Modern Games, a new games company specialising in merging physical and digital play, has acquired the tabletop stacking game Beasts of Balance.

The award-winning Beasts of Balance was created and launched by Sensible Object, but the studio was acquired last year by Niantic and become Niantic London.

According to TechCrunch, Modern Games is relaunching Beasts of Balance as well as bringing a new game to market in the form of Seven Sails, a tactical war game about pirates.

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Sensible Object, the firm behind Beasts of Balance, has been acquired by Niantic, the studio responsible for Pokémon Go.

Founded in 2014, Sensible Object has been developing games that combine physical and digital play and the company will now focus its efforts on building all new real-world AR experiences with Niantic as the core of Niantic London.

“We’re excited about Sensible Object joining Niantic as it significantly advances our efforts in developing a wide range of gaming experiences that bring the physical and digital world closer together,” said Niantic CEO John Hanke.

Sensible Object CEO Alex Fleetwood added: “John Hanke and his team have an incredible, progressive vision for the future of play that resonates deeply with us; building global communities, pioneering new forms of augmented reality, and helping people get outside, get exercise and connect with one another in the real world.”

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The journey that led to Beasts of Balance started all way back in the misty past of 2015.

That initial team consisted of the core of the development team now: there was Alex Fleetwood, the company founder, with a misty dream of making a game that combined the richness of videogames with the social connection of board games; there was Tim Burrell-Saward (who wrote the previous entry in this column) a physical designer with a fine eye for getting the curves of our beasts just right; Chris Shaw, an engineer who had been working on exciting new contraptions for piloting drones; Lyall McCarthy, an illustrator with a precise, intricate style; and me, George Buckenham, a indie videogame developer with a history in making wild things for exhibitions.

Together we sat down and started tackling the problem from the ground up: how does a computer know if a pile of things has fallen over? And what things are fun to make fall over?

When we started, we assumed that the details of how you stacked things would be a key component in how the mechanics worked. We started investigating intricate computer vision systems, patterns on the sides of irregular shapes that could match up with each other… but we already knew we wanted to make a game that people could buy and have in their homes, so we knew it needed to be cheap and reliable. Which, sadly, computer vision has not quite achieved yet.

So we started paring back the information we were using, until all we knew about the tower is what thing was currently getting stacked (via an implanted RFID chip), and the total weight of all the stacked things (via a load cell in the base). As we reduced the inputs available to the game, we found the mechanics became clearer and simpler, too.

We always knew we wanted to make a game about animals, a game about ecosystems and “balance” (I strongly advocate for pun-based game design, by the way).

We were making a competitive game, a head to head game for two players about messing with food-chains.

We wanted to add depth and strategy, and we wanted lots of interesting shapes for players to stack.

So we worked away, solving many problems along the way, and sent Alex off to GDC 2016 with a heavy case filled with an intricate, rich, stacking game with 48 unique pieces. And people liked it! They had fun playing it, and it was clearly new and fresh and exciting. We returned from the conference, happy and ready to commit to turning this prototype into a commercial, polished project.

Fast forward to that autumn – we were iterating on the design, smoothing out the rough edges and trying to make the game comprehensible. We knew there was fun there, somewhere – we had fun when we played. But, we were having a hard time convincing new players of that fun.

I clearly remember one particular moment, demoing the game at a party, when I started explaining the game to a (somewhat inebriated) girl, and she, with the honesty of alcohol, straight-up asked me “but why is it so complicated”? I’m sure I gave her a good answer, but I don’t think it convinced her… and it didn’t really convince me, either.

So we scrapped the whole design. Pretty much, anyway – we took out most of the complicated pieces, opened it up so it was a collaborative experience for a fluid number of players, took out all the complicated rules about cascading effects of food chains and focused on the stuff that players had responded to – making weird hybrid beasts and keeping them alive.

We reduced the number of screens down to one and we took out almost all of the interaction with the tablet – we made it simple and straightforward. Again, we found salvation in paring back the design to the small core that had shown itself to be fun and ruthlessly cutting all the clever stuff around it.

There were many challenges over the next year of development – how to indicate to players how the pieces operated, how to make them care about the beasts they were creating (even: how do we make these mutant hybrids without killing ourselves making hundred of unique designs – or rather, killing Lyall).

And of course, there was the always-exciting challenge of raising money on Kickstarter and telling the world at large about the cool thing we were making. But from this point on, we had found the fun, and were able to focus on the easier task of not losing it again, and not hiding it with other details.

So that’s the story of how the design of Beasts of Balance came to be. We launched last November, and we’ve had a great response. And since launch, we’ve kept busy – we’ve just finished a second Kickstarter campaign, where we’ve recovered a few of the ideas we lost along the way, and added some new ones informed by the lessons we learned over the past year or two of watching people play the game and discussing ideas with our fans.

So watch out for next year, when a competitive version of Beasts of Balance will finally be unleashed upon the world!

George Buckenham is lead programmer at Sensible Object.

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In the first of a new series lifting the lid on the development process behind Sensible Object’s new edition of Beasts of Balance, the firm’s lead designer – Tim Burrell-Saward – talks us through the prototyping stage of its award-winning augmented reality stacking game.

The product team here at Sensible Object works somewhat like a mildly dysfunctional family. We can disagree about anything and everything: from huge, game-defining decisions like core mechanic choices all the way down to whether dragons can vomit lava. That’s right; we had an actual argument about whether dragons can vomit lava. Official line: they can.

This way of working came about because, to be frank, we’ve been running at 100 miles an hour since the day we started the company and simply didn’t have the capacity to stop and define proper working practises.

When you’re an unknown, unproven studio trying to make something ridiculously ambitious, to a tight deadline and to an even tighter budget, you find yourself having to sprint a marathon.

Once we’d hobbled over the finish line (having successfully Kickstarted, manufactured and shipped our award-winning, digital-physical hybrid game Beasts of Balance), we took a moment to examine the ways in which we approach the various aspects of the creative side to the studio, keen to reduce unnecessary friction, improve efficiency and generally ensure everyone enjoys themselves. We’re making games after all, and that should be fun.

The concept phase of any project is always the point where creative teams can most easily run into issues, as so much of it can come down to personal opinion. With these kinds of discussions it tends to be difficult for all sides to subjectively quantify their standpoints, so we felt it was important that we took a little time to define proper frameworks to work within.

And after a fair bit of trial and error, we’ve been trialling a version of Google’s Design Sprint system, mixed in with some good housekeeping advice from respected sources such as IDEO. We’re still adapting them to fit our needs, but they seem to be helping.

Our concept development work usually runs in two simultaneous tracks. Game concepts typically begin life as a series of lo-fi paper prototypes, allowing for quick play testing and iteration, but there inevitably comes the point where things need to move to digital. MVPs are made as quickly as the complexity of the mechanics and interaction methods will allow, in order that playtesting can continue. Generally the more playthroughs you run, the better the end product, so we try to cram in as many as we can.

In conjunction with this is the physical concept process, which follows a similar cadence. Simple placeholders are used in the early days (in the case of Beasts of Balance, literal bits of wood and plasticine).

After this, the 3D design process starts, employing 3D printers to produce lots of quick and dirty iterations. Typically these are very rough prototypes, but they’re great for feeling out the concept space and progressing ideas quickly and fluidly. Electronics prototyping mirrors this, usually beginning on prototyping platforms like Arduino or Raspberry Pi before moving on to custom component fabrication.

It can be easy for these very different disciplines to splinter and diverge, especially given the speed in which all of this is taking place, so having a solid framework of processes to default back to helps keep things on track (and also keeps our stress levels just about manageable).

Once we have a concept we’re happy with, the next step is to move onto design proper. But that’s a story for another time…

Tim Burrell-Saward is a founding studio member of Sensible Object and lead designer for Beasts of Balance.

Check out the Kickstarter campaign for the new edition of Beasts of Balance here.

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Sensible Object has returned to Kickstarter with a new campaign for an expansion to its award-winning augmented reality stacking game, Beasts of Balance.

This year’s campaign introduces a series of new additions to Beasts of Balance, including a new competitive gameplay mode known as Battles and new physical pieces to collect.

“We had an incredible experience with Kickstarter last year,” said Alex Fleetwood, founder and CEO of Sensible Object.

“18 months ago, we were a start-up team with nothing but a prototype. Thanks in large part to the support of the Kickstarter platform and its community, we were able to bring this ambitious, groundbreaking game to life. Having shipped the game on time to an amazing response, we’re ready to take things to the next level. Our players and backers have been hungry for new ways to play and new pieces to collect, and we can’t wait to share our work with them.”

In Beasts of Balance, players take on the role of Divine Creators, tasked with building worlds and reaching high scores by stacking magical Artefacts into towers. Everything added to the tower interacts with a world that evolves on a wirelessly connected digital device. To succeed, players have to keep their tower and the ecosystem of their world in balance, stacking all 24 pieces and caring for the virtual beasts they create.

In the new Battles mode, two to three players each take on the role of a Divine Creator of a single region: Land, Sea or Sky. The aim is to fill your region with powerful beasts while stealing and destroying those of your opponents.

Elsewhere, the More Beasts Pack introduces three brand new beasts for players to collect: sassy Flamingo, impossibly cute Chameleon and slightly dopey Angler Fish. When played into the game, these new beasts can be crossed and evolved to create over 100 new digital hybrids.

Check out the Kickstarter campaign here.

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In February 2016, Beasts of Balance from London-based tech start-up Sensible Object hit Kickstarter. The game, a blend of tabletop dexterity and digital strategy, sees players take on the role of gods and goddesses, taking turns to add magical Artefacts (including an array of beasts) onto a balancing tower. Every time you successfully stack an Artefact, the connected digital world is altered, allowing users to build magical worlds and create fascinating new beasts.

The game raised over £165k on the crowdfunding platform and landed on UK shelves in November, where it was immediately met with a wave of critical acclaim: some deemed it the “perfect melding of a digital and physical game” while others called it “the next evolution of the toys-to-life gaming.”

As the firm returns to Kickstarter with its first expansion pack, Beasts of Balance Battles, we caught up with Sensible Object CEO Alex Fleetwood to discuss the origins of the game and how both the toy industry and the tech sector have responded to the product.

How did Sensible Object come together?
Before Sensible Object, I founded and ran a design studio called Hide&Seek. Hide&Seek made games and experiences for clients such as Tate Modern and PlayStation. I created a lot of hybrid physical/digital game projects and as the IoT revolution got going, saw an opportunity to take everything we’d been learning about and pack it down into tabletop form. It was around the time of the peak of Skylanders craze – and I thought that a lot more could be done to generate fun interactions between physical and digital.

Where did the idea for Beasts of Balance come from?
Beasts of Balance started when I was making a fire in a campsite in California. While stacking bits of firewood and watching pelicans fly by, I had an idea for a game that linked the balance of nature with the balance of objects.

Once back in London, I called up George, Tim and Lyall – who I’d worked with while making games at Hide&Seek. With the help of Play Sandbox, we started working on a prototype with the engineering department at Bath University. Chris began helping us with hardware, and rapidly became the fifth member of the team. We worked together on and off for about a year before we shipped our first Kickstarter campaign.

Why opt to launch via Kickstarter?
Kickstarter is just a brilliant platform. We had an incredible time with them in 2016. They introduced us to a global audience of enthusiasts who helped validate what we were trying to do, gave us invaluable feedback on the game and have formed the backbone of our burgeoning player community. And of course they helped fund our initial production run.

We’re excited to return to the platform – with a shipped game, great reviews and a load of cool new stuff to share, we think it’s going to be an exciting month.

Each of the beasts has a great, unique look to them. Can you talk us through some of the design decisions around the look of the creatures in the game?
Tim leads on product design. The challenge was to come up with something that was super-collectable and also really fun to stack. We ran through dozens of 3D printed prototypes before settling on the final forms.

How have you found the experience of straddling the line between physical toy and digital play experience?
The most exciting thing is the reaction from players and families. We’re really solving a problem in homes – kids want to play games on mobile devices, but unlimited screen time is off the table. The game manages to be inclusive – we see boys, girls, parents, grandparents all playing the game and really enjoying it.

Augmenting a physical social play experience with video game design gets people very excited, and we’re seeing that in the data we get back from the app – over 17 play sessions on average per household.

How has the response to Beasts of Balance differed between the toy industry and the tech sector?
I think that everyone’s curious about what we’re doing and supportive; they want to see us succeed. Naturally, the questions you get asked are very different! Tech people understand the analytics and digital product side of what we do – toy people are interested in BOM, retail and distribution and how we’re doing with all of that.

The challenge for us is succeeding on both of those fronts! Look out for announcements on our next project which we think are a new leap forward for mass-market connected games.

Do you think the world of toys and games is in a good place, creativity-wise?
Yes and no. I have a lot of respect for the creative work of companies in the sector, from Hasbro to Big Potato, but I think that in this new field of augmented reality/ connected play/whatever you want to call it, we’re barely scratching the surface of what’s possible. I would love to see more ambition and imagination, especially from the bigger companies.

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