'At least for me it's always been about how can I do this better? And to actually make things that are fun, and continue to be fun, and are inspiring and positive and make you want to come back, not out of this lizard-brain dopamine need but because that’s where your friends are hanging out or that’s where you’re learning new things,' she said. Howe thought the episode was humorous, but she also described how the pitfalls of free-to-play inform the kind of games she wants to make now.

Much of what South Park was mocking took place in the early days of free-to-play, although many aspects of these loops exist in contemporary games as well. is really late to the party in making fun of it.' I got so much of that back when I was on Farmville, and it kind of tapered off. 'There are people who go into meetings with that core loop. It’s funny that it’s supposed to be satire, but it’s not even satire,' she told Polygon. 'Their core loop, I’ve seen core loops described exactly as they were there. There are scenes in the episode where the Canadian characters describe how to get people hooked on the game, and Howe explained that they weren't making fun of the early days of free-to-play games, they were just describing it. I felt totally famous in this weird way.' 'I watched the rest of the episode in this stupor like, ‘they’re making fun of me, they’re making fun of my entire industry, I’m just so excited about it. She pulled up screens from the episode to compare them to the game, and it's easy to see where South Park got the inspiration for their fictional Terence and Philip game.įamily Guy: The Quest for Stuff vs. 'I saw that and I was like ‘Oh my god, that’s our UI. It’s the shopping cart in the lower right, and then the quest list in the lower left, and the fact that buttons got smaller.' That was a weird UI choice that we made, and I think we’re one of the only games that decreased the size of the buttons to represent their comparative importance to game play,' she said. 'As soon as it came up, I was like ‘Oh my god, I think that’s my HUD. Last week she had a brush with the oddest sort of fame: South Park made fun of a game she had helped design. Chelsea Howe worked at Zynga on the Farmville team before taking a job as the senior designer on Family Guy: Quest for Stuff, seeing that project through to soft launch.

Free south park game