Say hello to Tero Alatalo, creator of the classic action game Crimsonland, as well as part of the MythPeople team responsible for Abundante! and the exciting new game Profitville. Tero took a little time to speak to us about the art of game design. Read on to find out about what indie game development is like for this Finnish team, and what it takes to get a casual game just right.

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

MP: There are three of us at the moment in our core team. In addition to Sampo and Tero, there is also Valtteri. We all studied computer science at the University of Tampere, where we met. Some years ago Tero made a game called Crimsonland and we decided to try to make a living out of indie and casual computer games. All of us had a passion for these games and therefore the motivation for this was high.

CR: We truly enjoyed Abundante. Can you share your creative experience in making that game with our readers? Where did you get the idea, what were your challenges, and what would you change now, if you could?

MP: The basic game mechanic (match groups of four) of Abundante! is probably ages old. We wanted to try and see if we could improve the concept to something better. One of the main ideas was that there should be an abundance of collectibles to reward the player for his or her actions. Therefore you get gems for each broken stone brick in the game. You’d also get to catch them which even earns you more points. There have been similar games like Abundante! One example is Astro Pop by PopCap Games, which we all liked but felt it had an unnecessarily difficult two mouse control scheme. So anyway, with these ideas in head, we made a few prototypes and eventually moved on to flesh out the creation with graphics, sound, music, and small story elements.

If we had to change anything in Abundante!, we would definitely make the secondary game modes more accessible. Also we could have made the world and the characters more interesting. Also the “!” character in the name has been a bit difficult since many services and even protocols have that character reserved.

CR: You’re the first developers we have talked to located in Finland, and we know our readers are curious: What’s it like being a Finnish game developer? Is there a big “games scene” up there? Can you share any interesting Finnish trivia?

MP: Finland truly is one of the untamed wildernesses on this planet. It’s around -200 degrees Celsius here in summers, and wild polar bears and Santa Clauses roam on the streets of our major cities. Some of them have been also trained to work as firemen and politicians. Seriously!

Joking aside, in general the world has become a lot smaller during the last ten years so I don’t think it’s that different from other Western countries. It is quite cold in the winter (peaked about -30 Celsius last winter) but summers are warm and nice (over 30 Celsius last summer). If you are going to visit Finland, you should certainly do it in summer. The cities are relatively small. The population of our capital, Helsinki, is about 560,000 and here in Tampere there are about 200,000 inhabitants. Taxes are a bit high but on the other hand even university education is free for everyone. Of course you have to be successful in the admission test to get in as there are a limited number of starting positions every year. Finland is also known for its effective and high quality health care system.

We have some mainstream games industry companies here like Remedy, Bugbear, and Frozenbyte. Then we have some community-based game stuff like the very successful Habbo-hotel from Sulake Labs. Also there are some companies making mobile games such as Sumea, Mr. Goodliving (which was aquired by Real), and Universomo.

CR: Karu was a truly interesting take on the Luxor genre of games, and is still a lot of fun to play. Can you share a little bit about your experience in making that game with us?

MP: Looking at games we’ve made it’s pretty obvious that we just love Zuma. Karu was an attempt to evolve that mechanic to make it a bit more intense and rewarding for players that like when it gets more intense. From that point it is quite logical how Karu was born. Once we came to a conclusion that the basic mechanics work, we started to think about the design details. “Karu” is actually Finnish and means something like “rough.” That idea is part of the look we went for the game.

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? How do you know when you have it right?

MP: We think that everyone is a potential user. Almost anyone could play our games, and we have seen that also. From a middle-aged farmer to engineers in their 30s and finally to your “average casual gamer” - a female between 20-65. As to why they are playing, we believe that they play because they enjoy the experience as a whole and get something from it.

How do we know when we have it right? We don’t. I don’t think anybody knows until you get some real world feedback. First of all we need to like the game ourselves in some way. We don’t want to be making something that we wouldn’t want to play ourselves too. We also give the game to our friends, family, and to our loyal group of testers so we can evaluate the concept further. We have been gamers since the ’80s, so our background may be a bit different from some of the casual audience but many preferences overlap. We think that the enjoyment from a game usually relies on the basic features of our thinking. They don’t repeat the mantra “easy to learn, challenging to master” for no reason. The games have to be easy enough for you to make some right moves at the very start, but leave the player lots of new strategies to discover — maybe even those ones that the game developers hadn’t even thought of! You want to feel successful.

CR: Since you started making casual games, what have you learned about the casual market? What are you changing about your games, and what do you think you still need to change?

MP: We’d still need to really, really understand that female dominant audience. What do they want besides more of the same?

The most obvious thing is that production values have gone up, and will probably continue rising for some time. Developers need to keep up with this, while trying to come up with new twists to old concepts, or even better, something completely new. Also the main distributors have become more competitive and they have their own strategies. Developers need to keep up with these developments.

CR: What is one thing most casual game players don’t know about casual game developers that they really ought to?

MP: We’re all actually four inches tall and smell really good. But hush, don’t tell anyone, they’d make perfumes out of us. And what’d people play then?

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

MP: We’d like our games to be huge hits since that would enable us to make even better games We really hope that everyone will enjoy our next game too (it’s called Profitville). It will have unique game play mechanics and also the style is a bit different from our previous games. It’s something that’d fall into category “something new” instead of a twist to some existing proven mechanic.

CR: Is there anything else you’d like to tell our readers?

MP: We are quite near releasing our next game which is called Profitville. It is quite unique so check it out when it is released. Have fun playing games and get Profitville, Sparkle, and other games from www.mythpeople.com

You can see more of Mythpeople at their website, www.mythpeople.com. Be sure to stop by and have a look! Check back at Casual Review soon for more developer interviews, features, and reviews.