Hot PXL’s Jordane Thiboust talks ‘mini-games reinvented’

With Atari watching its back, French developer zSlide has been cautiously optimistic about the mini-game genre and how it’s slowly becoming a growing attraction among handheld gamers. In the face of the new gamer – the non-gamer – game developers and publishers have begun to assess the possible profits of a fledging market.

 

zSlide’s Jordane Thiboust, the lead designer for Hot PXL that should arrive to the PSP on June 22 in Europe, spoke much about the mini-game genre and how Hot PXL was designed to deliver as much as 200 mini-games in one revamped title for the mobile hipsters.

Despite the apparent negativity against mini-games by certain brackets of the core gaming market, the mini-game is actually a realm of game creativity practice for the developers, especially zSlide after having to design 200 games with different concepts. Thiboust explains:

It was a lot of fun to come up with all the different mini-games. What is funny is that finding 200+ game ideas becomes harder and harder with time. And this is where the craziest and weirdest concepts come to mindÂ… from abducting cows in space to memorising how steaks are grilled on a BBQ. Our game concepts come from everywhere – from everyday life (catching cereal in a bowl) to ‘not the average day’ (zombies hunting brains in a supermarket).

What’s more, they had help from then-great games giant Atari, which was brought to success with games billionaire Nolan Bushnell and his rag tag collection of arcade games for the Atari consoles and arcade machines. Atari’s collection of retro-games – the inspiration for Hot PXL – spurred much of the zSlide’s inspiration for the few hundred games. Thiboust added:

Mini-games are great for handheld consoles, no doubt about it and … WarioWare has proved it. Game design is as much a science as an art and looking at what your predecessor did is mandatory if you wish to progress, then you take it from there, enhance, create and evolve the concept.

From our standpoint, we consider that this idea of sampling games, thought up by the masters at Nintendo, actually gave birth to a new genre of games, on the same level as an RTS or FPS. Of course, we could work on that concept with a different set of characters, a new graphic style and a different platform. But we also wondered about what we could do to take the genre further, technically.

With Atari watching its back, French developer zSlide has been cautiously optimistic about the mini-game genre and how it’s slowly becoming a growing attraction among handheld gamers. In the face of the new gamer – the non-gamer – game developers and publishers have begun to assess the possible profits of a fledging market.

 

zSlide’s Jordane Thiboust, the lead designer for Hot PXL that should arrive to the PSP on June 22 in Europe, spoke much about the mini-game genre and how Hot PXL was designed to deliver as much as 200 mini-games in one revamped title for the mobile hipsters.

Despite the apparent negativity against mini-games by certain brackets of the core gaming market, the mini-game is actually a realm of game creativity practice for the developers, especially zSlide after having to design 200 games with different concepts. Thiboust explains:

It was a lot of fun to come up with all the different mini-games. What is funny is that finding 200+ game ideas becomes harder and harder with time. And this is where the craziest and weirdest concepts come to mindÂ… from abducting cows in space to memorising how steaks are grilled on a BBQ. Our game concepts come from everywhere – from everyday life (catching cereal in a bowl) to ‘not the average day’ (zombies hunting brains in a supermarket).

What’s more, they had help from then-great games giant Atari, which was brought to success with games billionaire Nolan Bushnell and his rag tag collection of arcade games for the Atari consoles and arcade machines. Atari’s collection of retro-games – the inspiration for Hot PXL – spurred much of the zSlide’s inspiration for the few hundred games. Thiboust added:

Mini-games are great for handheld consoles, no doubt about it and … WarioWare has proved it. Game design is as much a science as an art and looking at what your predecessor did is mandatory if you wish to progress, then you take it from there, enhance, create and evolve the concept.

From our standpoint, we consider that this idea of sampling games, thought up by the masters at Nintendo, actually gave birth to a new genre of games, on the same level as an RTS or FPS. Of course, we could work on that concept with a different set of characters, a new graphic style and a different platform. But we also wondered about what we could do to take the genre further, technically.