This week's pitch is from the team behind Strawberry Diva, an indie MMO with a casual bent aimed, as founder Paul Carey describes it, "firmly at women". The interaction is based purely on "social navigation": every action must invoke trust or disdain, affection or enmity. So no smacking rodents and orcs with handbags. Damn.
Read on to find out more about the game, and the most rational argument I've ever read for the rise and rise and rise of indie games.
Explain your game to my mum in 140 words.
"Strawberry Diva" places you, along with thousands of other players, in a contemporary city. You host parties, bitch about your enemies - winning points if your friends think you're acerbic enough, grovel by offering gifts and seek introductions to powerful players. Your relationships with your friends and enemies lie at the heart of the game, you rate all your relationships and your own ability to succeed depends on how others rate you. Success in Strawberry Diva is all about being smart, having guile, second guessing your friends and opponents.
How do players control the game?
Our user interface is that of a fairly conventional web app. Point, click, type - very straightforward.
What is your background?
I chose to study computer science because I wanted to make games. But graduating at the height of the dot com bust meant jobs for newbies were thin on the ground. I've spent the last few years working as a software developer in a variety of different companies. I've always been tinkering with different projects on the side and eight months ago decided I wanted to commit fully to developing Strawberry Diva.
Name your competitors.
I don't know of anyone trying to do exactly what we're doing. But I'm increasingly aware of games aimed at girls and women that focus on social navigation. Web Boyfriend, Coolest Girl in School and the Second Life tie-in for "Gossip Girl" all offer their own take on social success.
How many players do you have now and what's your target in 12 months?
Our playtesting was limited to a few handfuls of users - trying to playtest an MMO on a limited budget is hard! We hope to have a few hundred players signed up when we launch in December. If just a fifth of those play, that should give us the critical mass we need to keep growing. I'd be very happy if we had about 50k active players by this time next year.
What's your biggest challenge?
The list of things we need to do and that we'd like to do is overwhelmingly long. And it only gets longer. Maintaining focus and just pushing for the next goal is a continual challenge.
What's the weirdest development experience you've had thus far?
The realisation, just now, that weird, interesting and unusual things seem to have stopped happening to me. I can say this with some degree of certainty as I keep a log of what I've been working on. It's annotated with stories from my actual life... there are very few! This may be what happens when you spend too long in front of a screen.
What's your distribution/publishing plan?
Being able to play directly in a browser is a big win, the only impediment to playing is the signup form. We already have gameplay elements that encourage players to invite their friends and intend on adding more as the game evolves. Exercising your social muscle is at the heart of Strawberry Diva and so we expect it to have a viral personality. We're planning on releasing a Facebook app and iPhone app early next year.
Are indie games the latest killer app?
The advances in the underlying technology on which games can be built and disributed - XNA, Flash, Facebook Platform - offer, to many indie developers, true killer apps. The barriers to publishing your own game - so low in the eighties, so high in the nineties and for much of this decade - are low again and look to stay that way. While only very few indie games may achieve real success, many deliver on experimental ideas that studios wouldn't risk. That innovation benefits us all.
Are you the next big thing?
There's a strong element of right place, right time to being the next big thing. I believe we're creating a truly compelling game. In my less lucid moments, I like to think that we're pushing the boundaries of an emerging genre. Strawberry Diva, and the games I mentioned as our competitors, are all doing something very interesting. Sooner or later someone's going to create a brilliant social strategy game set in a contemporary world, and it's going to be huge!
