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Hi Ben, please introduce yourself and tell us about your background in the games industry:
I handle marketing and sales at Yatec. Among other things, I contribute heavily to our game designs from the start to make sure they’re right for our audience. I produce most of our in-house sound effects and do some music editing as well. I’m also the unconfirmed Guitar Hero master at the office, though some of my coworkers may dispute that claim.
Like a lot of people who end up in the industry, several of my previous jobs revolved around games. I’ve worked at one of the first LAN gaming centers in the nation, served my time in retail, managed an arcade, and spent four years as a game journalist. In grad school, I based my Master’s thesis on player perceptions of advertising in online games. That research led me to my position at Yatec, where I’ve been since June 2006.
When was Yatec Games formed, and what previous titles have you released?
Yatec was incorporated back in March 2006, when Louisiana was shaping up its digital media tax incentives to draw game studios to the state. Enchanted Gardens is our first public game, and we’ve currently got two more in development along with some potential federal grant work.
What inspired Enchanted Gardens, and why did you decide to make it?
A little market research pointed us in the right direction. The best casual games have themes that really click with traditional casual gamers. As it turns out, gardening is one of the top interests among many casual gamers. We also know they love achievements, trophies, and unlockable content, so we added 30 awards and plenty of fun progress indicators along the way.
We decided to get into the casual games space for many of the same reasons so many hardcore game studios are moving to casual: short development times, reasonable budgets, digital distribution, smaller team sizes, and the ability to work on multiple projects. We’ll take on larger games as our team grows, but Enchanted Gardens was a sensible first product for Yatec.
What were your expectations from your game, and do you feel the end product lives up to those expectations?
We wanted to familiarize ourselves with Torque Game Builder, the development software we used to make Enchanted Gardens, and get as close as we could to a successful formula with our first game. It was a learning process all the way, and now Enchanted Gardens will be released on most major casual portals and game networks over the next few weeks. Of course there were other features we wanted to include, but then we might have never finished the game!
How long did it take to develop the game? Any big problems you encountered during development?
Dev time was five months from prototype to completion. Once our programmers were comfortable using Torque, the biggest hurdles occurred during that last 5% where the little things needed polishing. One of the toughest parts was trying to make sure the tutorials were easy to understand but not annoying to players, which we still could’ve spent more time on.
Preparing the Mac version also took some extra time since we had virtually no external Mac quality assurance. Fortunately, our distributors were able to provide QA and the game runs great on OS X!
What’s the most interesting thing about Enchanted Gardens and why?
The Garden Builder area turned out to be a favorite with our beta testers and focus groups, and it really gives the player incentive to go for gold medals in each level. After every five levels, you’ll visit your own custom garden where upgrades appear based on your performance. The more gold medals you earn, the more choices you’ll have. It seemed like just a fun distraction on paper, but it ended up being one of the coolest parts of the game for a lot of players.
What game(s) are you currently working on?
We have two new games in the pipeline, but it’s too early to reveal them yet. We’ll be approaching publishers for both, and they’re coming along nicely. Both are very different from Enchanted Gardens and will target the same broad downloadable market. Maybe we’ll see some sneak previews in the near future?
What’s your favorite indie game at this time, and which recent mainstream titles do you admire, and why?
I can’t speak for the rest of the team, but I’m a big fan of Last Day of Work’s games. Virtual Villagers was one of the freshest ideas in the casual space in a long time. As for more mainstream titles, I finally got around to playing Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion on Xbox 360 and I haven’t been so addicted to a single-player game since the first Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. I also have to admire the fact that the Burger King games were some of the best-selling titles of 2006! Who knew?
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Interview with Ben Lewis
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