To be perfectly honest, when I started this blog, I already knew that my current direction was towards creating multi-player games with niche appeal for profit. It came to me one day a few months back as I was brainstorming and looking over a few ideas I had for my next venture. The problem I usually came up against was the problem of passion. Most ideas made good business sense, but weren’t very interesting from a lifestyle perspective. I always asked myself: Do I really want to be working on this for the next x months and then supporting it for y years if it is successful? Generally the answer was no, especially when I did a bit of market research.
So I came up with an idea for a game which asks the player to change who they are from the inside out, in a fun way. The game will take a bit of work to create, and is not going to be the first thing I make either. Instead, I have done some research in the intervening time period around the current casual gaming market, and I think there is a lot of opportunity there. So, to get my feet wet I worked on creating a very basic game (like what you might find on a typical flash portal, but not so good as their best ones) to learn a bit about Flash, ActionScript3, and how to build a game using that framework.
I am glad to report that it was not very hard to do. I certainly learned a lot about what not to do when designing my next game. The game revolves around the idea of being cupid, and trying to match two people together to make a couple. While the player is trying to remember which people on screen were thinking which thoughts, and trying to match them, Dark Cupids are popping up and trying to stop you. The game is pretty simple, but can get pretty challenging as you move up in the levels. I don’t expect it to hold anyone’s attention for more then 15 or 20 minutes, but I do think I will try placing it on a few portals for some additional feedback from gamers.
The other test I want to perform is whether or not using this as a marketing strategy (by placing clickable links in game back to this site) will drive any traffic. Though for such a game as this I expect any result to be small, I will test it out and report back with my results.
I have included the game here for you to try out:
