Village the Game: Play it. Love it. Live it.

After much conversation, deliberation, and revelation, the design of Village the Game is now drastically simplified to keep it more in line with the expectations of casual game players. Games in this space are usually 20-30 MB in size; contain 12 hours of gameplay, have an easy learning curve, and sell for almost always $19.95.

Originally I was designing this game by combining everything I liked from Warcraft and SimCity and drafted up a monstrosity of a game concept. Now we have a game design tailored for an audience that is used to games like Diner Dash and Virtual Villagers. Games in this realm are almost entirely single player; they have smaller maps and less content than huge multi-million dollar games like SimCity or Warcraft. (Don’t worry hard-core gamers, once we have successfully launched this casual game we’ll begin work on the multiplayer RTS that was originally envisioned.)

The Casual Game space is a great starting point for several reasons: 1) it’s the fastest growing sector at 200% a year. 2) Development costs are 10 times less than the Warcraft-and-Sims-type games. 3) The time required to get to market is a third the time of a larger massively-multiplayer project. Those factors combined have made a massively compelling case to postpone massively multiplayer features that require massive budgets, teams, and timelines. Instead we are pursuing something far simpler, and still significant: “Village Casual”.