Helmi Games is a Finnish game studio with a core of two enthusiastic developers: Matti Anttonen and Janne Mankinen. Our mission is to offer unique playing experiences for the players. We have been creating Bouncer Story for a few years already and an essential part of the development have been collecting direct feedback from the gamers to improve the game during the years. We launched an early beta-version for iOS and Android in October 2018 and gathered very quickly 300 beta-testers for the game. The feedback was encouraging. Players loved the setup of playing as a bouncer and getting involved in a film-noir styled story involving mafia, detectives and a murder mystery.
Your decisions matter
Bouncer Story has 13 different endings to discover based on the decisions you make in the game. Beta-feedback made it clear for us to increase the tempo of the plot to encourage replayability. At the moment it takes about 6 hours to complete the game which stimulates replayability as dozens of in-game-choices affects the story. You can decide if you want to help the detectives, to be loyal to mafia or something between. All variations offer different twists in the plot.
We soft-launched the game on mobile in October 2019 and our analytics data discovered a need to improve the onboarding of new players. We completely changed the beginning of the game to make it more inspiring, redesigned our tutorials and fixed all the bugs in the game. Now we are ready for an official PC/Mac release and we hope to offer a unique playing experience for big screen gamers as well.
Journalists have reacted positively on the soft-launched game:
Pocket Gamer’s GAMES OF THE WEEK for iOS and Android
“Bouncer Story is a really interesting offering, in many ways it captures notes of Lucas Pope’s Papers Please or PanicBarn’s Not Tonight, however it chooses to focus more on the choices and branching story rather than the constricting beurocracy of its forebearers.” -Pocket Gamer
https://www.pocketgamer.com/articles/081333/games-of-the-week-the-5-best-new-games-for-ios-and-android-october-17th/page/2/
SNAPP Attack review
“Helmi Games really surprised me with this one. With a bunch of different endings, you have no clue how things are going to go. There’s so many twists and turns every night that I wanted to keep playing. If you’re a fan of management sims or are looking for something a little different. Bouncer Story is definitely worth picking up. Who knew that being in debt could be so much fun?!” -SNAPP Attack
http://snappattack.com/2019/10/16/bouncer-story-ios-snapp-review/
DroidGamers best new Android games of the week
“Bouncer Story is a surprisingly deep simulation of what life could be like in the world of a nightclub bouncer.” -DroidGamers
https://www.droidgamers.com/2019/10/19/best-new-android-games-released-this-week-bad-north-super-80s-world-monolisk/