One of the biggest names in casual games, Reflexive Entertainment was founded in Orange County, California, in 1997, and since then it’s produced such amazing hits as the Ricochet series and Big Kahuna Reef, as well winning accolades and awards for games like Ricochet and Wik and the Fable of Souls. Today, Reflexive, through its site Reflexive Arcade, is one of the most important casual game distributors, helping to bring hundreds of titles to the market. We were lucky enough to be able to speak with James C. Smith, co-founder and lead programmer at Reflexive Entertainment. Here, he talks about the company, its games, and the casual gaming industry.

CR: Reflexive Entertainment has been a real success story for independent game development, going from its first few games to becoming one of the major distributors in the casual game market. Can you tell us a little bit about that journey? What were the key events that brought Reflexive to where it is today?

JS: The success of the original Ricochet game in 2001 is one of the most significant reasons why Reflexive is where we are today. Ricochet Xtreme started as a side project for fun and turned out to be very successful as a downloadable try & buy game. This made us aware of the possibilities of the downloadable games market (long before anyone called them casual games) and made it possible for us to invest in self publishing more downloadable games and developing our distribution network.

The next most important event would have to be Wik winning many awards including several IGF awards. This helped get Wik and Reflexive into many new places including Xbox 360 where we plan to focus a significant amount of our future game development.

CR: Southern California is seen as a kind of "ground zero" for big console and triple-A PC games. What's it like being a casual game developer in that environment?

JS: Casual games development is starting to get more respect but five years ago it wasn’t quite the same. Some of the artists who worked on the first Ricochet game moved on to other companies to work on what they called “real” games. Now some of those same people have realized the fun and value of working on smaller teams and have changed jobs again to work on casual games. But Reflexive has never really focused on being a “casual” game developer. We make the games we want to make and do it our own way. We break most of the rules of casual games by making dark gritty sci-fi environments, using brushed metal textures, requiring complex controls, and generally not designing games specifically for 35 year old females. We have managed get fans from the casual, core, console, and retro communities.

CR: Wik and the Fable of Souls was highly acclaimed and won awards and accolades, but it never translated that into great commercial success. What's the difference between winning awards and selling games? Are there different standards of creativity, originality and fun gameplay, when it comes to the casual game community?

JS: It is certainly true that different kinds of games will do well with different audiences. Wik didn’t do very well in the causal portals, but it did very nicely in the indie games scene and on Xbox 360. It is a commercial success in addition to winning great accolades. The key to selling games is reaching the audience who is interested in the type of game you made.

CR: One franchise that has come a long way is the Ricochet series. How did the Ricochet games evolve, and what was Reflexive's experience in opening level-building to the casual gaming audience?

JS: When working on the first Ricochet game there was an overwhelming list of cool features making it very hard to decide what to implement in a reasonable time and what to cut. I often found myself saying “save it for the sequel” when someone suggested a great new idea. Fortunately Ricochet Xtreme was successful enough to warrant a sequel and we had the opportunity to add many of the great features that we had always wanted to include in the original. With the second Ricochet game, Ricochet Lost Worlds, we tried to make sure we didn’t make Ricochet Xtreme obsolete. We picked some things that we though made Ricochet Xtreme great and left them out of Lost Worlds so that Lost Worlds and Xtreme could each have their own unique identity rather than making Lost Worlds be Xtreme plus more. This has worked out well, and to this day many players still love to play both games. But for a long time the Ricochet Lost Worlds fans have been asking for the return of the rail ball and some of the other power-ups and features that are unique to Ricochet Xtreme. With Ricochet Infinity we are giving them that and more. Ricochet Infinity includes all other power-ups, environments and specialty bricks from every Ricochet game ever made plus a lot of new and original content.

With Ricochet Lost Worlds we helped plant the seeds to grow a community of level designers and player. The game includes a level editor and the ability to select which installed add-on packs to play. We created a web site for players to share and discuss levels and editing techniques. The community has generated over twenty thousand levels and releases about 500 new levels per month. This has given Ricochet Lost Worlds players a lot of value for their $19.95. The community creates very diverse kinds of levels that could have never been imaged, much less made, by a single company. Many of them are what I would call “more casual” then the original game itself. So you could say the community has turned Ricochet Lost Worlds into an even more “casual” game than it was when we launched it.

Having this community of Ricochet experts has also been very helpful when designing new games. The community knows more about Ricochet level editing and scripting then anyone at Reflexive does. We recruited many of the Ricochet community members to help us build Ricochet Infinity. With Ricochet Infinity we have taken the level editing and sharing to the next level by integrating it into the game. This makes it much quicker and easier to find a play levels created by the community. It also allows for better ways to rate, filter, and sort levels to help find the levels you want to play.

CR: Could you tell us about Reflexive's experience in being both a publisher and a distributor on such a significant scale, and what it's like to work with so many independent developers?

JS: To get the widest distribution possible for Ricochet Xtreme we build a network of affiliate websites back in 2001. Some sites already had DRM and ecommerce system for selling games and were happy to add Ricochet to their catalog. However, many other sites had an audience who liked games, but the site itself didn’t have a way to sell games to them. For these sites we burned an affiliate ID to the games they distributed and linked the customer back to our own ecommerce system. This way we could process the sales and send a royalty to the web site. Once all that was in place, it just made sense to reuse our ecommerce system and affiliate network for more than just our own games. We started making agreements with other game developers to help sell their games to our audience at Reflexive.com and to our network of affiliate sites.

It has been great to work with so many different developers to get their games in front of our audience. At first some people thought it was strange that we would advertise a “competing” breakout game on our own web site. But we had a mailing list of Ricochet players who like breakout games so it turned out to be the perfect place to sell all breakout games even if they came from our would be competitors who turned out to be our partners.

CR: How does Reflexive see its affiliate program, and how do you think affiliate programs will change in the future?

JS: The Reflexive affiliate program has evolved into white label content aggregation system which we have rebranded as GameCenterSolution. We see ourselves as a service provider to web site operators. Anyone who wants to sell games on their website can source over 800 games from our catalog. We manage securing the deals with the game publisher or developers, wrapping the games in DRM, serving downloads (if desired) and processing sales. This makes it very easy for a web site operator to full his virtual game store with content. But the store customer never sees the name Reflexive anywhere. All splash screens, order formers and e-mail show the “affiliate’s” logo and name. Most URLs will have the “affiliate’s” URL but a few URLs do say GameCenterSolution.com. But if an end user tried to go to GameCenterSolution.com they will not be able to buy any games there. GameCenterSolution is just a service provider to web site operators and will not sell games directly to end users. We don’t think of any web sites as being “a GameCenterSolution affiliate website”. They are each an independent game store that use many service providers to run their business including GameCenterSolution.

The casual games “affiliate” market is getting very mature with many diverse types of programs now available. It is great that web site operators now have so many choices requiring different levels of involvements and allowing different levels of control. Now that it is easy to setup a new web site with hundreds of games, hopefully we will see website operators with more time to focus on making unique and diverse game sites with many different types of offerings.

CR: EA, Ubisoft and Eidos are all announcing new casual game development initiatives. With the entry of major publishers into the industry, what do you think will become of independent developers? How will the landscape change?

JS: For many years the average budget for downloadable games has been steady climbed higher and higher. It is very hard (but not imposable) for a one or two man team to make a game that does well in the casual games portals. The players just expect more now and they are getting it from developers like Sandlot, Big Fish, Reflexive, and Pop Cap. I don’t expect this trend to stop any time soon. Casual games will continue to grow in size, scope and budget. But today, and for the next couple years, the budgets that can have a successful return on investment in this space are still going to be tinny compared to what EA, Ubisoft and Eidos are used to pouring into a game. They may be able to make some mass appeal games for consoles and portable. But I would be surprised if they could keep a budget small enough, and hit the right demographic, to make a successful game on a casual portal or downloadable console game. I do see companies like this helping to expand the definition of what is casual. But I don’t see them making any significant changes to the markets that we call casual today.