I recently got the opportunity to interview the game director at
Runaway Play, Tim Nixon, about Flutter.
When we initially set out to form a studio which was about making games inspired by nature, we looked at all the species and environments around the world that was just naturally, on its own, an incredible story. The idea was that we could find these stories which would make great gameplay mechanics, and so we looked at butterflies, which are intrinsically beautiful creatures and have this really interesting story behind their life cycle.
Each individual species, as well, has these really interesting eccentricities. Various different caterpillars have symbiotic relationships with ants where they look after each other and, different butterflies have very different temperaments and life spans. There are so many of them to base it on.
So we were looking to make a nurture game, something where someone could collect and not only play it for entertainment’s sake but also pick us some cool facts and knowledge about the natural world. So butterflies just fit.
The other thing is, that nobody had done it before. So, our brief to ourselves at the start was to make a nurture game that was based on butterflies and their incredible life cycles, something that you could pull out of your pocket any time which would be 30 seconds of happiness in your day. That was the initial brief for the game.
Where did the inspiration for Flutter come from? Was there any inspiration drawn from Otago Museum's butterfly exhibit?
That was more of a happy coincidence, actually. It certainly helped because we had a dozen short-listed concepts and the availability of many real life species close by really bumped Flutter up the list. The thing that really got me jazzed about focusing on butterflies was all the stories that I unearthed – the depth and the complexity and the craziness of some of the behaviour and background story to these different species. It just felt like the basis for a really great world and really great fiction. My imagination sort of got captured by that.
How much research was put into the game?
Quite a lot, especially thinking about, and having to find, all the different species. At the moment, we’ve got over 60 species, not all that are live at the moment, that we have researched out, developed facts for and done the designs for. We did research into the life cycles and tried to find permutations of different species that were interesting and told a cool story. There’s definitely solid research behind it to make sure that it is factually sound.
What’s the target audience and demographic?
It definitely leans towards girls – it’s 80 per cent played by females. The thing is, though, that there is definitely the depth and complexity in there to attract guys to it. It’s an interesting game, with problems to solve and sets to collect. We’re looking at how we can make it more inclusive to all genders. Usually when people say “gender inclusive,” they mean the other way around, with trying to get the girls in, but we have the opposite problem and we have some ideas on how we might do that. Age-wise, our average player is in their mid-twenties, but we have a ton of players that are in school. So anywhere from 13 to 40 or 50.
What was your approach to making the game both a learning and an entertainment experience?
We took the same approach that the television side of NHNZ takes, which is that the work we do is primarily entertainment. It needs to be able to compete with the likes of Shortland Street or Game of Thrones, or whatever. The differentiator of our stories is that ours are real. They come from the real world, so when you pick them up you might learn something along the way. Like when someone turns on the discovery channel instead of a drama series. So first and foremost the core loop of the game needs to be fun, it needs to be just as compelling to collect butterflies as it is to raise dragons in Dragonvale. That’s our real competition.
The thing is, it is very important for our differentiator to have substance. We have people now posting photos of our in game butterflies beside real life butterflies and saying, “You should make this little adjustment to the wing pattern because it’s not exactly right.” People really get into it and they really appreciate that we have put the effort into researching it well and have the right facts backing up the species. Especially parents love that it is inspiring their kids to care about nature.
What’s in the future for Runaway Play?
To continue to build on our expertise in this niche of making games inspired by nature, we want to be the number one studio in the world in that field. We are in the rainforest now with Flutter, but who knows what other environments and creatures we might play with in the future? We are really excited with the traction we have with Flutter and we’re just going to continue to build on that.
