GamersInfo.net recently had the privilege of talking to Stieg Hedlund, chief creative officer at Turpitude Design, about Wedding Street. Stieg is the immensely talented and impressively grounded polymath whose legacy includes (but is certainly not limited to) Diablo I & II, StarCraft and the Tom Clancy games. Find Wedding Street on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=123665324320009.

GamersInfo.net: How did the idea for Wedding Street evolve?

Stieg: Turpitude is different from most game development companies (I believe), in that we really started by taking a long hard look at the Facebook audience. We wanted to make a game that was both made specifically for that audience, as well as truly original. We felt a lot of the games we were seeing were more or less rehashes of previously popular casual games from other spaces, which were therefore neither original nor particularly suited to the audience.

Stieg: We looked at the audience, saw that women made up a huge segment and decided to make a game for that audience — not a game that merely included that demographic, a game for them. We chose the topic area, partly as being interesting to our audience and also partly because we wanted to include user-generated content (UGC), as a major component of the game.

GamersInfo.net: Tell us about your development team.

Stieg: Turpitude started out as a design consultancy business in 2008. We provided services to companies like Disney, Zynga and Playdom. For those last two companies (and others), we started working in the social games space, bringing our expertise in fun and stickiness and increasing our knowledge of virality and monetization and the specific needs of the social audience.

GamersInfo.net: What was the development process like?

Stieg: In a lot of ways, it’s how game development used to be back when I started — rather than massive 100-plus teams that are somewhat common in larger companies now, we have just a handful of people. Even within those huge teams, I was always very hands on, so it wasn’t much of an adjustment in that sense.

Facebook itself does provide developers with challenges as well, but I do really like that it provides direct distribution to your audience. Traditional games put a lot of layers — publishers, wholesalers, retailers — between the game creators and the audience, where really this is the relationship that’s important. Social games are also live, so as creators, we can see what our audience likes and put in more features and content based on that. It’s really fantastic.

GamersInfo.net: What was the biggest challenge you encountered during development?

Stieg: I guess it was finding the right team; even though social games are theoretically easier to develop, there was a very specific set of skills required to make Wedding Street. We really had to look all over to get the right people.

A great example is our dressmaking pieces; they were all done by Svetlana, a woman from Ukraine we found on DeviantArt. We had been scouring the site looking for someone we thought had the fashion-design chops to execute on our vision for dresses, and we were very fortunate to find Svetlana, and through the magic of modern technology, we were able to work with her, even from the other side of the globe!

GamersInfo.net: Which aspect of Wedding Street are you most proud of?

Stieg: I’m proudest of just of how unique it is: new ideas, new gameplay, and a very distinctive and beautiful art direction.

GamersInfo.net: We saw that Wedding Street uses actual women from the dev team as name inspiration for the game’s assistant characters. Are there any other similarly fun facts you can divulge?

Stieg: That one was fun — we thought it was really important to hire women to make this game, partly to get the aesthetic right for the game, but also as being somewhat representative of our audience and what they think is fun and engaging. While we created to Hon out of whole cloth, as it were, since she mainly needed to fit the needs of the game, the assistant characters could be a bit less restrictive — they made sense to us as being women, and we thought it would be a nice tribute to the women that helped make the game to be “in the game” as much as their work is.

Stieg: Apart from that, I guess we’ve played it mostly straight — our main focus was on providing a large amount of great content that could be used in a lot of different ways to make a huge variety of beautiful, fun, quirky custom items.

GamersInfo.net: What do you feel makes Wedding Street unique?

Stieg: Well, apart from the things I’ve already mentioned, I’d say it’s how we integrated UGC. UGC is typically both fairly hardcore as well as being sort of outside the game. Obviously we didn’t want ours to be anything like that, and we worked really hard to make it highly accessible and relevant to the game, which I think was quite successful in Wedding Street.

GamersInfo.net: How did you go about crafting the stickiness of the game?

Stieg: As I mentioned before, Turpitude has worked in the social space for some time, and that’s been a specific area that our expertise has been sought in. Essentially we were looking to create more depth in each of the game’s interactions. We wanted something just as visceral as the so-called “clickers,” where a great deal of the gameplay is simply clicking on things, but with more behind it — meaningful choices for players, as well as a great deal of self-expression.

Also, even for fairly simple things like completing a wedding, we have fun, engaging microgames representing some of the last-minute emergencies that might come up around an actual wedding. I call these microgames because they really are very short — you only have 30 seconds to complete each one, so while we wanted visceral gameplay instead of just clicks, we still wanted to keep sessions brief and relatively interruptible, not expecting all players would want to stay with our game for hours at a time (brief, somewhat frequent “check ins” seem more the norm for social game players), but at the same time, we wanted to avoid the feeling that you can get from some other games that you sort of get kicked out at a certain point, either because they use an energy mechanic and you have to wait for it to replenish (or pay for more). Or in that you have timers on tasks that make you wait a long time to finish. Though we do have some of this last element, we also provide a lot of things for you to do while you are waiting, so we think people can have play sessions as brief or as long as they want.

GamersInfo.net: What role does story play in Wedding Street?

Stieg: Although there’s not a lot of explicit story in Wedding Street, there is certainly an implicit one: You are an aspiring wedding planner, whose goal is to create the perfect wedding with the help of a network of friends and a non-player character called The Hon, an expert wedding planner who is showing you the ropes of the biz.

GamersInfo.net: What role do you think story should play in social games in general?

Stieg: I think it’s important, although I must say, I think that some people stress it too much — the defining intrinsic property of games is their interactivity, which also implies degrees of both non-linearity and intertextualism; so I wouldn’t necessarily call games a storytelling medium in the sense that sequential media like film and books are. I think games still have a bit of an inferiority complex with regard to these other media — particularly film, which has obvious similarities in form as far as being highly graphical — so I often see game creators overburden games with story, so much so that they forfeit that primary feature of being interactive. My view is that story is more or less important depending on the needs of the game, which again should ultimately derive from the needs of the audience.

Sorry if my answer got a bit too deep here, but it’s a pretty important question in my opinion.

GamersInfo.net: Are there any new/upcoming features we can look forward to?

Stieg: There are lots of them! I’m a little reluctant to tell, both because surprises are fun and also because we really do want to let the audience have a say in the features they want to see, but contests — we call them Bridal Shows — are an upcoming feature I think a lot of our players will really like.