Facebook: Facts You Probably Didn’t Know

In case it was not obvious that FaceBook is a viable platform for games (and everything else):


[Source: Mashable.com]

Interview of 4 social game developers

Four social game developers (from Zynga, Playfish, Playdom and Crowdstar) were interviewed during the Flash Games Summit on March 8, 2010.

Here are some excerpts that I found interesting:

"Moderator: What are four words that are the keys to successful social games?

Playfish: Social - provide a context for meaningful interaction, Relatable, pick themes and mechanics that are understandable and aspirational; Rewarding, emotionally rewarding and socially, reinforcement schedules to keep players engaged, Emergent gameplay, easy to pick up but emergent complexity and depth

Zynga: Mass Market - if it doesn't appeal to enough ppl, it won't be as successful as you want; Invest - ppl need to be excited about investing their time in it, Express - needs to be a game that ppl want to express themselves in; Relationships - allow ppl to create new relationships or nurture existing relationships



Moderator: Why do you think those casual game companies don't experience the same success on FB?

Zynga: Guild of Heroes was a Diablo 2 clone - I joined the company as it was finishing up. The question was how is it social - and it wasn't. The team thinking was that they'd add the social afterward. And it doesn't work. Needs to built from ground up.

Playdom: I agree. So many examples of that. Lots of examples of games on FB that would be big if they weren't on FB. FB games need to be social from the ground up. Also, lots of the users in the social gaming space are REALLY casual, so Bejeweled did it right with short play sessions, accessibility. Notifications have gone away. FB is moving away from one-to-many notifications and toward more deliberate, one-to-one notifications. User to User, App to User.

Crowdstar: I think this is a pretty profound change. Makes it increasingly difficult for other companies to reach the same success we have. Will be very difficult for other companies to get where we have. Changes way you're going to distribute your game. For business people, it's something they need to look at closely to see how they're going to grow their game. You're going to have to spend more money to launch something.



Moderator: Most of you have two currencies, right?

Playdom: We have a couple PHDs helpding to manage our economies.

Crowdstar: I heard one of the Playfish guys saying they deal with a billion pieces of data a day(?).

Zynga: Zynga collects 5TB of data per day and we have a team that turns that into reports we can track.

Playdom: Very different from any other industry I've seen. I came from Google and YouTube and thought those were data driven companies, but this is way beyond that. You can make valuable decisions within minutes because everyone is logged in all the time and the quality of the info is so much higher than worrying about cookies, etc."



Moderator: Aren't these games just sophisticated slot machines?

Zynga: Farmville brings families together. Moms play with their 4 year olds, etc.


[Source: freetoplay.biz]

As mentioned, the removal of FaceBook Notifications (from apps), which is to reduce spam, will make it a lot harder for new applications to become popular without external advertising.

[Event] 'Doing Business in Singapore' @ Tampines Regional Library

Going indie means you will need to probably consider setting up a company.

Well, I have no idea. Hopefully I will know more after November 7. *sigh* It's a Saturday.

"

'Doing Business in Singapore' at Tampines Regional Library on 7 November 2009
		12 October 2009 Thinking of starting a business? Planning to be an entrepreneur? Here is an opportunity to know more about being your own boss at an upcoming talk of the popular ACRA@Heartlands series. Jointly organised by the Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority (ACRA) and National Library Board (NLB), the talk on ‘Doing Business in Singapore’ will provide you with information and useful tips on starting a business. To register, please log on to http://golibrary.nlb.gov.sg/Event.aspx?EventID=30320 Date : Saturday, 7 November 2009 Time : 1.30pm to 4.30pm Venue : Auditorium, Tampines Regional Library Jointly organised by ACRA and NLB

" - [Source: acra.gov.sg]

Registration is absolutely free.

Unity - Game Development Tool

Unity (or "Unity3D" as it was first known as). It is currently at version 2.5.

It is a multi-platform game development tool, designed from the start to ease creation. A fully integrated professional application, Unity just happens to contain the most powerful engine this side of a million dollars.

Besides publishing standalone games, it has its own web player add-in (the download is about 9 MB) for browsers and IPhone publishing (at an additional charge). Currently in two versions: Unity Indie (US$199) and Unity Pro (US$1499).

"Unity supports three scripting languages: JavaScript, C#, and a dialect of Python called Boo. All three are equally fast and interoperate. All three can use the underlying .NET libraries which support databases, regular expressions, XML, file access and networking.

Scripting is frequently thought of as limited and slow. But in Unity your scripts are compiled to native code and run nearly as fast as C++. You get the fast iteration times and ease of use everyone loves about scripting languages."

[Source: Unity3D.com]

That seems very believable after viewing their Tropical Paradise demo.

Also, according to some bloggers, it is apparently easy to convert a game written with Papervision3D (Actionscript) to Unity. Something which they mostly do so as to publish their games to the iPhone.

Something to comeback to once I made something with Flash.



Update:

Here are some reviews/comments on Unity:
DevMaster.net - Engine details of Unity
StackOverflow.com - What’s the best indie game development environment?

Consoles Overrun By Motion Controllers at E3

Now that the dust has settled after E3, I like to mention about what caught my attention the most.

The solid sales from Nintendo of their Wii which targeted the casual, non-gamer with their motion controller has resulted in the other two consoles (Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Sony's PlayStation 3) announcing plans for their own motion controllers.

Microsoft's Project Natal seems the most genre changing as it makes people the controller. Its' facial and voice recognition is also something that will likely become expected not only in game consoles, but likely most electronic devices (e.g. changing your air conditioner's temperature to suit who is in the room, blocking mature-rated TV shows when kids are around, etc). Let's hope the cost is reasonable.



Nowadays it is even easier that ever for an indie game company to make a console game. With freely available development kits and publishing platforms (of either the Xbox Live Marketplace or PlayStation Store), making a console game has never been easier.

Time to start dreaming of making games that make use of motion control.

PopCap Developer Program moving to SourceForge

PopCap has both online and download-able games. Their most popular is probably Bejeweled.

They had previously released the framework used for their download-able games (built with Visual C++) for anyone to use free of charge.

Sadly, they are discontinuing support for this and hopefully moving it to SourceForge as open-source.

"The PopCap Developer program has had a good run, but we've been unable to spare the developer time required to keep the Framework (and related tools) up to date here, and it doesn't make sense for us to publicly support an increasingly old version of it.

That being said, everyone who is currently using the Framework may continue to do so, and we plan on making the Framework available on SourceForge so the developer community can continue to have access to it and even support and enhance it as they (you) see fit.

Details of the SourceForge move will be forthcoming, but the plan is to move toward shutting down this site on May 1st. If anyone is interested in stepping forward to volunteer to host the message archive as a knowledge base, please let me know."

-Brian Fiete
CTO & CoFounder, PopCap Games

[Source: developer.popcap.com]

It's nice to see companies so open with their technologies.



While on the topic of PopCap, I would like to talk about their recent move to add their games (at the moment on Bejeweled and Peggle) into another game, World of Warcraft (WoW) as add-ons.

Their first attempt, Bejeweled was a direct port that allowed you to pass time in-game and has some nice extras like keeping highscore for you, your friends and your guild.

Their second attempt, Peggle has a lot more integration with WoW like using WoW's dueling feature to start a two player Peggle game, distributing loot based using Peggle, and adding WoW concept of talent trees into Peggle.

Games-within-games is nothing new, but having another commercial companies making the game-within-game is new. PopCap is probably doing this as a form of in-game advertising and hoping to tap into WoW's 11 million active subscribers. I am curious as to what this will lead to.

Ex-Ubisoft staff goes indie and likes it

Interesting story of a person, Phil Fish who was working for an established game developer and developing a game, Fez during his own free time.

He quit when he received an IGF nomination for Excellence in Visual Art (which he later won in 2008) for Fez and his boss did not allow him to attend it.

Not bad for someone fired from Ubisoft, who still calls his experience at the publisher "the worst experience of my life." It was his first gig in games, and initially he was jazzed.

"The way these people make games, it's so horrible," he says. "Hundred of people on your team, you don't know any of their names. It's so big and impersonal." Some people find ways to persevere, to grow in that environment, Fish adds — like weeds pushing up through cracks in concrete.

"In my case it made me want to give up games altogether," he continues. "It was an extremely dark period of my life. Years and years thinking this was my dream only to realize it's a sweatshop."

Gaming was changing, the way games were being made was changing and with the rise of the video game blogs, the way gaming was covered was changing, too. Everything was in flux. Indie developers were saying "Screw the corporate ladder" and going off and making their own games — devs like World of Goo's Ron Carmel and Kyle Gabler. Young developers, like Everyday Shooter's Jonathan Mak, weren't even climbing that ladder.

[Source: Kotaku.com]

Working in an established game developer is not for everyone. I am sure there are advantages too, but as it seems some people just prefer being indie.

Events like the Independent Games Festival held every March are slowly helping indies gain awareness and popularity, by listing finalist and winners of the event. One such winner was Portal in 2006, which became very famous and got snapped up by Valve.

Here's an IGF trailer... excuse the language.

Why start this blog?

Some friends have ask why I have just started this blog about Indie Game Development in Singapore.

After reading some success stories, I have recently decided to give it a try; not for the money but simply because it is something I think I will enjoy doing.

I have been interested in gaming, and not just computer gaming. I have enjoyed playing card games, board games, table-top war games, brain games... you name, I think I played it.

When I was schooling, there were no available game-related courses, so I went into the next closest thing, IT. Got a degree and worked in a few IT companies (including NCS, Mercury Interactive, HP) doing programming, technical support, etc. Nowadays, there are private schools and even universities offering courses in computer game design, both from the computer science and art perspectives. I envision courses from the business perceptive to appear in the next 10 years, as the gaming industry is rapidly becoming more of a serious field of business.



Next question these friends of mine ask will usually be either why or what is Indie? This is a short for for independent, which means without the financial support of a publisher.

Most computer games are so huge and expensive to develop now, that they require huge amount of funding from a publisher (like Electronic Arts, Activision, THQ) in return developers get payed for work done and earn royalties, while the publishers keeps the rest of the profit (which is sometime used to offset games that make a loss). As such, some decision as when to release, what to focus on, etc are out of the control of developers.

Being independent "in my opinion" allows more creativity when designing a game, there is less pressure to keep releasing sequel after sequel just to keep profits high. Also, joining or starting up an indie game company should give a higher chance to be involve in the design process, which is really what I am interested in.

While being involve in making a game by following instructions handed down to me is something I would still enjoy, I would enjoy it a lot better having a part in the game design too. Thus, I am now searching to either join or start up an indie game company here in Singapore