Making Casual Games

You may have noticed that I don’t put up a lot of Game Analyses. I love to analyze games, but the write-ups take a few hours of time, and I always feel like I should be working on something that pays the bills instead. I still play lots of casual games, but I only jot down a few notes on each one, and never write up a web page for them.

But I do love doing the write-ups. So I was thinking, what if instead of making write-ups of published games, I wrote up analyses of almost-finished games, just for the author? So here’s my pitch: if you have a mostly-finished casual game and would like a second opinion on it, I’d be happy to provide one. I’ll play your game for an hour or so, write up all my notes (three or four pages worth), and send them back to you — all for $20.

This will include:

• a mini-QA session (I’ll try to crash your game),
• checking for common oversights (for instance, do you support lefty mouse button swap?),
• notes on the intuitiveness of your control scheme
• notes on your game’s presentation.

I’m not a super expert, but I do have years of experience as a professional game developer crafting user interfaces, which means my comments will at least be somewhat relevant. Think of me as a very attentive beta tester who will give you copious notes on my experience.

The results will be sent privately to you, unless you’d like them added to the Game Analyses section of my website, which I’d be happy to do too.

Anyway, drop me a line if you’d like to try it. I’ll do the first one for $10, as a Getting Started offer There are crazier schemes on the internet, right?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 10th, 2007 at 12:40 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.