Suttree.com: Casual Games, Social Software by Duncan Gough

Something that I’ve noticed on Playaholics and, to a lesser extent, Chickstop, is the popularity of certain games. As always, the best way to explain this is with a good example.

A friend of mine, Thayer, put me in touch with some well respected games developers called Crystal Squid who were writing Java games with an eye on the ‘women in gaming’ meme. We offered them a spot on Chickstop and Playaholics for any games they wanted to send our way. The first was Bee Mania, then came Monkey Trouble, both of which were good match-three stlye puzzle game.

The production on all the games was first class. There were enough differences in the levels plus the pacing and progression of the games were excellent. However, they weren’t very popular. Neither game stayed in our Top Ten for long enough and I felt responsible for this lack of success. Part of me thought that it was down to the fact that the games were written in Java. However, there are plenty of popular Java games around and our audience is pretty language agnostic when it comes to games.

The solution was something I’d been thinking about a lot at the time. Playaholics has seen a few games fall by the wayside that should otherwise have been permanent fixtures in out Top Ten games list. Almost all of the time, they were games that you could call ‘original IP’. They were new ideas, new game types, mashups of previous game stlyes. Flash seems to encourage a lot of creativity around the process of creating a game which, I’m sure, is down to the ease with which a new genre can be protoyped thanks to Actionscript and the whole Flash UI. So, I emailed crystalsquid and floated the idea of a Solitaire game. After all, new IP was falling by the wayside but real world translations of games like Solitaire, Soduko, Chess, Minesweeper, etc were almost guaranteed successes.

If I was impressed with the people at CrystalSquid for the quality of the games so far, I was even more impressed by their attitude towards Playaholics and Chickstop. Within five days, a weekend included, they had a version of Solitaire written that we happily put up on our sites. Crystal Solitaire went straight into our Top Ten games on both Playaholics and Chickstop where it has remained ever since. Of course, to prove it wasn’t a fluke, Crystal Squid went on to write Golf Solitaire which has done exactly the same thing.

It’s hugely impressive to have two games from the same developer in the Top Ten, given that our Top Ten games lists are worked out on a daily basis. Furthermore, it goes to prove that good ideas are not what games developing is all about. Writing popular games and especially remakes of existing games is a big part of casual games development. Although it’s frustrating to have to keep your creativity in check, in the long run I think it pays off.

Classic, casual games can be used to establish your identity and values as a games developer. Once you have those in place, then you’ll also have an audience ready to play your masterpiece. Why is this? Because causal gaming is all about acceptance - hitting the ‘Play’ button and playing a game for 5 to 15 minutes, not learning how to play for the first 10 minutes.

It’s a balancing act to give your game the depth and learning curve that makes it more than a one hit wonder. That’s why classic games are great for casual gaming - they have already cracked the learning curve. Card games and board games are often easy to pick up and have a learning process built in as you play (think ‘landing on a snake during a game of snakes and ladders’, you didn’t know what it did the first time you played, but you understood the concept clearly from that moment on).