I’ll be attending Nordic Game in Malmö next week, so drop me a line in case you want to meet and try out the social yoga game yourself! I am happy to show it off now as we are only a few weeks away from going live with restricted beta. Also if you have analytics, advertising or monetization solutions suitable for flash games, let’s talk.
Some of the feedback we’ve received regarding the Kickstarter campaign is that from player point of view we reveal too little what’s going on in the game…
So we decided to let you know that all of this practising and teaching of yoga will take place in your own little tropical paradise island. In addition to yoga and healing of your customers, you’ll be able to expand the place further and have even more fun!
The social yoga game will also feature a yoga cat (cats are natural yogis and yoginis!) that will help you to start the fun.
Yoga cat will also every once in a while appear to show you a few ideas how to make your play session more healthy to your neck, shoulders and spine…
Free to be published immediately
A Finnish well-being games entrepreneur’s social yoga game seeks crowdfunding
A Finnish well-being games entrepreneur’s Tiina Zilliacus’ yoga-themed Facebook game is seeking funding via US based crowdfunding service Kickstarter. Crowdfunding means collection of small amounts of funding from large number of people. Zilliacus’ company, Gajatri Studios, started a campaign in Kickstarter on Monday 07/05/2012.
- Kickstarter is the most important crowdfunding service for creative projects in the world, allowing anyone with a credit card to support projects with an interesting idea and to help those projects into fruition. The collected funding levels range from a few thousands to millions of dollars, Tiina Zilliacus says.
In addition to funding, objective is that social yoga game project becomes known to people in US and attracts enthousiastic first users for the game.
- We are making the game for women interested in yoga as well as for their friends, who already enjoy and are playing on Facebook. It is possible that we are first in the world offering this type of authentic well-being content within a social games format. It is truly helpful if Kickstarter project gets people excited and soon beginning test period pleases beta players. I hope as many people as possible find their way to the campaign site to learn more on the yoga game and why I needed to create it, Zilliacus says.
This week we did have some more user tests as the next yoga game sprint was ready. We were testing whole Tuesday, and we’re planning to test on Thursday. However, got the point already within a day: building functionality within the game needed improvements before moving on with development.
I think we have a good idea now what is needed, and changes are live within a week. So more testing after 1st of May will be taking place with fixes. Thanks again for everyone who came to test on Tuesday, your help just rocks!
Since I am not (yet!) revealing more detail on the game theme and story, I thought you would anyway like to check out something new from us for a change. So, here is the yoga game character line up with male characters. I absolutely loved it when ladies were testing last time, and they said to me: “Where are all the men? We would love to train them”. Fantastic. Gentlemen, I consider that as a challenge!
With those thoughts, have a lovely weekend.
Another good friend has agreed to help us out as an advisor in bringing the yoga game accessible to a wider audience. Ladies and gentlemen, may I present you: Lotta Lautsuo. Many of you of course already know Lotta, and that we’re friends since 1995.
Lotta was actually the first person I ever told about the yoga game idea (Gajatri’s another advisor Timo Lappi was the 2nd), and true to her character she was not only supportive, but also wildly excited about it. From the start, we both felt that a game where yoga and social games format are combined, would have more true fans in US than anywhere else in the world.
Lotta lives in New York City, and works with large media companies developing and introducing digital and mobile services to US audiences.
l will write more about what we’ll be up to later. Next week we will have another round of user tests for the yoga game, so yet another eventful week at Gajatri Studios coming up!
..with your own product feels just wonderful!
I’ve never thought of my relationship to new product development this way before, but yes, this time I’ve definitely found “the right one” with the yoga game based on how it feels to be doing it.
Taking a few steps back, this crush of mine would definitely not be possible without few very practical things. First of all, game development has been proceeding incredibly well. Sami Liikanen joined Gajatri Studios as main developer of the product and is doing an amazing job in helping me out in everything. Sami has worked previously for Rovio Entertainment and Ironstar Helsinki. Also, I’ve been lucky to find really professional software and graphical designers to UI, character and item design to help us out with the game. These folks are not laughing at my dream (nor to this love affair I am having for that matter!), but instead are taking it surely towards beta capability.
Last week we had user tests for the first playable prototype and got valuable feedback from testers. Most of the corrections have now been made to core loop, and we are proceeding to second phase adding more content and features. Many of my Facebook friends and ex-colleagues have offered help for testing the game. It truly feels that we are supported by a lot of people in what we are doing. This is really valuable to me as the development phase without real customers would not be serving its purpose.
For now it definitely looks like we will reach beta capability in exactly planned schedule i.e. around end May. I will not release the details what the story and theme will be in the game until then, but core loop is about playing with yoga practises, learning them yourself and after that teaching them to others.
With the words of one of the play testers: “this game is really good because you do not have any guilt of playing it as at the same time while playing and having fun you learn about yoga as a kind of side kick”. Exactly my target. Also, how to live without guilt is a major driver in yoga, so happy to live my yoga “off the mat” and to deliver joy (not guilt) to folks with the game we’re building.
Have a great spring weekend everyone!
