Though Facebook games have a reputation for being addictive, they're also seen as far too simple to satisfy the serious gamer. David Whatley, president and CEO of Simutronics, hopes that his company's new game will live up to the rigorous standards of the hard-core.
Fantasy University, a parody-driven role-playing game that riffs on pop culture, went into closed beta testing last week. And it is certainly a step in the right direction.
The game plays like a classic turn-based RPG. Players move around a game world, gathering quests and fighting beasties one whack at a time. But there's more to the game than flavorless hack-and-slash. Fantasy University is funny, stylish and smart; in short, it's no FarmVille.
"If you listen to Zynga they'll say that the target demographic on Facebook is a 35-year-old housewife," Whatley said to Wired.com. "Our game will probably not appeal to the demographic of Facebook."
Rather, Simutronics hope to lure serious gamers to Facebook and get them hooked on stat-driven role-playing. If World of Warcraft can do it, so can a Facebook game.
Whatley is a long-time veteran of MUDs, the text-based online games that preceded the MMO. His company Simutronics runs GemStone IV, an online game that has been up and running since 1988 and earned his company millions.
Simutronics has also found success as a middleware vendor. It created the HeroEngine which will power BioWare's Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO. And Critical Thought Games, another venture of Whatley's, did bang-up business on the iPhone with the popular GeoDefense games.
It is the job of a team of twenty developers in St. Louis to replicate those successes and leverage the company's heritage of creating online communities in this new space. And they're doing it the hard way – by being funny.
With an art style created by Tracy Butler, the artist behind the web comic Lackadaisy, and a plot brimming with pop culture references, the game feels like Mad magazine's take on the fantasy videogame.
When you create your character you can pick between hairstyles that duplicates Gene Simmons' heavy metal samurai coif or obscure Saturday Night Live character Ed Grimley's pointed cowlick. The riffs come relentlessly, stuffed in the flavor text and in the many hand-drawn images that illustrate the game. References to H.P. Lovecraft mix with LOLcats, caricatures of megastars like Johnny Depp rub elbows with television microcelebs like Billy Mays.
"The game definitely appeals to the more clued-in," Whatley says.
Simutronics has been focus-testing Fantasy University on everyone from game-addicted college kids to those fabled 35-year-old housewives. The point of the tests were to make sure that first moments of the game weren't too off-putting for the casual gamer, Whatley said.
Fantasy University has a slowly-ramping complexity beneath the surface. Hardcore undertakings like weapon-crafting and guild quests await the player who enrolls, as do micro-transactions that'll buy "fluff items" like clothing and in-game perks like increased experience, money or moves.
"First, we've got to hook 'em," Whatley says.
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