How my 15-year-old son gave me a Game Making lesson

Today I want to tell you the story behind Blumgi Merge. It’s a longer article, but I have a lot of learnings to share that could help you make successful games for a casual audience. Let’s go!

The Internship

My 15-year-old son, Tom, did his school internship at Blumgi.

I asked Poki if we could spend one week in their nice Amsterdam office so Tom could discover a new culture, speak English, and see the publishing side of the games I make.
The Poki team is super nice, and I knew Tom would feel comfortable there.

I decided his challenge would be to make a game as if he were a dev wanting to publish on Poki. I’d help him make it real, but the vision would be his. I’d take care of the graphics so he could focus on game design and programming in Construct 3, which I also use.

His “final boss” for the internship would be the Player Fit Test:

This is not an easy one. For example, I never succeeded with Blumgi Chase.

Building the Game

Tom wanted to create a merge game, a genre I had never tried myself, but something that could work in scope for a first game.
We decided to arrive at the Poki office with a working prototype and a mockup, and then spend the week integrating visuals, making content, and testing.

Two months before Poki week, we worked exactly 30 minutes a day, no more, no less, after school and after my workday.

Because we only had 30 minutes, we had to stay super focused and deliver something every sprint. After a few weeks, I was surprised at how fast the game was progressing compared to my main project (Blumgi Chase at the time), even though I was working on that one full-time. Two brains solving challenges made the prototype phase go so much faster.

In one “week equivalent” of work, we had a playable prototype and a mockup we liked.

The hardest part of this “sliced” workflow was plugging and unplugging our brains after a school or work day. What worked for us was writing down after each sprint the exact challenge we were on and what the next step was, so we could jump back in with low effort.

Tom’s vision for the game was simple: super easy to play, and the player gets stronger and stronger. You merge slimes, they beat monsters, you level up. That’s it.

I told him, “It’s not enough… where’s the challenge? The risk/reward? Players will get bored fast.”
He insisted, so we kept his vision. I thought, “He’ll learn…”

The First Test

When we started our week at Poki, they arranged a nice space for us in their office. We felt at home. Day 1, we merged the prototype and the visuals, and decided to launch a test as soon as possible so we could see how far we were from the goal and iterate every day.

We pushed the first test with almost no content, only a few clean monsters, the rest were doodle placeholders.

First test. First day. Exactly Tom’s vision.
BIM! The game passed the test 😲😲😲
… I learned something that day.

Here are the results, one on “global audience” and one on “merge games” audience.
If you’re not used to these, just know they’re already good results.

More great tools

I was surprised you can get such strong engagement time with a game that’s far from perfect and still WIP visually, as long as the gameplay loop is solid.
This is exactly why Poki designed the test, to let devs know early if their concept fits the audience.

We then iterated every day using another great Poki tool: video playtests:

Thanks to these tests we could:

• Make sure players understood what to do
• Balance pacing
• Fix bugs
• Polish details
• Understand weird behaviors

Every day we tested a new version. After 5 days the metrics had improved… a lot.
Playtime went from 03:49 to 07:50 minutes.

I couldn’t believe it. On Blumgi Chase I struggled for months to hit the minimum target with no success. Here, with the simplest game Blumgi ever made, everything was smooth and easy. And at that point we had only invested about 2 weeks of full-time work.

If a game is aligned with the audience from the start, everything becomes way easier.

From Prototype to Launch

Back home, I spent one more week finishing the game, with Tom helping after school. We kept a strong direction: “Make the player feel more and more powerful at their own pace.” All the game features reinforced this.

Even if it was repetitive, I designed monsters and weapon with love, trying to make every step a little surprise. We even made a real ending to reward players who stayed motivated until the end.

We sent it for the WebFit Test : the last gate before publishing on Poki.

They run it with 1000 players and compare your metrics to other games on Poki in the same genre. If it performs well, you sign the contract, then it goes through QA, a soft launch, and finally a global launch.

The game passed all the last steps, with crazy metrics (+10 min playtime), and was launched as Blumgi Merge.

It’s by far my most successful game on Poki and still doing super well after several months.

You can play it here:
https://poki.com/en/g/blumgi-merge

Learnings :

• My most successful games are the simplest ones (Blumgi Merge and Blumgi Slime).
• I definitely see a pattern of low skill / high reward in my best-performing games.
• I’m very proud of this one because we managed to make the entire game experience fit in a single screen. You are never cut off from the gameplay.
• Having such a simple game loop allowed me to spend a lot of time designing nice monsters and polishing every detail of the game feel and art.
• I regret not adding sound. I was scared it would break the magic and become irritating in the long run, so I kept the version players already loved.
• I think Poki players love experiences where they feel more and more powerful step by step. I’ve seen this pattern in many successful Poki games, and I’ll explore different ways to give them that feeling in future projects.
• I was even more surprised when experienced gamer friends sent me screenshots of the ending (which probably took them more than one hour). It seems this feeling of progression is universal, even if it’s not based on the classic gameplay rules of flow, challenge, and risk/reward.

I realised some casual players are not looking for a deep experience. They just want to kill time in a rewarding way, without much focus, and enjoy progressing at their own pace.

It was an amazing adventure with Tom. I’m so proud of him, not only for finding a concept that fit the audience perfectly, but for the effort, consistency, and focus he put into starting and finishing the game.
I’m also very grateful to the Poki team for welcoming us into their office, making Tom feel comfortable.

He even presented the game in front of the whole team during their lunch break, and everyone came to listen. Best partners ❤️

Thanks for reading. This is a new format I can do here on the blog, sharing the process behind Blumgi games. Let me know in the comments what you think, and if you’d like to see more of this kind of story.

Loïc

🏝️🏝️🏝️