TE: What is Louisiana's appeal?
BL: The tax credits offer a lot. The word is slowly getting out. I know Austin and Georgia are also doing tax incentives. It's really tough. Development communities are really already there in Austin and Seattle, so that's been our biggest focus. Trying to bring people in with incentives. It's a good, low-cost place to live and work. Like, Lafayette for instance - a lot of people don't know what a really high-tech, driven city it is. It's a slow process, but the state does have a lot to offer, especially if you're doing any type of digital media.
TE: The company's about page says you're currently hiring and trying to ramp to team up to 30 in the next couple years. Do you plan on growing slowly?
BL: It's in line with the vision that we're staying casual for now, and as we get bigger, we're going to be adding more people. Say we're going to be doing an MMOG within the next year or so ... we're definitely going to need more than we have right now. Eventually we do intend to grow the team quite a bit. We're actually building a new office right now to fit more people.
TE: Do you plan on working on one game at a time with the larger team, or do you want to have multiple teams doing multiple things?
BL: You have to split it up. We have three projects going on right now. The great thing about casual games is small budgets, quick dev times. You can't have 12 people working on a game at once. You'll have art styles clashing against each other and everything. So we break it into smaller teams. It's usually two to four people per project now. Our last [project] took about five months.
I wish I could talk [more about what we're doing], but we do have a couple projects that are in the early stages. One of them is a boutique MMOG kinda thing. Actually, that would be blending an MMOG and an [alternate reality game], but the casual stuff would be separate. The casual stuff is a stepping stone for us.
TE: The whole office recently got addicted to PopCap's Bookworm Adventures Deluxe. They really did something interesting by merging more traditional gaming elements into a casual game. Is that something you look at and say, "That's what we want to do"?
BL: Every time PopCap puts a game out, we say, "Wow, they nailed it." One of our things is whenever we try to figure out, how should this sound, how should this look, it's like, "Well, what would PopCap do?"
They've never put out a blatantly bad game, but their budgets are pretty crazy, because they can afford it. They're bringing in millions a year. ... There's no way we would spend two years getting a casual game just right, because we don't have the budget for it. ... But, man, if we had the budget, we could really do something like that. It'd be great.
TE: Yatec has one game out now, Enchanted Gardens. Could you tell us a bit about it?
BL: It was our first foray into the casual gaming space, so we were looking into themes [to see] what we could do to really resonate with the people who play these games. We were at Casuality in 2006, up in Seattle, thinking up ideas. We had gotten the game mechanic down; we were already prototyping it back at the office. And we remember seeing that the top five interests of ... the core, female audience ... were pets, shopping, arts and crafts, gardening, and travel. Alright, well, gardening, OK.
