http://sio2interactive.com

http://sio2interactive.com

And I absolutely agree with you. Something about working on smaller projects is far more rewarding and enjoyable for me. I like being able to take a simple concept, flesh out it out over the course of a month or two, spend another month tweaking it and polishing it, and have a releasable project than I do the two-to-three year turnaround of a major commercial or AAA project. Part of this is because I work best when I’m working on fresh ideas and such, but I also just love being able to work without the pressure of a long development cycle that releases a project that fails and screws over everyone involved.

I’m really looking into Unity for my next project and one of the reasons I’m doing this, aside from its ability to deploy projects to the iPhone, is the engine’s ability to deploy games on the web. I’d love to try and figure out a relatively casual, quick-play action game and deploy it on my site. That and the iPhone platform both have a lot of the same benefits to me: large exposure, unique platform strategy, and I can feel free to try an expound a simple idea into something playable for a wide range of people.

Future thinking, I think mobile apps (iPhone, and whatever the next-gen of mobile electronics turns out to be) and smaller web games (not full-on games crammed into a browser) will carve out a huge consumer slice. For example, Madden09 for 360/PS3 has 10 million players. There are a 100 million football fans. That leaves 90 million potential customers, most of whom are more likely to purchase a quasi fantasy football product on their iPhone (or more likely at work in their browser) than a super hardcore football simulator on a console.

It’s an exciting time really once you break the mystical trance of having to develop AAA action titles. I’m sure it must be fun to work on some, but most are 300 person teams with killer hours and huge risk. It’s much easier to succeed selling $1000 worth of iPhone apps a day x 10 apps. The process of developing small games also reminds me of what attracted me to developing games in the first place. As a kid, I always wanted to develop the games I was playing at the time. As an adult, I am doing that but the games have changed a lot and have become much more complicated. I’m currently trying to find some middle ground, but web and iphone-type development really seems to be getting close to what I’ve always wanted to do.