All Aboard - Part One

It's a very good question. When we started the company, when we were looking at the space and talking to people, there was an emphasis on the super-casual female gamers. If you were listening to some people, those were the only gamers on Facebook - but we were a little suspicious of that, because the numbers were growing so fast... and who is on Facebook? Well, everybody.

So it's hard to put all those people into one box now - but because it's free-to-play, because it's casual, between the time you're looking at the game and playing it... it's almost instant. That's absolutely fantastic - there are no long downloads. The behaviour therefore is very exploratory, and we heard a year ago that when a person tried one genre - let's say the Farm genre - they'd play on average four other games of that type.

The space definitely started on what you'd call snack gaming, where you play for a minute. The average play session on all games in Facebook is two and a half minutes - of course you can design lots of your game mechanics based on that, and it wouldn't be a mistake at all, to take that into account.

But we also come from a space where we sit down sometimes for hours. Maybe it's not the right time to do that exactly on Facebook, but we can try to increase that - and not only that. We think it starts and ends with games - do good games have a place on Facebook? We believe they do, and so that's our other philosophy.

We think the next generation of games on Facebook isn't going to be so much about spamming people, using all kinds of excuses to bring them in and then hammer them with repetitive gameplay. We think it's going to be about fun, engagement... and the proof is in the pudding - our average play session is close to 13 minutes.

But why is that? Well, we hope of course that people are having fun when they are playing our game, but it's because of the way we designed it - to be fun, addictive and quite entertaining. I think there are lots of new, untapped and - thanks to A Bit Lucky - emerging gameplay mechanics that will prove on Facebook we have a new breed of game that is possible.

Well, as recently as GDC this year... of course, game developers can be their own brand of cynics, but at the GDC awards when Zynga was awarded Best Social Game somebody in the audience yelled out "But you don't make games!"

I think that's totally the wrong attitude, but it was as recent as then... at that point you might just think it's sour grapes, right?

Designing simplicity is difficult - I've been on numerous games that have proven that, Spore being one of them of course. But obviously a huge inspiration for me with Lucky Train was Transport Tycoon by Chris Sawyer, so taking the base mechanics of that game and projecting them onto a social graph was sort of my main focus for design. Then it's a case of finding a way to make that understandable for people - accessible and playable.

That's the main challenge - and we did work on getting the base game design, the core, really playable and usable before we then add the other layers, which are coming soon now. Then we can get nearer to the endgame.

I play a lot of World of Warcraft and I almost believe that the game doesn't start until level 80 at this point - and I think Blizzard believe that too. They've done so many things to make that grind from 1 to 80 much less painful, the bulk of their content generation seems to be aimed at that endgame now, and we've got sort of the same thing.

We have a lot of features in design, and coming in very soon, that are for both our high-end players and the lower-level players. Right now we have just passenger gameplay, but one layer we're going to be adding on is cargo gameplay where you have supply chains.

What I really want to do is have pyramids, where say it takes 100 iron to make a piece of steel, 100 pieces of steel to make the Eiffel Tower - and have low level players gain access to the iron mine, the medium level players have access to steel mills, and at the top of the pyramid is the high-end players.

Everybody would then benefit from that - if somebody builds the Eiffel Tower, anybody who's connected to him on a train route will get the benefit, a bit like a Wonder in Civilization.