Meteor Games' VP of business development, Josiah Gordon, and director of PR and communications, Katie Gerber, were recently involved with an interview here at Gaming Blend covering Meteor Games' business portfolio and how they plan to leverage the Facebook platform for a new kind of direction for casual games. You can check out the first part of the interview right here.

The second part of the interview with Meteor Games about Serf Wars is now available for your viewing perusal. Find out more about Meteor's attempt to cash in on the Nintendo crowd and some of the features in Serf Wars that might make it happen.

GB: I noticed that the game has the option to invite friends into the experience and will the cooperative features play a bigger role as you establish Serf Wars as a long-lasting game?

Josiah: It is, it is. You know, today, it’s limited to be honest. You can visit other people’s kingdoms and one of the cool things -- and I don’t think this is going to push the envelop on virality or anything -- but one of the cool things we don’t do is make [gamers] spam their friends a lot by design. You know, we want to build games that are fun to play and people recommend to their friends but not that they have to bug their friends about. And you can sort of see that throughout all of our games. But one of the things we did in Serf Wars we did for players is you're limited to three mini-games a mission per day. Because with the mini-game you get gold, items you can craft with -- it’s sort of a way to balance the [game’s] economy.

If you don’t have one of the eight mini-games -- perhaps it’s nine, but I think it’s eight mini-games -- you can go to your friend’s kingdom, click on their building and submit one score a day. So even if you’re not at a level high enough or have enough gold to unlock say, Codfarmer, which is one of the later ones or Frog-hopper with the princess tower, you can still play it by visiting your friends. So there’s a reason to go and check out their kingdom and have some sort of social aspect or social relationship there.

Cooperative play is something our players have really been asking for, so we polled our players a while back and they told us strongly that they prefer cooperative play over player-versus-player where they’re fighting their friends. I think that sort of speaks to the mid-market appeal of the game. So it’s sort of casual plus mid-core…or mid-core plus casual is the stats right now, it’s leaning toward mid-core. So that’s something we plan to add fairly soon in the next few months.

It’s not a finished design document for that but it’s being coded right now. And that’s something where there will be sort of…I’ll just say generally, you’ll team up with friends to fight large monsters and that will help move the story along. So instead of getting to a point in a single-player battle where you fight the three hard guys at the end, you may have to team up with a few of your friends to fight a giant monster that takes over a third of the screen or something like that. And that’s an element that we think will be really unique to Serf Wars and really fun and very engaging for players.

GB: That sounds a lot like the dungeon raiding from other big budget MMOs such as World of Warcraft.

Josiah: That’s exactly right. You hit the nail on the head. If we could get to that level of engagement if people plan their Friday nights around raiding or fighting a boss, I would be very happy. I mean, that’s the ultimate goal. World of Warcraft has created a culture and if we could get to a fraction of that engagement we would be happy.

GB: In terms of the mini-games...was that a design decision made early on to include inside the game as incentives to keep playing or were they added to distract players from continually dealing with the Age of Empires style strategy aspects?

Josiah: The mini-games were planned from the very beginning. In fact, they were the very first pieces of the game that were coded. And the mini-games sort of bring together the theme world and the way we sort of create the item-economy, the resource-economy so to speak. If you need to craft something you have to go play the right mini-game…so, I’m trying to think of an accurate example.

Well, here’s an example (I’ll have to double check this) but as a hypothetical let’s say you need something called Dwarven Dander to make something, I think it's called the Dwarven Headslam. It’s like a potion that gives you health and defense. To create that you need Dwarven Dander and it’s really rare. I believe you get it from [the mini-game] Frog-Hopper, but I’ll have to double check. I believe you’ll have to score an awesome score, and there’s sort of five levels of score, and it goes from okay to good or something like that…we could give you that scale, and those points score change per game based on the difficulty and how fast you can score.

But you actually have to have good scores to get to up to the very rare items. Those items can give you a significant advantage during battle. So if you can equip all of your players with the very best of the weapons that are available in the forge, then you can have a significant advantage when you go into co-op and player-versus-player down the road, and even now in the single-player missions.

So they were always from the beginning going to be the driver of the economy and they’re fun. So we don’t have any energy limits in Serf Wars like you see in Zynga games or Sim Social where you can only click 15 times in a row. There’s none of that. That concept doesn’t exist. So you can play mini-games all day long, but you can only submit your three top scores in each game. So if you have all eight mini-games you can submit 24 scores a day. So you can progress very quickly without spending money by playing the mini-games.



GB: The gameplay is definitely solid and the visual appeal is enough to stand on its own as a good looking game. I have to ask, though, why was Facebook picked as the launch platform for the game as opposed to the iOS, Android or other mobile devices?

Josiah: That’s another great question. It really comes down to the size of the audience, the revenue per average user, or D.A.R.P.U, the daily average revenue per-paying user and the app discovery, which sort of boils down to what’s the outline for marketing and acquiring your users. Very simply put: how much does it cost to get a user? And Facebook is fairly low, still. So we certainly looked at all the options but all of our games are currently on Facebook because we think that the equation points to Facebook in that way. On Facebook you have a mass audience around 800 million or something, more than half of those are gamers or play a game every once in a while. I think it’s above 52% or something like that, and app discovery is fairly good. So they have the ticker, they have wall posts, there’s going to be featured spots on the timeline for applications when that rolls out to the general audience and that sort of combines to make Facebook a great platform.

And Flash is also a great platform to develop on as well. All of our technology is rendered in Flash so -- we have teams built on Flash so in the short term it means we’re going to prefer anything online in a web browser that can handle flash. We’re certainly always looking at mobile. We have a mobile strategy in place that’s not quite announced yet. But for the time being we’re very happy with the Facebook platform.

GB: Following up on the last question, if the game manages to do well or continues to do well, would you considering porting the game over to other devices such as the mobile platform?

Josiah: Certainly. Yes we would. We’re always looking at that. Our current strategy is that we view mobile as a compliment to the bigger game world of Facebook. So Serf Wars with its mini-games and missions would lend itself to being sort of a complimentary app. For instance -- there’s no plans to do this but we’ve talked about this -- having a mini-game or two on the iPad or an iPhone where you get scores or certain exclusive items and it feeds back into your main game data. So when you get back to Facebook you have different things and you can buy things with the gold you’ve collected or accumulated.

We have a daily mechanic called taxes where based on your population size, happiness and how much food you have for your people, you can collect a bonus everyday. That’s something we may make available via an iPhone app and there will be other things. So, you know, as the game progresses and it goes more towards the combat elements, we’ll probably look at things like having users check in on their kingdom at any given time. So let’s say you just got attacked by someone and you want to react or maybe there’s something -- and remember this is all hypothetical -- but maybe there’s something where you can do defense and you hit a button and you would use your health potions because you know you’re about to be attacked or something like that.

So we’re looking at various ways to make the mobile compliment the main game world.



GB: That’s interesting because recent research from LeadBolt shows that there are potentially 350 million mobile Facebook users who spend double the amount of time using Facebook and Facebook apps as opposed to normal Facebook users, and I was curious how Serf Wars would be moving forward in that direction, especially competing with Zynga [via Marketwatch] who recently announced that they would be putting a bigger share of their resources into mobile gaming.

Josiah: Yeah, I honestly don’t have an answer for you there. It’s just too new of a game to know anything about that strategy other than the overall company-wide strategy that I mentioned in the last comment. But yeah, we’re definitely looking at it, we just don’t have an answer there. Not yet, anyway.

GB: Well thanks for answering the questions. And I just have to say that Serf Wars is a much better game than I anticipated it being. I seen the e-mail and it said “Facebook” and I thought “Oh no, Facebook…” but it turned out to be a pretty good game.

Josiah: (Chuckles) That’s a good point. You know, you were asking about the Facebook platform and I guess we think about making great games. We’re not thinking about making social games primarily or the typical social game, or what I mean by that the usual casual games.

We really think we want to make a great game, where players will be able to find the game so that they can have fun, obviously there’s monetization involved because we have salaries here -- we’re a for-profit company -- but yeah, it’s really about that we really hope to make a great game and we try not to think that we’re so limited by any given platform. So we’re always looking forward, we’re looking at the 3D Flash environment, Unity and we’re looking at everything out there to be honest on our idea side and what’s the next thing we’re going to do.

I think Facebook and the social network, browser-based games have a long life and I think we’ll see much higher engagement and deeply immersive games on the horizon. And we certainly hope we can lead the way there.

GB: Yeah there’s so many companies out there that focus so heavily on the bottom line that I did find it surprising that Serf Wars was such a well polished game. I know a lot of publishers out there aim for the lowest common denominator and oftentimes spend as little as possible with a game that doesn’t offer half as much as it could, just to capitalize and benefit from the game being available for a wide audience.

Josiah: Absolutely. We focus on quality. And if you look at any entertainment industry or any company in entertainment be it movies, publishing magazines, books, the companies that win are the ones with the highest quality. So you look at Pixar or Disney for animation, quality wins. People want the best entertainment experience. And that’s not lost on us. We want to make very high quality games in everything we do.

Our thanks to Josiah Gordon and Katie Gerber for taking the time out to answer the questions. You can learn more about Serf Wars or play the game for free over at the Official Facebook Website.