Founder of a Stealth Game Startup Discusses New Opportunities in Social Games

Milton, founder of a stealth game startup, discusses new opportunities in Social Games

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http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/cc-milton.mp3

Or listen to it here…

Show Notes:
Interviewer: I’m here at Casual Connect in Seattle and with me today is a special guest. How about you introduce yourself?

Milton: Hello, everyone. My name is Milton Soong. I’m the founder and CEO of Zabu Studio. We’re a new studio who just formed recently to do social networking games with a twist.

Interviewer: Can you talk about the twist much? How are you going to use social networks to use games?

Milton: Sure. Our mission statement is to bring your living room parlor game experience to the social network. Our theory is that the board games, like Monopoly or Pictionary, that you play with your family, is really the original social networking games that you play with your friends and family. The relationship you have is meaningful in playing those games.

I think with the advent of Facebook and social networks like that we can now try to recreate that experience online. So, what we’re trying to do is take the gaming experience that you remember as a kid or an adult and take that to the Facebook world.

Interviewer: Now, those games you’re playing in person, kind of real time, to an extent. It’s all almost at the same time, so how are you going to reconcile that with the asynchronous design that’s prevalent on Facebook?

Milton: Sure. Yeah. That’s one of the biggest challenges when it comes to the mechanisms. Most face to face games have this “I go, you go” synchronous mechanism. So, one of our main tasks is to come up with innovative ways to break that.

So, one example I can cite is there’s now asynchronous board games that’s coming out. Check out Galaxy Trucker, if you can. It’s easily found on BoardGameGeek. Basically, it’s a game that doesn’t have turns. It’s a game of buying and trading goods with this spaceship milieu. So, what you do is you have all of these egg timers in front of you, and you can’t do anything until your egg timer runs out.

And so, it’s basically you’re frantically flipping egg timers in front of you, recharging your energy to put it in social networking terms and then pushing the pieces on the board. It’s a real blast, and it’s something where we can say, “Hey, we’re going to steal some of these mechanisms to make our board games fun on .

Interviewer: Another thing I want to point out is, have you seen the Family Feud game on Facebook where they actually allow you to “play” with your friends by just posting your results to the feed and then just having the other person come in which kind of makes the other person feel like they’re playing together.

Milton: Yes. I love Family Feud. I think that’s one of the first stab at what we’re trying to do. I think there could be an even richer interaction because right now Family Feud, the only interaction is at the end where you’re trying to have your friend help you get to that big money round.

Interviewer: Yeah.

Milton: But, during the game you’re not really playing with them.

Interviewer: Yeah. Exactly.

Milton: So, what about a world where… I’m going to use Pictionary as an example. So, I’m imagining a game, let’s call it Pictionary Blitz. You sign on. Let’s say, the day you sign onto the app, you get a message saying, “Draw a cat on this canvas in 30 seconds.” So, you’re going to do it as fast as you can. It’s going to look all weird and funny. And when it’s done, it’s going to send it out to your friends, to your actual friends on Facebook.

Now, when they log onto the app, they’ll see the image that you drew. They’ll say, “Hey, Milton drew this, and in 15 seconds type in what this is.” So, that would be something that’s asynchronous, yet you’re actually directly playing with your friends. That’s an example of party games that could be adapted. So, that’s something that we’re trying to do something like that.

Interviewer: And I think it’s also interesting to point out that even they’re asynchronous, you’re attaching time constraints to each of the asynchronous aspects so the blitz aspect and, maybe, even answering has a certain time limit, too.

Milton: Sure. Well…

Interviewer: Which is kind of against what people consider casual in the sense that timing shouldn’t be important.

Milton: I think one of the constraints, if you remove the turn, is that if you have to draw a cat and are given unlimited time, you will draw a perfect cat.

Interviewer: That’s a great point.

Milton: But just try to remove that element.

Interviewer: So, do you think this kind of blitz mechanic is going to be the key to getting these casual games to have a kind of FarmVille type of success? I mean, you look at Bejewel Blitz. And now Zuma Blitz is going to come out.

Is it ironically the time constraint mechanic that is going to keep people playing the games?

Milton: In a sense, time constraint is one way to recreate the so-called turn mechanism because once your time runs out, it’s the equivalent of your turn runs out.

Interviewer: And it also doesn’t put much pressure on the player in terms of having to make things look perfect. You can explain away the stuff with time.

Milton: So, one of the fascinating things about the asynchronous play is that we went asynchronous because you don’t know when your friend’s going to be online. But if you actually have a unique gaming experience, the server actually knows a lot about you and your friend.

So, what if, let’s say, the scope, I’ll use Pictionary as an example, Pictionary Blitz, let’s say you and your friend are actually online at the same time. The server knows that, so maybe, the timer can get modified, because hey, Johnny’s right there online. He can answer that right now. And, maybe, you should give him a verbal clue, like the real game.

So, we can have a game that’s much richer. So, if you’re off line with your friend, it goes into an asynchronous mechanism, like I described. If you’re online at the same time, maybe, you actually get into a head to head, real online experience without you even trying.

The most frustrating thing is if you try to wait for your friend to show up in the asynchronous game room, but the server does that for you as an added delight when they happen to be there. I think that will be a win.

Interviewer: Now, you’ve done games previous to social games before. Can you talk about the difference in terms of development style for the social games versus the previous types of games you’ve done?

Milton: I think for the social game today it’s a live service that’s evolving constantly. So, in the old way of developing a lot of games, it’s more, OK, we have a game concept. We’re going through pre-production. We’re going through development that takes six months and then it gets released, either released online or released in a Box CD.

But, the rules are very different now. It’s a service. You push some changes out. It might take you two days to do. You immediately get results, measurable results. Based on the result, you can tweak your game anyway you want. It’s almost a constant reaction, reaction cycle that’s very short compared to the old, nine month game plan. So, that’s one of the biggest differences, not just in time but all you have to think about, requirements and implementation.

Interviewer: Do you feel that Facebook in the future is going to be still an important platform for games because in 2007 people were always talking about virtual worlds because that’s when Club Penguin got sold. So, everyone else was trying to develop a virtual world. Then, right at that time, a Black Swan came out which was the Facebook platform.

Do you feel there’s another Black Swan out there, or is it primarily being mobile and Facebook?

Milton: I think another Black Swan could possibly come out, and I think if you’re a smart game studio you’re going to try to be as Facebook independent as possible. So, you want to make sure you have a compelling offering that will work with the social graph. Now, whether that social graph is Facebook or the new Google rumored app, or the fact that the entire Internet is going to become a social web because there’s some prediction of that.

If you can adapt to those without too much over reliance on one platform’s specifics, I think that will be your value add in the space.

Interviewer: Great. Thank you very much for your time, and is there a website yet where people can check out your games? Is there anything like that?

Milton: Not quite yet. We’re still in stealth mode, but as soon as we have something ready for the world to see, we will announce it.

Interviewer: Great.

Milton: Thank you.