Kevin Ryan is the lead coder at Top Meadow, the studio who recently released Puzzle Poker and Minigolf Mania. Minigolf Mania came at second place in GameTunnels Game of the year sports award.
Tell us about the history of your studio!
Top Meadow was founded by Brian Supple and myself in 1998 when we started work on our first game. Very soon after we released that game my son was born with severe medical problems that lead to a liver transplant among other operations and my family and I spent the next 7 months living a few hundred miles from home in San Francisco. Since then there have been many month long hospital stays and Top Meadow work was either on and off; or pretty much on hold. A couple of years ago my son had a brain surgery that solved his last problem that was causing many hospitalizations. Life calmed down and I’ve been able to work with the only interruptions being short overnight hospital stays. Expect to see many more Top Meadow games from Brian and myself in the future.
Before founding Top Meadow I had worked in the game industry for many years. I was one of the owner/partners of Dynamix along with Jeff Tunnell, Damon Slye, and Tony Reyneke before Sierra bought us. I’ve created somewhere between 20-30 games — apparently my most well known design is The Incredible Machine. I’m always surprised when I hear that people have heard of it or played it.
Where did you get the inspiration for Puzzle poker?
I was working on a game called Minigolf Mania that was getting close to being finished and I wanted to take a break from it. Garage Games had released a new engine (Torque Game Builder) that I wanted to check out. The first day I created a simple match-3 type of game for my son, Aidan. I wanted to do something different than the typical match three items and using cards occurred to me which lead to “hey, maybe try matching 5 cards into poker hands.” Torque Game Builder turned out to be very easy to use and I was able to get the prototype completed the first day. Then it was just a matter of refining and crafting.
Tell us about the game, what are the objectives?
In Puzzle Poker you are dealt 25 cards in a 5×5 grid on the board. The goal in Puzzle Poker is to form as many poker hands as you can on the game board by sliding cards around. You earn more chips by creating better poker hands. It really is very simple and people seem to get it
right away. I added pop up hints to the game to help when people are playing their first ten hands. I continue to have the hints show up if their average score is low.
Was it difficult to develop a game where you didn’t have any real examples to follow design-wise?
It wasn’t really that hard. I’ve been doing this for over 20 years now and I’ve gotten used to doing this stuff. And thinking about it I doubt there is any gameplay element in Puzzle Poker that I couldn’t find dozens examples of in other games.
What was the most challenging part of development?
Probably thinking about online and community elements. This was probably harder because it was added later in the development process than thought about up-front.
How long time did it take to create the game?
The first prototype took just a day in late November of 2005. I spent December playing around with layouts, menu flow structure, and different surrounding overall game types. In January I had most of the game design down and I then wrote all of the core code. Alex Swanson of Garage Games came on board in February to do the Art Direction and also the actual artwork. The look of the game is all Alex. In March we decided to amp up the GUI with more interactive elements and I also worked on adding more online/community elements. It was pretty much done by April and shipped near the start of May 2006. A couple of weeks after shipping the first version I updated it to a new version that has new/much better music created by Matt Sayre.
How large was the budget for the game?
Close to $0. The only thing that money was spent on was tools that will also be used in future games. Jeff Tunnell of Garage Games was the producer and so I worked closely with them.
What are your targeted audience?
After I finished the first version, Jay Moore, Garage Games marketing person at the time, became seriously hooked on the game. And then I heard that Jeff Tunnell’s teenage daughter was hooked on the game too. My Mom, who is in her seventies, has become hooked on Puzzle Poker too - which is a first for me. My Mon wasn’t really into some of my earlier games like driving tanks in the Antarctic and shooting aliens (Arctic Fox) or flying around in space shooting aliens (Skyfox 2). So, anyway, the target audience was in a sense everyone, although I do think Puzzle Poker is a little more cerebral than the typical match three type game.
Are there any other things you would like to mention about the game?
Give it a try: www.topm.com/puzzlePoker
Tell us about your current game/games in progress.
The game I just recently finished is Minigolf Mania. It is available for Windows and the Mac and it uses the Torque Game Engine so it is 3d. It currently has three 18 holes courses with a new 18 hole course just recently finished and available for free download. It can be download from this page: www.topm.com/minigolf. It has 60 minutes of free play so give it a try 
Right now I’m working on three different projects. One is the first match three prototype game that I created the day before making the Puzzle Poker prototype. Brian Hahn, who did the artwork for The Incredible Machine, will be doing the artwork this game. Another is a game I’m doing with my oldest son that we will be releasing late this summer. And what I am spending almost all of my time on right now is a game project with Garage Games that I can’t talk about.
Oh, and I am also spending a surprising amount of time doing various marketing tasks for Minigolf Mania.
To wrap things up, thanks for answering our questions. Anything you would like to tell upcoming indie developers?
For those that haven’t finished a game yet. Finish it. Ship it. You may make some money. And for sure you will learn a lot.
Thanks to Kevin Ryan for doing the interview!
Posted by Anders Linder
I am currently working on making the website a little more user-friendly and more good-looking.
Posted by Anders Linder
Posted by Anders Linder
