As part of Games On Deck's "Road to the IGF Mobile" feature, we talk to the staff of Punch Entertainment, including founder and CEO Tobin Lent and Creative Director Steve Nix about the IGF Mobile 2008 Best Game and Innovation in Mobile Game Design finalist EGO, an online mobile virtual world.
Games On Deck: What kind of background do you have in the game industry or in making games?
Tobin Lent: The team at Punch has been making mobile games since the beginning of the industry in North America. We created some of the very first games to go live on US carriers such as Astrosmash, Defender and several Intellivision titles. We then went to work on several innovative and high-profile titles over the course of the last five years, numbering over 75 titles collectively. These include award-winning and top-selling titles such as Fox Sports Racing, Fox Sports Football, The Incredibles, Finding Nemo, NCAA Football, Mega Man, Ghosts 'N Goblins, King Arthur, Space Invaders, NBA 3 Point Shootout, and Tron 2.0. As Punch we've released titles such as Bam Koala: Jungle Hero, Hunting Unlimited, NBA Slam, Gunslinger and the upcoming Mobile Battles: Reign of Swords, the first in our Mobile Battles series of multiplayer battle games. We are very excited about this game as well.
GOD: What motivated you to make your game?
TL: Punch is focused on community-based gaming for mobile phones. We believe the mobile games industry is moving into it's next phase of evolution. Phase I was dominated by ports from other mediums such as PC, Arcade and Console. We think Phase II of the industry will see highly innovative applications that are specific to mobile. We believe that heavily viral, community-based games that take advantage of mobile's strengths (mobility and connectivity) will be the most successful. As a result, we wanted to create a community game that was fresh, easy to get into, fun to play, could be shared with other people, and was made just for mobile. We came up with the idea for EGO by focusing on these elements through several brainstorming sessions. We had a lot of fun brainstorming ideas and came up with a lot of crazy stuff. We eventually landed on EGO because it could leverage mobility through social connections, and we could have the EGOs participate in all kinds of fun games and activities.
GOD: Where did you draw inspiration from in its design and implementation?
Steve Nix: The inspiration for creating EGO came from a desire to design a game that provided players with a fun way to meet new people and keep in touch with them. The game needed to combine modern communication methods of text messaging, blogs, and social websites into an entertaining experience where the player's avatar developed by interacting with the rest of the community. The game's avatars needed personalities that immediately revealed something about their owning player, so that they were their representative to the community even when the player was offline.
Evaluating these game design goals immediately led to the interesting question, "What determines and defines a person's personality?" The short answer to this question was, "An individual's choice of behavior and the behavior of their immediate social circle."
This answer guided the development of EGO's personality attribute and icon systems. With these game systems, player avatars (EGOs) could grow and evolve their attributes by interacting with each other but the matter of quickly expressing their personality in a snapshot was still needed.
To describe the current state of an EGO's attributes, the common personality archetypes found in psychology felt too clinical to use in a game setting. Instead, the classic archetypes of high school seemed a better fit and expressed more information about how that EGO might behave or who they might get along with. Another bonus to using the high school model was the unique visual look that each archetype possessed, which led to the game's reward system of unlocking archetypes to gain new visual customization choices. With the archetype and visual customization systems in place, a player could now reveal in a snapshot not only their avatar's current personality but their entire personality history by mixing in the visual elements of previously earned archetypes. The core game of EGO was complete, with the rest largely devoted to making communication between players and their EGOs as fun and easy as possible.
GOD: What sort of development tools have you been using in the production of your game?
Kyle Poole (Technical Director): The great thing about programming for mobile is that most of the tools are open source and well-supported. We used the NetBeans IDE with carrier Wireless Toolkit SDKs, which allowed us to quickly test on the phone emulators during development. The complex character animations were created with a custom EGO Animator tool, which allowed the artists to visually create the animations to be imported into the game.
GOD: What do you think the most interesting element of the game is?
TL: I think the deep level of interactions EGOs can have with each another is really interesting. EGOs can fight with each other, make out, flirt, dance, argue, give gifts, compete, play games, chat, send messages, etc. I haven't seen this deep level of interaction in too many casual avatar-based games, and definitely not in mobile. It's a lot of fun and there's really no limit to what EGOs can do. We'll continue to add more activities, games and things for EGOs to do. It's really limitless.
I also think the fact that EGOs have their own unique abilities, stamina and emotions that can develop over time creates a lot of unique gameplay and interactive elements.
SN: The fact that a player's social circle and the EGO community at large have a huge impact on how a player's EGO evolves. While a player is offline, their EGO is still growing by interacting with other players. When the player next logs on, they get to watch replays of their EGO interacting with buddies or meeting new people. In a sense, the player is always connected to the community through their EGO.
Spencer Chi (Project Manager): The ability to socialize with another person based on some simple search criteria has a lot of potential.
