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Screen Magazine - Index

Screen Magazine - Screen Magazine: Vol. 29, Issue 22 - Index

play,” explains Graeber.
“You have to make sure
your games are bugproof.
It has to engage
[gamers] immediately
because casual games
are often played between
your boss walking down
the hallway, [and the
gamer is] trying not to get
caught playing a game. It
has to be something that’s
quick and immediately
understandable by
looking at it because [the
gamer] will click on it, look at it and then go away. Since people
will probably be coming back, you want to show them the level of
complexity quickly.”
Graeber explains the challenge of creating a casual tower
defense game, saying that, “It’s extremely difficult because
strategy games, in nature, are complicated. They’re not fun for a
casual gamer unless there is an intense amount of strategy. If you
put the towers out and they kill anything with different cars and a
currency system, you have to make it immediately obvious and
very clear otherwise people will open it up and say, ‘What’s this? I
don’t want to play it,’ and toss it.”
Independent game development has taken a raise from several
games from Popcap Games, Yahoo! Games, and has even caught
the attention of the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 online collections
with “Castle Crashers” and “Braid.” One tool that newcomers are
grasping with starting off interactive media is Adobe Flash, the tool
Powerhouse used for
“270.”
“Flash gets such a
bad rep because
it’s such a wonderful
tool,” explains
Graeber. “A lot
of novices have
a quick go at
it.” One website,
Newgrounds.com,
is dedicated to firsttime
developers
and animators
to experiment and release their content using Flash. “Castle
Crashers” comes from the team who created “Alien Hominid,”
which premiered on Newgrounds and became a mainstream
game.
With the rise of the Internet due to the blogging generation,
gaming culture has become very open with regards to how games
are created and produced. “Our game is getting tons of feedback,
and the Internet creates a world of gaming Siskel and Eberts that
want to give their opinion on everything,” says Graeber. “It’s really
funny. On the same page of reviews of your game, you’ll have,
‘This is too hard, too easy, it’s not complicated enough, it’s way too
complicated.’ [The reviews appear] literally one above the other.
To me, knowing how the Internet creates this kind of anonymous
critic power, that’s what you’re looking for. When you see both
sides of the same argument, that’s how you know you did a decent
job. If you get a ‘This sucks, this is awesome’ – if you get both sides
of that, you’ve landed right in the middle.”
One philosophy that Powerhouse subscribes to is to “not get
texodomized in breaking games up into casual versus regular
versus cartoons,” says Graeber. “What I would like
to see the medium go towards is creating your
avatar and seeing it in a cartoon and the cartoon is
also an interactive game and you have this
kind of world that is cinematic plus game
plus interactive plus animation.
That’s an immersive experience
that brings all the different
things that you find online
together, and I think
eventually it will get
there – to where you
have these more
story worlds that are
well developed and
interactive using this
type of technology.”
Powerhouse’s game can
be found at both kongregate.com and
at potheadgames.com/270.
//www.powerhouseanimation.com
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