“Every designer should ask themselves: ‘Is the game suitable to be easy or hard?’,” Scott Chen advised in his session at Casual Connect USA 2014. “You need to really look at the core mechanic of your game and then let your game decide if it should be hard or easy.”
Scott Chen, the co-founder of Team Signal, says the greatest fun in the games industry comes from being able to contribute in a game you are passionate about. Scott is the game and graphic designer of Team Signal, and sometimes contributes on the business side as well. He co-founded the company with Brian Lee while doing graduate study at Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center. During that time, he learned to develop highly interactive prototypes. Most of the time, these were games. These experiences helped him become more familiar with the development process and develop the soft skills required for working in a small team. In the last semester, Lee approached him about creating a startup, and since it was their dream to make the games that they were passionate about, they went ahead with no hesitation.
At Casual Connect USA, Scott announced that they are currently developing an Android version of Hyper Square. They expect to release the game by the end of this year, and it will be free with IAP.
Awarded and Encouraged
The proudest moment of Scott’s career was winning the Indie Prize Critic’s Choice Award at Casual Connect Asia 2014. It was their first award for a published game, and the greatest encouragement they had ever received. Scott says, “At least we know there are some people who like our game, and all our hard work hasn’t been for nothing.”
Scott believes the huge wave of copied games that are now flooding the market brings the biggest challenge the games industry is facing today. It greatly reduces the visibility of other, more obscure games. It is possible that this problem may be mitigated through using a publisher. Scott knows a lot of developers dislike the idea of talking to a publisher and think that self-publishing is the true indie route. At Team Signal, they kept that option open, but believe there is benefit to publishing either way. All developers really want is for more people to enjoy the games they have spent months and years creating.
-
Learning From the Past
Scott is an intense gamer who owns most of the consoles starting with NES up through the last generation, plus a Wii U. He grew up as a console gamer, and most of the series he grew up with continued to be exclusive to console. But his favorite platform to play on is PC because there are so many interesting indie games, and most of them are only available on PC. These days, he is playing 140 because he is a big fan of games that combine visual and sound into a cohesive experience.
When Scott is not working, he enjoys visiting arcades and playing a few rounds of a rhythm music games. Even more than playing, he enjoys talking with the arcade players about almost anything. He feels that this interaction between players is lost with the current generation of mobile games, and is something he misses in the gaming scene. Besides gaming, he enjoys watching movies and discovering new restaurants; he emphasizes, “Yes, I enjoy eating good food!”
Comments
