TOGETHER LIKE VOLTRON

Indie games often aspire to be different, and Crossy Road did, too. Hall and Sum wanted to create a free-to-play game that would sell well at first and then drift away. To do that, Hall figured, it needed two things. First, Crossy Road needed "retention," which just means the game gave players several reasons to enjoy and play the game as long as possible. Free-to-play games tend to be good at that, offering incentives that reward players to come back. In lieu of a traditional narrative ending, for example, free-to-play games have a solid gameplay loop.

Done well, the incentives and gameplay would create what Hall calls "virality," to which the developers add elements that make payers want to share and talk about the game. If they were successful, Hall believed, everything would "come together like Voltron."

A template exists for games like these with hooks like these, but Hipster Whale didn't want to copy anything. They wanted to emulate the good — even Crossy Road's name is a tribute to another recent, easy-to-play, addictive mobile phenomenon, Flappy Bird — and exorcise the bad. And, the thinking went, if they made a popular game, they might also make some money, even if they didn't stress the money-making part.

The point is, Crossy Road's oddities were deliberate and focused.

"It wasn't like throwing darts at a dartboard and spinning around three times," Hall told Polygon with a laugh. "We took careful aim at a different dartboard. Everyone's playing with that one. We're going to go over here. We think that might work."

They spent months trying to combine the essences of Flappy Bird and Frogger, until Hall had what he calls a "shower moment" — an epiphany in a moment of dull routine — where he realized Hipster Whale could fuse art, commerce, design and marketing into something with heart.

"If you make a game that's only about business, you're going to get Candy Crush clones," he says. To make art, you need to do some mixing. If they made money, then so much the better. And that could fuel subsequent games.

"Crossy Road, I think, feels a lot like a premium game, in a weird way."

At the core of the experiment that became Crossy Road's design, the developers tried to figure out how to make a fun, free game that didn't behave like a free game. They wanted to embrace a new and potentially lucrative design, informed by older things they both enjoyed.

That's what gives Crossy Road its character. Nobody has to pay a dime to play. Any character they want to use still can be be earned quickly. Everyone has the option of buying a favorite character piecemeal, but it's not a requirement, and the in-game store doesn't intrude with reminders that money must be spent.

"Freemium was a surprise, right? I'm sure it caught everyone by surprise," Hall said. "But there's a lot of thought that went into it. There's a lot of my own wrestling with that concept. I really like games the way they were. Crossy Road, I think, feels a lot like a premium game, in a weird way."

As proof, he offers the Piggy Bank, an item in Crossy Road that is only unlocked by paying for it. To the people who continue to write him asking if there's any way they can pay for the game, the $3.99 Piggy Bank character effectively serves as the game's price. It is the game's most popular character.