by NorseGamer, HSM Editor-in-Chief

Whenever a successful Hollywood blockbuster film is released, the production studio behind it inevitably has to field lawsuits from people claiming it was their idea that somehow got ripped off. On rare occasion, this is true; James Cameron blatantly ripped off Harlan Ellison to create The Terminator, and lost in court as a result. And Paramount’s treatment for Deep Space Nine, given that it had the Babylon 5 production bible pitched to them years earlier, is more than a little suspicious. However, more often than not, it’s simply a case of what the industry calls “parallel development.” Armageddon and Deep Impact are a good example of this.

Speaking as a formally trained and professionally published writer who has registered works with the Writers Guild of America, West: you can’t copyright an idea. The details are everything. There are only about nine basic story concepts, and once you pick one of them, there are a certain number of what are called scènes à faire — scenes which must happen — within the narrative structure of traditional storytelling.

The same applies to the video game industry. If I give you a basic logline description — “A gritty first-person shooter in which a grizzled thirtysomething mercenary antihero must battle terrorists and nationalistic forces bent on harming the USA and its allies” — how many games come to mind?

You see my point.

Home is no stranger to parallel development, either. Hot on the heels of Home 1.7 being publicly deployed, it seemed like every developer out there was offering wings for (horizontal) avatar flight that boosted your speed. And you can plainly see multiple developers cashing on the trend of creating a personal estate which is an unfolding game unto itself, in order to drive long-term user engagement with it and boost sales.

Parallel development in Home is further complicated by different timetables for different regions. As far as we can work out, the QA backlog for SCEA Home is absolutely monstrous — and if even one thing fails QA, those delays can be costly. How frustrating must it be to work on a project for months (or, in some cases, years), just to see a similar product from a competitor get released in the interim?

What we as consumers have to remember is that stuff takes time to create in Home. You can’t just see something cool, boot up an HDK, slap together your own version of it, whisk it through QA and carpet the airwaves with your PR. Stuff can take a long, long time to put together.

Which leads us to our current case of parallel development: Lockwood’s Jewel of the Skies estate.

Okay, let’s get the obvious out of the way here: your brain flashed on Juggernaut’s Palace of the Seven Winds, didn’t it.

It’s nearly impossible to ignore the pink elephant in the room. After all, it wasn’t all that long ago that Juggernaut released its own sublime personal estate which riffed on Indian and Middle-Eastern themes. So here comes Lockwood, one of Home’s most respected developers, releasing the same thing? Has Lockwood run out of ideas? Have they sunk so low as to copy another developer? Should we boycott them on the forum? WAS DODI FAYED ACTUALLY KILLED BY MI6!?!?!?!?!?

Oh for god’s sake, shut up.

Let’s assume for a moment that you’re a Home developer. And let’s assume that I ask you to come up with an “Arabian-themed estate.” What would you naturally come up with?

Well, let’s see. You probably played a lot of Prince of Persia as a lad. You likely have at least a small level of familiarity with The Arabian Nights and Ray Harryhausen’s Sinbad movies. You want to come up with something glamorous and fantastical that will appeal to the widest number of consumers. Something that will appeal to a western-European cultural mindset despite the fact that America has spent a bloody decade bombing the heart of the Middle East back into the stone age, thinks Sikhs are Muslims, thinks Arabs are Muslims, and thinks Muslims look like Rodrigo Santoro.

So yeah, you’d probably come up with a sky palace, too. And you’d use all the shorthand vocabulary you could grab for your marketing efforts. Thus, words like “sultan” and “caliph” are going to appear. And there’s bound to be a veiled princess with a bare midriff — because there’s always a veiled princess with a bare midriff, isn’t there.

This isn’t a knock against either Juggernaut or Lockwood, nor is it a criticism of their respective estates. It’s simply a means to illustrate parallel development. Frankly, Lockwood’s Jewel of the Skies seems to have more in common with Heavy Water’s formula for Avalon Keep; you have the same sort of resource retrieval mini-game, and the same concept of completing tasks from a questgiver to unlock new areas and follow a larger story.

From Lockwood’s PR: “A faraway place, a magical world, The Jewel of the Skies is just waiting to be discovered! Enter the palace in the clouds and visit the Genie. If he deems you worthy, you’ll be given a magic carpet and gem hunting quests to follow. Those who follow the Genie’s commands will be granted wishes that will gradually restore their palace to its former glory.”

And you know what? I love it.

There are just too many personal estates in Home now, and unless a particular estates aesthetics really appeal to you — or you’re simply a completionist — the bar has really been raised in terms of how to make your product stand out in a saturated market segment. Several newer estates, such as nDreams’ Savage Manor, Juggernaut’s Cutteridge, Heavy Water’s Avalon Keep, and now Lockwood’s Jewel of the Skies have all latched onto the tactic of building personal estates with long-term value by baking in large mini-games which unlock new areas to explore, and this is an excellent method of driving user engagement.

Lockwood’s also pulled out another marketing trick which I quite like: a personal machinima walkthrough of the estate’s genie game, hosted by their very own awesometastic Megan.

Anyone who’s spent any length of time crafting virtual estate tours (beyond the lackluster one-shot wave-at-the-camera routine) knows that it’s an ungodly amount of work. But it’s absolutely worth it. Home is a visual experience, and you’re going to have a decent chunk of consumers searching YouTube, looking for virtual tours. This means that, from a marketing standpoint, it’s absolutely prudent to have a formal presence there. And not just the typical promotional trailer, either — something like this, where the developer offers their own walkthrough, is an exceptionally good move. In particular, it endears the consumer to the product and developer on a more emotional level, because a developer walkthrough video says, “We cared enough about what you feel to spend the time to create this for you.”

These little things make a difference, if you have the resources to take advantage of them.

You’ve probably noticed I’ve written very little about the Jewel of the Skies itself. And that’s because I really don’t have to. Lockwood’s put together another amazing work of art (that genie’s art and animations, in particular, are remarkably impressive), and it’s worth investing in. Some people may opt not to buy it because the theme doesn’t appeal to them or because they already own Juggernaut’s Palace of the Seven Winds, but I would urge anyone in the latter grouping to reconsider. Both estates are remarkably fun, and if you look closely, they’re actually quite different experiences. Juggernaut’s Palace is more of an environmental experience (diurnal controls, background music options, et cetera), whereas Lockwood’s Jewel is more of an unfolding game. Juggernaut’s Palace feels like a place to hang out in, whereas Lockwood’s Jewel feels like a place to explore.

Parallel development may be hard at work here, but the end results are wildly divergent. And yeah, I’d recommend owning all of it.

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