Gamezebo article about making Wedding Dash

I was interviewed by Gamezebo, a leading publication for the casual game industry, as part of a series about women in our industry. The article touches on themes such as breaking in, diversity and the making of Wedding Dash . Read the interview.

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Getting viral about viruses. Here is an example of a Flash tool that integrates with a social networking site to promote a game or in this case, a cause. Check out Be my Bra.

Wedding Dash

My first game shipped! Wedding Dash is about a woman named Quinn that gets thrown into planning her friend's wedding. She gets so good at it that she gets hired to plan other people's weddings. Her responsibilities include picking out flowers, stopping fights, seating guests and making sure a room full of people get fed a 3 course meal. It is in the spirit of the bestselling casual game, Diner Dash.

The game is doing exceedingly well and getting rave reviews from players and even game critics. See our AP video and our Gamezebo Review.

While its great that my name is associated with a succesful title, it was not easy getting here. For my first project I couldn't have been assigned a tougher challenge. Every game is unique, but this one had its share. Everthing that could have happened did.

Accomplishments:
Improved the game's ratings from 1.0 to 4.5
Shipped the game 1 week early
Manage internal and external development team that scaled from 4 to 12 people
Ramped up a new team quickly
Praised as a "super producer" by team
Found innovative ways to visualize progress and keep energy up
Super organization of tasks using spreadsheets, Project and weekly email
Key collaboration with QA, Marketing, Site, BizDev and upper management
Conducted weekly or biweekly user tests of game; successfully gathered feedback that shaped the course of the game
Quickly responded to feedback turning around design changes in days
Remained flexible with management and resource shifts above me
Escalated issues proactively concerning art and game features
Maintained a positive attitude and working environment
Focused team on important tasks

The thing I am most proud of is that I have the proven ability to rescue struggling projects.

Advice from Producers

So I went to GDC last week and hung out with Game Developers at the Blacks in Gaming roundtable and party. My first project is pretty challenging. I'm leading production of a high profile game. This is my first game and there is a lot of pressure to get it done quickly with hight quality. So I sought out advice from some mentors that I wish to post:

1. Team must believe in what they are doing.


2. Put yourself out there. Do what you believe in.


3. Do what you nkow. Be yourself.


4. Your team must believe you know what you are doing.


5. People want to be told what to do.


6. If the schedule is fixed just push ahead.


7. Pick the main prolem and solve it.


8. Know your team.


9. Team must buyin to what is planned. Ask them "does anyone want to push the red button?" Do we need to stop?


10. Make sure everyone knows what they are doing.


11. You just have to have confidence in your approach, numbers don't lie.


12. Management wants someone to say, "I got it." They just need to know you are staying up and worrying so they don't have to.

The advice sounds pretty simple. Sometimes the simple things are the most important to get right. Charge ahead!

Z-axis in Chain Popper Games

The causal gaming genre is dominated by games that the industry calls "chain-poppers." These games include Luxor, Zuma Deluxe, Lotus Deluxe, Dynasty and Sweetopia. Each game adds something unique to the category. The basic mechanic is to fire a ball at a rapidly moving chain of balls. If the ball matches two or more balls of the same color you explode that part of the chain.

The major obstacle is time. The balls are constantly moving towards a "bad event." In Sweetopia its the collision of two powerful candies. My job is to prevent them from colliding by clearing the chain. See picture.

These games are pretty addictive. What makes them so is perhaps a nice risk/reward mechanice, or z-axis that is baked right into the core of the game. Let's take a look at each game.

Z-axis in Zuma Deluxe
The risk/reward tradeoff that brings out the z-axis in Zuma is the chaining feature. If I chain enough balls in Zuma I can fill up my Zuma meter and have all the balls pushed back, ultimately buying me more time. To do that I have to risk the time it would take to setup a string of matches. Play Zuma Deluxe >

Z-axis in Lotus Deluxe
This one could have been stronger. Essentually this is a chain matching game, not a pure "popper" in which you match the patterns of flowers. Lotus didn't have a reward meter that filled up. If you made a chain of matches you would get multiplier points. However the most risk reward scenario I faced was in look at this random flowers that would pop up. The flowers were subtely disruptve. Because you had to stop your scan of the chain to look at the surprise. As a reward, sometimes that surprise flower would help you with a match in your chain. Play Lotus Deluxe >

Z-axis in Dynasty
Dyansty is a chain matching game where the player flies as a dragon swapping balls in the chain with whatever is in its mouth. It is an innovation and it forces you to think differently. The risk reward tradeoff was the same as many of the afore mentioned games. You could set off this dragon events that could help you clear faster. Interesting disrupter in this game was the blue dragon that would set off a shower of coins. You could get caught up in the greed of collecting coins and miss your match. Another interesting innovation is a recovery reward. If you come close to losing and recover some ground, the game rewards you verbally and by pushing back your chain. It's an improvement over Zuma's near impossble recovery gameplay. And it possibly points to a way to acknowledge the player's prowess. I like the feature. Knowing me I would begin to risk near death to buy more time to setup a chain. That's an extreme Z-axis. Play Dynasty >

Z-axis in Sweetopia
Sweetopia like the others has a z-axis where you risk time to setup a better chain. However Sweetopia is different. Sweetopia's top innovative features are: teleporting, pinball, and varying size/distance of the balls. As well it has interesting disruptors like a canon that shoots items at the chain. Interestingly the most innovative feature, the pinball had a muted z-axis. The game gave you the abilty to bounce balls off walls. However if your aim was off, you suffered. If you succeeded, you could reach inaccesible parts of the chain at times. Usually the reward never outweighed the risk so you could play most of the game without using the walls. A way to deal wth that might have been through level design which trained you to use the walls, making targeting easier or aiming at a weakness in a candy canon. For the risky features that requre more skill, there should be a bigger payoff. Play Sweetopia >

Risk/reward scenarios add meaningful gameplay and are accentuated by interesting disruptors that make our play both a greedy delight and an adventure.