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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.

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.

'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.