Great games – Silly designs

It’s no secret I’m a big fan of developers who take a chance with unorthodox designs. This brings me to my latest infatuation with Popcap’s Plants vs. Zombies. I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve only played a couple of hours of the game so far but I’ve also been watching my roommate play (and beat) the entire game over my shoulder for the past few weeks. The high concept is simple – Tower defense with flowers on defense and zombies on the offense. If you’ve never heard of the game, it sounds like it either suffers from a bad Japanese to English translation or it’s plain old crazy. It turns out it’s the latter and it also happens to be great fun. Addicting gameplay, great character design, and lots of replay value through minigames make this a unique departure from classic tower defense games. But seriously, take a look at the wall-nut, I dare you not to laugh.

Why is it that controlling a clumsy minotaur in a china shop while trying to retrieve tea cups for customers is so addicting? It’s not just me, as you can see from Blurst.com’s rising popularity. With games like Raptor Copter, Jetpack Brontosaurus, Off-Road Velociraptor Safari, and Minotaur China shop, the names and pitches are some of the strangest out there.

There’s something inherently juvenile about hearing high concepts that are extremely tongue in cheek or even outright based on a pun. (SpringFling anyone?) Frequently through college, game development class assignments were to write a GDD or develop a game idea of some sort. Every time, one or more groups would come up with an idea purely based on the fact that it could get a laugh. With a reckless disregard or forethought of basic elements of gameplay, balance, playability, the team would go forward with a silly idea. Most if not all of these failed before getting too far from the starting gate. Maybe it’s due to a lack of preparation or commitment but it seems both Popcap and Flashbang Studios are heavily invested in their silly ideas and can really pull off a quality game.

Blurst also has an inventive monetization scheme, but that’s the subject for another post. I forsee much more popularity in the future for them, provided the ingenuity and experimental gameplay remains with each new release. I have to say, I was a bit disappointed by Flashbang’s departure from crazy with Paper Moon, so hopefully we’ll get some more creativity/weirdness from Flashbang in the future. Possibly more prehistoric creatures as protagonists? I won’t complain.