by ted2112 HSM team writer

nDreams joins LOOT, Lockwood and Heavy Water as the latest in Home’s family of third-party developers to announce new content outside of Home. nDreams has not only upgraded Blueprint:Home and introduced a new luxury hot tub, but has also debuted two new casual games: Pub Play: Drinking Games and Dash’s Family Photo Face-Off on the iOS platform available outside of Home in the Apple App Store.

This expansion is not only huge for nDreams, but important for the Home community itself. Several core Home developers are pushing content boundaries and legitimizing themselves — and Home along with them — as a successful and expanding realm of gaming.

Let’s start with the games.

Pub Play: Drinking Games is an adult-themed app that’s lots of fun. You use your smart phone as a kind of game hub where you can play up to seven different games. For example, Photo Face-Off is a picture-taking game where you take candid snap shots and vote in several silly categories. Forfeits is a kind of dare game where you challenge your friends to do somewhat embarrassing and hilarious stuff like sit on a crowded pub floor, or allow someone to draw something of their choosing on your body. The game Smashed invites you to prove your sobriety with physical challenges. Pub Play is designed as a kind of high-tech drinking game for two to four players. Also included is Finger Point, Conversation Bomb, Truth or Forfeit, and an old Home favorite: Spin the Bottle.

Dash’s Family Photo Face-Off, on the other hand, lies at the opposite end of the spectrum. This is a fun game made for the whole family. In Dash’s Family Photo Face-Off you take and rate pictures based on very funny questions, like “Who looks more like a gorilla?” “Who is the messiest?” or “Who looks most like a dinosaur?” The winner is decided by you! Dash’s Family Photo Face-Off has over one-hundred family-safe questions that are meant to be as much about bonding as fun.

The casual game market may seem like somewhat of a departure from the company that brought you Xi and Aurora, but then again not really.  These two iOS titles are, at their core, simply fun. Like nDreams companions Thing in a Box, Benji, Nipper, and L’il Reaper, they are a simple and goofy good time that doesn’t require much reading into.

The games are also designed with social media in mind. Both games can post game activities to Twitter and Facebook, but I might be careful with Pub Play, as we have all posted things that didn’t seem quite as funny the next day.

I talked with Joe Dale, Digital Products Manager at nDreams, and asked him about the new games.

HSM: Are you guys excited about these new titles?

nDreams: We are extremely excited to have released our debut titles and have them available for everyone to try. nDreams is well known for creating quality content for Home and we feel that we know that platform extremely well so we are really excited to see what we can do on another platform, one that we are going to have to learn from scratch. There are going to be some great experiments we run along the way with, not just these apps, but forthcoming titles that will help us ultimately succeed in a crowded marketplace.

HSM: Do you feel Home has helped nDreams in some ways to create them?

nDreams: Home has and will continue to be our main bread and butter, it is the platform we have worked on the longest, have an amazing community who follow our products and have learned a great deal from. In terms of learning from Home then there has been lots we have been able to take from that platform and use when making decisions around Pub Play and Dash’s Family Photo Face-Off. Home is a social platform and that is one of the key things about our two titles, having a great time with a few friends or your family. In Home also we have tried various different ways of monetizing games, the two biggest examples are F.U.B.A.R being free to play and Xi: Continuum being Paymium and while Home has a much smaller user base than iOS we have been able to look at player behaviors and factor that in when designing our debut iOS titles.

It certainly is an exciting time for nDreams, and we know the weight of the Home community will be behind them. To get you own copy of these games, visit the Apple app store. Pub Play: Drinking games and Dash’s Family Photo Face-Off are free with additional costs for add-ons, and Dash Family Face-Off is ninety-nine cents.

Share