In Case of Emergency, Make Burrito Bison 3 (2017)

The Making of Burrito Bison: Launcha Libre

TL;DR

• Our previous game, Toto Temple Deluxe, didn’t sell as expected
• We decided to make a new Burrito Bison to get back on our feet financially
• We added lots of new features to improve on the 2 previous games
• We had to adapt the BB formula to the F2P mobile market
• The mobile release has been a success so far
• Some numbers

If you’ve been living under a rock (or if you don’t know about us, which would be strange because we’re super famous, really) you might have missed that in November 2016 we released the 3rd game in the Burrito Bison series, Burrito Bison: Launcha Libre, for web, iOS and Android.

If you’re unfamiliar with Burrito Bison, it’s a simple and supposedly addicting game about Mexican launchadores (launching + luchadores) wrestling gummy bears. It’s a classic launching game, like any you’ve probably played in your browser a couple years ago, but on steroids.

The Burrito Bison games are probably our most famous games to date, just above Knightmare Tower. They all went pretty viral back in our Flash days (we’re talking dozens of millions of plays). You might be thinking “if it’s your most popular franchise, why did you wait 4+ years to make another one?” That’s actually a very good question!

Why wait 4 years before cashing in on that success?

Busy Beast

The direct answer to that is probably that a bunch of opportunities led us to work on other things after releasing Burrito Bison Revenge (BBR) in 2012. Here’s a quick list of what we did since.

• Burrito Bison Revenge on Kongregate
• Knightmare Tower on Kongregate
• Flippin Dead on Kongregate
• Knightmare Tower on Ouya
• Knightmare Tower on iOS
• Toto Temple at ToJam
• Gentlemen Dispute at Indie Speed Run
• Knightmare Tower on Android
• FROX at ToJam
• Knightmare Tower on Steam
• Toto Temple Deluxe on Ouya
• Toto Temple Deluxe on PS4, Xbox One, Wii U and Steam
• Right Click to Necromance at Indie Speed Run
• Burrito Bison: Launcha Libre on Kongregate
• Burrito Bison: Launcha Libre on mobile
• Burrito Bison: Launcha Libre content update (Time Travel)
• Burrito Bison: Launcha Libre content update (Stopwatch Mode)

As you can see, apart from Toto Temple Deluxe and a bunch of jam games, we haven’t release any new games. It’s mostly just ports of our old games.

Adventurous Beast

The other, less obvious answer to that brilliant question is that we like to create new things and experiment with new ideas. Making the same game over and over gets pretty boring (yes, like ports). We also felt that there wasn’t much we could add to the Burrito Bison experience to justify making another one.

The ugly truth

Let’s be honest for a second. The ugly truth is that… It’s that… Jeez it’s hard to say… The truth is that we did it for the money.

Seriously though, here’s why.

Toto Temple Deluxe’s financial failure

It might be a surprise to you, but Toto Temple Deluxe didn’t sell that much. The game is good, fun and everything, but it’s local-multiplayer only, and these are extremely hard to sell. Long story short, it was a pretty serious situation that nearly kicked us out of business. We were out of money and we needed a way to get back on our feet quick.

Evaluating options

“How about a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for a new game?” That would take months... We would clearly take too much time and we’d run out of money before even reaching the end of the prototype phase.

“You guys are in Canada, right? Why not apply to the Canadian Media Funds?” CMF is a really good option... The thing is that applying to CMF is pretty similar to building a Kickstarter Campaign. It would take us months to build a solid pitch.

“Can’t you just get a loan from a bank or something?” That would have been a solution, but it’s not always as easy as it sounds. We like to think of borrowing money as a last resort.

The Solution

Wait a minute. Remember that thing Kongregate did back in August 2015 called Battle KongRoyale? Burrito Bison Revenge ended up winning that popularity contest.

Shortly after Toto Temple Deluxe’s release, I thought: “That’s it, that’s how we can get back on our feet!” We could use this contest to ask Kongregate if they want to fund the development of a new Burrito Bison game!

As you can guess, we got in touch with Kongregate, and after a couple weeks discussion surrounding our pitch, we finally got a funding deal for Burrito Bison 3! We were saved.

It felt a tiny bit wrong

Our priority was to get back on our feet (financially), and thanks to Kongregate, we succeeded. It still felt a little bit wrong because we weren’t making a new Burrito Bison because we wanted to, but because we had to in order to survive as a business.

Making the best BB we can, no matter what

Even if making a new Burrito Bison game wasn’t our first choice, we still wanted to make it the best in the series. We still care about the quality of our games, and we would never release a game we’re not proud of.

In order to improve on an already good game, we used the same process we used to make the first two games. It was all about taking something we like, and finding what could be done better. It was a pretty organic development process, since the foundation was already there.