Front Porch Chat: Lucky Train

I had the pleasure of sitting down on Skype with a couple of guys from A Bit Lucky, the developers of the brand-new Facebook game Lucky Train. Since the conversation was as much a demo as an interview, I’ll just recap it here and hit all the high points.

First, a little bit about the company: A Bit Lucky, Inc, was founded last fall to make social games, and Lucky Train is their first product. The company has about 15 people making and maintaining their games. I got to chat with the two founders, Frederic Descamps and Jordan Maynard. They’ve both been in the industry for a while and have a pretty wide range of experience – Frederic has worked in e-commerce as well as at Xfire and at Trion making traditional, large-scale MMOs. His background is in marketing, community management, and analytics. Jordan is the lead designer, and has been in the industry for a long, long time – counting youthful internships, he worked at Electronic Arts for 16 years before moving to Trion.

They were both really excited to talk about the possibilities of gaming on Facebook. Frederic waxed lyrical about the value of being able to get immediate feedback from the players and act on it right away – Lucky Train is updated pretty much every day with bug fixes and new ideas. No waiting months to get a patch together! Jordan, after spending years working on Spore and more years working on one of Trion’s upcoming MMOs, was really excited about the ability to think of an idea for a game, make it, and get it out to the public quickly – one of the chief virtues of Facebook games.

We talked for quite a while about Lucky Train – you can read more details about the game itself in my review, but our conversation covered a lot of aspects that the review doesn’t. One of these is their ambitious daily update schedule, and all the cool features they have planned – from simple things like an improved store interface and an achievement panel (so you can see what achievements to shoot for) to complex features like the ability to expand your county (or maybe even manage multiple counties!) and an entire cargo sub-game that would add a layer of strategy for higher-level players. Don’t worry, when these (or other) cool features go live, we’ll be sure to let you know!

We also talked a little bit about the impetus behind the game. On the one hand, Jordan has been a big fan of games like Railroad Tycoon and Transport Tycoon, and no one else is really making train-based games. All the trains are based on actual historical or modern trains, including crazy oddities like the Russian Jet train, an actual train that had two jet engines bolted to the top of it. You’d never get me in one of those things, but your Lucky Train passengers take it perfectly in stride.

The more theoretical basis for Lucky Train was the social nature of Facebook – they really wanted to make a game that made the best use possible of the social connections we all have. Jordan said specifically that he wanted your friends to feel like a natural part of the game world instead of an artificial restriction, and all of the game systems are designed with that in mind. If you upgrade a train, all of your friends on the route get the benefit. If you send a train to your friend in London and he sends it to a buddy in Paris, you’ll all get the “Chunnel” achievement. It’s a truly cooperative game, which is actually not all that common, even on Facebook.

Before we hung up, Jordan made a very interesting observation. He said looking at Farmville (currently the most popular game on Facebook by a long shot) reminded him of the early days of MMOs, when Everquest was just taking off. Lots of people looked at that and said “Wow, this is an incredible new type of game” but they also said “There’s no way the market will get any bigger than this.” They were all proved wrong when World of Warcraft came out a few years later and eclipsed Everquest by an order of magnitude – and Jordan says that we haven’t seen the Facebook version of World of Warcraft yet.

Not that they were arrogant – on the contrary, Frederic talked for a while about all the things they had to learn from the big companies in the Facebook arena. But they both also brought up their desire to bring the things they’ve learned in the traditional and MMO game markets to Facebook – things like how to make a game interesting to maxed-out players, and how to make cooperative gameplay (like raiding and dungeon-crawling in MMOs) successful. These folks are bringing a lot to the table, and I’d keep an eye on them, if I were you – they’re definitely going places.

Frederic, Jordan, and lots of other folks from A Bit Lucky read the Lucky Train Discussion boards regularly – if you want to chat with them or learn more about the game, drop on by! And check out our review of this ambitious new game as well – it’s definitely one you don’t want to miss.