Casual v. Hardcore

In one corner, you have the reigning champ of flash games; a powerful opponent with a one-two punch of being laid back and appealing to a huge number of gamers. In the other, you have a heavy-hitter with an impressive history, deeper and more engaging gameplay that keeps players up at night is hard to argue with.

It's easy to see that we (the devs) have always been hardcore gamers. No matter what we say, the more we work on Skyrates, the deeper and more complex the game becomes. Skyrates 1 was wonderfully simple, and drew a huge number of players from a really varied audience. Skyrates 2 on the other hand, has a much more dedicated following, but less flow thru. Players show up and are generally confused, I fear, but those that make it through the first hoops, and aren't immediately turned off by the real time flight, seem to stick around longer.

I have real data to back this up, but I'm notoriously bad with sticking to my gut feeling, and I'll do the same in this case. We've defined the problem, if you missed it in there: how do you make a game that is both simple and easy to engage with little investment, but also provides the player with layers of depth to discover as they delve further into the world?

The answer is, generally: you don't. We tried, and we like our solution, but it got far more complicated in the latest incarnation. The amount of data a new player needs to uncover before really having a meaningful experience is too much for my tastes, and the team feels similarly.

I've had a friend recently suggest that we drop the real-time flights, and had it been someone who I respected less, I would've outright dismissed the idea. Of course, the original idea for Skyrates had you being able to jump into a 3d client and engage the baddies that way, so it's not like I haven't thought about furnishing gameplay on demand, removing a lot of the time drain element.

Andy probably figured the opposite of the rest of us. While we were reacting badly to the new complexity, he probably saw it more easily becoming a fully-fledged hardcore game than going back to it's casual roots. We on the other hand, were trying to solve the harder (and maybe dumber) problem of forcing a fairly complex game into a casual game mold.

I didn't come to agree with him, but I have to admit, there was merit to the argument. I'm working on a solution, but it isn't easy. More on it later.

Influences part 2

­Another big influence was EVE online, a space based MMO and a wonderful game!

A few of us played while in grad school, EVE is a very intensive game, what we considered a pretty hard core experience. I could easily see spending 6-8 hours a day playing that game if you got into it. If you have that kind of time please go play, you’ll have a blast!

But as busy students we started to realize that we didn’t have that kind of time to play games, especially when most of our hours were spent making our own. However one of the nice things about EVE is that travel takes A LOT of time. It was easy for us to fly around space, play the game, and then fly off somewhere else and leave a single ear bud in our headphones while we got back to work in another window on the computer.

When our trip had ended an hour or so later we would be notified by a friendly voice in our ear.

This was one of the first influences for what we eventually call sporadic play (although it took a while for us to realize that’s what we were experimenting with).