For my bachelor's project, I am trying to find simple guidelines that can help game developers and game designers design better casual games. First I worked through a literature review and a number of case studies and I was able to distinguish 7 main guidelines. These are: -Challenge -Representation -Simplicity -Feedback -Randomisation -Flexibility -Social Features
I am now trying to test these out and see if I was correct. For that I chose a simple game concept in form of 'Breakout' or its popular incarnation called Arkanoid.
I'm developing 5 versions of the game -'Vanilla' will only be the basic game concept, destroy all bricks to win, only one life -'Challenge' version which will increase its difficulty over time by gradually increasing the speed of the ball. This version will also include a leaderboards system. -'Representation' version which will include nice colourful graphics, background music, sounds and perhaps some sort of animation. -'Randomisation’ version which will have the bricks spread randomly across a certain area of the screen. This will make each game slightly different. -‘Full’ version which will combine all of the above.
I'll then use Analytics to get the data that can be valuable to my experiment and analyse that data to come up with some conclusions.
Read more about it here: http://casual-gaming.tumblr.com/