Business Case
From Project Shrink
SHRINK works on several levels. These levels are the following genres: Adventure, Platformer, and Puzzler. They are all potential selling points for the game.
It works as a puzzler, because an entire level is a puzzle. Players must ask themselves, How do I get past the guards and beat the level with what I have? In that regard, it's similar to popular games like Resident Evil and Portal.
It works as an adventure game, because players walk around, collecting new items and abilities to solve aforementioned puzzles. This puts it in the same vein as games like the recently-rebooted Sam and Max franchise, and The Legend of Zelda franchise.
Finally, it works as a platformer, primarily when shrunken. Players navigate through the level by jumping along platforms. Other games in this genre include the primary Super Mario games, Braid, and the Castlevania series.
We feel as though our key demographic is males ranging from 17-25, with the upper bound being around 35. Because the game will likely be rated M for Mature by the ESRB, gamers below 17 are excluded. Above 30, many gamers will probably be turned off by its content, and a large percentage of females will be turned off by its content as well. This isn't true in every case, however. Grand Theft Auto IV is a very violent game (and part of a very violent series) that sold over 10 million copies as of August 16, 2008. Although primarily played by roughly our target demographic (18-35), it is popular for females and older gamers
SHRINK's violence is not necessarily a stumbling block for it, as other games have shown, and it can support a healthy demographic range as well.
COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
We can pick out one key recent game from each genre. First, the puzzle genre. A great example of a recent successful puzzle game is Portal, by Valve. Portal was an interesting game for a large number of reasons, and created something of a cult phenomena around itself very quickly. We can learn a lot from Portal for many reasons. Firstly, like SHRINK, it was a new IP. And like SHRINK, each map is like a living puzzle. It also has some complicated mechanics, and manages to do a terrific job of teaching the player these mechanics without a clunky tutorial system. In other words, great pacing and level design. It also had a fantastic story that the player really plays, rather than following the typical [game-story-game-story] that games usually follow. Clearly we can learn a lot from Portal. We can look at all of these things, and change and build on these mechanics.
What Portal did wrong, frankly, is that there isn't enough of it for some gamers. We attempt to avoid this by offering as much interactivity as we possibly conceive and implement. In Portal, solving a puzzle is solving a puzzle, and all the player can improve upon is a speed-run. In SHRINK, players can explore all the different levels by beating previous ones differently. As noted earlier in this document, there are multiple exits to a level, leading to multiple other levels. Players will want to not only beat the game, but re-beat it.
As of December 3, 2008, The Orange Box package, including Portal sold 3 million copies worldwide (http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/56193). We are unsure as to whether this figure is PC-only, or includes the Xbox 360, but we can assume it does include the console. However, this great figure does not include sales from the Steam download service, where The Orange Box is still within the top 10 Steam sales as of February 17, 2009 (http://kotaku.com/5155504/pc-sales-charts). This is a game that was released October 10, 2007, and is still on Steam's top charts. SHRINK falls within Portal's genre, because as previously indicated, they share a common puzzle mechanic, trying to escape a particular level using what's available.
Onto the adventure genre, we can talk about The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass. This was a recent Nintendo DS title that has sold 4.13 million copies worldwide as of March 25, 2008 (http://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/pdf/2008/080425e.pdf#page=6). We can also mention a more pure adventure game, Sam and Max, which has recently been rebooted and stayed on top of GameTap's top-played games for at least a month (http://www.telltalegames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1270). But focusing on Zelda, we have a game in which the player goes around the world, collecting new items and weapons to access previously unaccessible areas, solve new puzzles and defeat new enemies. SHRINK shares in some of these elements. Like Zelda, the player's inventory is persistent and is used to solve puzzles.
Phantom Hourglass did many things right. It was a lot of fun, sold well and scored well with critics. Much of its greatness comes from the largeness they were able to pack into a smaller package. SHRINK shares in that too, because we also have a smaller scope. We hope to draw on this and have a very rich world, even though SHRINK is level-based, even though our scope is smaller than many games today.
But we can succeed where Phantom Hourglass did not. Reviewers had two primary criticisms. One was that the touchscreen-only control scheme was decent, but seemed forced at times. SHRINK has a more traditional control scheme that aims to be responsive and intuitive. Another was that the game felt too casual and the puzzles too easy. We will avoid this by drawing on the previously-mentioned Portal, which has been lauded for its level design and difficulty curve. We hope to have simpler puzzles in the beginning that teach the player, and more complex puzzles later on that expand on what they learned in the beginning.
The final genre we fall under is platformer. Here, we talk about Braid. Braid, like Portal, is a new IP, but is also from an upstart developer and was only released via the Xbox LIVE Arcade download system. This is where SHRINK falls. It is partially a platformer, like Braid, and is a smaller-scoped game, like Braid. The developer suggests that about 55,000 copies of the game had been sold in its first week (http://braid-game.com/news/?p=323). A low number compared to the previous ones, but this is a small, independently made game only available via DLC for one console. From the linked blog, we can tell that the developer was actually fairly pleased with this number, showing that a profit has been made on it.
Braid was successful in many ways. It was a very solid platformer that had some difficult and interesting puzzles on it. Critics and players alike responded positively to these mechanics. They go well together, which bodes very well for SHRINK. There is a lot of potential in this genre, because it is so basic. It can easily be merged with others, as Braid and SHRINK both do. We can draw on strong puzzle and level designs, as well as a detailed and unique world.
But Braid, like Portal, loses much of its replayability after one playthrough, and it is short as well. SHRINK strives to offer the player more playability through its high level of interaction. We can take what these two somewhat similar games have done, and build on them and attempt to address the length issues that seem to persevere.
