What genre? (20 points X 3)

When we decided to create a second app, what genre could we choose from? There are an absurd amount of games released each day, and the one we would release would just be another pebble on a beach filled with pebbles.

And we wanted to create something different, something that looked and felt different, something that would stun, shock, impress, lol, rofl, lmfao, and create a reaction. Because, if you create something that’s “Hmm…yeah, it’s cool”, or “It’s alright”, it’s just not going to cut it.

We live in a loud world

Actually, what I realized recently, is that it’s not just a loud world, it’s a REALLY loud one. I used to think that a good product (hopefully) would be a one way ticket to recognition and success. It turns out that it’s not just a good product, of course that matters, it’s a huge prerequisite, but here’s a more comprehensive list that I’ve piled up over the years.

What you need

• A super cool idea
• Support from your family or friends, or your dog(s) or cat(s)
• A strong belief that what you are doing really matters.
• Willingness to work alone, and believing in your idea alone -Willingness to collaborate with your peers, who may or may not be more talented than you
• Patience, to continue working when nothing around you is changing
• Flexibility, to know when what you are doing isn’t working out and requires change
• Hard work to fix all of the small problems that you never anticipated -An excitement for this small tiny insignificant idea that for some strange reason makes you feel alive

So we planned idea after idea, and bounced ideas off each other. By we, I mean myself in the shower, and myself who’s not in the shower. When I’m in the shower I get an idea, and when I’m out of it, I have a different one…So I get back in the shower to figure it out.

So what did we come up with?

Making Portions took a toll on us. It was stressful to fix all of the small issues that kept popping up and to imagine a streamlined user experience. It was also technically challenging. We wanted to release it at the start of the year, but it kept getting delayed until it was June when we released it.

To almost no response.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m biased, it’s my baby, and I love it, but beyond that from an objective standpoint, I still think that it’s a good work, it’s a very challenging puzzle game, and if you like to think, or do IQ tests in your free time, this game is good for you.

but regardless of the quality of the game, the world was just too noisy. I thought we were in a noisy room, with many people talking, and you would have to shout to be heard. In my experience after release, we were actually in a nightclub, and we had to talk right next to someone to be heard, and even then most of the time they had no idea what we were saying.

That’s why we came up with Dado, a super simple one tap game, inspired by the esteemed / notorious mobile publisher Ketchapp who machine gun out simple games for a casual audience.

Designing for a Casual audience

What designing for a casual audience meant was that we could test the game easily with people around us, and we could keep reformulating it until it became something more interesting that people would love.

What I also noticed about casual gaming is that it’s not so much an audience, as a state of mind, casual games have captured that void moment that we have on buses, or waiting for dinner, or a short interval in time that’s too short to commit to, but too long to sit idly for…

With these ideas in mind, we created Dado in a way that it would instantly attract the attention of people, and get them to (hopefully) spread word about the game to their friends.

An Emerging Target Market

I think casual games will grow larger, based on the way our society is structured today, we have a lot of opportunities for short intervals of time that we fill doing mundane tasks, and as we develop, these periods will be more frequent. And what better way of capturing these moments than a mobile phone that you can instantly whip out and tap tap tap to?

I also think that we will see more micro games, casual games that are becoming micro casual games, maybe they last up to ten seconds, perhaps games of this category will become more frequent.

Armed with these ideas, I hope to keep creating games that I love, but also ride the waves of our current times and remain relevant in peoples’ lives.

Cheers, gieoon