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Designing Zen Fashion
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April 28, 2008 |
by Guest Writer
Hi there, I’m Christopher Natsuume, Creative Director of Boomzap. As you may or may not know, the Casual Review site is hosted at Boomzap, and some of the writers are Boomzap designers. Lately, Boomzap has completed another game, Zen Fashion, and we’re very proud of it. It should be showing up on a lot of the portals in the next few weeks, but you can pick it up over at the Boomzap website right now. To celebrate the release of the game, we thought you might be interested in learning a little bit about how we made it.
  The original idea behind Zen Fashion was to make a follow-up to Magic Lanterns, which we shipped about two years ago. However, we decided against using the collapse-style mechanic, because we felt the audience had seen enough of that particular gameplay, and we were looking for something newer. We were playing with the idea of dragging a line across matching items, similar to games like Magic Match, but allowing more freedom of movement for larger matches. We wanted players to have the same "prune the colors to make a big rewarding match" gameplay that we had in Magic Lanterns, but with more control over that set, so they could make even bigger sets. Once we did a brief prototype of the mechanic we were convinced that we could make a pretty cool game out of it.
We also wanted to make some changes to the theme. We liked Magic Lanterns, but we always worried that the main character was a little too childish for our audience. We had some long discussions with the artists at Playware, who had done the art for Magic Lanterns, and we hit upon the idea of having the main character "grow up" and become some kind of professional. Moreover, we wanted to send her outside of Japan, and have her interact with some of the other fun cultures in Asia, like China, Korea, and Thailand.
We let Playware run with that idea for a while, and suddenly had all of these beautiful new designs for the character and great concepts for places around Asia, and the idea took on a real life of its own. We had not originally planned for the game to be a fashion game at all, but when we saw that the concept art had all of these beautiful traditional costumes, we were hooked on tying the costumes into the game. We had been playing a lot of Cradle of Rome at the time, and were looking for a way to capture some of the fun of having the player determine which bonuses they were going to have in upcoming levels, and we thought – "Why not have her powers tied to the costumes?" It was then that the real design for the game came together.
 I stayed up all night one night pounding out the full design for the new costume based gameplay, and when the team saw it in the morning, everyone was pretty excited. We all agreed that this was an interesting way of dealing with Asian culture without creating the classic casual game stereotypes of egg-rolls, rickshaws, and ninjas. We had always discussed how we wanted to celebrate traditional Asian culture, but in a way that was refined and modern. We felt this was a great medium for doing so.
The story flowed naturally from our feelings about the subject matter. We wanted the game to remain modern and relevant, so we made the story arc the story of a modern girl learning about her culture and traditions from her grandmother. That allowed us to have the past "speak to the present" in a way. Maybe we’re over-thinking it, but that was the intent, anyway. We also think grandmothers need to show up more often in games, full stop. We like grandmothers, and think that having a modern Japanese grandmother in a video game is a nice step towards the elimination of the sort of silly stereotypes we often see in "Asian themed" games.
An interesting note on the "Asian-ness" of Zen Fashion: we did get a lot of pressure to "De-Asia-fy" the game. Many of the publishers and portals who saw the early builds of the game were very uncomfortable with having the lead character be Asian. Coming from a bi-racial family myself, and having a development team composed almost entirely of Asian developers, I found this quite frustrating, as I genuinely wanted to make a game that was more inclusive and ethnically diverse. While there is some logic to the idea that our audience might feel more comfortable with a blonde girl in sweaters and jeans than a Japanese girl in kimonos and sarongs, there is also a point to be made that the American audience should be seeing more Asian characters in leading roles in entertainment products. Sure, we’re not a major Hollywood movie or anything, but we’d like to do our part. We decided in the end that we thought the Asian costumes and setting were far more culturally rewarding and unique, and regardless of the possible backlash of not having a leading white woman, we wanted to let Hana stay Japanese. So we kept it. We hope the audience agrees.
 The game mechanics have tested out well so far. People who play it seem drawn in by the costume changing and the "gotta make a bigger set" gameplay. Most importantly, the drag-match gameplay coupled with the various special objects and tiles has really made the different level layouts meaningful. We were sad in Magic Lanterns that in the end, the different level shapes never really made that much difference except in the puzzle levels, and were pleased to see that in Zen Fashion they really did. That means that getting to new levels has a lot more meaning, giving the overall game purchase more value for the user. Or so we hope.
In the end, the game came out quite pretty, and we’re proud to add it to our growing library of product offerings. We hope you’ll give it a try, and fall in love with Hana (and her many costumes!) in the same way we have.
If you’d like to read more about the game, see some tips on playing it better, or pick up some wallpapers and other free treats, please head on over to www.zenfashiongame.com and check it out.
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