Lessons learned from the development of an online casual game

Wednesday, 18 November 2009 | Jason Slater

Whilst working on a social media project for work, and being a curious software developer, it seemed like a good idea to have a go at creating an online Flash based casual game to better understand the mechanics of the online casual game environment. During this exercise, and after having produced a few other titles, a number of lessons have been learned – a number of these are included in this article.

Create something new

When deciding upon a particular type of game a number of options were considered but the one finally selected, a memory matching card game, seemed like a reasonable place to start. From this development an important lesson emerged that special something or new which gives people a reason to play the game over other similar “me too” games needs to be factored in. The original Pairs game developed was played on various portals around 3,000 times in just under one month – it may sound a lot but other games were played 300,000 times or more in the same period of time. When producing Pairs II a number of new features including multi-levels were added and it had more plays in one day than the original had received up to that point.

The best thing of course is to create a game from an original idea.

Lessons learned from the development of an online casual game – from www.jasonslater.co.uk

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