The Popcap® Way
At PopCap, game development is all about "iterate, iterate, iterate." We'll start with a core game concept, build a quick prototype, and then spend months refining and refining and refining it until it's super fun and polished.
Every iteration adds more of the perfect touches that set a PopCap game apart: Extremely fun and intuitive game play. Simple learning curves and user interfaces. Beautiful visuals and exciting sound effects. New goals, increased challenges, and sparkly things to collect as players get better.
“We may experiment with different genres, but our goal is always to make games that literally anyone can play. That's what we do best.”
-- Jason Kapalka, PopCap founder
We test all our games with our employees, our moms (really!), our significant others and friends, and of course our beta forum. All these sources provide invaluable insights into every detail of a game's makeup, and we use their feedback to fine-tune each game before launch.
We typically spend twice as long finishing a casual game as anyone else in the industry. And although we're always pushing the envelope in production quality and depth of game play, the core activity must be truly fun for a game to make it out the door. Otherwise, we'll shelve the game - no matter how long we've worked on it. In fact, we pursue dozens of game ideas for every title that ends up shipping.
While a typical video gaming company may have three to five flops for every success, PopCap Games has yet to have a failure thanks to this fervent approach to development. And for these developers who share our passion for excellence, we also provide our development framework for free.
“We are willing to kill a game at any stage if we don't think it's working out - even ones we've been working on for months.”
-- John Vechey, PopCap founder
