Feature: 'Postmortem: Gamevil's Nom 2'

For today's Gamasutra feature, we present this postmortem for Gamevil's innovative 'one-button' cellphone title Nom 2, part of a series from the Skipping Stone developer which is a significant hit in the company's South Korea, but not yet well known in the West. The article is a companion piece to a postmortem of the original Nom that appeared in the September 2006 issue of Game Developer magazine. In the intro, Nom 2 creator Bong Noo Shim describes both the terrestrial and extraterrestrial inspiration that's moving the Nom franchise forward: "The success and great user response from Nom spawned the initiation of the Nom 2 project. However, after I started to kick off the Nom 2 project, I realized that it was much tougher than I thought. Well-known pop artists tend to struggle with their second album. If the second album has the same style of the debut album, fans will complain that there was no change. On the other hand, if the artist puts out a totally newly styled second album, fans will say that the style has changed too much. Therefore, in order to make the Nom 2 project a success, I decided to get advice from users. I gathered all the comments and reviews of Nom and divided it into good and bad. Nom 2 had to emphasize the good and complement the bad, so that the game would provide a better experience than the previous one. I also decided to put an entirely new feature that would fascinate users. This new feature was called ECG (External World Contact Game). If Nom was the world’s first game to have to rotate the handset to play, Nom 2 would be the first game to send a message to outer space by playing the game! So by adding this feature, I wanted Nom 2 to surpass the original version. Nom 2 would maintain the basic features of Nom (using 4 rotational angles, one-button feature etc.), but would have new graphics and a new game system that would increase game play time. Because Nom was a big surprise to many users, I wanted the Nom series to keep on presenting surprises. This was a burden for the Nom series, because each had to overcome Nom itself. I am planning to put an amazing new feature in every Nom series, but since I’ve already used the mysterious space concept in Nom 2, I’m having a hard time deciding which concept Nom 3 has to have." You can now read the full Gamasutra feature on the topic, including Nom 2's out of body experiences, and how the game may have ended up just a bit overheated (no registration required, please feel free to link to this feature from external websites).