We added accounts very quickly to count cheese as a currency, so that people could use it to buy hats for their mouse. The physics engine (Box2D) and real-time multiplayer allowed extremely hilarious situations, and people got hooked fast. Things were going pretty well and people were enjoying the game a lot, even with its great simplicity: no accounts, no cheese-counting, very simple brown mice and color-solid grounds. We launched the game on May the 1 st 2010 (we thought it would be funny to do it on French’s Labor Day) and we only shared the news on a single French videogames forum we were familiar with, JeuxOnline.
In about three weeks, we had a fully working prototype. The core gameplay loop was simple: climb your way up to the cheese, go back to the mouse hole, as one player (the Shaman) can summon planks and crates to help everyone. We quickly changed it for a super-mouse (the Shaman) summoning the planks and crates, but the name Transformice stuck. Thrilled by his ability to quickly make a gameplay hilarious, I accepted and proposed him a gameplay with mice having to transform themselves into crates and planks in order to help their other fellow mice to cross gaps and get the cheese: Transform-mice. Jean-Baptiste had a history of creating small browser games for fun, and asked for my help in order to a new one, with better graphics. In 2010, Jean-Baptiste Le Marchand and I were full-time employed at a French videogame company, him as a developer and I as a graphic designer / technical artist. Because making a game is hard, but making money from it is even harder. While the game isn’t actually “finished” and still under active development, today I would like to share what is has been like during those four years, from the game viewpoint of course but moreover, monetization-wise.
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