The Minds Behind Some of the Most Addictive Games Around

If you've wasted half your life playing Peggle, Bejeweled, Zuma or Plants vs. Zombies, blame these guys!

by James Turner | comments: 5

The gaming industry tends to focus on the high end products, first person shooters that crank out a bazillion polygons a seconds and RPGs which spend more time developing the plot in cut scenes than in actual gameplay. But for every person playing Borderlands, there are scores playing casual games like Bejeweled and Zuma. PopCap Games has been at the forefront of casual game development, with a catalog that includes bestselling titles like Peggle and Plants vs Zombies, in addition to the two previously mentioned. I recently had a chance to talk to Jason Kapalka, one of the founders and the creative director of PopCap. We discussed the evolution of PopCap, how the casual gaming industry differs from mainstream gaming, and the challenges of creating games that can be engaging, without being frustrating.

James Turner: Could you start by talking a little bit about your background and how you came to PopCap and what you did before then?

Jason Kapalka: My career in computer games started back in the early '90s, when I was writing for the magazine, Computer Gaming World, doing various reviews and articles. In '95, one of the editors from the magazine left to join an internet dotcom start-up in San Francisco called TEN, the Total Entertainment Network. He invited me to come down there and work there, which I did. And TEN evolved over the dotcom boom and bust cycle, from a very hardcore gaming service into what eventually turned into Pogo.com around 1999. I worked there initially on hardcore games. One day, I was working on Total Annihilation tournaments, and then the next day, someone said, "Hey, design bingo." And I was sort of like, "Oh. Bingo? Okay."

That was the beginning of my casual game design career, I guess. And yes, I was there at Pogo. I helped design a lot of the structure for their casual games until around 2000 when I left, and Pogo eventually went on to get bought by Electronic Arts, of course. I left in 2000 and started PopCap with two other guys, Brian Fiete and John Vechey who are these guys from Indiana that I'd met earlier, around '97. They had made an internet action game called ARC that we'd produced on TEN, and we stayed in touch. In 2000, we all thought we wanted to try something different. So we all left our respective companies to start PopCap. As you might remember, 2000 was not the best year for internet companies. So we didn't really realize that the entire industry was collapsing. We had an interesting time initially. Luckily, our ignorance protected us, I guess.

PopCap started from there, just the three of us working out of our apartments. And over time, we'd say, "Well, I guess we need to hire an artist." And I'd say, "Well, I guess we need to hire maybe another guy here to program this stuff." And then eventually, maybe someone should look at the books or whatever, so we'll hire someone to take care of the bookkeeping. And it kept going like that until eventually we thought that maybe we needed an office. And from there, suddenly, we've got nearly 300 employees now in 2009. So it's been an interesting kind of experience. We never really intended PopCap to get anywhere near as big as it has today.

James Turner: How would you describe PopCap's place in the market today?

Jason Kapalka: I guess it's a bit odd. Casual game companies exist in these strange spaces where they're often the developer and the publisher at the same time. And then they also publish stuff with other guys, where they're sort of rivals, but also they're partners. There's a lot of this co-opetition thing going on. PopCap is obviously a developer, and we develop a lot of games. We used to publish other people's games. And we still do indirectly. in that we have SpinTop Games. which is a company we bought a couple of years back. They distribute a lot of other people's games through their site. But primarily, I think we develop and then publish titles. But we primarily focus on publishing our own titles. So we're kind of a self-publisher, I suppose.

James Turner: That's actually something I wanted to ask you about because one of your distribution channels now is Steam, which is another company's portal for their games and others. How do you see that relationship?

Jason Kapalka: Steam's been really good. We work with lots of different portals. Steam is one of many that our typical game would go out on. On Steam, on Real Arcade, Big Fish Games, Yahoo Games, MSN, WildTangent, a whole bunch of smaller channels. So Steam was just one of several. It's been interesting in that it was developed differently than a lot of those other ones. Steam is definitely much more of a hardcore game distribution channel than something like Real Arcade. So initially, when we started on Steam, it was uncertain whether our games were going to really fit in. Initially, a lot of the ones we tried on Steam didn't really work too well for their audience. Hidden object games don't do especially well with Steam users, for example.

The turning point for Steam was probably when we did Peggle Extreme with Valve. I don't know if you remember that. Peggle had just come out, and the guys at Valve really liked it. We were talking and we had some weird ideas. Someone had the odd suggestion to do sort of a miniature-themed version of Peggle that featured all of the Orange Box's characters, the Half-Life, MT Team Fortress guys. It was a really strange idea, because that was a fairly mature violent kind of franchise. And certainly, it didn't seem like the obvious fit for Peggle. But, on the other hand, we thought, "Well, what the heck? We can try it and it's only going to go on Steam anyway so it's not like it'll offend the soccer moms necessarily." So we tried that out, and it went up. And we were all kinds of nervous because we didn't know -- it had launched initially as a free download with the Orange Box. And even though it didn't cost people anything, we were still kind of wondering if there was going to be this big backlash from the hardcore community about, "What the hell is this cheap little pinball thing doing in the middle of my Orange Box product."

But actually, the response was really good. I mean, the Orange Box guys all really liked Peggle a lot. And ultimately, that led them to go and seek out and buy the regular versions of Peggle which made Peggle suddenly this fairly big success on Steam. Which a month or two ago, before that, didn't seem very likely that this game with unicorns and rainbows would be selling well on Steam. So after that, that sort of seemed to kind of be -- it sort of opened the floodgates a little bit. And now a variety of our games do very well on Steam. Obviously, Plants Vs Zombies was the last one that had quite a hit there. Not everything. There's still some of our games that are clearly more casual and that don't particularly work well on Steam. But the ones that do work there seem to really work well.

James Turner: There seems to be a fairly different expectation level for casual games in terms of graphics and such. Do you think that's a natural result of how they're produced and what they're intended for? Or could you see something like Plants Vs Zombies but with the graphics levels of a Half-Life?

Jason Kapalka: It's certainly possible. I mean in some cases, we're not intentionally trying to make the games low fidelity. We try to do the best art direction we can. Although the usual contradiction, or decision to be made, there is we also want to make games as accessible as possible. So we want Plants Vs Zombies to play on every crummy netbook and seven-year-old computer your mom has and all of these types of things. And so that tends to mean that we try to work and have good art, but usually make the technical requirements very modest. We've been working at making things that can scale well so that on a good computer, you'll get a really nice experience and it'll still scale down to play on a lower-end computer. But that can be challenging in itself. So usually, we err on the side of not worrying about the graphics being too high-end because our experience is showing that a good game with not very fancy graphics can sell very well, like Plants Vs Zombies. And I think that game has good graphics, but it's definitely limited. It's only got 800X600 resolution and so forth. But on the other hand, we've seen plenty of games in the casual space that have really good graphics and they sell very poorly if they're not a fun game. So accessibility and fun definitely, for us, end up being a first priority over graphics. And especially 3-D or technically impressive graphics versus just good art direction.

James Turner: You would think Nethack and Rogue would be the ultimate proof that you can have good game play without good graphics.

Jason Kapalka: Sure, I love Roguelike games. We have lots of Nethack fans over at PopCap, which seems a bit weird in that they're obviously not very casual in many regards. But yeah, they're good exemplars of that principle that graphics are not as important as game play.

(continue reading)

Four short links: 14 July 2009

Twenty Questions, CC Pix, INSERT INTO WEB, and Wash Your Hands!

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 2

1. Twenty Questions about GPLv3 (Jacob Kaplan-Moss) -- twenty very challenging questions about the GPLv3. foo.js is a JavaScript library released under the GPLv3. bar.js is a library with all rights reserved. For performance reasons, I would like to minimize all my site’s JavaScript into a single compressed file called foobar.js. If I distribute this file, must I also distribute bar.js under the GPL?
2. CC Searching within Google Image Search -- what it seems. (via waxy)
3. YQL INSERT INTO -- insert into {table} (status,username,password) values ("new tweet from YQL", "twitterusernamehere","twitterpasswordhere"). That's too cool. (via Simon Willison)
4. CleanWell -- very low-cost recyclable enviro-friendly antimicrobials to battle third-world disease. Met the founder at Sci Foo. He said women wash hands more than men, because women enter bathrooms in pairs. Single easiest way to increase handwashing compliance is to put sinks and basins outside the room, in public view.

Four short links: 7 May 2009

iPhone Rocketry, Copywrongs, Econopocalypse, and Empire

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 1

1. How To Use An iPhone To Fly RC Airplanes and Helicopters -- So I had my basic idea down. iPhone joins the Linksys router network. It gets an IP address. Then, I open up my pilot program. The pilot program interfaces with the router via SSH (I couldn’t think of a better way that has redundancy, and speed, and was already buily by someone else). The pilot program interprets what the iphone is doing, and outputs data to one of the ethernet ports of which there are conveniently 4. Rudder, Ailerons, Throttle, Elevator.
2. Economist Debates: Copyrights and Wrongs -- The Economist live debate about copyright, with the moot "This house believes that existing copyright laws do more harm than good." Public comments, voting, and new informed opinions each day.
3. How I helped build the bomb that blew up Wall Street (NYMag) -- story of the software developer behind a lot of the mortgage repackaging software. Many good lines, e.g., But even then, I was wondering why I was making more than anyone in my family, maybe as much as all my siblings combined. Hey, I had higher SAT scores. I could do all the arithmetic in my head. I was very good at programming a computer. And that computer, with my software, touched billions of dollars of the firm’s money. Every week. That justified it. When you’re close to the money, you get the first cut. Oyster farmers eat lots of oysters, don’t they?
4. Yow -- words of wisdom from John Battelle on Google as the new Microsoft: If any lesson is to be drawn, perhaps prematurely, from all this, it's that no company - or two companies - can lead a culture for longer than half a generation. After that, the culture starts to distrust the companies' motives, regardless of whether they are pure or well intentioned.

You ain't gonna need what?

by Mike Loukides | @mikeloukides | comments: 9

One of the defining characteristics of the Rails movement has been its willingness to throw out the rules by which software developers and consultants have typically worked. Those rules typically produce big, overblown projects laden with features that no one ever uses--but which sounded good during the project specification phase. Build the simplest thing that could possibly work, and add features from there; say "You ain't gonna need it" when partway into the project, stakeholders come along with strange requirements based on what they think they might want.

(continue reading)

Challenges for the New Genomics

by Matt Wood | comments: 14

New guest blogger Matt Wood heads up the Production Software team at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, where he builds tools and processes to manage tens of terabytes of data per day in support of genomic research. Matt will be exploring the intersection of data, computer technology, and science on Radar.

The original Human Genome Project was completed in 2003, after a 13-year worldwide effort and a billion dollar budget. The quest to sequence all three billion letters of the human genome, which encodes a wide range of human characteristics including the risk of disease, has provided the foundation for modern biomedical research.

Through research built around the human genome, the scientific community aims to learn more about the interplay of genes, and the role of biologically active regions of the genome in maintaining health or causing disease. Since such active areas are often well conserved between species, and given the huge costs involved in sequencing a human genome, scientists have worked hard to sequence a wide range of organisms that span evolutionary history.

This has resulted in the publication of around 40 different species' genomes, ranging from C. elegans to the Chimpanzee, from the Opossum to the Orangutan. These genomic sequences have helped progress the state of the art of human genomic research, in part, by helping to identify biologically important genes.

Whilst there is great value in comparing genomes between species, the answers to key questions of an individual's genetic makeup can only be found by looking at individuals within the same species. Until recently, this has been prohibitively expensive. We needed a quantum leap in cost-effective, timely individual genome sequencing, a leap delivered by a new wave of technologies from companies such as Illumina, Roche and Applied Biosystems.

In the last 18 months, new horizons in genomic research have opened up, along with a number of new projects looking to make a big impact (the 1000 Genomes Project and International Cancer Genome Consortium to name but two). Despite the huge potential, these new technologies bring with them some tough challenges for modern biological research.

High throughput
For the first time, biology has become truly data driven. New short-read sequencing technologies offer orders of magnitude greater resolution when sequencing DNA, sufficient to detect the single-letter changes that could indicate an increased risk of disease. The cost of this enhanced resolution comes in the form of substantial data throughput requirements, with a single sequencing instrument generating terabytes of data a week--more than all biological protocols to date. The methods by which data of this scale can be efficiently moved, analyzed, and made available to scientific collaborators (not least the challenge of backing it up), are cause for intense activity and discussion in biomedical research institutes around the globe.

Very rapid change
Scientific research has always been a relatively dynamic realm to work in, but the novel requirements of these new technologies bring with them unprecedented levels of flux. Software tools built around these technologies are required to bend and flex with the same agility as the frequently updated and refined underlying laboratory protocols and analysis techniques. A new breed of development approaches, techniques and technologies are needed to help biological researches add value to this data.

In a very short space of time the biological sciences have caught up with the data and analysis requirements of other large scale domains, such as high energy physics and astronomy. It is an exciting and challenging time to work in areas with such large scale requirements, and I look forward to discussing the role distribution, architecture and the networked future of science here on Radar.