PassionFruit – Girls gone indie: Pioneering the romance casual game genre

I recently helped found a company named PassionFruit Games, whose mission is to do something that was virtually unheard of in the US until recently: convert romance novels into video games!

It makes so much sense. Romance novels account for 50% of paperback fiction sold, so there’s already a solid fan base. And female-oriented video games are a booming industry. These are mostly “casual games” (games that are extremely user-friendly, appealing to all ages, and don’t require huge time commitments), and don’t necessarily get the hype and media attention that the male-oriented games are getting. So I thought I’d do my part and share my team’s story of how we became as romance casual game developers!

PassionFruit Games was born from a lay-off. Our whole team had worked at a great game studio called Her Interactive, and was responsible for a new series of Nancy Drew-themed games for casual players. Despite the fact that our games had been met with critical acclaim (even winning Yahoo’s “hidden object game of the year” award), they were not a commercial success, so Her Interactive was forced to let the team go. I’ll never forget the moment when I was called into the conference room to receive the bad news – I know the folks at Her Interactive hated delivering it, but with the current economy, there was no other choice. The whole office was in a state of sadness that day.

Luckily, though, I had an idea that just wouldn’t leave my mind for several months leading up to the lay-offs, an idea that had its beginnings back at my ten year high school reunion where I learned that my friend Marjorie M. Liu had gone on to become a successful writer of paranormal romance novels (if you’re not sure what “paranormal” is supposed to mean, think “Twilight”). At that time, I was beginning a new career as a producer of video games. After seeing how casual games had been reaching out to women, and then realizing how much the two industries’ audiences—female casual game players and romance novel readers—overlapped, it made perfect sense to develop a romance game and try to bring some of those romance readers into the world of games. And while there are currently all kinds of “female-oriented” games (based on weddings, cooking, fashion, waitressing, etc.), I thought that women would probably like to experience deeper emotion in a game than fulfilling boring cliché roles with little imagination. Where was the intrigue and fantasy that so often fill the pages of romance novels (especially great ones, like the ones Marjorie writes)?

So as soon as we were laid off (that day, in fact), I gathered our team outside the building of our former company to tell them my idea. It turned out everyone agreed: Romance readers would love to play a romance casual game… they just don’t know it yet. It seemed to be enough of a good idea that 100% of the team was willing to live off savings and family generosity and start a company together. Even better, Marjorie was willing to let us use her breakout novel, Tiger Eye, as the basis for our game. To mitigate the risk somewhat, we decided to break the book into two halves; that way we could develop the first half in 6-7 months while staying true to the story and allowing for all the major plot points to be included in the game.

Though no one was certain whether we’d be successful or not, things started looking promising very early in our development cycle. Two months into production, we sent out a press release announcing the game, and it gave us a ton of exposure: we landed on several romance book blogs, the front page of IGN PC, and we even got a joke on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon where he mentioned our company name (and did a pretty silly Fabio-esque joke). Frankly, we were floored – the idea of a “romance video game” really seemed to resonate with the public! Now the pressure was on to create a game to meet the hype. And to throw our hat over the fence, we decided to announce the release date as “April”.

And we made it. Flying in right at the end of April, we released Tiger Eye: Curse of the Riddle Box. If you know anything about game development, you know how seriously the odds were stacked against us to release a game within 7 months. We went from working for a completely different company to forming our own company from scratch, starting a completely new project and fully developing it in a very abbreviated schedule. Sure, nerves were frayed at the end, and working in a 1-room basement together means every team member knows way more about every other team member than they’d probably like at this point… but going through this process has helped us all grow as developers.

When will Part 2 come out? Well, that part of the tale has yet to be written…

In the meantime, feel free to check for news and other info about our games at our website, passionfruitgames.com!

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PassionFruit Games prides itself in being one of the first companies to make games written by, designed by, and created for intelligent, savvy, romance-seeking women. Working out of their home base in Seattle, the company’s mission is to bring stories and characters to life through lushly-painted interactive environments and captivating cinematics, while providing engaging, entertaining gameplay. Their first game, Tiger Eye: Curse of the Riddle Box, is available for both Mac and PC at passionfruitgames.com.