The Game Career Guide is a sister site to Gamasutra, a fantastic resource all about building games.

One of the highlights of the site is the Game design post-mortems, where you get the benefit of months of sweat and coding all condensed into a few pages that offer up useful ideas, areas to avoid and lessons learnt about the design process.

The latest game post-mortem features a Flash-based casual game built by students at Carnegie Meillon, called Skyrates.

They started with one idea which quickly evolved as a result of wide feedback from user/testers on a forum that they had initially only set up for bug reports.

This is what the game was about in essence:

Skyrates set out to be a persistent multiplayer world in the context of a casual Flash game. The game is set in a world of floating lands. Players travel from skyland to skyland in WWII-inspired aircraft. The real-time flights typically last a few hours. By queuing up a sequence of actions, players can keep their characters moving for days without further interaction. Everyone who interacts with the world earns gold and has a chance to upgrade his or her plane.

Find out more on the site here.