Just Blogging Along

Ok, so no-one's yet taken me up on the casual games challenge so I'll just post a little of what I'm upto instead.



If any of you have had a chance to click through to my website (www.whitetreegames.com) then you'll see I've been starting to develop some casual games. It's my ultimate ambition to go full time and make a decent living out of this and so I'm finally ready to release some more information about the projects I'm working on...



The first project to be released is called PipeDreams (here's a screen grab from the title), and for those of you who may be interested, it's a single screen puzzler, where you have to help our hero Jack (the eponymous plumber from the title) get a good nights sleep and not be plagued by every plumbers worst nightmare... (can you see what I did with the title there??)


Anyway, the game's starting to shape up quite nicely and hopefully the finished project will be quite polished.


One of the things I'm particulary pleased with is the games personality. Rather than trying to get all serious or hardcore, this is a game with a sense of humor (albeit one like mine - so be warned!)


I thought bringing out a pleasant, polite personality in the game would widen it's appeal and hopefully make it more commerically successful (plus politeness is always nice, regardless of the source or the reason), especially as the demographics for the casual sector often involve women, older folks etc etc. I'm also working very hard on making the game as easily accessible / playable by as many people as possible, so even the die-hard luddites should find the game a pleasureable experience.

Any that's all for now, so keep your eye's peeled and I'll release more info as and when.

Jon...

Casual Gaming

So what's this casual gaming malarky all about anyway, and how can it be casual if people are glued to their games for hours on end...
I was intending to write a long discourse on this but then I thought I'd see what other peoples takes were on this first - if you've got any ideas or comments you'd like to share, send an email to the address above, that way I won't just be blowing my own trumpet and hopefully can inspire some thoughtful debate.
Eventually you'll see what my take on casual gaming is all about by the games that appear on this site, who knows you might even help to influence the kind of games I make and the target audience...
Next time I'll blab a bit more about WhiteTree Games, the return of the fabled back bedroom developer and how to hold down a full time job AND develop video games professionally as a hobby *eek*.

And so it begins

Friday the 13th was probably not the most auspicious day to launch a new site, but what the heck... It's not as if I'm suspicious or anything. Anyway hello and welcome to my new blog - eventually (when I get the hang of this HTML malarky) this will turn into a proper blog with comments etc, but for now you'll just have to put up with my ramblings - besides you can always drop me a mail at jon@whitetreegames.com if your really desperate to get in touch.
So today the site went live, shame there were no games demo's to go with it (*cest la vie*) but it shows progress all the same...
I've thought about blogging for a while but until I felt I had something worth while to say, I thought the best bet would be keep shtumm, but now with the development of my first two casual games speeding along I thought it would be time to annouce myself to the world...
So who am I and what do you care anyway...
Well in anwser to the first. My name is Jon Howard and I'm the owner / boss / top developer / general dogsbody of the entity known as White Tree Games (see the about us section for more info). White Tree Games was setup to develop and promote "old skool" classic style video games - what are currently referred to casual games. I'm not (at least not anymore) a hardcore games player, but instead have matured to a more abstract type of game, ones that you can pick up and play for five minutes but five hours later still have you hooked. Think solitare, minesweeper, tetris etc etc etc the net is full of these time sinks and rightly so, according to the latest trends casual gaming is now big business and the big players are starting to take note.
Casual gaming also offers one more exciting benefit (and the one were here for), many people have called it a return to the halcyon days of the one man band, the single developer, the bedroom coder (does using your laptop in the living room count?) anyway more on this next time...