[casual_games] Startup

[Gabriel]

El jue, 08-12-2005 a las 12:30 +0100, Alex Soler escribió:

> This is very interesting, Gabriel. What kind of things do you consider you
> learned from PegSweeper that allowed you to make a profitable second game?

I'm not sure I can pick a single thing or even a finite set of things -
I think it was the sum of it all. I had been making small
demos/unfinished games since I was 12 (or 6, depending on what do you
consider an "unfinished game"), but nothing had prepared me for the
experience of making a complete game end to end. 

We thought PegSweeper was a 1 week project, but it took several months
instead (including developing a game framework which has evolved very
nicely and powers much more complex games such as Wild West Wendy and
our upcoming, hardware accelerated game). Although PegSweeper was a
commercial failure, I consider it an invaluable experience. Remember
that we had zero professional experience making games, so just
understanding the vast amount of resources, effort, time and attention
to detail was extremely important.

PegSweeper was an experiment - we didn't really expect it to make much
money. We approached our second project, what became Betty's Beer Bar,
with the conviction that we could actually finish and market a game; and
this time we paid a lot more attention to the game design itself, after
devouring every single piece of advice we could find in developer
message boards and listening carefully to the distributors feedback
about PegSweeper. 

This time, instead of small abstract pegs, we had a strong female in the
lead role! We also made a casual game instead of a hardcore logic
puzzle. Turns out we made a lot of good decisions - Betty's Beer Bar was
successful (unfortunately, we weren't aware of the current extremely-
politically-correct climate of our target markets, so many of the
biggest portals didn't want Betty's Beer Bar because it had...
cartoonish beer), and as you can see, later examples of more refined
games with very similar inspiration (girl serving customers in a bar)
have been extremely successful.

	--Gabriel

-- 
Gabriel Gambetta
Mystery Studio - http://www.mysterystudio.com
Gabriel on Graphics - http://gabrielongraphics.blogspot.com