Learning Exclusivity

• Announcements
• Gaming
• by meridimus about 1 Month ago

High Speed Chase 2 is fresh out of development and it's live for everyone to play, on this site and on a ton of other sites. But what's different about a player out there on the internet and a registered player at Johnny Two Shoes?

Before we launched High Speed Chase 2 we had a number of ideas for how we could reward players for being part of the community, it started a very long time ago when all of our games were released exclusively to Johnny Two Shoes, a lot of them remain that way today, most recently Banana Dash World 4 was released as an exclusive.

We realised to build a proper community we need to integrate feedback and player interaction but we also need to make the experience at Johnny Two Shoes unique. At first that was comments on games, but that was pretty basic (and not very unique) so we re-designed the entire site from scratch with the community at the core. Johnny Two Shoes 2.0 launched almost 2 years ago — we had medals, high-scores, player accounts, profile pages and a blog.

Things have changed since then, but it's been more of an evolution of that basic idea and an evolution of our design. We did have to start make games with other companies because we simply ran out of money — it was a hard decision to make and it lead to about 18 months of incredibly hard work, the worst part was that we were incredibly distant from the community during that time.

In October 2009 we started to see the light at the end of the tunnel, we were coming to a period when we could re-think what the community meant and how we would release our new games. We gave you Banana Dash World 4 as an exclusive, something we were very proud to do! We even tried throwing in a bonus level to see if it changed the reaction to the release.

The positive feedback we got from that bonus level set off a chain reaction with us. We worked out so many different ways to engage with the community and ways to boost the size of the community — we had High Speed Chase 2 half finished collecting dust so we busted open the files and tried to apply some of those ideas to:

• Promote High Speed Chase on the iPhone
• Engage new players
• Encourage player registration at Johnny Two Shoes
• Reward the existing community

So this is where we are now, a new blend on an existing mentality — another way to reward the community and a new way to drive new player registrations. As I write this, we're having a soaring number of new registrations when High Speed Chase 2 has been in the wild for around 24 hours.

So, what does this mean for the future of Johnny Two Shoes? You can bet that it means more community features, new ways to interact with each other (stuff you won't have seen anywhere else before) and a ton of new experiments that you can all get involved with.

This is an exciting time to be part of Johnny Two Shoes. We want to say thanks for sticking around and we're really looking forward to the rest of 2010 with you all!