Creative Patterns

(Désolé pour les anglophobes, cet article n’est disponible pour l’instant que dans la langue de Shakespeare)

When we began working on TURN, we wanted to give the game something “original”, a sort of special USP (unique selling point) that we can build upon. At that time we settled a brainstorming, actually it was more a gross meeting than a real brainstorming, to discuss about that “strong” point of TURN. And we choose one thing, one adjective: HARD. And we were wrong…

TURN’s gameplay is quite fun by itself: you move your character, you turn the room, everything falls. Difficulty is what makes the game something more than a simple toy. Without difficulty TURN is just a kind of nice snowball. But if the challenge is too hard, and especially too hard too soon, you lose that “instant fun gameplay” and the game turns (a really appropriate verb for that game, sure) out to be a real headache. We didn’t understand that. Since by working on TURN we became sort of “TURN pgms” (progamers, not to be mistaken with programmers) we didn’t realize that the game was that hard. Actually it became something more of a challenge for us to create rooms which were nearly impossible to solve. And we were awfully wrong…

For someone with the right brain and the time to spend at overheating it, TURN Episode 1 (the first version) was perhaps one of the best puzzle games on the AppStore. We received such praises by hardcore puzzle gamers, since our game was long (nearly 300 rooms) and hard (rrrrr). But they were drowned in the middle of many complaints about the game difficulty and especially the fact that it wasn’t forgiving at all: any mistake and you could end up having to start a room all over. We listened to that demand, and we began to think about loosening the difficulty noose. And that time, we were right.

We first thought about making some tips available to the player through the game. But we also realized that we would have to make some levels easier. And by doing this, we found that the game was still a good game for us “TURN pgms”, and actually it was probably “more fun”. So we started a real complete introspection, and a new project was launched: creating a game that relies only on delivering the instant fun gameplay of TURN: MiniTURN was born. We now think that MiniTURN is the good game for iPhone’s audience. And we hope that we’re right.