developing the game?

We had a slightly older target group in the original plan that actually turned out to be a younger age group. We changed the game to be simpler because we took some of the advanced controls out, so if we had stuck to the original idea I think we would have hit our target group. Since we took out a lot of the difficult navigation things and dexterity issues, it turned out that a younger audience could actually also play because it’s really simple.

Opening up for the American market sounded like something you really went after, do you think it paid off?

I think if you look at the percentages right now, we have around 75-80% of the games board bought on the American and Canadian market, so I think in that respect it is a success. We would have liked to have larger volume but if you look at the percentages, I think having an American publisher was a wise decision.