In One and One, Game|Life asks a member of the gaming industry two questions: one about gaming, and one about something completely random.
Dylan Cuthbert is the founder and president of Q-Games, which recently released *PixelJunk Monsters, its second in a series of three downloadable games for the PlayStation Network *.
How is the audience for a downloadable game different from the audience for other games? Does that factor into your creation/design process at all?
Cuthbert: Well, to begin with downloadable games are much cheaper from a price point of view, so this changes the market considerably, it means that eventually non-gamers will also start buying downloadable content. However, the market is still too young for that (on consoles) and we still have a large contingency of core gamers buying PSN titles.
Also, because of the lower price point, we obviously have less money to invest into a particular game, so we try to be as innovative as possible to give players the same 10 hours or more play they would get from a big budget title, but in a slightly different way.
To do this we first try and find an addictive core mechanic; something that will bring you back time and time again. It's missing from a lot of games these days as games have become cinematic and linear in style, but games back in the 80s and early 90s had a certain level of compulsive addiction to them (as anyone who played Super Mario Bros 3 in the day can testify to).
So the key difference is this search for some simple dynamic. If we were making a big budget game we would begin with the worlds/story and characters (which are incredibly important for immersion), but for smaller gamers it is more important to re-iterate the design continuously until you find that delicious biting point and everything clicks into place.
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Finish this sentence: Even though I probably should, I'll never, ever throw away my:__
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