The Simon Test

There's a weird challenge for game designers. As much as we like to
think that everyone plays games these days and everyone enjoys
leveling, boss battles and all that nonsense, there is a definite
devide between those of us who are willing to spend 20 hours of our
lives completing Dragon Age 2, and people like my mum, who plays
Farmville because the horses are cute.

This is an especially difficult thing for developers like us. The
entire studio spends lunch playing Killing Floor, grinding away at a
relatively hardcore and unforgiving FPS, trying to become a level 6
sharpshooter, while spending the other 7 (or more like 15 recently)
hours of the working day making accessible, cutesy platform puzzle
games.

Don't get me wrong, we love our game, but let's just say there's a
disjoint between the level of challenge/punishment/reward/difficulty
that many of us "hardcore" gamers are looing for, and the kind of
experience our target audience wants. It's easy to assume that people
will "get" the game concept and persevere with it if it's hard, when
in reality, if they don't enjoy it in the first minute they'll hit the
home button and go back to Angry Birds.

That's where the Simon test comes into play. Simon is our CEO, he
admits that he's not a gamer. He hasn't loved a game since Mario
Party, and phrases like WASD or Progression Tree just make him angry.
He is also the bane of all coders, with a seemingly super human
ability to break any build of a project within seconds of playing it.

Frustrating as this is (retrieving sobbing coders from under their
desks is a task no producer wants), Simon is the ideal test candidate
for a game - he gets bored in 5 seconds, he hates being defeated
unfairly and he doesn't really have any knowledge of the codes and
conventions of game controls or gameplay. Put simply, if you haven't
nailed something accessible and fun, he won't be interested. He's also
a sucker for slapping down feature/budget creep and a total
perfectionist.

Sounds like a nightmare right?

Well. Yes. But ultimately when we've put out anything that he wasn't
totally into, the public reception has been tepid at best. Annoying as
it is when he's not happy with something and it feels like he's nit-
picking, he's generally right (no Simon, you can't quote that last
sentence next time I disagree with you).

The upside of this is that on those rare occasions when he gets all
excited playing something, and won't give you the controller/ipad/
mouse back because he's having fun, it means you're probably doing
something right.

I'm not going to jinx it by telling you about his reaction to today's
build.