Incredible Indies: Max Inferno on bringing A Little to the Left to mobile and the “deflating” experience of copycats

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The games industry has many big-name studios with eager eyes on them, all waiting to see what their next big hit could be. But giant studios aren’t necessarily the home to what could be your next favourite game. 

There are thousands of independent game studios and solo developers, all hard at work crafting new game experiences with often unique ways of looking at games. In this series we aim to highlight those very games and the developers behind them. 

In this interview – part of our regular Incredible Indies series – we speak to Max Inferno co-director Lukas Steinman on bringing A Little to the Left to mobile, copycats, and surviving as an indie developer.

PocketGamer.biz: Tell us a little about yourselves. What’s your background and why did you decide to start your own studio in games?

Lukas Steinman: Max Inferno started as a passion project between myself and Annie Macmillan. We met at art school 18 years ago in K’jipuktuk/Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, where we still live and work.

I’m programming lead, coming from a background in web and mobile app development, and Annie is art director, coming from a contemporary art practice with experience in motion design and illustration.

We’ve always loved making things together, and it just so turns out that game development is a perfect intersection of our skills! When we noticed that our concept for A Little to the Left was getting some interest, we decided to take the leap and start Max Inferno to focus on game development full time.

How did the idea for A Little to the Left come about and how long were you working on the project? How many were on the team?

The concept for A Little to the Left came about during the GMTK Game Jam 2020, inspired by the theme of “Out of Control”. We immediately thought of someone trying to cope with this feeling by seeking control of their environment by neatly organising the items in their home.

This is a behaviour we’re familiar with ourselves and was an especially poignant concept considering much of the world was under quarantine at the time.

After the game jam, we spent some more time polishing up our prototype into a vertical slice, and over time we started to see interest in the concept building on Itch.io, the platform that hosts GMTK Game Jams submissions.

In 2021, we applied for the game to be included in the Wholesome Direct showcase and were lucky to be accepted. This event really started a snowballing of opportunities for us, leading to some valuable media exposure and catching the eye of some publishers who were interested in signing the title.

It was at this time that we decided to take the leap, quit our jobs and start focusing on A Little to the Left full-time. We signed on with our publisher, Secret Mode, as a team of two and expanded the concept into a larger release, bringing on some friends to help us with art and programming.

We started to focus fully on A Little to the Left in June of 2021 and released 15 months later. It was a breakneck development cycle and in retrospect we should have given ourselves more time, but with this being our first foray into game development, we had no idea how long it would take to develop a polished video game.

It turns out that everything takes way longer than you’d expect. Nonetheless we met our release date with a game we were proud of, and players responded super positively.

Max Inferno became a core team of three when Daniel Crane joined as technical lead this year, and we continue to work with friends on contract when we require development support. 

How has the game performed on PC and console? Did the success surprise you?

The game has performed incredibly well on PC and consoles – well beyond what we, or anyone else who makes these sorts of predictions, would have expected.

A Little to the Left is a niche puzzle game that wouldn’t normally capture attention from a wide audience, but the game was able to gather 100k Steam Wishlists leading up to launch which buoyed our hopes for a successful release. 

These wishlists were first kicked off by a positively received Steam Next Fest demo and inclusions in some high-profile showcases, such as Day of the Devs and Nintendo Indie World. Once we launched, the game immediately developed a strong fanbase and really piqued interest from a wide range of players and non-gamers alike.

If I were to guess, I’d say our success has been largely thanks to the game’s light-hearted go-at-your-own-pace attitude, strong “just one more puzzle” energy, punchy visual style and easy to understand organisation puzzle mechanic.

Streamers and social have been huge drivers for us with the game trending on TikTok periodically, which has also led to organic coverage from some large streamers such Markiplier, Jerma, and Gab Smolders.

What is it like working on a game as a small indie studio in today’s game climate? What challenges do you face and what opportunities does working independently provide you?

We’re incredibly fortunate that we’ve been able to keep our studio super small and independent – we’re currently maintaining A Little to the Left as a team of four – while having the opportunity to reach an audience that’s really connected with our game and helped us succeed.

We’re the lucky ones – being an indie dev in today’s climate is incredibly risky – there are just so many quality titles releasing every day and it’s getting harder and harder to get noticed.

Discovery is a huge challenge, not just on the storefronts, but also to get the attention of platforms, publishers or funding should you need help getting your game out there.

We found that marketing and business development took up close to half of our time leading up to launch, and that was even with a great publisher on our side helping make connections with partners and drum up marketing opportunities.

Releasing a video game is incredibly complex and we had no idea how many hats we’d have to be able to wear to get our game out to the world – this has been both a challenge and an opportunity for us working as a small indie studio.

The benefit of being so small is that we have full control over the creative direction and voice of A Little to the Left. This allows us to have a sharp focus for the concept and to imbue the project with a strong personality by incorporating playful tidbits from our personal lives throughout both the game and our marketing.

On the other side, the challenge of being so small is that there were a lot of bumps – some anticipated and many not – along the road to release that needed very specific skill sets, experience, or access to resources that our team just didn’t have being so new to the industry.

These were barriers that were quite stressful to navigate within a tight timeline and budget. We’re happy to say that we made it through and will be much more prepared the next time around.

Why did you decide to launch the game on mobile now and what’s the opportunity there?

Our biggest request from fans has been for a mobile version of the game. We had intended to release A Little to the Left on mobile from very early on in development. In fact, our very first demo tested with family and friends was running on an iPad, and the touch felt great, ultimately making its way into the Nintendo Switch version of the game.

The format of the gameplay, with approachable short-and-sweet puzzles and lots of variety, also fits well with mobile, so we think that the game will feel right at home.

Our main motivation for bringing A Little to the Left to mobile now is that while we’ll likely see some fans picking up the game again to be able to have it close on hand, there is a huge market of potential players that are interested in A Little to the Left that haven’t had a means to play because they don’t game on PC or consoles. 

Why go with a free trial and premium price point? That seems like a tough sell in the modern mobile games market. Did you explore other business models like partnering with a subscription service?

It’s been incredibly hard to figure out our go-to-market strategy for mobile. For one, the data on best approaches doesn’t seem to be widely shared, with most insights to be found to be catered towards free-to-play market strategies.

All arrows seemed to point toward this approach, but we don’t have an IAP-laden experience, nor were we interested in making the game ad supported. That would ruin the flow and atmosphere, but more importantly, ads just aren’t fun.

We did pursue subscription services such as Apple Arcade or Netflix, but those avenues didn’t pan out. We also considered a premium release, which is quite common for premium PC/console games that get ported to mobile, but there’s little data on how these games have performed.

These games are also often sold at a steep discount from their PC/console counterparts, which has always felt a little odd to me, especially since our port of A Little to the Left on mobile is not any lesser than the experience you’d find on other platforms.

At the end of the day, we went with a free-to-start (trial) model to reduce the barriers to entry and to let players freely try out the game to see if it’s something they think they’d like before making the purchase. It’s still early days from our release, so we’ll have to wait and see how this approach fares. 

How did you become aware of mobile copycats and how have they impacted sales and your plans for the title? Also – how have they impacted yourselves as developers?

Copycats have been a huge thorn in our side and have taken way too many resources to manage over the past couple of years. There’s been no shortage of copycats popping up in both the App Store and on Google Play every single week. It’s required constant diligence.

The copycats can be very difficult to find, and luckily for us, we have a very devoted fanbase who have been instrumental in reporting copycat listings to us when they find them.

We also do weekly searches of our game name in the stores, and from there, we’ll use the “similar apps you might like” sections to investigate other connected apps to look for more obscure infringements: name, app icon, screenshots, art assets, trailers, ads. All these elements get utilised by copycats to try and trick consumers into downloading their heavily ad-supported apps.

We keep track of known copycats in a spreadsheet, which is embarrassingly long at this point. From there we can track the status of our claims, whether a developer is a “serial” copycat, and try to look for patterns to help us find other copycats as they change their tactics. It’s exhausting.

The only course of action is to report these copycats to Apple and Google in the hopes that they’ll rule in our favor and remove these fraudulent listings from their stores, but the process is slow and frustrating

They do eventually take action. The preference from the platforms is for us to work issues out directly with the developer of the copycat apps to see if we can come to an agreement.

However this approach often draws out the process as the infringing developers will present as amenable to resolution, but actually don’t have intention to make right, as impersonating A Little to the Left is their primary source of discovery.

It’s incredibly hard to tell if the presence of these copycats has impacted the sales of A Little to the Left on other platforms. But we can for sure say that it’s caused confusion. For example, high-profile streamers seeing convincing listings on the mobile stores and directing their audiences to a copycat.

The toll these copycats have taken on us is substantial; managing copycats has been a constant, time consuming, expensive, and overall deflating experience.

What’s next for Max Inferno? Are you looking to expand on A Little to the Left? Are you working on new projects?

A Little to the Left will land on Android later this year, alongside our Cupboards & Drawers and Seeing Stars DLCs, and we have other updates for A Little to the Left planned as well.

As for what’s next, all we can say right now is that we’re very excited.

Are you an indie developer?

At Pocket Gamer Connects there are a number of ways indies can put their hot new games in front of publishers, investors and industry peers – as well as gain insights from other indies.

We’ll be hosting the Pocket Gamer Connects Jordan on November 9th and 10th. If you want to take part in the Very Big Indie Pitch to get your game in front of experts and gain valuable feedback, you can submit your game here. We’ll also be hosting the Big Indie Zone, an exclusive expo area for indies to show off their games.

Not heading to Jordan? Pocket Gamer Connects London will take place on January 20th to 21st. Once again we’ll host the Very Big Indie Pitch, the Big Indie Zone, while also bringing the Incredible Indies track to the show live on stage!