There are still a few hours to go, but as of this morning our Kickstarter campaign is (exactly) 100% funded. But rather than bask in our own success, I'd like to take this time to draw attention to some other really worthy projects on Kickstarter. I know firsthand how important even $1 is for achieving success!
Hanafuda Cards:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sarahehthomas/modern-hanafuda
Oh, I remember many happy hours playing Kwa-Do with my sister using these cards. Is anyone outside of Japan familiar with these? Apparently at least one person is!
Exile Sun:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gameknightgames/exile-sun-multiplayer-conflict-redefined
I played this board game at BGG.con in November. They already have super-professional-quality components, so I don't really know what they need investment for. But if you can just buy a game through this campaign, it's probably money worth spending.
Tunnelers:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gejmerqo/tunnelers-an-action-game-most-girls-won-t-understa?
Wow - this one looks really amazing. They've already spent 2 years on it, and it looks like a real-time mix of Moonbase commander and Scorched Earth. SO AWESOME.
Auro:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dinofarmgames/auro-the-golden-prince?
By the team that made 100 Rogues. That game wasn't especially compelling, but their new idea sounds stronger, and actually shipping an iOS game has GOT to increase your chops significantly.
The official blog for Sunstone Games. Check here for our artistic musings, press releases, community events, and game announcements.
Grouping Levels
It is customary for level-based games on mobile devices to have three levels to their level selection process: a main menu where players select "load a level", a chapter-select, and then a list of levels within that chapter. This is a classic way to present lots of content in a clean, accessible format.
Within Sun Stones we change things up a bit - we don't put players on a menu screen at all. In fact, most of our playtesters never enter any sort of menu, because we just let them flow between "glyph walls" and individual puzzles. We do have a menu system, and you can load individual levels through a more traditional 3-layer system, but our "no menu" alternative has been so strong that I sometimes wonder if we needed to bother.
What are Glyph Walls?
The metaphor behind playing Sun Stones is that you are using a cache of magical stones to create art on the rocky surface of a cave. You close your eyes and receive a vision, which remains represented in abstract form when you open them again. Using that abstract guide, you place stones on the surface. Once the stones exactly match your vision, the stones disappear and the final artistic glyph is inscribed onto the surface. That's one puzzle, or level of the game.
But these glyphs don't just exist in a vacuum - between individual puzzles you view a "Glyph Wall" which shows groups of glyphs - finished and unfinished. These Glyph Walls generally have 8 glyphs or so, grouped by thematic elements and arranged to tell a story. As players move through the game and solve their visions, they are simultaneously revealing the story each Glyph Wall tells. For example, our second story is "The Hunt." It begins with a campfire, arrowheads, and then a series of deer prints. The prints lead to a deer, then an arrow in flight appears. The final puzzle is the deer's hide drying over the fire which began the sequence.
Glyph Walls = Story = Mechanics
An exciting challenge for the team has been to not only select thematic glyphs for each wall, but to simultaneously teach new mechanics and new types of goals within each story. In the hunt, you are learning to transmute orange sun stones into obsidian stones - a transformation which first happens with the fire and the arrowhead. Later we use Weaving as a metaphor to teach players how rows of black stones are transmuted into white stones, and so forth.
It has been an ongoing challenge to simultaneously develop our mechanics, aesthetics, and level progression. Various attempts by the team to separate these elements have resulted in some less-than-compelling experiences, so we've continued down this demanding path. I hope players enjoy the efforts we've put into making those relationships so seamless.
Within Sun Stones we change things up a bit - we don't put players on a menu screen at all. In fact, most of our playtesters never enter any sort of menu, because we just let them flow between "glyph walls" and individual puzzles. We do have a menu system, and you can load individual levels through a more traditional 3-layer system, but our "no menu" alternative has been so strong that I sometimes wonder if we needed to bother.
What are Glyph Walls?
The metaphor behind playing Sun Stones is that you are using a cache of magical stones to create art on the rocky surface of a cave. You close your eyes and receive a vision, which remains represented in abstract form when you open them again. Using that abstract guide, you place stones on the surface. Once the stones exactly match your vision, the stones disappear and the final artistic glyph is inscribed onto the surface. That's one puzzle, or level of the game.
But these glyphs don't just exist in a vacuum - between individual puzzles you view a "Glyph Wall" which shows groups of glyphs - finished and unfinished. These Glyph Walls generally have 8 glyphs or so, grouped by thematic elements and arranged to tell a story. As players move through the game and solve their visions, they are simultaneously revealing the story each Glyph Wall tells. For example, our second story is "The Hunt." It begins with a campfire, arrowheads, and then a series of deer prints. The prints lead to a deer, then an arrow in flight appears. The final puzzle is the deer's hide drying over the fire which began the sequence.
Glyph Walls = Story = Mechanics
An exciting challenge for the team has been to not only select thematic glyphs for each wall, but to simultaneously teach new mechanics and new types of goals within each story. In the hunt, you are learning to transmute orange sun stones into obsidian stones - a transformation which first happens with the fire and the arrowhead. Later we use Weaving as a metaphor to teach players how rows of black stones are transmuted into white stones, and so forth.
It has been an ongoing challenge to simultaneously develop our mechanics, aesthetics, and level progression. Various attempts by the team to separate these elements have resulted in some less-than-compelling experiences, so we've continued down this demanding path. I hope players enjoy the efforts we've put into making those relationships so seamless.
Our Secret Mechanics
We've been working hard to get the word out about Sun Stones the past few weeks - those of you in our social media spheres are doubtlessly inundated with tweets, blogs, posts, videos, and so forth. You could be forgiven for thinking that we're giving everything away.
But, in fact, our entire game has been conceived and developed with a sequence of secrets in its DNA. We have some awesome, awesome secrets which we hope will really ignite loyalty and interest from our players. Of course, since only a few people will actually have these secrets revealed through gameplay, we don't want to make the mistake of putting TOO much effort or energy into them. What use, after all, are secrets that nobody sees?
So this is our balancing act - to build a game which thrives on secret information, and to still put most of our time and energy into the forward-facing features which we need to sell the game concept with. I'm going to spoil one minor secret, as an example. You are forewarned!
The basic mechanic of our game is trivial - touch a stone to "pick it up" and release the touch to "put it down" where your finger is. We never explain this to anyone - it takes at most two-three seconds for people to figure it out. Beautiful and Elegant.
But our second mechanic is a bit harder, if only a little bit harder. It's this: horizontal or vertical lines of three or more "sunstones" will transmute into common black stones. Over the series of just a few puzzles we teach people to look for interesting opportunities to use this mechanic. Exactly where you create these transmutation lines becomes important. Do you transmute 3,4, or more stones at once? How about five stones in a right angle? Players discover the "three in a row" rule quickly, but they might not realize that both horizontal and vertical lines work, or that you can change the order in which you place sunstones to transmute larger groups all at once.
We push all of these concepts in individual puzzles which require you to make these leaps in order to achieve perfect scores. But if you don't go for the perfect score - you might be missing some of the subtleties of the mechanic for quite a while. We've experimented with different approaches, and our best guess at this time is that it is better to allow players to grow at their own pace rather than hold up some artificial stick for them to measure themselves by. We believe that our players are intelligent - it's in our charter manifesto - and so we don't want to deprive them of that magical learning moment.
Learning, after all, is where much of the fun originates in single-player games. Our job as game creators is to create interesting spaces for learning.
But, in fact, our entire game has been conceived and developed with a sequence of secrets in its DNA. We have some awesome, awesome secrets which we hope will really ignite loyalty and interest from our players. Of course, since only a few people will actually have these secrets revealed through gameplay, we don't want to make the mistake of putting TOO much effort or energy into them. What use, after all, are secrets that nobody sees?
So this is our balancing act - to build a game which thrives on secret information, and to still put most of our time and energy into the forward-facing features which we need to sell the game concept with. I'm going to spoil one minor secret, as an example. You are forewarned!
The basic mechanic of our game is trivial - touch a stone to "pick it up" and release the touch to "put it down" where your finger is. We never explain this to anyone - it takes at most two-three seconds for people to figure it out. Beautiful and Elegant.
But our second mechanic is a bit harder, if only a little bit harder. It's this: horizontal or vertical lines of three or more "sunstones" will transmute into common black stones. Over the series of just a few puzzles we teach people to look for interesting opportunities to use this mechanic. Exactly where you create these transmutation lines becomes important. Do you transmute 3,4, or more stones at once? How about five stones in a right angle? Players discover the "three in a row" rule quickly, but they might not realize that both horizontal and vertical lines work, or that you can change the order in which you place sunstones to transmute larger groups all at once.
We push all of these concepts in individual puzzles which require you to make these leaps in order to achieve perfect scores. But if you don't go for the perfect score - you might be missing some of the subtleties of the mechanic for quite a while. We've experimented with different approaches, and our best guess at this time is that it is better to allow players to grow at their own pace rather than hold up some artificial stick for them to measure themselves by. We believe that our players are intelligent - it's in our charter manifesto - and so we don't want to deprive them of that magical learning moment.
Learning, after all, is where much of the fun originates in single-player games. Our job as game creators is to create interesting spaces for learning.
Setting the difficulty bar for Sun Stones
Sun Stones has plenty of powerful analytics built into it, so after launch we should be able to tune difficulty to really serve our audience well. But in these final weeks before launch, we're still making blind guesses about difficulty. I thought it might be interesting for our readers to get some insight into our difficulty tuning process, as it's played out these past few weeks.
1 - We want the game to be accessible. This means that we need to avoid places where players cannot proceed.
2 - To ensure that players understand our mechanics, we want to very explicitly introduce our two main mechanics (discarding stones, and creating new stones.)
3 - Creating individual teaching levels for each mechanic means a lot of very simple levels.
4 - Too many simple levels at the outset give the impression that our game is trivial.
5 - Any sort of difficulty spike in the initial levels turns away some significant % of our trial users.
6 - Repeat steps #4 and #5...
We were stuck in this loop for quite a while - how do we get to the good stuff quickly, without moving too fast for some users?
The biggest part of our solution was to break up our mechanics into pods - rather than allowing players to use all our mechanics, we put in place a system to "lock" some mechanics out. This allowed us to introduce just two key concepts, then build complexity around them, before our next teaching sequence. This gives our game more of a shark-fin difficulty flow, rather than an upward-curve. We hope this will create a good experience for all our users - not just one group or the other.
One sort of odd consequence for the "locking" mechanism is that if you go back and play the early puzzles after unlocking more mechanics - you can often get better scores, or earn more achievements. Will hard-core players be upset that they can't earn every trophy on their first play-through? Will players actually go back and discover that they have more flexibility later on? It's not clear.
As a way of selling this mechanism, we've implemented in-game achievements for each unlock. These are closely modeled after Xbox-live achievements, and they create a pretty strong reaction in play-testers who are familiar with that sort of reinforcement. Our assumption is that people who will go back and re-play early levels with new mechanics are probably the sort of folk who recognize achievements - but maybe we'll be proven wrong?
Team is hard at work already, after a long Thanksgiving break.
1 - We want the game to be accessible. This means that we need to avoid places where players cannot proceed.
2 - To ensure that players understand our mechanics, we want to very explicitly introduce our two main mechanics (discarding stones, and creating new stones.)
3 - Creating individual teaching levels for each mechanic means a lot of very simple levels.
4 - Too many simple levels at the outset give the impression that our game is trivial.
5 - Any sort of difficulty spike in the initial levels turns away some significant % of our trial users.
6 - Repeat steps #4 and #5...
We were stuck in this loop for quite a while - how do we get to the good stuff quickly, without moving too fast for some users?
The biggest part of our solution was to break up our mechanics into pods - rather than allowing players to use all our mechanics, we put in place a system to "lock" some mechanics out. This allowed us to introduce just two key concepts, then build complexity around them, before our next teaching sequence. This gives our game more of a shark-fin difficulty flow, rather than an upward-curve. We hope this will create a good experience for all our users - not just one group or the other.
One sort of odd consequence for the "locking" mechanism is that if you go back and play the early puzzles after unlocking more mechanics - you can often get better scores, or earn more achievements. Will hard-core players be upset that they can't earn every trophy on their first play-through? Will players actually go back and discover that they have more flexibility later on? It's not clear.
As a way of selling this mechanism, we've implemented in-game achievements for each unlock. These are closely modeled after Xbox-live achievements, and they create a pretty strong reaction in play-testers who are familiar with that sort of reinforcement. Our assumption is that people who will go back and re-play early levels with new mechanics are probably the sort of folk who recognize achievements - but maybe we'll be proven wrong?
Team is hard at work already, after a long Thanksgiving break.
Kicking into high gear
As promised last week, this week marks the start of our Kickstarter Campaign. For those who don't know, Kickstarter is a process for collecting startup / investment funds for projects. For a specified period (usually a month) anyone can make a pledge to the campaign. If enough money is pledged by the end of the campaign period, all of the pledged money is transferred to the owners of the project. If the campaign fails to meet its goals, no pledged money is actually taken from contributors.
The Kickstarter community has become a bit of a metagame - if you "bet" on projects which will become successful, you gain reputation. Your losing bets cost you nothing, so you only actually put money into the community when you "win" - that's pretty much the inverse of the old Arcade Model, where players would only put in a new quarter when they died.
So, please check out our Kickstarter page, and pledge generously.
It has been our intent from the beginning to make Sunstone Games more than just a one-game studio, but a strong showing from our initial product would really do a lot to facilitate a faster production cycle for the next project.
The Kickstarter community has become a bit of a metagame - if you "bet" on projects which will become successful, you gain reputation. Your losing bets cost you nothing, so you only actually put money into the community when you "win" - that's pretty much the inverse of the old Arcade Model, where players would only put in a new quarter when they died.
So, please check out our Kickstarter page, and pledge generously.
It has been our intent from the beginning to make Sunstone Games more than just a one-game studio, but a strong showing from our initial product would really do a lot to facilitate a faster production cycle for the next project.
Sun Stones - first teaser trailer!
As alluded to last week - we have our official Teaser Trailer ready for the world. Bashi Ale, our CEO, worked hard on this all week to get it ready for the world. The rest of the team was pretty harsh and specific with our early critiques, but I think the result is interesting, visually appealing, and (most importantly) gives an accurate sense of the mood our game seeks to evoke.
So much of our game is about discovering and exploring the consequences of our few simple mechanics - we were not sure how much to "give away." After a few different approaches, we settled on a strategy which perhaps errs too much on the side of obfuscation in favor of stylistic integrity. I guess if people want to get a teaser trailer of Excel sheets, they probably aren't looking for that on youtube.
Without further ado, I provide THE VIDEO.
So much of our game is about discovering and exploring the consequences of our few simple mechanics - we were not sure how much to "give away." After a few different approaches, we settled on a strategy which perhaps errs too much on the side of obfuscation in favor of stylistic integrity. I guess if people want to get a teaser trailer of Excel sheets, they probably aren't looking for that on youtube.
Without further ado, I provide THE VIDEO.
Preparing our best foot...
This week, we are polishing up our visuals to put together the first official Teaser Trailer for Sun Stones. This trailer is important not only because it will be an important visual introduction of Sun Stones, but because the Teaser Trailer is the cornerstone of a Kickstarter project - and we're hoping to get some of our startup costs repaid through a successful Kickstarter campaign.
For those who don't know, Kickstarter is a method for crowd-sourcing startup-cost funds. You pick a target dollar amount, and ask people to donate. The cool twist is that, until donations reach that target dollar amount, no money is actually transferred. This means that people can "play" kickstarted by guessing which projects deserve funding, and which do not. If you guess wrong - you lose nothing. If you guess right you donate to a project which lots of other people picked - so you spent money on a validated project! It's a very clever package, and it has been quite successful for some people.
The next question, of course, is how can we best position ourselves to be one of those success stories? We have one advantage in that we are largely complete already, so we have a fairly polished product to show. We also don't need money to make the game - we're just looking to earn back our start-up investment funds.
So the questions we're asking ourselves, while putting together this Teaser Trailer, are things like "How much do we explain our mechanics, and how much do we just wow them with visuals?" "Do we explain the Hopi influences in the game?" "Do we mention every platform we're on explicitly?".
Next week, we'll be providing the link to our Kickstarter Campaign. Check the site out, make an account, and see how high the bar is for other projects.
For those who don't know, Kickstarter is a method for crowd-sourcing startup-cost funds. You pick a target dollar amount, and ask people to donate. The cool twist is that, until donations reach that target dollar amount, no money is actually transferred. This means that people can "play" kickstarted by guessing which projects deserve funding, and which do not. If you guess wrong - you lose nothing. If you guess right you donate to a project which lots of other people picked - so you spent money on a validated project! It's a very clever package, and it has been quite successful for some people.
The next question, of course, is how can we best position ourselves to be one of those success stories? We have one advantage in that we are largely complete already, so we have a fairly polished product to show. We also don't need money to make the game - we're just looking to earn back our start-up investment funds.
So the questions we're asking ourselves, while putting together this Teaser Trailer, are things like "How much do we explain our mechanics, and how much do we just wow them with visuals?" "Do we explain the Hopi influences in the game?" "Do we mention every platform we're on explicitly?".
Next week, we'll be providing the link to our Kickstarter Campaign. Check the site out, make an account, and see how high the bar is for other projects.
Beautiful, Limited Components
Sun Stones is, fundamentally, a puzzle game about moving rocks around on a board. But unlike most sliding box / push push / drop-3 / tangram puzzles out there, we really wanted to make beauty as important as mechanics. When someone looks over a player's shoulder they shouldn't think "ugh, that looks complicated" but rather "wow, that's so pretty!"
So how did we go about approaching this goal? We decided relatively early on that the best way to achieve visual beauty was by creating a game which had very few elements. That allows us to really polish the visuals of those parts. Our final game has only three elements: black stones, white stones, and sunstones. We use patterns of these stones to paint beautiful Hopi-style glyphs across natural stone surfaces. Our beauty comes from the careful arrangement of our limited components.
Mechanically, each of the three stones "reacts" differently with the other types of stones. For example, groups of 3 or more sunstones will transmute into black stones. Sunstones placed around groups of black stones will transmute the black stones into white stones. White stones placed to surround a sunstone will detonate it - and so forth. Our mechanical complexity comes from the careful arrangement of our limited components.
As a result, both of our essential game elements - the elegant mechanics and the austere beauty - follow from the same sort of interactions. Hopefully this means that players motivated by aesthetics will naturally employ our mechanics, and players motivated by mechanics will naturally create beauty. That's good synergy flowing from good design.
So how did we go about approaching this goal? We decided relatively early on that the best way to achieve visual beauty was by creating a game which had very few elements. That allows us to really polish the visuals of those parts. Our final game has only three elements: black stones, white stones, and sunstones. We use patterns of these stones to paint beautiful Hopi-style glyphs across natural stone surfaces. Our beauty comes from the careful arrangement of our limited components.
Mechanically, each of the three stones "reacts" differently with the other types of stones. For example, groups of 3 or more sunstones will transmute into black stones. Sunstones placed around groups of black stones will transmute the black stones into white stones. White stones placed to surround a sunstone will detonate it - and so forth. Our mechanical complexity comes from the careful arrangement of our limited components.
As a result, both of our essential game elements - the elegant mechanics and the austere beauty - follow from the same sort of interactions. Hopefully this means that players motivated by aesthetics will naturally employ our mechanics, and players motivated by mechanics will naturally create beauty. That's good synergy flowing from good design.
Platform Agnosticism
Although our first products will be games for mobile devices, Sunstone Games does not plan to restrict itself to only mobile devices in the future. In fact, we believe that individual platforms will become less and less significant moving forward. What's the difference between playing Farmville on my iPhone, vs playing it on my desktop PC? I can buy essentially the same version of Plants vs Zombies on a dozen different platforms. Major middleware providers make a point to emphasize multi-platform compatibility.
This is different from the talk about "convergence" which was so popular a few years back - the idea that eventually we would all be using one super platform to do everything in our lives. We believe that there will still be dedicated consoles, phones, desktops tablets & laptops in the future. There will always be competition and differentiated hardware brands.
But software is on a different track. Software is on a path to becoming totally platform agnostic - our same code runs on iPhone and Android devices, for example. Hardware agnosticism actually facilitates increased competition between hardware providers - because nobody will have an overwhelming advantage in exclusive software. Yes, there will be exclusives like the Uncharted series on the PS3 - but those will become increasingly rare.
Many of the forces driving this trend are rather surprising - Wi-Fi, for example, is accelerating platform agnosticism by allowing almost every device to remain transparently connected to the internet. If player data is stored on a server, then client programs on any sort of device can access the same pool of data. You can play the same game on your phone that you play on your console in the evening. Not just two ports of the same IP, but literally the same game - thanks to centralized servers and universal IO protocols.
We really want to define a unique space for Sunstone Games, and a big part of that is being able to share our vision and our process with as many people as possible. We are very fortunate that today people can find the games they want without worrying about the hardware brand they chose to support, or the number and type of devices they are willing to juggle in their lives.
This is different from the talk about "convergence" which was so popular a few years back - the idea that eventually we would all be using one super platform to do everything in our lives. We believe that there will still be dedicated consoles, phones, desktops tablets & laptops in the future. There will always be competition and differentiated hardware brands.
But software is on a different track. Software is on a path to becoming totally platform agnostic - our same code runs on iPhone and Android devices, for example. Hardware agnosticism actually facilitates increased competition between hardware providers - because nobody will have an overwhelming advantage in exclusive software. Yes, there will be exclusives like the Uncharted series on the PS3 - but those will become increasingly rare.
Many of the forces driving this trend are rather surprising - Wi-Fi, for example, is accelerating platform agnosticism by allowing almost every device to remain transparently connected to the internet. If player data is stored on a server, then client programs on any sort of device can access the same pool of data. You can play the same game on your phone that you play on your console in the evening. Not just two ports of the same IP, but literally the same game - thanks to centralized servers and universal IO protocols.
We really want to define a unique space for Sunstone Games, and a big part of that is being able to share our vision and our process with as many people as possible. We are very fortunate that today people can find the games they want without worrying about the hardware brand they chose to support, or the number and type of devices they are willing to juggle in their lives.
'Sun Stones' is Coming to an App Store Near You!
We've been live just over a week, and it's high time we pulled back the curtain a bit on our first project: "Sun Stones" - coming to iOS and Android devices in January. We've been working on the game more than four months now, but this is the first time we've talked about it publicly.
What is it?
At the core, Sun Stones is a puzzle game. Players manipulate and arrange a set of stones in as few steps as possible. When all of the stones are in the proper location, they transform into a magical glyph - each glyph is part of a group which, when viewed together, tell a little story.
Players have three types of stones at their disposal: common black stones, white stones, and magical "Sun Stones." White and black stones may be moved around the board freely, using the touch screen. Sun Stones are (slightly) more complex - the player is given a "well" of (usually) three to five Sun Stones. If discarded or destroyed, these stones return to the well. So players actually have an infinite number of Sun Stones, but may only have a few on the board at a time.
Transformations
The magic of the game is the way our three stone types relate to one another. If you create a line of Sun Stones, they transform into common Black Stones. If you put Sun Stones on either side of a line of Black Stones, the stones in that line turn white. A few other recipes are discovered over the course of the full game.
This type of transformation really expands the potential for interesting solutions. Most puzzle games provide you with limited material, and have only one solution. Sun Stones, on the other hand, is a game where you can literally remove every starting piece, and then build the entire puzzle up from scratch using only 3 Sun Stones. (In fact, we've been considering making that an alternate game mode...) Of course, finding an efficient solution to each puzzle is another matter entirely!
Hopi Theme
In parallel with our mechanics, we felt it was important to really give a sense of thematic space to the project. Our original inspiration was a traditional Native American game called "pebble patterns" - which was essentially a memory game. As it changed into a game about creating glyphs, I thought of the book Arrow to the Sun - which I quite enjoyed as a child. We looked into applying Hopi / Pueblo People aesthetics to the game, and it seemed like a very good fit. Our color scheme, soundscape, and artistic choices for the game have all been influenced by this Hopi aesthetic. Along the way we've taken pains to educate ourselves, which has been a rewarding process on its own merits.
The Sunstone Company Line
As a company, Sunstone Games is built around three key ideas:
- Players are intelligent
- Players appreciate quality
- Players come from every demographic
For our first blog post, I thought I'd expand on what those three ideas mean - and how we interpret them as promises to our players.
Players Are Intelligent
Video game developers are, almost without exception, very smart people. So smart that they often adopt an air of authority, and lose sight of the fact that even very smart people make a lot of foolish decisions.
Sunstone Games is filled with very smart people - but we are dedicated to putting the needs of our players first. That means players get to be a part of every decision we make. Player feedback, player involvement, and player participation are an integral part of our process at every level. We trust our players to be intelligent, thoughtful, and useful participants in the creative process.
Players Appreciate Quality
People who play video games have lots of options - especially in mobile games. Becoming visible in a crowded market is a challenge. One solution is to create a large number of low-quality games, and then polish up whichever games happen to sell. This is known as "Minimum Viable Product."
This strategy makes lots of sense to the business world, because it does not require any judgement about which games will or will not be successful. At Sunstone Games, we believe that it is our duty as game creators to apply our judgement, and produce only quality products. Quality is more important than maximizing financial return, because quality builds a relationship of trust between us and our players.
Players Come from Every Demographic
Early home consoles were marketed as toys - products aimed at children. And even though games have become a ubiquitous part of life for huge segments of the population it is still common to think of video games as the exclusive purview of 14-year-old boys. We know that the median age for people playing games is close to 30. But instead of producing games which appeal to our older players, we too often just add nudity and profanity to our existing games. We know that female players outnumber male players online, but instead of eliminating our gender bias we too often create "pink" versions of popular games.
We at Sunstone Games believe that players are not defined by gender, race, religion, sexual orientation or income bracket - and our games will not rely on those assumptions.
Sunstone Games is filled with very smart people - but we are dedicated to putting the needs of our players first. That means players get to be a part of every decision we make. Player feedback, player involvement, and player participation are an integral part of our process at every level. We trust our players to be intelligent, thoughtful, and useful participants in the creative process.
Players Appreciate Quality
People who play video games have lots of options - especially in mobile games. Becoming visible in a crowded market is a challenge. One solution is to create a large number of low-quality games, and then polish up whichever games happen to sell. This is known as "Minimum Viable Product."
This strategy makes lots of sense to the business world, because it does not require any judgement about which games will or will not be successful. At Sunstone Games, we believe that it is our duty as game creators to apply our judgement, and produce only quality products. Quality is more important than maximizing financial return, because quality builds a relationship of trust between us and our players.
Players Come from Every Demographic
Early home consoles were marketed as toys - products aimed at children. And even though games have become a ubiquitous part of life for huge segments of the population it is still common to think of video games as the exclusive purview of 14-year-old boys. We know that the median age for people playing games is close to 30. But instead of producing games which appeal to our older players, we too often just add nudity and profanity to our existing games. We know that female players outnumber male players online, but instead of eliminating our gender bias we too often create "pink" versions of popular games.
We at Sunstone Games believe that players are not defined by gender, race, religion, sexual orientation or income bracket - and our games will not rely on those assumptions.
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