Casual Games - Idea to Prototype

Oh right, i had a blog

Andreas Westerlund — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 14:35:07 +0000

So the 100 ideas are done and documented, im currently working on selecting the top 20 which is a bit painful. I have a pretty good idea on which will be taken to the next step but i still want to do just a little bit more research before i set them in stone. The fact that i wrote a little summary (4-5 lines) of every idea in the 100 idea list will speed on the progress as the basics are already set out, i just need to flesh it out a little more and maybe do some quick concept sketches for some ideas. I will put in some overtime this weekend and finish it up by Monday as it seems right now.

I have also finished and sent the Project Plan, lets hope that one is accepted immediately so i can go on without worrying about that. I was a bit reluctant in writing a detailed plan for such a short project, but i guess its good experience for the future. Plus i got to set my own salary!

If i get some spare time I’ll edit the 100 idea document a bit more and post it up here for public bashing.

Thanks for reading!

80/100. Achievement Locked

Andreas Westerlund — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 08:04:46 +0000

It’s Friday morning and i still don’t have 100 ideas done. It is certainly a lot harder than i expected to crunch out 100 reasonable game ideas, even with the help of creativity techniques.

Yesterday i tried the Idea Cards, writing down around 75 random words on paper and then drawing three at a time, trying to make something out of the words. The results were pretty neat, i gathered around 50 new ideas during the day albeit the quality of them was very shifting. After a quick look i dismissed 20 of them as pure garbage and was left with 30 ideas which all feels doable. 30 ideas in one day is by far the best return yet, i was kind of surprised at how effective this was.

For the last 20 i will try find some new way of generating ideas, and if that won’t work ill just do another round of idea cards. Hopefully i can finish it all today so that i can start weeding out the weak ones as soon as possible. I’m still waiting for one of my books to arrive, i would really like to look through it a bit before deciding on the top 20. Fingers crossed that it arrives today.

Thanks for reading!

New week, new ideas

Andreas Westerlund — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 15:31:25 +0000

OK, so maybe getting 100 ideas by Monday was a bit too optimistic. I’m currently sitting at #32, roughly 1/3 of all thats needed. Beside the old technique i used (which turned out to be something called Morphological Analysis according to Pelle & Simons blogs) i tried something i called “Visual Randomization”. I started a movie and paused it at set intervals and then took some object present in that scene and incorporated it into a game idea. The resulting ideas were very random indeed, as i received objects such as dolls, candles, curtains, corn and dynamite. I must say it worked very well, i will attempt something similar with a random image generator this evening.

After that i will look through some of the litterature i have chosen as well as google a bit to find some other interesting technique.

Thanks for reading!

First ideas

Andreas Westerlund — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 14:02:48 +0000

So my first attempt at generating ideas was the simple “take-two-subjects-and-combine-them” method. The way i did this was by taking the four most popular genres among casual games; Puzzle, Card games, Strategy and Action. I then combined them with the general interests of the key demographic audience (primarily women over 35 according to a survey made by the Casual Games Association as well as a study made by PopCap games, creators of Peggle and Bejeweled). These interests are (according to EDGE Magazine) mainly pets, travel, art & crafts, shopping and gardening.

So for example i took a genre like Card games and combined with an interest like Travel and came up with an idea about a game where you travel the world playing a type of solitaire card game focused on clearing the board of certain objects. In doing so you gather money which allows you to travel to new destinations which can feature different rules or objectives. The end goal would be to visit to each continent and then return back home where you started.

It feels like this approach is generating very focused results, which is what im after. Unfortunately due to the limitation of subjects its quite slow and there’s really just not much you can do with certain combinations (Action+Shopping? What, like a mall riot??).

I’m going to keep this approach up today and try some other method tomorrow, it will be interesting to see the difference in ideas.

Thanks for reading!

Up and running

Andreas Westerlund — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 01:11:31 +0000

So the blog is created, all shiny and neat. On my way to send in the project proposal, hoping it wont be sent back with a big red “Rejected” slammed across it. I will try to focus my efforts towards the Casual Game genre, hopefully getting a few good prototypes out that i can use to wedge my way in somewhere.

I chose the first option and is currently working on the 100 ideas, will probably have them done by monday. Im gonna try some different idea-generating techniques and tricks and see what comes out.

Thats it for now, thanks for reading