The StarPop Story

The history, design, and ideas behind StarPop!

Part 2 : Designing the game!

The design begins

Sheepishly avoiding the glare of my wife who doesn't really approve of me bringing a laptop on holiday, I write down my thoughts, and start a design for a game. It starts off with a title (just to help focus thoughts) and then the goals, and then overall designs and down into individual ideas.

There's things to pop. When you pop them you get a nice effect, and some more things to pop come onto the screen, and you get to carry on. This turns into the idea that when you pop something, you get some smaller things out as a result, and you can pop those into smaller and smaller things. It would be silly if you could go on for ever, so I settled on big things you pop into medium things, and each of those medium things into smaller things. Pop the smaller things and they've gone.

I still don't really know why, but while I knew that bubbles are fun to burst, the game should be about stars. Maybe it was in my subconscious from a little voice singing "Twinkle Twinkle" over and over, who knows! So the feature of the game would be popping stars into smaller stars, and having fun doing it.

So, what's the aim?

And here was the big question. In most games, the aim is to solve the puzzle, get to the end of the maze, find all of the words, kill all of the baddies... but what's the aim of this game to be?

There could be a time challenge... an accuracy challenge... objects to avoid hitting... lives to lose... but none of those felt right. I thought long and hard about this, before realising it was very simple!

The aim of this game is to just have fun playing it.

So, you have the fun by popping objects. Why make that hard? Make the objects big and easy to tap. Make the effects really nice. Make it the game about achievement rather than failure.

And here's the jaw dropper...

Make it so that you can't actually lose!

What's a game?

A game you can't lose... that's so mind bogglingly simple that lots of people don't really get it...

But if you can't lose, is it still a game? A game implicitly for most people has a challenge, so you must be able to lose.

We call StarPop a game, but arguably it is closer to a pastime - or even a toy. That certainly doesn't make it any less fun. You can't "lose" playing with Lego, or with a jigsaw. (You can lose pieces and make puzzles technically unsolvable, but that's different!) Nobody would argue that Lego and Jigsaws aren't fun! The only way to lose in a game of popping bubblewrap is to run out... and with a computer game you can always start a new game and get more.

Games industry people are vaguely intrigued somewhat by the idea of a "game you can't lose" but mostly smile politely and sidle away (perhaps to talk with someone else about a "normal" game where you run around and kill people... how bizarre is that!). When I show the game to normal people - they tend to get it much more easily. They just find it fun without worrying about the strict definition of a game.

The design thickens...

Armed with the concepts of simple and un-losable, I figured out more and wrote it down.

• Lots of levels and themes, different backgrounds and different objects to pop.

• Different behaviours for the objects, some would float up like bubbles and balloons, some would drift down like snowflakes, some might bounce, some might go in all directions. Lots of variation.

• Positivity - rewards all of the time for popping things, plenty of positive feedback ("great!").

• Sometimes you'd get bonus "flurries" of objects if you did well, maybe for popping things more quickly...

• But you should still get them sometimes even if you're not quite so fast!

• No penalty for missing - this is all about achievement!

• No instructions needed. (In fact, later I did concede on this, and the game does have the words "Pop the stars" and the countdown of "3...2...1...Pop!", but most people figure it out well enough without reading.)

It was a simple enough game, and so I also had the aim that it wouldn't be too hard to develop, so wouldn't be very costly for the company.

And then, having completed the draft of the game design ready to go into more detail on specifics of levels and graphics when it came to development... I filed the design away until we had development time.

For 3 years.

This great simple idea for a game was sitting waiting for the time to emerge from its virtual cocoon on my hard-drive, and spread its wings and be born to the world. But the time was never quite right... it was always one urgent thing after another, a new game that had to be completed quickly, this game had to be out by Christmas, these games had to be completed for an external contract... and each time they pushed the opportunity for StarPop further and further down the line.

The cocoon opens!

Sometime in early 2006, the time finally came. One of our game programmers, Jan, who likes to think deeper into the design of games, had just finished another title, and was looking for the next project to start, and it was the right time for us to make a game of our own.

The StarPop design was brought out, dusted down, and carefully opened.

Jan has a talent for seeing the little ways that people have fun with games. Jan got it!

Sketches on paper, scribbles on our big whiteboard, lots more writing, and we had fleshed out the game much more, but still keeping to the design goal of keeping it simple, fun, and un-losable.

I'll admit, I did have my doubts. The game might not be as fun as I hoped. One of Jan's first tasks was to create a prototype - that's a first version with almost nothing in the game, just enough to see that the concepts work. Bryan, one of our artists, made some sketches of stars of different sizes for Jan to use, and she made a very simple game showing how you would tap to pop the objects. She added simple sounds (pings of different pitches), and got the game working.

Then she showed it to me. And I couldn't stop playing! We showed it to others on the team, and they loved it. Even in its raw and unpolished state, it was great fun - and that was a great motivator! We knew it would be fun.

Jan thought through in much more detail about how the levels would work, and asked me all kinds of questions about how the times and scoring should work, how many objects on screen, how many they pop into... lots of that kind of detail that is essential to figure out if the game is going to feel right. Some of those we got right first time, some had to be tweaked as we went along.

My original design called for the ability to add any number of add-on packs with their own objects and features. That's a great idea... but it adds a great deal of complexity to the game and its technical design. It was a tough choice - and a hard decision, but the first release would have built-in levels only, so that we could get the game out in an achievable (and even affordable!) amount of time.

<-- Part 1 : How an idea comes about!

Part 3 : Pops, Pings, Glittery Sparkles! -->