What it Takes to be an Independent Game Developer – Interview with Yang Yang Mobile

Staying afloat in the gaming industry is not an easy task. Game developers have to compete against a deluge of new titles, and they are pitted against incumbents with established brands and massive resources. In the midst of such rigorous competition, several developers are able to achieve international success.

​Media Context speaks to an editorial representative at Yang Yang Mobile, a company that has made impressive strides in its industry.

​Producing Yang Yang Mobile’s Games

Writing and Reviewing Story Pitches

From pre-production to full release, our games take us around 1.5 to 2.5 years each to develop.

Our stories are forged from the blood, sweat, and tears of our incredibly talented writing team. Our story’s outline and branching paths took months of planning, and were carefully written and edited multiple times throughout the development cycle.

We begin by defining our game’s target genre, target audience, target length (play time), and gameplay (if there’d be any). Using this information, our writing team would then make their initial story pitches. 

We’re also on the lookout for aspiring game developers that have a great sense of artistic skills, someone who’s confident with their writing and game design abilities. We’d love to partner up with these people and help them supercharge their projects, so we can make amazing games together!

What would you require from external writers who want to pitch their games to you?

What's most important to us is that they can work on the nitty-gritty stuff of their game/visual novel, so having a solid demo together with their pitch would be invaluable. They should also have enough willpower and passion to see the project through until the end. It's not really a requirement for them to help us fundraise, but if they can, then that's just an added bonus.
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Developmental Stages

Once we’ve decided on a pitch, we’ll proceed to pre-production, which is basically our R&D/concept phase. Depending on our game’s scope, pre-production takes us about 3 to 6 months. 

Once we’re satisfied with our pre-prod, we’ll dive right into production. We’ll write the actual script, create the art assets, compose music, code the framework engine, and schedule the voice over recordings. 

When everything’s set, we do quality assurance to make sure everything’s polished and working as intended, and then marketing, in preparation for the game’s launch.

Overcoming the challenges of game development

What is the main challenge that Yang Yang Mobile has faced when developing its projects, and how has it overcome them?

One of our greatest challenges is the burnout. Our games are big and they take a long time to finish, so it’s inevitable to feel burned out in the middle of our 2-year long journey. This is a problem that plagues us until now, so we can’t really say that we’ve “overcome” it already. 

However, we’ve learned from our past mistakes and have taken measures to alleviate this, such as joining other projects for a while to break the monotonous cycle, or making smaller projects in general.
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To avoid burnout, do you put long-term projects on hold whilst you work on other initiatives?

What we used to do before is that all of us in the team would work together in 1 big long-term project. We tried to change that, so right now we're working on 1 long-term project and 2 short-term projects. When people run out of things to do in Project A, or just need to take a breather, they can choose to lend a hand with Projects B and C for a short while (as long as the deadline permits it). This is working out so far for us, without having the need to put any major projects on hold. As long as our budget affords it, we also practice having relaxed deadlines and avoid crunches.

​What are Yang Yang Mobile’s future plans?

Yes! We hope to be able to attract more talent so we can tackle bigger and more ambitious projects. Our goal is to be the new Telltale Games – except for the bankruptcy part.