作者：Keith Stuart

一个在西雅图的车库中办公的工作室怎么能成为世界上最大的休闲游戏开发公司之一呢？本文将揭开Popcap公司的成功秘诀。

不知为何，貌似人人都爱Popcap。这家游戏公司以业界的经典方式崛起于一间三位怪才共有的车库（这正是《毁灭战士》的开发商id Software的成长之路）——尽管Popcap的三位创始人John Vechey、Brian Fiete 和Jason Kapalka总是对游戏的定义持不同的看法。他们原本把公司定名为Sexy Action Cool，然后开始制作一款脱衣扑克游戏，不过之后他们明智地改变了方向，将目标锁定在新生的休闲游戏市场。他们从来没有定位玩家。

现在，Popcap的办公室遍及全球，旗下有数款史上最成功的休闲游戏品牌，如《祖玛》、《Peggle》和《Bookworm》，下载量超过15亿次，单单首款游戏《宝石迷阵》就卖出了超过5000万份。据该公司所言，它的游戏每年吸引玩家11亿小时。

如何在这个竞争激烈的行业中成功而又不树敌众多？Popcap也是个榜样。确实，Zynga每走一步都会引发游戏文化界的争论和谴责，而Popcap得到的却是赞扬和尊重——甚至是在它被行业巨头EA收购之后。

所以，Popcap成功的秘密是什么？它如何创造一连串的成功，从配对经典《宝石迷阵》到塔防杰作《植物大战僵尸》？为什么没人讨厌它的游戏？上一周，适逢Casual Connect会议期间，我与Popcap的几位最资深的设计师和制作人展开对话，他们揭秘了公司的游戏设计方法和运作模式。

Bejeweled(from guardian)

1、忘记竞争

尽管Popcap经常开发常见的休闲游戏类型，它的设计师却称从未考虑其他开发商靠什么成功。Matthew Lee Johnston是公司的高级制作人，他解释道：“不是我们故意不学习竞争对手的做法，我们乐意学习所有可以学习的东西。判断什么能在市场上成功、什么会失败，我认为这是很容易的，但最终我们只听从自己的心声，做我们认为对自己的游戏有益的事，而不是紧盯着我们的竞争对手在做的游戏或者盲从某些看似会流行的游戏。我们作决策的依据是有益于玩家和让游戏更有趣。”

特许经营总监Tony Learner称：“Popcap从未追逐大动向，相反地，我们几乎是反大动向的！”这个论断很快被Ed Allard接下。这位Popcap的开发工作室的副主管认为：“玩家在哪里就把游戏投向哪里，过去我们不曾那么专注于提高这样的反应速度。有时候我们比竞争对手还慢；事实上，我们总是比竞争对手慢！我们只管走自己的路，我们做自己觉得很棒的游戏。我们这种始终如一的态度有时候是让我们慢了半拍，但我们也从中受益了。我们不会盯着水晶球预言未来——我们只关注玩家，对玩家的所在作出反应。”

2、游戏为人人

又一次反其道而行——显然，Popcap并未急于寻找像Facebook或Android或智能电视那样的新平台。“我们入驻新平台是必然的事”，Popcap并没有针对特定的人群，而是瞄准所有人。Johnston解释道：“可以说我们从来不是为游戏玩家制作游戏的，我们是为所有人制作游戏。如果新平台让更多人接触到游戏，那绝对合我们的心意。我们努力创造能吸引所有人的体验，平台转移可以将人们的目光引向他们不曾见过的游戏。”

Popcap的女性玩家总是比男性更多，但这种情况从未对设计过程产生影响。“休闲游戏本身就是针对女性玩家的，我理解也尊重这一特点。然而，至于我们增加的任何特点，我们会问自己，这会不会降低女性玩家或儿童的兴趣？无论增加什么特点，我们都要这么考虑一番。我们考虑的方向不是这个特点是否吸引某部分人群，而是这个特点是否让某一类型的人群想玩这款游戏，如果是，要怎么做？”

plants-vs-zombies（from platformnation.com)

在这方面，公司冒的一个大险是，《植物大战僵尸》中的僵尸。设计师George Fan最初的想法是，用植物对抗外星人——尽管不久他很清楚地意识到，对于一园子的植物战士来说，这种外星入侵者不免太聪明了，所以他把天外来客改成了僵尸。然而，美术团队别出心裁地设计了角色，不仅让角色非常可爱无辜，而且看起来不太像人类：僵尸的可怕之处在于他们曾经是活人，是可以辨识的活人。移除这一特点后，Popcap才将这些活死人放进休闲游戏中，没有吓到任何玩家。

3、盈利是一场关于信任的对话

因为许多新开发商都加入休闲游戏领域的竞争中，所以现在大多数Popcap游戏是免费的了——盈利主要来自游戏内消费，包括虚拟商品。免费游戏仍是一种有争议的模式，广泛受到传统玩家的怀疑和谴责。所以Popcap怎么做才能不沦为免费游戏中的贱民呢？Johnston表示：“我们几乎每天都在讨论这个问题。这是一门进化哲学。我们想制作一种了不起的游戏体验，无关乎收费模式。我们曾在温和的游戏内消费方面犯错，所以我们不能破坏游戏体验。但是，商业毕竟是商业——游戏开发不是免费的，所以我们必须确保我们与玩家之间建立一种互惠互利的关系。”

当然，听起来很好玩，但这对开发有什么实质影响呢？Johnston继续说道：“从设计的角度说，在Popcap制作游戏的人觉得与玩家很亲近，因为他们自己就是玩家。我经常使用的一个比喻是，想像游戏设计是一场面对面的谈话——如果在谈话中提到钱，我既可以亲切地要求玩家用钱交换价值，也可以微笑着把钱从玩家的兜里骗出来。这个交易点可能是谈话中最重要的部分，这是人们最挂心的时候，也是他们最敏感的地方。我们要非常恭敬地对待此事——它必须是这种关系中的积极成分。我认为人们会信任Popcap。”

“在任何游戏设计中，从行为角度看，你可以采取操纵玩家的方式，或者，你可以采用向玩家提供价值的方式。如果你尊重玩家，不企图诱骗他们的钱，那就是一种双赢局面——他们会成为忠实的顾客，不断地消费。我们不是慈善机构，不可能免费做游戏，但从商业运作的角度说，最好的交易能为你带来价值。这就是驱动力。”

4、人人都是游戏设计师

大多数创意游戏设计工作室都会组织特殊活动，让员工组成小团队，构思新想法或制作他们自己的游戏原型。Double Fine工作室就是这样想出标新立异的游戏，如《Stacking》和《Costume Quest》。Popcap也有类似的运作方案。

“我们有一个叫作‘Popcamp’的计划，我们一整年都在构思游戏，工作室里的任何人都可以申请参与。一个基本原则是，你不可以单独工作，你得有一整个团队的人在背后支持你。Popcap的创始人是在车库里工作的三个家伙，而不是一个，因为游戏开发是一种涉及多学科的工作。所以你得有一个团队来经营一个项目，如果那个项目看起来有开发前途，那么你可以花一整个星期的时间在上面。之后我们会在一间会议厅举办一个展览，在那里我们展示所有项目的成果；所有人，从营销团队到发行团队，都来玩玩其他员工制作的东西。这一个创举，尽管大多数看起来不像经过一个星期的努力产生的成果，《Solitaire Blitz》就是从Popcamp计划中产生的。”

Popcap还运作它自己的独立品牌工作室4th and Battery（一间位于西雅图的开发工作室），那里的员工可以制作并发行试验项目。这个品牌的第二款游戏，《Candy Train》是由Sophia Hohing构思出来的。她曾供职于外部技术团队，直到她询问是否可以参与Popcamp。她的原型太好了，工作室给她额外的几周时间完善游戏。现在，她已经成为内部设计团队中的一员。Allard感叹：“她是出色的游戏开发人，如果我们没有这种挖掘人才的计划，我们可能永远也不会发现她。”

“这个计划还帮助大家理解想法和执行之间的区别。这两个领域之间有天壤之别。业界最伟大的神话之一就是，创意就是一切。而事实上，不是的，执行才是一切。”

5、营销

“最佳营销方案就是我们的游戏本身。事实上，头五年，我们完全没有为游戏搞营销”。因此，公司往往在一个平台上发行游戏，让游戏自己火起来，然后再考虑转移平台。“多平台发行通常要借力许多不同平台的营销投入，但如果你不在发行时投入大量营销资本，多平台策略就不如看看这款游戏是否吸引玩家来得重要了。如果游戏吸引了一类玩家群体，那么你就能借助势头推广了。这是一个不错的策略——使我们的游戏更长寿，保证我们的游戏在各个平台上成为最热门的游戏。”

6、灵感的返朴归真

Popcap将它的大量成功归结为一个事实：所有员工都是痴迷的游戏玩家。诚然，每个工作室都这么说，但不同点在于，团队是否努力返回电子游戏设计的源头。“我们追求旧时光的感觉，我们不太关心现在流行什么，而多地是回到老式游戏机的时代，什么能带给玩家的感动？现代游戏拿什么替代那种感动？我们当中很多人年纪相仿，玩着雅达利街机和《吃豆人》长大的——我们在寻找一种灵感，那种灵感能够带给广大玩家第一次与启蒙游戏相遇的感觉，就像我们当年一样。”

不只是关于设计，还关于游戏的体验——和它们激动人心的音效和冲击视觉的画面。像《Peggle》和《宝石迷阵》这样的游戏回归第一代街机游戏的声音-视觉反馈环路：我们仍然时时回想起来的奇妙的哔哔声。

Johnston指出：“Popcap游戏与早期的游戏有相同的情绪奖励系统。想从前，你不可能玩好几关来培养一个角色，因为在《吃豆人》中，在云端上是不能保存的。一定程度上，得分高就是奖励，但主要是情绪反馈——必须是立即的反馈。你想想当你在《宝石迷阵》中配对成功，或在《吃豆人》中达到‘极热’的状态，或在《植物大战僵尸》中做了有关角色的一点小事，这些游戏就会发出声音，这不是玩家长年累月地积累属性值，而是立即发生的事，让玩家当场觉得心情大爽——这一直是Popcap游戏的必要组成元素。”

Allard还提出另一个有趣的地方，在休闲游戏中，声音-视觉反馈便利了不想读游戏文字说明的玩家。“如果你的手指没有打游戏的历史，你不会说，‘好吧，我要在哪升级’，你不会带着这样的期待进入游戏。所以，所有的这种反馈，在一程度上要教会玩家要做什么不要做什么——这与操纵行为是不同的，它的奖励是有助于游戏进展的。

“我有一个好例子。《宝石迷阵：闪电战》中曾经有一种声音非常让我崩溃，因为我不知道这声音跟游戏有什么关系——它是游戏中最响的声音，我的光标移到哪里它就响到哪里。每次这声音一响，我就会想，又怎么了？其实这声音是宝石落下来的声音。问题是，它虽然提醒玩家发生什么事了，但又与玩家的行为没有关系——可能当玩家没干什么好事时却响起了积极的声音。这就有问题了。再举一个正确的声音强化的例子，在《Peggle》中，当你击中橙色球时，音乐声音会越来越高。不用游戏告诉你得到的球越多，你的得分越高：声音和视觉反馈已经在起这个作用了。关于玩家，我们学到的非常重要的一点就是，他们不会阅读任何东西！”

Peggle(from peggle.wikia.com)

“这也是我们的设计哲学中始终坚持的一点，我们的游戏是玩家可以不断返回来玩的。如果当玩家达到极限，游戏的吸引力消耗殆尽了，你就失败了。大量游戏都存在这个问题。但对于《宝石迷阵》，它是没有终点的——快乐的体验是无穷无尽的。”

7、专注体验，而不是数据

休闲游戏是一种即刻和短暂的体验。它们必须容易上手，同时又吸引人。设计休闲游戏不是提出一大堆玩法或剧情，而是挖掘交互体验的根本。Allard指出：“玩家每时每刻在做的事就是我们最需要反复推敲的地方。每款游戏的专注点各不同相。在《闪电纸牌》中，重点是玩家翻牌时的感觉，点击的速度能有多快？要不要三四组卡片？还是要更多组？这是一秒接一抄的事。这是让玩家坐下来玩上三分钟的关键，感觉不错，我们就着手制作。核心就是最大的时间百分比——那是我们经历失败多过成功的地方。”

Johnston继续说道：“我们的经验是，专注于改善视觉效果和声音效果等等，但只有与核心机制和真正的奖励环路相结合，才能制作出一款优秀的游戏。这才是关键。你必须能够把游戏提炼成瞬时的体验。那正是我们的诀窍。”

8、理解焦点测试

在焦点测试方面，Popcap坚持的关键技能是能够恰当地解读来自玩家群体的反馈。Allard解释道：“所谓反馈，不是玩家说什么就是什么。如果你把游戏摆在一个非开发者的人——甚至是一个玩家面前，他们会说，‘呃，僵尸太可怕了‘，这句话跟角色的设计没有任何关系。他们真正的意思可能是僵尸跑得太快了，让我害怕。对设计师来说，这是一件棘手的事——听到‘僵尸太可怕了’，然后得把这句话翻译成‘僵尸跑得太快了，让我很害怕。’玩家反馈几乎从来不会恰当地描述问题。”

9、信任核心机制

忘记游戏教程吧——核心的游戏机制应该能够循序渐近地教会玩家他们必须做什么。如果游戏做不到这一点，就不应该发行。 Johnston表示：“《植物大战僵尸》其实就一个大教程。整个游戏体验就是一个漫长的、逐渐熟悉的线性教程，教会玩家各种植物怎么对付僵尸。这是一段连贯又平衡的体验。根据许多发行商的标准，这款游戏本可以比我们实际完成的时间提前一年发行的，但在那一年里，我们不断改进，卓有成效，最终成就了游戏的成功——我三岁的孩子和我祖母都会玩。”

10、狠得下心

显然，Popcap始终在构思新的游戏概念，但大多数没有制作出来——的确，开发商称设立的项目与发行的游戏比率是20：1。Johnston称：“我们淘汰的项目远比发行的游戏多。完成一款游戏确实很困难，如果你不觉得这款游戏有多好，还有其他上百个创意等着执行呢。为什么要把所有精力浪费在一款你不相信的游戏上面呢？如果你想到一个点子，但不觉得有什么值得骄傲的地方，总是有其他值得尝试的想法……”（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Popcap: the 10 secrets of casual game design

by Keith Stuart

How did a studio started in a Seattle garage become one of the biggest casual game developers in the world? Here are the secrets behind Popcap’s success

Number 1 hit: Bejeweled, PopCap’s first runaway success

Somehow, everyone seems to love Popcap. It is a games company that started out in typical fashion for this industry – as a garage project shared between three young geeks. It’s exactly how Doom creator id software began – although Popcap founders John Vechey, Brian Fiete and Jason Kapalka always had a very different idea of what gaming was. They originally called their company Sexy Action Cool and began working on a strip poker title, before wisely changing course and aiming at the nascent casual gaming market. They never went for gamers.

Now, with offices all over the world, Popcap is responsible for some of the most successful casual gaming brands of all-time. Titles such as Zuma, Peggle and Bookworm have been downloaded 1.5bn times, with debut title Bejeweled alone selling more than 50m copies. According to the company, players spend 1.1bn hours a year glued to its games.

Popcap is also an example of how to succeed in this ultra competitive industry without making vast numbers of enemies. Indeed, while Zynga’s every move is debated and condemned by the gaming intelligentsia, Popcap has earned little but admiration and respect – even after it was brought out by perennial industry bogeyman, EA.

So what’s the company’s secret? How has it managed to create a string of accessible mega-hits, from the match-three behemoth Bejeweled to the tower defence masterpiece, Plants vs Zombies?

And why does no one hate them for it? Last week, during the Casual Connect conference, I spoke to several of Popcap’s most senior designers and producers about how the company approaches game design, and how it operates within the industry.

Here is what they revealed.

1. Forget the competition

Although Popcap has often worked in very familiar casual genres, its designers claim to have never looked at what other developers were having success with. “It’s not that we’re deliberately not learning from what our competitors are doing,” says senior producer Matthew Lee Johnston. “We’re open to whatever lessons we can learn. I think it’s easy to see what’s successful in the market and what isn’t, but ultimately we listen to our hearts and do what we think is right for our games, not what is right because our competitors are doing it or because something seems popular. We try to make decisions that will benefit the player and make the games engaging.”

Amusingly, there’s almost a sense of deliberate Ludditism in the company’s approach to the games market. “Popcap has never been about chasing the next big thing,” says franchise business director, Tony Learner. “We’ve almost been anti the next big thing!” It’s a theme quickly taken up by Ed Allard, the VP of Popcap’s development studios. “We have not been so focused on being ahead as much as responding to where players are and putting our games there – sometimes we do that slower than our competitors; in fact we always do it slower than our competitors!

We often just paint our own path, we make games that we feel great about – and staying true to that sometimes gets us there a little later, but that has served us well. We don’t gaze into the crystal ball and try to predict the future – we just pay attention and respond to wherever the players are at.”

2. Make games for everyone

Another denial – apparently, Popcap doesn’t look at new platforms like Facebook or Android or smart TV and say, “we’ve got to be on there”; and it doesn’t target specific demographics. It just targets everybody. “We’ve kind of never made games for gamers,” says Johnston. “We’ve made games for people. And if new platforms are connecting more people with games, that absolutely plays in our favour. We try to create experiences that are appealing to anyone, and platform shifts can open people’s eyes to games they haven’t seen.”

The company’s games have always had a higher percentage of female players then men, but it seems that this has never shaped the design process. “There’s a vein of casual gaming that’s very targeted towards women I can understand and respect that,” says Allard. “But it’s never been the Popcap path. For every feature we add, however, we do ask, is that going to turn off a female gamer? Or a child? We put everything through that filter. We approach it inversely – it’s not, will this feature appeal to a certain demographic, but will it make a certain category of person not want to play this game, and if it does, what’s it doing there?”

A key risk the company took in this light was the inclusion of the undead in Plants vs Zombies. When designer George Fan originally came up with the concept for the game, it was going to pitch plants against aliens – it soon became clear, though, that extraterrestrial invaders would be too smart to fall victim to a garden full of vegetable warriors, so he switched to zombies. However, the art team specifically designed the characters, not only to be rather cute and non-threatening, but also to look much less human: the horror of zombies is the idea that they were once someone alive, someone recognisable. By removing that element, the company was able to put stumbling corpses into a casual game without scaring anyone.

3. Monetisation is a conversation about trust

As with many other developers in the casual sector, most of Popcap’s games are now free – the revenue comes from in-app purchases, including virtual goods. It remains a controversial model, open to abuse and viewed with suspicion by traditional gamers. So how does Popcap implement it without becoming a free-to-play pariah? “We talk about that almost everyday,” says Johnston. “It’s an evolving philosophy. We want to create great experiences regardless of how you charge the customer and we have erred on the side of being gentle with in-app purchases so that we don’t ruin the experience. But obviously this is a business – game development isn’t free, so we need to make sure we have a mutually beneficial relationship with the player.”

Sure, that all sounds lovely, but how does that actually impact development? “From a design standpoint, people working on games at Popcap feel very connected to players, because they are players themselves,” continues Johnston. “One of the metaphors that I use a lot is, imagine game design as a face to face conversation – if we’re talking and money comes up in our conversation, I can either be a friendly presence, asking for money in exchange for great value, or I can be smiling at you and conning you out of the cash – that transaction point is probably the most important part of the conversation, it’s the time people are going to remember the most and it’s when they’re going to be most sensitive. We treat that very respectfully– it has to be a positive part of the relationship. I think people do trust Popcap.”

“In any kind of game design you can take an approach which is very manipulative of the player from a behavioural standpoint,” says Allard. “Or you can take an approach which is about providing value to the player. If you respect the players and don’t try to trick them into getting out their credit card that’s a win-win situation – they’ll be a more loyal customer and they’ll do it again. We’re not a charity making games for free, but in terms of running a business – the best businesses provide you with value. That’s the driving force”.

4. Everyone is a game designer

Most truly creative game design studios organise special events where staff get together in small teams, either to pitch new ideas or to actually prototype their own games. It’s how respected US studio Double Fine came up with offbeat cult gems like Stacking and Costume Quest. Turns out Popcap has a similar scheme in operation.

“We have this process called Popcamp, where we carve out time throughout the year and anybody within the studio can apply to participate,” says Allard. “One of the underlying principles is,you can’t work on it alone – you have to have a team of people behind you. Popcap began with three guys working in a garage, it wasn’t one guy, because game development is a multi-disciplinary endeavour. So you have a project and you have a team and if it seems like something worth exploring you get a week to work on it. We then do a sort of expo in one of the meeting rooms where we show case all of these projects and everyone, from the marketing teams to publishing, comes and plays around with what people have created. It’s a great process, and although most of them don’t see more than a week’s effort, some do emerge – Solitaire Blitz came out of Popcamp”.

Popcap also runs its own indie spin-off label, 4th and Battery (the address of the development studio in Seattle), where staff can work on and release experimental projects. The label’s second title, Candy Train, was created by Sophia Hohing who originally worked for an external technology group, until she asked if she could take part in Popcamp. Her prototype was so good, she was given a few extra weeks to complete it and is now on the in-house design team. “She’s a great game developer,” says Allard. “We may never have found her if we didn’t have this structure that allows us to see what people are capable of.”

“It also helps people to understand the difference between an idea and the execution,” says studio director Joe McDonagh. “There’s a yawning abyss between those two positions. That’s one of the greatest myths about this industry – that the idea is everything. It’s not, it’s the execution.”

5. Word-of-mouth > marketing

“The best marketing for our games is our games,” says Allard. “In fact, we didn’t market our games at all for the first five years.” For this reason, the company tends to launch each title on one platform and let the buzz grow before considering any conversions. “Multiplatform launches tend to be about leveraging a certain amount of marketing across a lot of different platforms,” he says. “But if you’re not throwing a whole bunch of marketing at the launch, multiplatform is less important than seeing if the idea is really resonating. And if it resonates with a certain group then you build on that momentum. It turned out to be a good strategy – it gives our franchises a longer life and it ensures the game is the best it could be for each individual platform.”

6. Get back to basics for inspiration

Popcap puts a lot of its success down to one simple facet: all of its staff are obsessive gamers. Yeah sure, every studio says that, but the difference here is that the team seem to be trying to get back to the fundamentals of electronic game design. “There tends to be more of a sense of going further back in time,” says Allard. “It’s less a bout what’s hot now, and more about, well, what did I like back in the day on my Intellevision? What would be the modern equivalent of that? A lot of us are of a similar age, we grew up on Atari and Pac-Man – we’re looking for inspiration that will bring to a broad group of people the feelings we had when we first experienced those introductory games.”

It’s not just about design, it’s about the experience of playing – with their excitable sound effects and visual flourishes, titles like Peggle and Bejewled hark back to the audio-visual feedback loops of those first arcade games; the strangely pleasing bleeps and blips that we all still recall. “Popcap games share an emotional reward system with the early games,” says Johnston. “Back in the day, you weren’t playing over multiple sessions to build up a character; there were no saves in the cloud with Pac-Man. Partly, the reward was the high score table, but primarily, it was the emotional feedback – it had to be immediate. If you think about the voice in Bejeweled that rewards you when you make a match or the ‘extreme fever’ in Peggle, or the little things in PvsZ that make you connect with the characters, it’s not about the player building up stats over a long period of time, it’s about that thing that happens right now,that feels great and sounds awesome – that’s always been in the DNA of Popcap games.”

Allard also makes the interesting point that audio-visual feedback in a casual game provides the grammar of the experience for players who don’t speak the vocabulary of gaming. “Without the history of gaming at your finger tips, you’re not going to say, ‘okay, where’s my level up mechanism’, you don’t walk into it with those expectations,” he says. “So all that feedback, to some degree, teaches the player what’s good behaviour and what isn’t – that’s different from manipulating behaviour, it’s about rewarding the stuff that’s good for game progress.

“I have a good example. There used to be a sound in Bejeweled Blitz that drove me crazy because I couldn’t work out what it was connected to – it was the loudest sound in the game, and it kept happening away from where my mouse cursor was. Every time it happened, I just stopped playing and thought, what was that? And it was actually the coin gems dropping in. The problem is, it was telling players that something was happening, but it wasn’t connected to their actions – they may have made a bad move and a good sound happened. That’s problematic. With the right kind of reinforcement – the escalating tones when you get hit pegs in Peggle, for example – you don’t need to be TOLD that the more pegs you get, the higher your score: the sound and the visual feedback all do that. That stuff is important – if there’s one thing we’ve learned about our gamers it’s they won’t read anything!”

“It’s also inherent in our design philosophy that our games are things that you can keep coming back to,” he concludes. “If the appeal of the game runs out when the player reaches the end, you’ve failed. A lot of games have that problem. But with Bejeweled, there is no end – it’s just a fun experience.”

7. Concentrate on the experience not the featureset

Casual games are immediate and transitory. They have to be instantly accessible, yet compelling. Designing them isn’t about plotting out a huge gameplay arc or narrative through line, it’s about digging down to the fundamentals of the interactive experience. “What the player is doing from second to second is what we iterate on the most,” says Allard. “That’s different for every game. In Solitaire Blitz it’s how does it feel to flip over the cards, how quickly can I click on stuff, should it be three or four decks up here? Should it be more up there? It’s a moment to moment thing. And the point at which a player can sit down for just three minutes and it feels great, we start building out. The core is the biggest percentage of the time – and that’s where we fail more often than where we succeed.”

“It’s an experiential focus,” continues Johnston. “We’re concerned with visual polish and sound and all that stuff, but only to the point at which it combines to make a great experience –it needs to be combined with a core mechanic and a really rewarding loop. That’s the thing. You need to be able to distil the game to that second-to-second experience. That’s what we have a knack for.”

8. Understand focus testing

On the subject of focus testing, Popcap reckons the key skill here is being able to properly interpret the feedback of user groups brought in to play the games. “It’s usually not about what people actually say,” reckons Allard. “If you put a game in front of a non-developer – even a gamer – and they say, ‘oh the zombies are too scary,’ it might have nothing to do with the character design. What they’re actually saying is, the zombies move too fast, I feel threatened. That’s the tricky thing for the designer – to hear ‘the zombies are too scary’ and translate that to ‘the zombies are moving too fast, there’s too much threat’. User feedback is almost never a valid description of the problem.”

9. Trust the core mechanic

Forget tutorials – the core gaming mechanic should be able to teach players what they need to do as they go along – and no game should be released until it is capable of doing this.

“Plants vs Zombies is actually one giant tutorial,” says Johnston. “That entire experience is one long, masterfully created, linear tutorial that teaches you how each plant counters each zombie. I’s a beautifully articulated journey through George Fan’s mind and through this meticulously balanced experience. The game, by many publishers’ standards, would have been shippable a year before we were done with it. But it progress significantly, in very subtle ways in that year and that completely contributed to the game’s success – it made it possible for my three-year-old to play alongside my grandma.”

10. Be ruthless

Apparently, Popcap is constantly working with new game concepts, but most never make it to production – indeed, the developer claims that the ratio of axed projects to released games is 20:1. “We’ve killed far more games than we’ve shipped,” says Johnston. “Finishing a game is really hard – if you don’t feel great about it, there are another hundred ideas waiting to be born. Why spend all that energy finishing a game you don’t believe in? If you hit a point and you don’t think you’re proud of it, there’s always something else worth working on…”(source: guardian)