Social Game Lingo 2011

When you're making social games you hear a lot of terms and acronyms, trouble is, there is no guide posted anywhere. The way I would often handle encounters with unfamiliar terms was either to ask, ooking foolish, or nod smartly and ask a more knowledgable friend some time later. Well, no more! Here is a short but handy list of social game terms and there meanings:

• K factor (virality)
• Conversion (user flow beginning to end: visits/registered/active/paying)
• MAU / DAU (Month Active Users / Daily Active Users: player retention)
• ARPU / ARPPU (Average Revenue Per User: monitization)
• AB Testing (behavioral testing sets)

Wise words: Making art that ships

A friend sent me an article posted on Tadhg Kelly's blog "What Games Are." The article, entittled Art is the Best Business had a lot of gems but the last section really struck me and I wanted to share it.

So here are the three things to take on board to kick ass, change the world, and sell a lot of games:

1. Figure out where your audience is at. Understand what they already know and what they need in order to be able to access your work.
2. Develop an idea that uses that, but deliberately confounds or otherwise up-ends what existing ideas are already doing.
3. Share it, tell everyone you’ve made it, and give the gift to all. Ship, distribute and tell your marketing story.

Sounds hard, doesn’t it? Well it is. But better that than a sobering realisation that you didn’t water your business down enough to be just like everyone else.

Check out the full article, it's worth a read.

iWork doesn't autosave, luckily... there's an app for that.

I recently switched to iWork and really liked until I left my computer on, unplugged, having it die and losing two days worth of work one day before the deadline. A quick google search turned up this: http://tristanchadwick.com/worksaver/

Install this app and it will auto save at an interval that you scan set. I don't know why this wasn't built into the software. I've gotta throw props to MicroSoft. Their auto save is a killer feature that should be a standard on all programs.

Sprout game

This is a neat little game. It's fun and pretty, in a crafty kind of way

I found it here: http://samgine.com/sprout/

The Nature of Existance and the looming ecconomic collapse... heady stuff!

I was watching this video called "The Nature of Existance" It filled with esoteric math and was really long and a bit dry, but their was something about the creator/narrator, who calls himself EBTX, that kept watching

He has a calm and lulling voice with soothing cadence, this was mixed with a bit of sarcasm and wit that somehow kepted me watching through the whole video. I'm not saying you should watch the whole video, about somewhere near the beginning he goes on a car ride to examine beer cans and pick up trucks and you kind of wonder what this video is about.

After finishing the video my curiosity was piqued. Who is this man that calls himself EBTX, well as it turns out he has a website which is an interesting jouney on its own. One little gem that I found was a link to a video series by a person named Chris Martenson. The whole series can be found here: http://www.chrismartenson.com/ Check out this video for an idea of what he gets into

Dungeon Game Sprite Sheet

Follow this link for a great collection of lo fi dungeon game graphics: http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=8970.0

Web Diplomacy is Awesome!

I've gotten into playing web diplomacy over the past several months. I like it so much I thought I would blog about it. I've been playing an online version and I have to say that this seems to be the perfect medium for the game.

Like most war games, Diplomacy is all about dominating battle field. What separates Diplomacy from most other war games is the negotiation or "diplomacy" phase, where players talk in secret about their plans for the next phase. Once you've spoken with everyone you write and submit your moves once everyone has submitted their moves they are compared and resolved. It is here that you see just how honest your opponents are. From the webdiplomacy.net home page:

"Luck plays no part in Diplomacy. Cunning and cleverness, honesty and perfectly-timed betrayal are the tools needed to outwit your fellow players. The most skillful negotiator will climb to victory over the backs of both enemies and friends.
Who do you trust?"
(Avalon Hill)

Below I've listed a few different sites to play on:

http://www.goondip.com
This one has the most features and a ton of map variants, but it has been prone to crashing.

Before I ame accross goondip I was using this site:
http://game.xbsd.kr/endip/
It's more reliable but generally less user friendly. Plus the community is less active

and of course:
http://webdiplomacy.net/
this is the original. No frills no variants, extremely active community.

Look for me out there, I go by the title "The kindly Tyrant"
Good luck ;)