We’re talking to Brian Goble, one of the founders of the casual game powerhouse, Hipsoft, makers of great games like Jig Words, Gem Shop, Ocean Express, and Digby’s Donuts. As one of the pioneers of the casual game industry and one of the most respected independent studios, we were downright flattered that they would take the time to talk with us about their company.

CR: Can you tell us a little bit about your background: Who are you, and why are you making casual games?

BG: I’ve been developing games since I first got my hands on a computer in the 7th grade back in 1979. After graduating from the University of Washington, I developed children’s educational software at Edmark. A few years later in 1994, I left with 5 other guys to start Monolith Productions and develop games for the AAA retail market. Although Monolith is still going strong today, myself and two other founders had our eye on the emerging casual market and found the opportunity to “go for it” in 2002.

HipSoft was co-founded by myself, Bryan Bouwman and Garrett Price and we’ve been developing casual games for almost 5 years now in addition to 10+ years in retail (ack, we’re old!).

CR: The founders of HipSoft were involved in starting and building Monolith to one of the more successful AAA retail game developers in the industry. Why did you change to casual games, and what is life like now that you have changed over?

BG: Being a founding member of Monolith was a great experience. But, as the company grew bigger in the late 90’s, my job changed and was not nearly as enjoyable as when Monolith was small. Game projects took years to complete and I spent most of my time dealing with personnel and management issues instead having fun developing games.

However, I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to be involved in the first version of RealArcade prior to launch. After RealArcade was released and they migrated towards these new “casual” games, I saw the potential to start a new company that could remain small and have fun making games again. Being a father at this point, developing family friendly games was also a plus.

The rest, as they say, is history but I believe that remaining small and focusing on having fun as a company has been a big part of our success.

CR: HipSoft games like Gem Shop, Jig Words, and Ocean Express have a very distinct look and feel that is unmistakably HipSoft. What makes that look and feel, and why have you developed your games this way?

BG: I think a big part of our style comes from the fact that the same three people have developed every game we’ve made (we recently released Flip Words 2–our 15th product).

Our artist, Garrett Price, always starts a new project by coming up with the core colors that he believes will fit the game best. Other than that, I think the “HipSoft look” stems from the way we work together to develop games…it’s not really something we think about…so I guess we just sub-consciously gravitate towards it.

CR: Tell us a little bit about your users. Who is playing your games, and why? How do you target your games to these users?

BG: As you can probably guess, we have a wide variety of users–kids all the way to retirees play HipSoft games–something we’re really proud of because it means we’re truly reaching our goal of making family-friendly games. Although the majority of our users are between 30 and 50, it’s interesting to us to see how our loyal 65+ fan base is growing, too. We don’t specifically target a user group during development, because I think the very nature of casual games makes them accessible to almost anyone.

CR: RealArcade, PopCap, Big Fish, Wild Tangent, MSN, Sandlot, Oberon, HipSoft… Seattle is “ground zero” for casual game development. What happened up there to make such an explosion in casual games?

BG: The Seattle area has always been home to a lot video game and software development companies. As casual games first started to take off, I think the people who really understood the potential were those that had the opportunity to speak face-to-face with those already involved in the market (RealArcade, GameHouse, PopCap, etc). For those of us that were getting tired of long and expensive development cycles in the AAA retail market, this new “casual” market was very interesting and it was much easier to get involved if you could just drive on over to Seattle to meet with the industry leaders. I’m sure everyone’s story is a little different, but that is how it worked out for us.

CR: Some of your first games like Sportball Challenge and MicroMan’s Crazy Adventures are probably less known to our readers than your recent hits like Ocean Express and Jig Words. Why did your more recent games resonate better with your audience? What is it you have learned since starting making casual games that you wish you had known before?

BG: In the early days, we didn’t fully understand the market and what the users really wanted in a game. Keeping game mechanics simple with little instruction needed came relatively easy for us thanks to our experience developing children’s educational software in the early 90’s. However, we didn’t always choose the right game theme because we didn’t know our customers as well back then.

After our first year in business, we had enough of a customer base that we really started to learn what they liked and disliked. We also started doing pre-development surveys and earlier beta testing and the feedback was incredibly helpful. Having a direct relationship with so many of our customers has been a big part of our success and has helped us to avoid repeating past mistakes.

In my opinion, Sportball Challenge is still one of our best looking and best sounding games. However, in hindsight, it’s (painfully) obvious that we chose the wrong theme and didn’t perfect the core mechanic. Fortunately, we were able to learn from this one and our next game was Flip Words which went on to become our first hit.

CR: We have seen that the budgets for casual games are skyrocketing, as are the overall production values. Do you think this is a good thing for the casual game industry, and is it going to be a permanent change? Is HipSoft going to make radical changes to the way they make games?

BG: I think the increase in production value is positive for the industry because it will help remove the perception from outsiders that these are “simple” games. That said, my concern would be that development shifts towards visuals and technology as opposed to focusing on fun and addictive game play mechanics. Fortunately, the try-before-you-buy model helps to prevent this since most gamers won’t pay for a great looking game that is no fun to play.

HipSoft has been incrementally upping our production values and feature-set with each game. In Flip Words 2, we not only increased our native resolution to 1024×768 but we also added an internet multiplayer mode with a fully scalable back-end server architecture to support future multiplayer games.

CR: So Gem Shop and Puzzle Express both had holiday themed versions (Gift Shop and Holiday Express). When are we going to see “Yuletide Jig Words”?

BG: Hehe. Developing holiday versions of our games has been a lot of fun and our players seem to enjoy them as well. Although sales slow down significantly after the holidays, they never completely stop. Even in the summer months, we still see sales so we know there is a group of gamers out there who must really want to listen to holiday music year-round. I guess that’s how those holiday stores that are open all year stay in business.

Although you probably won’t see Yuletide Jig Words this holiday season, we have been kicking around an idea for a Halloween game.

CR: What does HipSoft have coming up in the future? What’s your next hit going to be, and what should we know about it?

BG: We’re hard at work on our next game but it’s too early to say much about it. I can tell you that it will be a little different from our past games and should be ready this summer. To get all the updates, just join our newsletter at www.hipsoft.com. Or, look for a preview at Casual Review in the coming months!