Dragon Army update: Things are going great
A funny thing happened this weekend. I updated my LinkedIn profile to include the non-profit that I co-founded, MATCH Atlanta. After updating it, I specifically moved the MATCH listing down a few pegs in the list of my “experience” because I didn’t want people to think that I was no longer with Dragon Army.
However, LinkedIn sent a handy email out as an update to people and it said, “Congratulate Jeff on his new job!” So needless to say, I received a boatload of “congrats on the new gig, what happened with Dragon Army?” notes. And there were some forums and chat areas on the web speculating on what must have happened at Dragon Army to cause me to shut it down. Too funny. I realized that it had been a while since I posted an update about Dragon Army, so without further ado…
Dragon Army is doing great!
Our team is currently at 8 people, down from 12 at the start of the year. The reduction is two fold: First, we added a few resources in Q1 to help get Robots Love Ice Cream out the door. Second, a few of our folks who weren’t passionate about games decided they wanted to pursue their passions elsewhere. When we started Dragon Army we were going to be a mobile apps and games studio, but we since dropped the “apps” and are focused solely on games. We are now at the right size to execute against our plan.
Robots Love Ice Cream has done really well. We’re approaching 500,000 downloads and for our first title, we are really excited about that. A few weeks back, the game was featured at Google I/O as one of the few games already working on their upcoming Android TV product. And we have some new updates coming soon that we’re really excited about.
We have two new games coming out soon. The first, Paper Trail, is a cross between the old Snake game and Duet Game, in the sense that its a “quick to die” type of game that is both beautiful and challenging. We will be launching Paper Trail in the next few weeks. The second game, Defend the Dam, is a tower defense game and we see it as a blend of Kingdom Rush (my personal favorite) and Plants vs. Zombies. Defend the Dam should be ready late summer.
So, things are great at Dragon Army. And I’ll be more specific the next time I update my LinkedIn profile :)
Hey Jeff,
Glad to hear things are going great! I was curious to see if Dragon Army has any plans to move outside of mobile for game development.
It seems Atlanta has gotten a lot of buzz over the last few months with Hi-Rez Studios hosting an e-sports tournament as well as Red Bull coming to town last weekend. Just curious your thoughts on the gaming scene moving forward and how you view Atlanta as possibly the next hub.
-Chad
Great question. Right now we’re fairly well committed to mobile, however, we did just port Robots Love Ice Cream to the Amazon Fire TV and Android TV, so I guess I’d say we’re opportunistic when it makes sense. We build in Unity which allows us to be fairly flexible.
Re: the Atlanta scene, did you know there are over 80 game companies in Atlanta? Obviously with more successes like Hi-Rez I hope to see that grow.