luke dewitt

Hi,

My name is Luke, and I have a problem…

I’m addicted to casual games.

At work a few months ago, my company decided that we wanted to get into the casual gaming market. At theRedSpace we’ve been interested in getting into game dev for quite a while now, but nothing had really materialized. When I heard the word “Casual Game” I thought of crappy Flash games that I would see everywhere on sites like addictinggames.com, which I never really cared about. However, I started to think about a site like miniclip.com, which I know I have spent quite a bit of time at in the past. I realized then that the Facebook application for Jetman was ridiculously popular amongst my friends and I, if only for about a month or two.

I never thought there would be a part of me that liked casual games (I’m more of the EA Sports game ilk, as my roomate and I have heated battles daily playing “Fifa 09″), but I started to realize that maybe I had a problem, and that these “casual games”, were something I, and others, secretly loved.

There was no doubt about it though when I was told to take a look at “Plants vs Zombies“, by Popcap Games. I played the demo and was hooked. I wasn’t the only one. It has recieved rave reviews from just about every review I have read, and is now being ported to XBox Live Arcade, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it come out for the iPhone, as I believe it would work perfectly on that platform. The game is a simple twist on a typical “Tower Defense” style game, with great (and hilarious) art and very simple, but ridiculously addictive gameplay.

Screenshot of "Plants vs Zombies"

These games are everywhere right now. Popcap isn’t the only major portal to sell these games. Big Fish Games has a truckload of great titles that I would love to be able to play. There are a bunch of sites like these, some sharing titles, some with exclusive titles for sale at prices that are more than fair! So much so that Casual Gaming is a multibillion dollar a year industry, and I heard the other day that gaming in general as an industry is now bigger than the entertainment industry as a whole! That’s pretty crazy if you ask me, but with so many different platforms, as well as being able to leverage these games using social media, it really shouldn’t be that big a surprise to anyone.

I do have some great ideas at the moment (agreed upon by co-workers and friends), on what kind of games we can build here at work that would not only sell, but would be fun to play, but there are two major problems for me personally when building these games. First off is being able to “beat” these other games in terms of what we can offer. Being relatively new to the realm of game dev, it’s very easy to come up with a game idea and develop it, but finding the “hook” that addicts people is a whole other beast. The other major problem, obviously, is being able to step away from these games for long enough to build ours.