The casual games industry has made game creation fun again. Twenty years ago, video games emerged via pure genius of industry titans such as Nolan Bushnell and Will Wright. This innovation has slowly been diluted in the traditional games industry through big-budget remakes, sequels and derivatives of games that target 18-24 year old males. What these games lack in innovation, they make up for in violence, high-end graphics and Hollywood brand recognition.
Casual game development, in some ways, is heading back to the basics with easy to grasp, addictive games. Over the past five years, an entirely new market has emerged around this type of casual game. Catering heavily to women—and men outside the hardcore gaming arena—this emerging market is pushing the limits of gaming and how they’re delivered to the consumer, capitalizing on an entirely new revenue stream. But at the center of the storm is pure innovation. In a try-before-you-buy model in which virtual shelf space is granted to top-converting titles, a game will live or die on its own merits. While purely derivative games can make money in the casual gaming space, innovative games that capture a gamer’s imagination and strike a unique chord will be more successful, irrespective of secondary factors such as whether or not it’s tied to some known consumer brand, celebrity, or marketing program.
So what exactly does innovation mean in the casual gaming market? At Sandlot Games, we believe innovation in gaming is literally the product of creative design and understanding your core demographic. Without those key elements, it’s nearly impossible to produce something great. And as all successful companies will tell you, fostering creativity and understanding customer feedback are equally important. By encouraging creativity among our teams, and having a strong sense of what our players want to play and why, we’ve been able to successfully develop and distribute a variety of popular games, including the first successful strategy casual game franchise, Tradewinds, and the most downloaded casual game of 2006, Cake Mania.
We often get asked, “What’s the secret?” Honestly, there is no secret. I simply believe that our entire staff has an incredible amount of creative energy to harness and, given the right environment and proper guidance, it can be channeled to create great games. From producers to marketing managers, everyone is encouraged to offer creative feedback at Sandlot.
Traditionally it’s hard to tell if you’ve created something really special until you offer it up for public consumption. And few truly innovative offerings are created out of whole cloth—the proverbial bolt of lightning or flash of brilliance. It is much more often an iterative process. By having a strong design that you stand behind and believe in, being creative and evaluating all user feedback, you drastically increase your chances of delivering an innovative and enjoyable game. The best way to demonstrate this is to briefly evaluate the creation of two of Sandlot’s most popular franchises: Tradewinds and Cake Mania.
Take the Long View
When we started Tradewinds, we were three guys working in the vacant upstairs bedroom of my townhouse in 2004. The Casual Games industry was mostly about jewel-matching at that time. Early on, we had decided that the traditional way of looking at a casual game was flawed. A casual game is not about a certain game-play style, like three-match. Most video games can be made casual by introducing a gentle learning curve to grasp the game’s pattern, rewarding positive behavior, and slowly injecting new game-play elements that enrich the playing experience. Tradewinds, at its heart, is based on an old game called Taipan, which we had played in the ‘80s. It is an economic simulation, with some light combat thrown in. We believed it was a system we could build on.
Granted, there was no other casual title that we could point to at the time and say that this was the right decision to make. With the addition of role-playing elements, we pushed the game into even more of an unknown, but we felt we needed to enrich the basic “buy low, sell high” game dynamic. Our approach was to gently introduce the player to the more hardcore aspects of the game and de-emphasize combat so that you couldn’t die within the first few hours of playing. As in Westward, we built a tutorial that walks players through a story, gently guiding them in all aspects of game-play without it feeling like a learning experience.
At the heart of deciding to build Tradewinds was a belief that casual gaming was going to evolve and consumers were interested in a deeper and more engaging gaming experience. We weren’t going to compromise our design philosophy for what games seemed to be selling at the time, since we wanted to take a longer view of the market and were willing to bet the company on that hunch.
Following those same instincts, we will soon be introducing a massively multi-player online (MMO) version of Tradewinds—the first casual MMO ever. . . .
Find the Gnomes
When we decided to build Cake Mania in 2005, I originally envisioned a game focusing on ice cream. Three separate conveyor belts would push cups and cones, ice cream scoops and toppings. After further discussions with the producer, there was concern over the depth of the game, and the team decided to change themes. Cake, with its variety of shapes and layers, was believed to be the most interesting. And thus, Cake Mania was born.
With this basic premise, many of the game design objectives could be clearly outlined by the team. The original game design document included most of the finer details, such as the customer interaction, price, cake creation, and machinery stats. This helped set the basic framework of the game and establish some guidelines before development began. In the meantime, I built out our development team in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Once the artists were selected, we encouraged them to rely on their talent and creativity to generate the look and feel of the game. The end result was the birth of Jill Evans. The team was determined to create a strong female protagonist, a character that was empowering and confident, someone that female players could associate with. We went so far as to create an entire history for Jill—what movies she liked, her hobbies, education, etc.
As art and development came together to produce the initial build, it was time to focus test the game-play. Focus testing is an important part of our overall development process inasmuch as it serves as the baseline reality check with our customers. Many a game has been radically altered and many more have been downright scrapped as a result of focus test feedback.
During our external focus test, Sandlot fans played the game, broke it down, and identified what was working and what wasn’t. Prior to focus testing we had added a feature to the game—gnomes that steal cakes as you make them. Our producer was particularly excited about this feature—we felt it would help “spice up” the game-play. After reading the focus test results, however, it was obvious that the gnomes did the opposite—they annoyed and frustrated our players. So we cut the gnomes. To this day, “gnome” is part of our game development vocabulary: It is a feature that looks cool on paper but uniformly annoys and frustrates our audience.
Conclusion
There is tremendous opportunity in the casual gaming market. We are in the bottom of the first inning in terms of content and game-play, and we’re just beginning to explore how these games are delivered and what features we can offer customers. By utilizing valuable feedback from both staff and focus testing to determine if our ideas are likely to resonate with our consumer base, we’ll continue to develop innovative games that change the market and keep us at the forefront of design innovation—even as casual games continue to mature with the evolving tastes of our audience.
Daniel Bernstein established Sandlot Games and has served as founder and CEO since its inception in 2002 as a premier developer and publisher of casual and family-friendly games across a variety of platforms. Daniel is a veteran of the gaming industry and has over twelve years of content strategy, game development, publishing and production-related experience having successfully launched over 20 game titles with Kesmai Studios, Monolith Productions and WildTangent. Prior to starting Sandlot Games, Daniel held the position of director of product strategy at WildTangent, where he devised and executed a successful online fee-based games business. An accomplished composer, Daniel also writes music for most of the games developed and published by Sandlot Games. Daniel holds a BS in Computer Science and an MA in Music Composition from the University of Virginia. Daniel can be reached through the following mailbox at Sandlot Games: bizdev@sandlotgames.com.
