Astro Ranch is nearing its App Store debut; so we decided to ask Paul Farley from Tag for some info about the game before trying it for ourselves. We greatly appreciate the time he’s spent answering our questions and are patiently waiting for our chance to play the game.
The concept for Astro Ranch actually pre-dates the iPhone. It was something we had talked about for traditional (Java/Brew) mobile phones! I do think that’s the sign of a good game concept, if it works across a number of platforms it obviously makes more sense commercially than something that is going to be limited to just one device. We really wanted to make a resource management game and one of the team is mad keen on farming for some reason. We talked about Harvest Moon and Animal Crossing a lot as games that inspired us, but which we’d need to rework entirely for mobile/handheld game-play where people play for shorter times and need to get into the core game-play very quickly.
The game really is a mash up of different styles and we hope that there is something for everyone! You play as one of the Starlight twins, Sindy or Max, and having crash landed (due to your own stupidity) on an alien planet you must build a ranch growing crops and raising livestock to survive. It is quite an open world style though with the farming part of the game being the core game-play, but with a number of small tasks and mini-games as well. Not so much a linear campaign but a number of small ‘quests’ based around the alien characters so you have plenty of things to do, especially early in the game when you have a bit more time away from ranching to socialize with the alien inhabitants and play the mini-games. Once your ranch grows you’ll be too busy tending to your crops and animals to do much else! It does get frantic and addictive!
I think I must be compulsive obsessive because I just love growing as much Corbet (big mutated alien carrots) as possible! They look great when you have a few fields of them and then I get a lot of satisfaction creating a little network of paths and picket fences to make my ranch look the best on the planet! Obviously the game will appeal to people that loved games like Farmville on Facebook and Harvest Moon but beyond that we feel we’ve made it very accessible to a wide range of potential players.
Astro Ranch is in many ways a transitional game for Tag as a studio. We can no longer look at ourselves as a studio that makes games to be played by a single player with no connectivity. Being able to connect your game experience with your friends is now expected and so we are in this place of moving to becoming closer to a web business than a games company in our outlook and structure. Astro Ranch bridges that gap a little. It doesn’t do everything we dreamt of in terms of social features but does the main ones such as being able to send your friends letters, gifts and money from within the game and then comparing the size of each others ranches. Of course we have over 30 achievements, some easter eggs and the usual highscore table as well. Also we will certainly add one on one challenges in the next update; we then hope to enable friends to visit each others ranches, but as you can imagine that is a degree more complex to implement. It’s been great working so closely with Scoreloop on the social and DLC side of things, they have really helped us take the first steps into this important area. Hopefully we can continue to work with them on the future updates to really make Astro Ranch the social gaming killer app on iPhone!
For launch you’ll be able to download a variety of costumes for each character (Sindy/Max) there’s animal, fancy dress and Halloween themes. We also have three different types of house décor, a couple of picture packs and a couple of rug packs in addition to being able to buy in game currency if you are really impatient and just can’t face saving up for those upgrades! In the next update there will be some outdoor furniture, more clothes and anything else we or our players can think of.
As a small self funded studio we simply don’t have the cash reserves to throw a large team at our original games like Astro Ranch so it has taken a long time to develop. We even put the game on hold for 9 months as we didn’t think the iPhone market at that stage was big, or broad, enough to support this genre of game. That of course has now changed and so with both the huge growth in iPhone gaming and the success of Farmville we think the time is now right for Astro Ranch to make a huge impact! Given the huge competition on the App Store we appreciate it every time a player decides to download our game, but ultimately the iPhone gamers will decide if the game is ‘good’ or not. If it sells well there will be plenty of updates and of course a sequel, if not then we’ll just keep going with our next big idea.
This depends a huge degree on the success of the game on iPhone first. We have already had discussions with traditional mobile games publishers about 2D and 3D mobile versions for Java/Brew/Android devices which is great because that’s where we started the project. We are also now self publishing on DSi Ware and PSP minis so those platforms would seem to make some sense. I suppose most of all we’d like to see the game on Wii or one of the other consoles as a full retail release. We’ve done most of the hard work in creating the environment, characters and game structure – it would be very easy and fairly quick to build more content on top of that and take the visual detail up a level. We do dream of being able to put a team of 20 on a console download version of the game for a year and create something that really blows people away. For now though we are working very hard to get the word out about the iPhone game and ensure it does as well as possible to provide the kind of launch pad to other platforms that games like Doodle Jump and Flight Control have enjoyed.
Thanks Paul! We wish you every success with Astro Ranch!
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