Catpurse: Keep it Simple, Stupid!
Ever wondered what makes a good game, a good game?
Is it the graphics, the art-work, the story? How about the mechanics? If you could distill the “elements of game” into the simplest, purest form, what would that look like?
When your ancestors first discovered whiskey, they must have realised they could pack more … punch, in a bottle, by focusing on what mattered most. (Getting sloshed). So they filtered everything else, and packed only what truly mattered. So what truly matters in a game???
Minimalism in Game Design
Whether playing a game or drinking grandpa’s whiskey (or both), you are after an emotion at the end of the day. Games that deliver emotion are fun, regardless of their complexity or their simplicity.
Catpurse is an experiment in simplicity
With this in mind, we wanted to make a game that would be fun, and yet, as simple as possible. What could we make you feel, using a simple whack-a-mole mechanism?
What triggers would such a game need to push, what strings would we need to pull, to get you to fall in love with it?
Human-Focused Design
Yu-kai Chou proposes a gamification framework dubbed “Octalysis”. In it, he details eight core drives that motivate us to certain activities, including gaming.
Rather than simply focusing on gaming mechanics, (functional focus), the design process optimizes for human motivation in a system, by thinking about the why a user would want to perform certain actions.
We designed Catpurse for humans
Human-Focused Design remembers that people in a system have feelings, insecurities, and reasons why they want or do not want to do certain things, and therefore optimizes for their feelings, motivations, and engagement.
You have to build your game with these drives in mind.
Of course, drives such as meaning, empowerment, unpredictability, etc. must come into balance for the game to make sense. The art-work, using a deliberate palette, should impress this to the user.
The game should just feel right to the gamer, without her necessarily knowing why.
The story, finally, should bring it all together like a conductor to an orchestra.
Current phase: Testing 1, 2, 3
Although complete, Catpurse needs to go through several iterations of tests by real users, to make sure the core drives are balanced and users find it fun. The users should try it, and give us feedback for the beta to proceed to release candidates.
Will we succeed?
Success for us means we enjoyed giving life to Catpurse, and we decided early on to optimize for fun — and not advertising dollars or anything else.
But what about the money?
Using Kin for monetization made this much easier for us. Given that the system rewards the developer for increasing engagement in their app, it was an easy matter to simply focus on fun from the point of view of the player.
Ultimately, the market will vote on Catpurse’s popularity. However, when we do release the game, we will tip a whiskey to Catpurse and The Man, for giving us the best time we had making this game.
