As with any creative endeavor, there comes a point at which the free-floating ideas must be tied down and fleshed out, to see if they're workable. This is called proof of concept. It's usually when the project reaches this stage that the big issues begin to emerge: Does this work as expected? If not, why not? Have we taken the wrong approach? Will people react well to this? Will the effort required to make this thing outweigh the profit to be gained?

Fortunately for Orisinal, a lot of these risks are mitigated by the fact that the games are simple and small; the developer, Ferry Halim, is under no pressure to commit to a schedule; and everything is free-to-play. Liberated from these typical market-driven vicissitudes, every finished Orisinal game is fairly close to its original proof of concept. So, what keeps the quality of these games as high as they are?

If we indulge ourselves a tiny conceit, let's pretend to be a casual game developer. We have an idea for a game about a frog catching flies. The first pass at this idea is to have the frog remain motionless at the bottom of the screen, the only action being his tongue as it catches flies. We'll have the mouse cursor become a target reticle, and when the player presses the mouse button, the frog's tongue zaps to that spot. If there's a fly there, the frog eats. If not ... hmm. It seems that there should be some penalty for missing the fly.

We brainstorm the idea of adding a Hunger Meter. If the frog zaps a fly, he remains satisfied. If he misses, his Hunger level rises. Once it reaches the top, he dies. Fine, except ... there's an urgency missing. Perhaps we could institute a timer -- every 15 seconds, the Hunger level rises on its own. The frog has to eat or he'll die; he can't just sit there and wait for the perfect shot. But now he's worried about the double-whammy of running out of time and missing his shot. Perhaps he needs power-ups to help him ... like a timer freeze, or something that makes his tongue fatter. They can drift randomly about the screen, requiring the frog to actively pursue them. Should he be allowed to have some lateral movement, say jumping from lily pad to lily pad? That might help keep the player engaged on two fronts: finding the best angle for targeting flies, and timing the tongue shot just right. And what about levels? Maybe trickier landscapes? The addition of enemies? Unlockable goodies?

At this point we've reached a stage of development called feature creep. The excitement of coming up with gameplay ideas can frequently overwhelm the original scope of the project, leading to an overly-complicated title and unnecessarily confusing gameplay. We've strayed from the casual game path and have ventured into niche gaming territory, which is all about time investment. If you can't make significant progress in a game in under a couple of hours -- in fact, if there's significant progress to be had, then you're playing a niche game. That's not the kind of game we want to make here. We want our game to be simple enough to pick up quickly and easily, and just as easily dropped without the player feeling like they haven't gotten a worthwhile experience out of it.

And there is the crux of the matter: what constitutes a worthwhile casual experience? More to the point, how does Ferry Halim do it?

There's no doubt that the Orisinal games are fun to play, and exceedingly simple, frequently revolving around one gameplay element, with the mouse button doing one thing only. The visuals are sweet and cute, many times involving animals as their focus. It's this simplicity that's so hard to pin down.

Perhaps it's the soothing color palette, or the soft dynamics of the music that accompanies each title that add to the overall experience, but at the core of it, these games are purely Zen experiences, and that's why they work so well.

Consider the game called Cats. There are six horizontal rows of black, demarcated by a thin white line separating each. In each row, a cat silhouette in white walks slowly across the screen, alternating left-to-right in one row, right-to-left in the row below it, etc. At any one time, a row may be highlighted in gray, indicating that the cat within that row is now the 'leader'. All other cats must do what that cat does: if it walks, all cats must also walk. If it sits, all other cats must sit. Points are only gained when all the cats do what the leader does. The cats can be made to sit by passing the mouse over them; alternately, they can be made to walk, if they're already sitting, by once again passing the mouse over them.

It may sound easy until you realize that the cats will randomly choose to stop walking or start walking at any given time, necessitating that you keep an unfocused eye on the screen at all times, waiting to pass the mouse cursor over any cat not keeping up with the leader.

Like the principles of Zen, to excel at this game requires a state of no-mind, wherein one merely reacts without judgment to the stimuli provided. Complex thought is not only unnecessary, it's actually a liability. The more you let yourself get in the way of your reactions, the tougher you will find it to play. And maybe that's the approach Halim takes with Orisinal as well -- he just lets the thoughts flow and chooses to develop each initial idea without prejudice, trusting that it will find a receptive audience. But he is divorced even from that expectation; he seems to create these games as worthwhile exercises in themselves.

If casual games can be said to have a philosophy, let it be that of Zen: to favor direct experience over scholarly explication, simplicity of concept and design over an abundance of features, spontaneous action and mindful acceptance over the need for constant analysis and overly-careful planning. Orisinal embodies these principles -- if you haven't already checked it out, go now.