Casual Games Harmony

There are many ways to compare performance of different games. You can look at the top tens of a particular portal, check a global game top-ten charts (like the one of Logler) or even sort games according to their score on CasualCharts.com. Unfortunately all top-ten based methods of comparison have a serious flaw – they are always relative and their meaning changes over time. Today’s number one game might be selling less copies than yesterdays number two. If only we had an objective way to compare games…

Continue reading “Using Google Trends to compare games”

Yes this is the 13’th post of Casual Games Harmony, which is a major milestone for me as this is my very first blog. I’m not a superstitious person, but I didn’t want to risk writing about Saqqarah in the 13’th post - especially after StoneLoops! not performing up to our expectations on the first 3 portals it was recently launched on.

Anyway, misfortune is one of those things that you won’t find playing casual games. At least in the properly designed ones. Whenever you find your barbarian suddenly equipped with a Fizbin of Misfortune (Army Morale -2) she can’t throw away or you find that your dinosaurs suddenly destroyed the fences and left your dinosaur theme park, there is a good chance you are playing a hardcore game. The best casual games can give you satisfaction and immersion rivaling the best mainstream titles, but even the worst casual games will never frustrate you on par with some of the hardcore gaming classics. After all if they do frustrate then they are simply not casual anymore!

I realized today that this blog is targeted at both game developers as well as gamers and some of you might not know what the hell I’m talking about in certain posts. This is why I decided to launch a FAQ section that I will be updating with both obvious and not so obvious things and definitions so that all of you can enjoy the full capacity of this blog. If you’re not sure about something just post a comment and I will try to post clarifications in the FAQ section.

A really funny thing happened to me today. When StoneLoops! was launched on Reflexive Arcade I decided to write and submit a short review for the game. After all everyone is entitled to having his own opinion and developers should not be discriminated in this manner. The review was quite honest (in my utterly biased kind of way) and went like this:

Wow! This game is simply amazing! Even if you don’t like marble poppers you should check it out because it has this new pull and shoot mechanics that I’ve never seen in any similar game before. The gameplay is much more strategic then in Zuma or Luxor because you get to choose marbles directly from the path. Such a small change, and suddenly the rusty old marble popping gets interesting and fun again.

The screenshots don’t do the game any justice - it looks much better in motion and with all the sound effects. The only negative thing I have to say about this game is that the sounds are a bit on the aggressive side and can get tiresome after a while, but you can always tweak the volume to your liking and keep having lots of fun!

The funny part started today when I was contacted and informed that my review was chosen as the last weeks best review. I was happy to hear that due to this StoneLoops! review will be featured on the Reflexive front page during the whole next week. It will hopefully give a nice boost to the game. Oh, and I also get to choose one free game! I think that I will be writing more reviews from now on. If you’re a developer of causal games I suggest you do the same – if your game is not a time management or hidden object, this might be the only way to get your game some front page portal promotion…

We came up with the idea of StoneLoops! less than 3 years ago when Luxor and Luxor Amun Rising were topping the charts. At the root of the idea there was a very simple (yet powerful) twist on the usual marble popping mechanics. We would try to blend the mechanics of Luxor with the pull and push gameplay of Astropop. We knew that what we came up with would work the moment we completed the prototype. Making it took us about 3 hours with one of the early versions of our in-house game engine CUG Framework.

On the screenshot to the right you can see how the prototype looked. If you’re interested you can even give it a try! Anyway, we had this great idea but we didn’t have the time to implement it. This was because after completing Magic Match and witnessing its success, we (me and Konrad) decided to finish our master studies. Then we would be setting up an office and gathering a team of developers. But that’s another story.

In the end we decided to outsource the development of StoneLoops! to a second party developer – The Farm 51, also from Poland. Everything looked good up till this point. We had a solid initial design, a working prototype and a company run by retail industry veterans to develop the game. What more would you want? A lot, in fact. According to the development contract StoneLoops! was to be completed over a period of 4 months and launched before December 2006. Yes, this is not a typo. The game was finally launched in March 2008, which gives a 16 month delay to the original schedule. Interested what the hell happened? Read on!

Continue reading “The making of StoneLoops!”

When we were going full time with Codeminion (less than two years ago) we decided to open an office and try to grow our business step by step. At that time we had to make many decisions, like for example do we need a conference room or do we need a centralized server for the network. Now we regret many of the decisions we made - like having a conference room that is rarely used - but there are also ones that we are happy about  - like having a centralized server for the network.

Continue reading “Ideas on managing your projects”

StoneLoops! is a good game but not a great hit. At least not as big of a hit as we have hoped for. This is due to the fact that the game was launched about a year late off the schedule and with passing time the market became very harsh for marble poppers. I will be writing more about it in the postmortem of the game later on. Anyway, StoneLoops! has already been launched on several portals (Bigfish, Reflexive and Iwin) and is on its way to others, but still there are some distributors that passed on launching the game.

We asked a representative of one of such portals (which I won’t name here) about the reason for the rejection of the game’s submission. To our surprise we received a very honest answer, which went something like this:

Continue reading “Portals not interested in high quality games?”

In case you missed it, today we have announced the gameplay details of Saqqarah, our biggest and most ambitious project so far. Jumping right to the point, the biggest single innovation in the game is the “distorted grid” board system. Basically while other match-3 games use grid like regular boards, in Saqqarah every single level is a graph with an unrestricted layout of nodes and curved connections.

I remember the day (about one and a half years ago) when we came up with the idea. By that time we were very impressed with strategic games like Pax Galaxia and Galcon and wanted to do something similar, but all our initial ideas were basically simplified war games played on graphs and we knew that it just wouldn’t appeal to the casual audience. Suddenly we asked ourselves the question: why not make a match-3 game played on graphs? After making a quick prototype we knew that this was a great idea as all of the popular match-3 mechanics (swap, rotate, drag select, pop, etc.) worked well with such a setup and felt very fresh. Now the question was: which one should we implement in the final game?

Continue reading “Saqqarah USP’s revealed!”

Lately we’ve been giving several interviews for local magazines here in Poland. This is because there is a lot of hype going on with the recent release of StoneLoops! of Jurassica and the nearing beta of Saqqarah, our most ambitious project so far. Anyway, one of the interviews was quite peculiar because it focused on the production of the graphics for Magic Match (our most successful game so far) so I thought this is an interesting topic to write about in English as well…

There are many interesting things to say about Magic Match, both from the development and business points of view. If you ask me, the game deserves a whole postmortem of its own - and in fact I plan to write it soon. Anyway, before we get down to the details of making graphics for Magic Match there are some basic things you should know about the game’s development.

Magic Match was created by only two developers - me and my business partner Konrad. We did everything ourselves including the design, graphics, programming, sounds and music, testing and business stuff. The only outsourced element was the voice in the songs because our attempts to sing proved to be futile. We worked on the game for about a year, part time as we both attended daytime studies at the time.

Continue reading “The making of Magic Match: Graphics”

In case you were wondering how many PC casual downloadable games are out there, here is a hint - A LOT! Below is a chart showing the sizes of the game catalogues on the major portals as of today (3′rd of May 2008). As you can see Reflexive has the biggest catalogue with 1008 games, the latest being our own Codeminion developed marble popper StoneLoops!.

• Game catalogue sizes of major portals (PC downloadable as of 3′rd of May 2008)

All of the catalogues share most of the games but even so this is a huge number. If you sum up all of the data shown on the chart it gives you 5674 free hours of gameplay. No wonder selling your games is so difficult.

Continue reading “How many casual games are out there?”