7/8 games for the biggest National Dutch TV-show for children since 2007

It seems I am going to disappear for a while again , so I thought I'd take the chance to do a quick post, and explain why this happens..

SINTERKLAASJOURNAAL - NTR

Nobody knows it outside of Holland and Belgium, but it's possibly the biggest National Dutch TV-show for children from 3-9. Won a very prestigious TV prize last year..

It only airs for a month, but is on EVERY day in that period and is almost instantly the best watched program (among the target group) and stays that way up to the end. Actually it climaxes at the end, because the parents and grandparents tend to join in.

This program maintains a website, during the period that it airs. Kind of a second-screen experience, if that tells you anything. I don't make the website, but I create the games..
So second screen means for me: the games have to be web-apps that run on mobile and table as well and preferably be mobile friendly. It's about 50/50 with the desktops..
Even when it's a platform game, so we have to think about controls!

70 games

I have been making games for Sinterklaas for the past 8 years. Just call me gamePiet!
(Or is that 9? 2007-2015 you do the math.. So 2016 will be 10 years? I can only hope...)
So that means.. somewhere around 60-70 games so far! The games range from small to quite big and encompass almost all casual game types: platform, racing, physics, puzzle and click games, time management, match 3 games, toys and classics like colouring, jigsaw, memory and tetris.
We have to keep them VERY simple and visual, it's for 3-9 years old mostly. For many kids it used to be the first game-experience ever, on grandpa's lap.. I'm kind of hoping it still is.

It's fast.
It's a lot of work.
It's sooooo much fun.

You can see some of these games in my portfolio.
(www.snoepgames.nl, I'd love to publish movies about them all, but it's just so much work.. )

Production madness

What happens is:
I get to sit with the editors and get a sneak peak at the VERY classified scenario.
Then we think of about 13/14 games to fit the scenario. I make an offer for all of them and they decide on 7/8 or sometimes even 9 of them.
And then production starts...

We have 1.5 to 2 months to create all 7/8 games, depending on how long we stay in the negotiation phase. They are in HTML5 these days, used to be Flash, that was a lot easier..
Every game that's somewhat playable, I put on my website (with a password, don't bother)
to be tested by the NTR as soon as it's finished enough to test.
Nobody else can test it, the scenario of the TV-show is one of the best kept secrets in Holland.
And while I make the next game and the next one, the bugs, misconceptions and tips start coming in for triage. So planning is a bit strange if not impossible. I plan about 3 days solid per game and then I'll just have to wing it. The triage is serious business. I couldn't do it without that principle, it's a battlefield.

But I haven't missed a beat yet, even the year when we moved from Flash to HTML5. That was a personal victory, but it's allways been close. It's nuts, but I love it.

Bugs and 'complaints'

Now I won't claim the games are completely bug-free or as elegant or polished as I normally like to make them, when I have more time. It's a bit rough around the edges.. Partially intentional. The style is great for simple and rough animation. But programming can't be too rough..
So last year we introduced something new. If there was a problem with the game, kids could tell us (me), so I could fix it right away. This was a safety measure I built in, because we had a couple of games with extra levels, which is always harder to test in advance.

We had 2,2 MILLION unique visitors in a month, that year. Games were played up to 60.000 times in a single day. That is an amazing amount of traffic. (There are about 2,5 million families in the Netherlands!). So about 80% of the Dutch population of kids..
And we got 23 'complaints':

• 4 of these 'complaints' were actually compliments. (Those meant the world to me, especially the one from the grandpa and grandchild, you know who you are!)
• 7 were little things I could fix in minutes.
• 12 were just general internet abuse ( like 'testing123 and BlahBlah') and a lot of stuff about the so-called 'zwarte piet' issue.
  (I have no fixed opinion about it, other than both sides should refrain from violence and abuse. It's a heated debate, too heated to take either side very seriously)

It was amazing.. The absence of complaints was overwhelming.

Trust and Focus

The thing that makes it work, despite the obvious obstacles?
  Trust, focus, positivity.. Sounds soppy, I know, but I mean it.

I get a lot of freedom, more than with any customer.. That takes a lot of trust.
But else this would be completely impossible, given the timeframe.
There is a lot of trust, both ways. I trust the editors to test the games, for my part I make an offer, that has so much specifications in it, it takes me more than three full days to write and I know at least 4 games are going to be dropped anyway so that's 40% of the work out of the window and I haven't even gotten a 'go' yet.
But this way, when we do produce... We all know what to expect going in. I try to accomodate as much evolving insight as I dare during production, but there is little room for it.
And most of all, we trust each other to stay positive, because with this kind of pressure, you can kill it if you don't stay positive. It has to be fun all-round, every day, or you'll never make it.
It almost went wrong twice, but both times we fixed it in the nick of time.
This is only possible, because at that moment Sinterklaas is truly the most important thing in the world.
For all of us.

Around 10th of November the games start going live. One every three or four days.
If anything is wrong, I need to fix it quickly, so I'm on call all day.
We've cut it as close as 20 minutes away from LIVE.. I never want to relive that moment..

And 5th of December it's all over.
I take a deep breath and relax a couple of days,
and then start hoping they will ask me again next year.