Thursday, November 8, 2007

Replayability, seldom seen in casual games

Having made it a point to download and try every new game released daily from BigFishGames.com. I discover that only a few have me playing them a second time and even fewer have made me reach for my credit card to pay for them. To date, the only casual games that I have bought are Kudos and Aveyond. I would consider those 2 games to be a life simulator game and a RPG respectively, and I do not see how they can be considered as casual games in my book compared to games such as Tetris, Peggle or Diner Dash. But since these 2 games are listed in BigFishGames.com and BigFishGames.com is a large casual game portal, so they must be casual games.

Anyway, what keeps a player going back to a game is replayability so that every time a game is loaded, a new game experience will await the player with the click of a button. Replayability is sorely lacking in most casual games that I have tried and that is one of the main features that I intend to have in our casual game. My intention is to have multiple branches which leads to multiple puzzles and also multiple endings for our casual game. So a player can play session #1 and go through puzzle A and puzzle B to see ending C while session #2 will involve the playing going through puzzle X and puzzle Y to see ending Z instead. Multiple paths, branches and endings will make for a unique and compelling gaming experience which, hopefully, will keep the player coming back for more.

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