Try Hard as it might, Singapore based Playware Studios cant hide its fascination with light.
While the PC game being developed at the studio (headed by Indian gamingpreneur Siddharth Jain) is named Lucent Grounds, the best of the breed casual online game that it released yesterday is named Magic Lanterns.
An online casual game Magic Lanterns is a magical journey of addictive lantern-arranging fun that stretches from Kyushu to Hokkaido, and all of Japan in between. It has been co developed by Singapore based independent gaming studio Boomzap which is headed by Alan Simonsen (who also heads Singapore IGDA chapter) and Christopher Natsuume (Producer on super selling PC game Far Cry and designer on Circus Maximus and PS2 version of Monsters Inc.)
Magic Lanterns boasts of 60 levels and various modes such as panic (for those want to play fast & deft) puzzle (brain challenging), adventure and community (which means user generated content)and is available in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, German, Norwegian, French, Finnish and English with Hindi verison to be launched soon.
On being asked about the distribution and the business model by AnimationXpress.com, Playware studios Chief Creative Director Siddharth Jain remarked,”We have already roped in five major online casual game distributors and aggregators for Magic Lanterns and that is a lot because there are only few big distribution channels in casual games space in the world”
“Players can download the full game and play it unrestricted for 60 minutes after which they have to buy the game if they want to play more. We hope to see a couple of hundered thousand downloads or maybe even more”he added.
“We have also been getting a lot of cross platform queries for the game” he further added.
Boomzap Chief “Boomzap is thrilled to be releasing our second game in the casual space, and our first working with Playware. We’ve had great results from our beta testers about the look of the game, the Japanese design, and the addictiveness of the gameplay, so we have high hopes it will do well”
“Working with Playware was a great experience for us. Boomzap uses teams from around the world, but we especially enjoy using talent from our own backyard in Singapore.” he added.
A team of 10 worked for a period of about six months to create the game. “We play and craft each level, its not just something slapped together to get a number there. we spent time and love and care making each level as much fun as possible and we made 60 of them” shared Jain.
Talking about the look development Boomzap’s Natsume shared, “We wanted the game to have a Japanese feel that showed a respect for the culture without falling prey to the same old steriotypes. By using the traditional Japanese “matsuri” we could introduce the audience to real element of Japanese culture they may not have known before”
Speaking about the casual games space, he added,”This space (Casual Games) is very competition intensive and as a result there have been some real great games like Bejewled, Luxor, Big Kahuna Reef, Diner Dash, Trade Winds etc”
“Though it was a struggle to make everything fit in 15 megs” he concluded.