The development and success of Puzzle Quest |
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Infinity Interactive and D3Publisher's Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords (Xbox 360, PSP, PS3, DS, Wii, PC, Mobile) has seen considerable success ever since it was first released. Budding developers out there may be wondering what it takes to create a good multi-platform game such as this. If you find yourself in the same situation, you might want to know that Gamasutra did a postmortem of this title.
The article discusses the failures and accomplishments of the developers while creating the game, as well as the various lessons one can learn from the project. Here's a short list of some of the things the developers did well as well as stuff that need improvement:
Things learned
- Time spent polishing is time well-spent. The extra time spent certainly resulted in additional sales. Focus and usability testing makes a difference.
- Good design is still important: A graphically simple game can still sell quite well.
- Focus groups are awesome: the title change, the addition of female avatars, and the shifting of the style to something a little more anime in execution all turned out to be great changes.
- Good QA teams are even better than focus groups: even though a few bugs slipped through, a solid QA team really helps.
- Work more closely with marketing to maximize how many games are sold in to the stores. This can be done by identifying whether the game has an instant appeal.
- Work with marketing to deal better and smarter with the press.
- Make sure the game is nice and showy to ensure that the press doesn't have to spend hours trying to find the most appealing parts of the game.
- Improve the build pipeline to minimize production times and bugs.
- More respect for what the casual gamer really wants.
- Some of the standard RPG conventions were absolutely mystifying to casual gamers, such as matching purple gems to level up.
Buy: [Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords (DS)]
Buy: [Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords (PSP)]
Buy: [Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords (PC)]
Buy: [Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords (Wii)]
Via Gamasutra
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Comments [refresh]
"Time spent polishing is time well-spent. The extra time spent certainly resulted in additional sales. Focus and usability testing makes a difference."
"Good QA teams are even better than focus groups: even though a few bugs slipped through, a solid QA team really helps."
Maybe next time they wont released a good but broken game
How is it broken? The game was very well polished, and extremely gratifying. Sure, sometimes it was slightly unbalanced, but overall, it was pure quality. I certainly wouldn't call it broken in the least.