Large Animal Talks Creative Direction For Social Games

Large Animal art director Brad MacDonald was recently featured in an insightful Gamasutra write-up covering the company’s approach to creative direction and social games.

The piece, which focuses on Large Animal's presence at GDC China, goes into detail regarding the company's take on cross platform social games and strategies for taking their games to market.

Here's an excerpt:

"Interestingly, Large Animal has implemented a completely cross-platform achievement and high-score for games like Bumper Stars and Lucky Strike Lanes, meaning that you can log on to the iPhone or Facebook versions and have the same achievements and networked information over all the platforms.

MacDonald then asked a fundamental question -- why take the risk of developing something visually distinct? He commented, understatedly, that social games have "a range of aesthetics", with even some top games having very basic looks. But those games have an embedded audience from early on, and social network gaming is maturing. He suggests that many casual PC players will "migrate across to social networks".

The art director believes that cloning will not pay off on Facebook and social networks. He joked that, "as a puritan", he believes that you are developing a relationship with your users, and will be more loyal to a developer if they know they are doing original, interesting work."

As a mainstay in the social-networking games space, it's interesting to hear Large Animal Games' attitude towards its target platform and how they approach game development in general.

To read the entire article Click HERE.