Radical Graphics Studios

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I work for Butterfly Works. We’re a social impact and relations studio, and we work with clients around the globe so they can get the best social impact from working with their beneficiaries. 

We mainly work with big NGOs. I work as a company developer and learning experience designer. In the case of the work we did with Radical Graphics Studios, I’m the game producer, and they’re our developers.

What challenge were you trying to address with Radical Graphics Studios?

We started working with them mainly because we needed skills and flexibility. We were looking to develop a game with the aim of having a high social impact in Yemen.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Radical Graphics has developed six of the games we have in our collection. For the seventh, they mentored a couple of our consultants, who started their own game studio. They transferred development skills to them. 

The games had to be extremely applicable to the local context. They coded in lots of details considering graphics and the ways people looked and spoke.

Radical Graphics also created a leader board to go with the game and connected it to Facebook pages. They’ve been doing some cross-promotion for this game and the others, and they’ve been dealing with lots of changes on the Google Play Store.

The most recent game they developed for us is called Arwa’s World. It’s a puzzle game where users match identical icons on a grid with the aim of unlocking higher and higher upgrades. The idea is to reach the final upgrade, which unlocks stories. 

Stories are GIF-animated representations of a little girl growing up. She has a Yemeni, Oriental look, and she grows up to become a leader of her community. Success stories are released with empowering messages for young women to believe in their dreams. 

The games are all Android apps available on the Google Play Store for free under the collection name Arabia Felix. They can be played on smartphones and tablets. They made the games in Unity, and they used Firebase for data collection. 

There’s a dashboard in Unity that we can collect data from, and they designed a system for the data to be collected on Firebase for further impact measurement.

How did you come to work with Radical Graphics Studios?

They were a recommendation from one of our former project managers. Radical Graphics was awesome, so we kept hiring them for all of our other games.

How much have you invested with them?

The cost per-game was always around $28,000–$35,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with Radical Graphics around April of 2017. Our last project ended in August 2019, and the collaboration is wrapped up until we have a contract for a new game.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

It’s a great impact story. Arwa’s World a fully-functional game that we’re extremely proud of. It has a rating of 4.5, which is really high. It has about 10,000 downloads.

It ranked as the third-best game on the Yemen Play Store at some point, just under Candy Crush and Clash of Clans. Of course, this is also due to the design, but it’s definitely thanks to Radical Graphics, too, because they were the ones making it a reality.

Another game that did really well is Eduo Quest. That was the second game they made, and it has a rating of 4.9, with a total of 598 reviews. It also has over 10,000 downloads.

Overall, Radical Graphics managed to make extremely good games that were well-appreciated by the community. The success of the games also impacts the community, and the community has been growing tremendously. Right now, we have close to 46,000 people following us on Facebook.

How did Radical Graphics Studios perform from a project management standpoint?

They underpromised and over-delivered. They’re great at meeting deadlines. On our end, we had to kick ourselves sometimes to come up with more content because they were already done.

Also, they were always clear and transparent about their processes and expectations. They developed jargon that allowed us to understand them. They were always helpful in contributing to using their experience. They brought in new ideas and points of view.

We had a complex process of remote collaboration with a country that’s not in the same time zone, so we had to do remote workshops. We’ve been working with Radical Graphics for the past two years, and neither they nor we have met our Yemen consultants. It’s a delicate task that they were totally able to manage.

We used Trello a lot, along with Slack and Appear.In for communication and tracking. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

They were an amazing partner for developing new kinds of games. This project was very different from a normal assignment given to a development studio, and Radical Graphics was amazing and flexible in entering a process with us. (We had no idea what game we’d be making at the beginning of the process. It was an ever-changing environment of ideas and priorities.)

Are there any areas they could improve?

We realized later down the line that some things weren’t fully functional. We had to do a lot of testing, but I don’t have experience with other developers, so I don’t know whether that’s typical. 

Sometimes, the bugs seemed obvious, but we still had to spend a lot of time testing each game and making bug reports. It felt like we, as clients, had to dedicate a lot of time on the development of the game. 

This might’ve been because we had budget limitations. Sometimes they were willing to help and go the extra mile, and sometimes it felt like they weren’t.