Using PlayerIO to Scale Your Online Multiplayer Game, Part 2

Oliver from PlayerIO talks about their service for developers, part 2

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/playerio-part2-interview.mp3

Or listen to it here…

Read the rest of this entry »

Using PlayerIO to Scale Your Online Multiplayer Game, Part 1

Oliver from PlayerIO talks about their service for developers, part 1

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/playerio-part1-interview.mp3

Or listen to it here…

Read the rest of this entry »

Free Game Art Assets…

Hey folks,

As part of the commitment to give away free stuff every month…we’ve gotten some good art assets…and have released them under the Creative Commons license…

The artwork relates to Easter…have fun as you use them 🙂

Post comments or suggestions on other things you’d like to see given away for free next month 🙂

Here is the image…and the FLAs are at the bottom 🙂

eastereggbg-night
eastereggbg-evening
eastereggbg

Interesting Talks/Notes from GDC 2010…

Hey,

I made a list and took some notes on the more interesting sessions at GDC that may be relevant to smaller game developers looking to get players…here are some write-ups with more info on them…
Social Games in Japan:
http://www.slideshare.net/d3ntaku/jp-soc-games-v03 (these are the slides on the Japanese mobile social networks…the mafia game is called Kaitou Royale…and is reportedly making several million dollars each month)

Sporadic Play:
http://www.raphkoster.com/2010/03/10/gdc10-sporadic-play/
http://kotaku.com/5493252/call-of-duty-for-the-rest-of-them (this explains a potential implementation of Sporadic play)

Scaling Farmville:
http://www.raphkoster.com/2010/03/12/gdc10-scaling-social-games-robert-zubek/

Designing for Parents + Kids:
http://www.slideshare.net/jesseschell/designing-for-kids-and-parents-playing-together-3388050

Five Ways Games Can Make You Cry:
http://gamesnewsinfo.blogspot.com/2010/03/amiga-five-ways-games-can-make-you-cry.html

Interesting Stats from Facebook Talk:
400 million users on FB, just getting started as there are 1.7 billion folks on the Internet
does not include mobile

Over 3 billion photos uploaded every month on FB

FlashForward demo shows the power of social data to make a compelling experience

Incorporating real events into online play….
People are getting real-world flowers via online gameplay (Pet Society did this during Valentines)

Sharing is a popular social activity

Indie Social Game Development Talk by Loud Crowd CEO:
Discussed their latest game, Music Pets
Talked about how they went from 0 users to about 60,000 daily users

First they came up with 5 solid ideas they would love to develop. Put up ads on Facebook to see which one attracted the most users. The one with the highest click-through was “Music Pets”

When people clicked on the ad, they were taken to the app. If they installed, they saw a page that said “Coming Soon”

They developed the game and released it…and kept iterating and improving it. It is now an entirely different game thatn it was 7 weeks ago…but players still here…because involves in helping to build the game

Players like choice…make sure you allow a lot of ways to customize things in the game…like lots of items in the store, etc.

Paperback Writer: The Emergence of Interactive Story …
Stories in games helps to create irrational loyalty

Lessons Learned for Effective Stories In Games…
a) Super important to ease them into the experience
b) Remind player what they should be doing at all times
c) Keep the story light and fun
d) Provide plenty of instructions and hints
e) Show progress

Student Project: First-Person Dish Washing Game…

Hey folks,

Here’s a game development interview taken from the Independent Games Festival last year…a group of students made a “First-Person Dish Washing Game”…

[wp_youtube]DGgONKtjqhI[/wp_youtube]

Feedback For The Show…

Hey folks,

In the past year, we’ve experimented with new features for the show…mainly…

a) Adding some video interviews

b) Releasing more podcasts…that were shorter than the hour-long interviews from before…and more focused…we have focused on more of the game design and technical aspects

c) Releasing free game dev books…like the free book on social game development

d) Releasing free code … like the free code for social and flash games

e) Releasing free artwork … this is a work in progress

f) Transcribed all podcasts

g) Worked on a “community” project…where we share information on a game and ask the community for feedback

h) Free giveaways and contests

The question is…what has worked for you…what have you found useful. What suggestions do you have to make this show better in the upcoming year.

We aim to add a few new features each year…and some things we are thinking of implementing are…
a) releasing more free game design books
b) more free artwork.

Any other suggestions? We’re open to all crazy and fun suggestions 🙂

Let us know of any topics you want us to cover more 🙂

We want to take all the feedback and implement them before we do interviews at the upcoming Game Developers Conference

Thx 🙂

Using Business Gaming to Train Workers

Leah of WTRI talks about business gaming and its benefits

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/engage-expo-wtri-interview.mp3

Or listen to it here…

Read the rest of this entry »

Using Games For Business Training

Chris, from Forterra Systems, talks about using games for business training

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/engage-expo-fortera-systems-interview.mp3

Or listen to it here…

Read the rest of this entry »

Interesting Insights for 2010 by the Unity 3D CEO

Hey folks,

Got a link to this blog post by the Unity CEO…a lot of the info is relevant to indie game devs…I’ve reprinted it below…

Original Link: http://blogs.unity3d.com/2010/01/14/2010-trends/

Without further ado.

The Year of Gamification, Part 1
We call the adoption of game technology and game design methods outside of the games industry “gamification”, and this is a really broad trend.

Unity and other game technologies are being used across more than a dozen sectors that have little or nothing to do with games. Architectural visualization is an obvious and older example. But apart from that we have some of the world’s biggest engineering and manufacturing companies, as well as several actual armed forces as our customers. TV production companies use Unity and other game engines to produce live TV shows and Machinima videos. Big corporations make employee training and simulation applications using Unity, and some of our customers have gone into online meeting and collaboration. Game technology being applied to all these areas means that Unity users are valuable to many and not everyone has to make a living from games.

Action item: Sell your skills outside the games industry. With a knowledge of other industries, you can create new and innovative products or businesses servicing these industries. The sky’s the limit.

The Year of Gamification, Part 2
A second aspect of gamification is that game design methods and strategies are being used outside of games to design better products and user experiences. A boring site like Mint.com has experimented with turning personal finance into a game, social networking experiment FourSquare maintains high-score lists for people who bar-crawl, and natural-language search startup Siri hired an accomplished game designer to design their user experience.

Action item: Learn game design and apply it to everything – how people sign up for a website, how people “succeed” in using your product, how customers share it with their friends and become leaders of user groups/clans, etc. Game design can be used for all of this.

Another Golden Age for Garage Developers
We are definitely going to see even more quality games done by small teams in 2010. With very little risk and by mainly investing their own time, a small team of 1-2 people can make a hit game that will sell millions of units. More importantly (and what makes this different than 4 years ago), there are now many more channels through which to distribute and sell such a game. Many such games are receiving world-wide acclaim.

Action item: Find an awesome partner and go create!

Publishers Continue to be Valuable
With casual, online and mobile games requiring smaller production budgets and eschewing retail (and thus expensive and slow) distribution in exchange for digital, the game industry was expecting to get rid of the publisher as a concept.

But as the iPhone ecosystem clearly proves (as well as the web somewhat less clearly with portals like Shockwave.com and distribution companies like Zynga and RockYou), the publishers stay. Though they may not be forwarding cash and fully owning the game IPs, their expertise in marketing, game design and online distribution metrics and strategies make them a valuable, if no longer totally required, partner to the game developer.

Action item: Consider working with a publisher. Fortunately with publishers’ leverage lessened, they are typically less demanding with regards to what they have to own (IP, sequel rights, revenue share). Or become your own publisher by building that expertise. This is not a simple task, but has been done by some of the top online game developers.

Everything Becomes a “Console”
This one is somewhat controversial. It seemed that with the move towards mobile and web, the closed ecosystems of the console world would be under siege and eventually collapse. What game developer (except perhaps the ones most entrenched in with the Nintendos-Microsoft-Sony trinity) hasn’t fantasized about this walled garden having its walls rammed down?

Well, welcome to the new world. The iPhone has proven that given the right amount of “openness”, neither consumers nor developers really mind closed platforms.

Even on the anarchic web (regions of which remind one more of a Mad-Maxian post-apocalyptical cyberspace than an enlightened utopia), Facebook is in the process of creating a closed environment within which consumers and game developers can meet and exchange fun and money (more or less) safely.

This section could also have been labeled “the Rise of the AppStore Model”, since it’s more the App Store than the gaming console which inspires this megatrend. And framed like that, it might have made people happy. But this is a problematic trend (to say the least) that should make us stop to think.

Action item: Make use of this. Or if you’re brave, build your own!

Facebook Wallet, Apple Tablet, Unity on Facebook
And then are the obvious ones.

Of course Apple will launch its tablet. We even know the screen-size and CPU make. The only uncertainly left is what day it launches. And its price.

Surely Facebook will launch a payment platform which in tandem with Facebook Connect will dramatically transform the face of microtransactions on the internet. If they do this right, it will finally enable the web-wide microtransactions which we’ve been dreaming of since the dot-com era.

And of course Unity will be big on Facebook. Several major games will get launched on Facebook, offering awesome games to hundreds of millions of people (not to mention significantly moving the needle on adoption of the Unity plugin).

Action item: Left as an exercise for the reader

Developing an Indie Football MMO

Sam, from Italy, talks about making a casual football game MMO

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/engage-expo-football-mmo-interview.mp3

Or listen to it here…

Read the rest of this entry »