The tools we‘re using to produce the final
24 noiembrie 2011To paraphrase Jack Black, “who doesn‘t wanna ROCK?!?” As the social space continues to evolve it‘s important for us to establish a unique identity. We‘ve always maintained that attitude and lifestyle are as important as the actual game mechanics and graphics. This is every bit as true in the social space. If you love how a game makes you feel, you are going to share it with your friends. If playing WITH your friends makes you enjoy the experience even more, you‘ll share with more friends. And so on…connecting people through play. [mw] Corey is absolutely right, we want to make a fun way for people to connect together, and then give them the tools through play to bring their own personality through. As games evolve, you‘ll see it more become the reflection of the player and less the reflection of some designer. How many developers are currently on staff at Detonator? [cd] Just the 3 founders right now.
We all work really hard and wear many hats so we can cover a lot of disciplines. The 3 of us are like 9 regular people. I just love what I do, too. So I‘m always working on things….but it has never once felt like “work”. [mw] Our first game is just the 3 of us, but as we start on the next game, we will start growing our team. Great flash developers are always welcome. How does designing and developing a game for social networking sites differ from ‘traditional‘ game development? [cd] In many ways it is remarkably similar. We have code and asset libraries structured just like we would with a traditional game. We have morning scrum meetings. We have very similar discussions about game design, usability, and player feedback. And in some ways it‘s very different. The tools we‘re using to produce the final product are the things we used in the past to rapid prototype.
We‘re using tons of off-the-shelf solutions. We‘re also developing super fast, not needing to worry about the decision that we make today haunting us by crippling some pipeline 6 years down the road. Most significantly, I think we‘re way more involved with the community than we would be with a traditional game. [mw] From a production standpoint, it‘s remarkably the same. The most successful social games from Zynga or Playfish are no different than MMO‘s. They have an extended live beta, they focus on microtransactions to support an ongoing live team. They have exploiters, and farmers, and rely on a strong community to grow. They are just done on a much smaller scale. From my perspective this is a very healthy thing for the gaming world. This will allow for some very cool innovation in a much smaller time than the typical 5 year development cycle of current large scale MMO‘s. Also, we are thinking of gamers in a completely different light. It‘s great when your best customer doesn‘t consider themselves as a gamer. Is it ‘easier‘ to develop warhammer en venta mobile and website games than it is to develop a traditional computer game? Why or why not? [cd] Well, yes. Emphatically.
