Interview with Sandlot Games CEO, Daniel Bernstein
Posted on August 30, 2008 - Filed Under Casual Gaming, Indy Gaming, Interviews, Time Mangement |
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Casual Gamer Chick had a chance to sit down with Daniel Bernstein, the CEO of Sandlot Games. The interview went well and even contains a small scoop that hasn’t been revealed yet. Below is the interview.
How big is Sandlot games?
About 50 people in the states and in Russia. Three teams, dedicated developers and contract teams.
How many different franchises do your teams work on? It seemed like you had a lot of projects going on.
We always do. We have the Westward franchise, the TradeWinds franchise, the Cake Mania franchise, the SuperGranny franchise and Glyph. Five major franchises and every once in a while we also do a new project like Eye for Design. We have dedicated teams on all of our franchise games.
Are the people that work on Cake Mania very familiar with every new release of the game?
Yes, Yes we have people that have worked on Cake Mania since the very FIRST Cake Mania.
How long has Sandlot games been in existence?
We have been in business since 2002. Since the beginning of the casual games revolution so to speak. We have been around for a while and we have seen a lot of companies come and go and we have focused on games that we like to play and I believe our audience likes to play as well.
Speaking of which, in 2006 you guys had the best casual games award from Yahoo for Cake Mania did that bring on a new wave of Cake Mania fans or were they already dedicated by then? Did that bring you a lot of different exposure or did you already have that momentum?
The momentum was there, I think, just on the success of Cake Mania alone. You’ve got a game that is pretty much a phenomenon everywhere that it launched. As a DS title, we sold about 300,000 units of the first version of Cake Mania one DS. Cake Mania 2 DS is out, Cake Mania Skills is out. We have a Wii version planned by the end of the year. We’ve got two mobile games for Cake Mania, Cake Mania 1 and Cake Mania 2. Cake Mania PSP and PS2 just launched. It’s definitely a phenomenon and we are excited by the success of Cake Mania. By the time that article came out, it was pretty clear what direction Cake Mania was headed.
Would you call Cake Mania your flagship game? Was that THE game that got you guys going or was it a combination of everything?
It’s a combination. There are people here that love Cake Mania and there are people here that aren’t really crazy about it at Sandlot. We have a wide diversity of developers that like the games they develop, that is what makes a successful developer. Making sure whatever your guys are working on they like to build it themselves. In the case of the Westward team they are really crazy about Westward
When it came to developing Cake Mania 3 what did you guys do differently to make it stand out as its own title, as opposed to Cake Mania 2 with a couple enhancements or is this is a different game compared to the first two, this is something that is going to be a new experience?
Its definitely based on the principle of Cake Mania 1 and 2. It is definitely a time management game. Your still serving cakes, but there is quite a bit more, this is probably THE biggest evolutionary step in Cake Mania, yet, the one we took with Cake Mania 3. From customers that are specialized in every bakery. A customer like Napolean that keeps everybody from being served until he, himself, is served in revolutionary France in a location there. You’ve got customers in the Jurassic period that eat other customers when they are upset or turn other customers into Mummies that’s what the Anubis does in ancient Egypt. There’s very unique customer interactions and that makes you think about the game differently and really play the game differently. I think our audience, based on focus test results, really resonated with that.
You had Jill that ran her own cake shop in Cake Mania. In Cake Mania 2, Jill had to pick which friend to help what is her role in Cake Mania 3?
Really, Cake Mania the series is the story of Jill and, essentially, the story of her life. We don’t have her stand still. She just goes on and she lives. She grows up, obviously here she’s older, she’s getting married and on the eve of the wedding is when all this stuff happens. There’s chaos there. The time bender, which is a trophy you got in Cake Mania 2, breaks into a million pieces, actually five pieces. Her friends and family pick up a piece of the time bender and get sucked into a different time period.
Oh and that is how you bring in, almost, the fantasy style Jurassic and different style characters you meet?
Yeah and when you get there Jill can dress up in those costumes and you save those costumes in your costume shop and play them later. The one thing we are going to be doing is introducing new expansion packs you can download directly from the game, download and purchase. The first one is free, but you can download and purchase new ones. For example, we’ve got one coming out at the end of September that’s going to be a brand new location with brand new customers and brand new outfits for Jill.
Do you guys have a price, yet, for what the expansions will go for, besides the free one?
We are not sure, exactly, they are going to be bargain priced. They are going to be in the $4 to $6 range.
How much time do you get out of an expansion pack?
It’s a bakery. In essence, you’ve got five bakeries in Cake Mania 3 so it is an additional bakery.
So as you get these expansions you end up with what could be a 15 bakery game set? Is there a certain amount of expansion packs you guys are going to release or are you going to roll with it and if it is a success just keep doing it?
We will just keep doing it. We don’t have any plans to stop it, if it is going to be successful. It is really up to our fans to tell us if this is something they want or not.
Are there plans ahead for Cake Mania 3 to arrive on OS X? The Apple crowd seems to be growing, is there any more demand for OS X versions?
Yes, we are going to take our best selling games to OS X. You are going to soon see … there is a scoop for you, I don’t think I have told anyone yet so I’ll tell you. Westward II will likely make an appearance on the Mac.
When you were building this release of Cake Mania 3 is there anything you have seen you could do better on in future releases?
There is always a set of features that get into the bin that you want to see. I think what you are going to see in Cake Mania 4 is really more of an evolution of game play types something that you haven’t seen in Cake Mania 3. There is going to be evolution from an evolution perspective, Cake Mania 1 is a fish, Cake Mania 2 is, maybe, an amphibian, Cake Mania 3 is a mammal, Cake Mania 4 is a spirit creature. It is millions of years into the future from an evolutionary perspective. When I was trying to cram some of those features into Cake Mania 3,obviously, my team said, your crazy. You have to wait until the next release and I can tell you that the next release, Cake Mania 4, will be more interesting for our gamers because they are going to be able to really really see how this franchise evolves.
Did you guys hit any obstacles in the development of Cake Mania 3 that you overcame, but were memorable?
Yeah, in Cake Mania 3 we have a team working in St. Petersburg and we have producers that are in the States. There is always a suite of communication issues that are always kind of funny and interesting. Our team has grown quite a bit and with the first Cake Mania we had a lot of misunderstandings of what we wanted our team to do and they were too polite to ask us to please clarify. Now it is like we don’t get it could you please clarify for us.
Yeah, you grow into the roll and the flow?
Here is a story for you, in Cake Mania 1 we asked for a guy in a rabbit suit with a five o’ clock shadow. For a long time we didn’t get a response, for days. We were wondering is work going on on this thing or are you guys just stumped? What is going on here? Finally, we get a reply and it is a question A five o’ clock shadow, do you mean if the rabbit stands there and it is five o’ clock at night and he casts a shadow… so you know over coming these language barriers has always been a challenge, but, honestly, with Cake Mania 3 its been really really smooth. We have project management here we have project management there. We have leads there and leads here so it is really very very tight. We went over there twice during this course of the project to work with them, our producer was there in the trenches, scripting and working and it helps. You’ve got a very tight development team that is working together for a good couple of weeks and that really accelerates development. Traveling over there really helped a lot.
When somebody gets into Cake Mania 3 is there any need for them to go back to the other games or can somebody jump right into this game and get going?
It is both. I think you will have an easier time if you have played Cake Mania 1 and 2. You just get in and know exactly what to do and can skip the tutorials and all that stuff. But, if you have a certain way of doing things and that you are kind of use to, ok I am going to go ahead and leave a set of three money on the counter because you try and catch up. All of a sudden Robin Hood comes in in Medieval England and his shtick is he steals money off the counter. So you get challenged in the way that you play if you are use to playing a certain way. I know that our players really resonated with that. They love it and they hate it. They hate it because it is making them change the way they play. They love it because it is new and challenging and it is interesting. A new player doesn’t really have these preconceived notions of ways of playing. They haven’t trained themselves in Cake Mania 1 and 2, but at the same time they will have a longer ramp up time for the entire game.
Right it is almost like an inside joke. I have seen my wife do it too. I have such a hard time with time management games, but she’s just like you leave all this stuff here. But it is like there I want to get rid of it it is in my way. No, no, no, you leave them there and you collect them all and get bonus points. I get all confused.
And, actually, in Cake Mania 3 you do get benefit for three in a row of something. You essentially work up what is called a sugar rush meter. What happens if you do three in a row of any one action it builds up your sugar rush meter and once it hits high then, essentially, all your equipment makes stuff, cakes, frosting, toppings , instantaneously. It lasts for a short period of time, but during that period of time you can really rip through a bunch of customers.
Like a reward for doing it besides just points. A little something to help you and you go ahh alright I did it and gives you a reason to do it.
Yeah, exactly. It is definitely a rush when you do that and your like now I have to maximize the time I have to be able to serve as many customers as I can.
So you end up with strategy, which kind of leads me to this question I had about hard core gaming. Now casual gaming has a stereotypical role where people are looked at as less skilled, if you will. Now I have seen people play time management games and it seems to me that this is actually more hard core than Tic Tac Toe, right. Do you guys find anybody who’d actually be considered a hard core gamer that plays Cake Mania? Should that stereotype be broken?
Well, yeah, I think that stereotype is not there, honestly, I think that is an artificial constraint that we have put on gamers in general that the gamers tend to fall into the hard core audience or the casual audience. I think, in general, we have people that will launch our game and beat it in like days. It is hard for me to wrap my head around that. The fact that they call themselves casual gamers, but they stay up all night and play our game and finished it. Where as our QA takes days and days to finish it. Our QA is made up of hard core gamers. I think, in general, that is a misnomer or misrepresentation.
What is Sandlot Connect and does it have anything to do with the expansions you were talking about or is it something completely different?
It is about the expansions. It is about high score posting. It’s about all of the connected features of Cake Mania 3. By having Sandlot Connect, you, essentially expose Cake Mania 3 to potential infinitum via these expansion packs. Each expansion pack is not just new levels. It is a completely new location with new customers and new types of customers. That is really what is a lot of fun about it.
Is it more of a social networking style thing or is it really just a way to connect back and interactively purchase things and look at new stuff?
It will some day, also, be about social networking, in connecting to the community. Right now we are starting out as a way to let our users download more content and be able to post their high scores and communicate with the community that way and also through downloading new levels.
Is that restricted to Cake Mania or do you plan on expanding that through out your different franchises?
That is going to be to all of our franchises and as the feature set of Sandlot Connect expands into things like social networking, you are going to see our games make use of that as well.
The Time Management genre is big in the casual game realm, could you see Cake Mania going another direction in the future or is this always going to be a time management style game.
I am not going to say. By me not saying, I am also opening up the opportunity for speculation. Yes, it could be all kinds of different things.
Like a puzzle game and or different types of aspects?
Yeah, why not?
On the topic of casual games, how much, if at all, do you see the industry growing in the next five to ten years?
I think the idea, the term casual gaming is kind of a misnomer because it really is mainstream and will continue to be mainstream gaming and will become that for everybody. People will see gaming and will automatically associate it with, what we at this point call casual gaming and what in the future will be called mainstream gaming.
Especially when you have Xbox Live Arcade and WiiWare. Every console system seems to be getting their own arcade style casual games.
Do you think there will be more indie companies coming in to compete on these levels?
If they are good games, yeah. I see a potential and an opportunity for them to do that, absolutely, but indie has always been plagued whether it is in the hard core gaming scene or casual gaming scene by a disdain of consumer interest. For indie games to really be mainstream games they really have to hit on what consumers really want. I think some of the XBLA games have done that in a big way.
And some of them might have just been an off chance. Whoa people actually like this.
Like geometry wars, right, that is one that just stands out and will always stand out. It is a game that seemed somewhat esoteric but it is really really fun. It made an indie game into a truly mainstream title.
Ok we don’t want to take up too much of your time. Thanks for taking the time to speak with us.
Thanks my pleasure.
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[...] Source:Interview with Sandlot <b>Games</b> CEO, Daniel Bernstein [...]
Honestly I didn’t think much of the cake mania games, but I did really enjoy tradewinds.
Yeah, I think Cake Mania definitely appeals to a certain type of gamer. Not to mention, you have to like time management games and baking cakes :-).
[...] Gamer Chick interviewed developer Sandlot Games’ CEO Daniel Bernstein a few weeks ago; check it [...]