Puzzle Quest: CotW - Steve Fawkner Postmortem @ Gamasutra

Gamasutra has put up a summary of a  talk given by Steve Fawkner, president of Infinitive Interactive, from the 2008 GDC on how the puzzle/rpg hybrid came to be developed and some of the challenges involved:

Steve Fawkner began by introducing Puzzle Quest as a project that Infinite Interactive had to start to get themselves out of trouble after a significant period of poor decisions and low-selling games.

The project had to fulfill several criteria: it had to be possible to execute with a small studio and it had to be possible to pull off in a short time with a reasonable number of staff. They examined trends in PC gaming and decided to look at where the industry was heading.

On some of the lessons learned:

* Time spent polishing is time well-spent. The extra time spent certainly resulted in additional sales. Focus and usability testing makes a difference.
* Good design is still important: A graphically simple game can still sell quite well.
* Focus groups are awesome: the title change, the addition of female avatars, and the shifting of the style to something a little more anime in execution all turned out to be great changes.
* Good QA teams are even better than focus groups: even though a few bugs slipped through, a solid QA team really helps.