Thursday, July 21, 2011

Review: Casey's Contraptions

Casey's Contraptions is an Indie game developed by Noel Llopis (industry veteran) and Miguel Ángel Friginal (web developer, artist) for iPad




What went Right?
  1. Strong Theme and Style - Character Personality, use toys and household items (instead of industry looking item), enable imaginary goal (rescue explorer from jungle with hotair balloon), strong outline and solid colors.
  2. Social Features: share solutions with friends, level editor (allow download levels created by others)
  3. Iterative Development: add features iteratively
  4. Strong launch: announce 6 months before release (25% into development), followed by twitter and blog, showing at GDC (developer feedback, game press), set release date 3 weeks after submission to Apple, featured as iPad Game of the Week, priced $2.99 (not $4.99) for volume reaching top 10 sales
  5. Enough Development Time: 8 months, early availability of level editor, change game's star rating system, time for polishing

What went Wrong
  1. No simultaneous iPhone Launch: lack of critical mass for game relies on social element, planning 2nd release with lots of new content
  2. Butting Heads Too Much: aesthetics vs. usability, performance vs. gameplay, simplicity vs. interest, uniqueness vs. familiarity, or tea vs. coffee; it is a good thing, but too much debating (than actual implementation) as well, hashing problem due to working remotely
  3. Unnecessary Rework: revision does make it better, problem when looping doesn't converge into a better design (shifting around), iteration testing of UI would help
  4. Not Enough Unit-Testing
  5. Fixed Price Model: Fall off chart after a few week, Microtransaction take more time to implement, selling more content, need larger play base for Microtransaction (2-5% would by extra content)

No comments:

Post a Comment