Review Fix chats with Silicon Sisters CEO Brenda Gershkovitch, who discusses the company’s newest iOS game, “Everlove,†which aims to get non-traditional female gamers, women who particularly dig drug store romance novels, on the iPhone/iPad to game it up.
Review Fix: “School 26” was geared towards younger girls and was downloaded over 700K times; why did you decide to go into a new demographic with “Everlove”?
Brenda Gershkovitch: We have always wanted to build for the female demographic – and that means kids, young adults, moms, adult women, seniors, the whole gambit. Ultimately we’d like to create a successful series for each of these market segments. However, as a small self funded studio, we are only able to create one title at a time, so started with what we perceived as the most underserved market, tween girls aged 12-16. We wanted to create a high quality gaming experience for that market that didn’t speak down to them, or sexualize them (which we feel happens quite often). We wanted something that connected authentically with their experiences, and School26 was born out of that goal. We are really pleased with how much our audience loves this series, and conversation rates are excellent. Summer of Secrets was our second game in that series, where secrets are the currency and the goal is to create a band with your friends on summer break. Everlove is the series we are targeting to adult women. Our target audience is not traditional female gamers – our target audience is women who love romance novels. It’s our hope that we can entice them to try playing romance interactively, in a game format. It’s a lot of fun, and we think it is going to connect – if we can reach that market.
Review Fix: What do you think you learned from creating this game? How will it affect you moving forward?
Gershkovitch: So much! This was a super hard game to build. We are all experienced game developers, most of us have shipped many titles in our careers, but all of us found this one quite hard to finalize. It’s an unknown genre. There are few benchmarks. We had to learn by doing and testing, not by building on what has been done before us. There is a lot of tape on the floor, as they say in the editing labs for film. A lot.
Going forward, we have learned that writing romance for games in an extremely difficult craft. Traditional romance writing is quite flowery. It is ornate and and verbose, and takes it’s time painting an elaborate story line. It creates images in your mind, and let’s your mind run with it. In games, we have art to assist us, and gameplay. Flowery narrative works well in a novel. This just doesn’t work well in games. When narrative is too lengthy, the game drags. We needed writing that was pithy and engaging, but still enticing and romantic. It was very difficult to try to get both. This game has had three writers work on it, as well as our game designer. In the end, we hired a young writer who had been at Bioware and she really helped us in finally hitting the right voice in the game.
Review Fix: What’s your favorite gameplay element/feature in “Everlove”?
Gershkovitch: I enjoy the design element that allows you to create a personality profiles while you make various love interest selections. Depending on whether the attributes you display are kindness, or romance, or responsibility or will etc, you create who your character is. This is fun – you can play as you would yourself, or you can play as someone else, and different story lines open up to you depending on the choices you make. It also leads to replayability.
Review Fix: How does “Everlove” connect with adult women?
Gershkovitch: Well, it’s set in medieval times, it’s a romance, there is mystery, intrigue, a rebellion, gorgeous men and potential liaisons. What’s not to love? We joke that you can have a dalliance and not threaten your marriage. That’s what has always attracted women to romance novels, in my opinion. It is interesting to note that the Romance Novel Readers Association of the US has researched their audience and report that the majority are happily married.
Review Fix: was the inspiration for the game?
Gershkovitch: Everyone in our studio are Game of Thrones fans. But on top of that, we wanted to build a game that is going to do well at market – that is why we chose romance. We feel it is the next big thing in gaming. At E3 this year, when Steven Spielberg, Don Mattrick and George Lucas were asked what they thought the next big thing in gaming was, George Lucas answered it would be a game for the female audience, and would be a romance. I think he is right. I’d love to grow this series into a 3D world on PS4 or Xbox one. A girl can dream, right?
Another influence is just who we are as a studio. We needed to have a strong, smart female lead. Both founders have kids who are red heads and we are partial to red heads for their tenacity, so we made Rose a red head. We believe that women love to have choice in their lives, and so this game is all about choice. We had wanted to include a lesbian option for the player, but we made the mistake of creating only one lesbian story line, and four hetero story lines. Our gay friends pointed out that this felt like tokenism, so we removed that option. We are still a bit torn about it, as we believe deeply in diversity and inclusiveness. But this is a long series, so we’ll figure it out.
Review Fix: How is the game different from when you originally thought up the idea?
Gershkovitch: In addition to the story line we scrapped, there were originally eight male liaisons available to the player. However, the way the game is designed, each decision has implications for the intertwining story lines, and with nine story lines, it was madness. Talk about scope creep. We had to select which four story lines to go with, and it was tough. We’d had these characters in our studio for months, and it was hard to let them go!
Also, we had to be very sensitive to how much sex we were comfortable including in the story. We were a bit steamier initially, but eventually settled on about the level a person would expect from a drug store romance. We’ll be playing with getting that right over the series, I except.
Review Fix: What was the development process like?
Gershkovitch: The development process was tumultuous, due to the challenges in the writing process. Moreover, we had originally though that this would be a good match for distribution through Big Fish Games, due to their access to the adult female market. However, they really specialize in HOG games, and while we have a small HOG element in our game to allow Rose to collect herbs for healing, it is not an HOG game. We weighed the options of creating a traditional HOG game in order to close that distribution deal, but really felt that romance would have been traded off, and didn’t want to do that. So, we’ll see how self-distribution goes, given that we are trying to reach a non-gaming audience…. It’s going to be tough. Tell your moms!
Review Fix: How do you want it to be remembered a few years from now?
Gershkovitch: We’d love it if our game were remembered as one of the first to give birth to a new a genre. We feel that the romance category of games is going to be huge, and plan to take our learning’s from this game to grow and meet that need.
Check out a trailer for the game below:
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