When here in Thousand Gears we thought to build a casual version of Stress Taxi the first move was to think in our players.

Who are the players?

We choose to focus on many age ranges that may have access to a smartphone. The kid with his mother’s phone and the thirty going to his job by bus are possible players for our game. The sex of our target audience will be mostly male due to the kind of game and theme.

The next step has been to study references in the market. We played a lot of games both for iOS and Android in the “racing” genre and “runners”. We tried to immerse ourselves in the experience to spot the best for each game. The common denominator was:

• you can control the whole game with a finger
• the avatar goes forward automatically and the player only choose its direction/lane
• the main mechanic is to dodge obstacles to last more

The simplicity of this context may be enriched with little innovations in the genre in order to create a new experience. In Bejeweled Blitz from PopCap (in the top 50 grossing of iOS charts since years) the player does not experience the feeling of lose the game. Instead, the goal is to make the higher score in a short time slice. We think this concept can be easily ported to the runner genre using the fuel metaphor. Which is great, since we can assure short game sessions to our players, which are casual players that want to have fun in a short time.

Another interesting reference for our game is Jetpack Joyride, which has 2 interesting layers of complexity for the players. In fact, they can choose to run for coins and achievements or try to survive more. We choose the mechanic of carry passengers during the track from the concept of Stress Taxi, because we believe this can be really engaging for the players: try to collect extra fuel during your trip or choose to shuttle more passengers to earn money. With this money you can unlock more powerful taxis for your garage. This perfectly fits into the main mechanic, since the player will change lane to take or leave a passenger, so the controls are the same for both layers.