For today’s cast, I had the absolute pleasure of talking to Seth Sivak, co-founder of Proletariat about what it takes to make a successful game in today’s market and how he’s applying that to his studio’s first game World Zombination.
We started off talking about Seth’s recent job as lead designer of Zynga Boston and how he and his team created Indiana Jones Adventure World. This lead into a discussion on the casual game market and the problems going on with sustainability and making those long lasting games on the mobile market.
After that we talked more about the recent developments of DLC and crowd-funding and their impacts on game design and marketing which also brought in the recent problems that Evolve has had with their DLC campaign. Seth talked about how DLC in the right mindset can do wonders for a game’s longevity but it is something that has to be treated carefully.
Our conversation centered around the concept that it’s better to build the perfect storm with your game, studio and brand as opposed to just lightning in a bottle. Meaning you want to keep the momentum and interest around your game and development going in order to keep people interested in both it and you as a company and developer. A very important point that I will be exploring further in an upcoming post and one that anyone interested in making a game needs to understand.
For our final topic, we talked about Seth’s first game at Proletariat — World Zombination and how they are trying to aim for both casual and core audiences with an interesting take on MMO or CCG design and tower defense mechanics. We talked about the design, monetization options and how Seth is trying to strike that balance between being a free to play title and having a great experience for paying and free players. As you’re listening to this, World Zombination should be out on the App store with a PC version planned for a few months later.
- Here is the Proletariat site and World Zombination section and where you can download it on the app store
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | RSS
