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 ;)

AS3 Tip: Working with Flash assets in Flex Builder

I do all my action script development in Flex Builder. As a programming IDE it's miles better then the one built into Flash. One place where it falls short is when dealing with assets created in the Flash authoring environment.

How Flash works with classes associated with your MovieClips

Let's say you create a movieclip, you plan on affecting said movieclip with actions in you scripts, so during the creation process you click the "Advanced" button and export it for actionscript. Flash, being the helpful guy that it is (I snickered as I wrote that) looks for a class in your source path that matches the class name you just entered for the movieclip (this actually is very helpful). Say I draw a robot on the stage, convert it to movieclip, and call it "Robot". If a class with the name Robot isn't found then Flash will create a dynamic one at run time, but if there is one, Flash is smart enough to put two and two together and apply all actions in that class to the Robot movieclip, including the actions applied to the named movieclips nested inside of Robot. Not so when you are using Flash assets in Flex Builder.

Flex and swcs

You can have access to you assests created in Flash while working in Flex, Just tick the box in publish settings. It'll export a swc. A swc is basically a compression format of sorts, Flash bundels a swf and an xml file together in one package, the xml file holds a reference to everything that has been "Exported for Actionscipt" in your movie. Let's say we're developing in the Flex environment, it allows you to do something like this:

public var robot:Robot = new Robot();

Now let's say that we had other named movieclips nested inside of our Robot movieclip, let's say we have a Head movieclip named head as long as we have declared the type of our movieclip as Robot we can do this:

robot.head.x = 120;

Pretty awesome! I can draw and layout my robot in flash, name all the nested movieclips and refer to them in flex, they'll have all the same properties and methods as any other movieclip! But all is not so keen. Let's say nested inside head we have an Eye movieclip named eye. We can't refer to that by doing this:

robot.head.eye.x = 120;

Flex won't know what the hell you are talking about. This isn't a huge deal when your drawing robots. You can just nest all of the robot bits in Robot but when you're making interface elements sometimes you want to nest things. Let's say you are making a simple photo viewer have a standard button that you are using in a few different places in the app. It has a label that you dynamically add text to. Now let's say that you want to make a pop up panel, you'd like to use the same button, you could place it with actionscript but wouldn't it be so much nicer to lay it out in the Flash authoring environment? It sure would, but you can't do this:

var panel:Panel = new Panel();
panel.button.buttonLabel.text = "close"

The Handy Tip Buried in this Long Explanation

buttonLable is nested inside of button which is nested inside of panel. When faced with this, I would always place the button in my actionscript and be done with it, no big deal.

today I figured out a work around. You can do this:

var panel:Panel = new Panel();
var panelButton:MyButton = panel.button;

and now you can do this:

panelButton.buttonLabel.text = "close";

Awesome!!

To Research the Internet

Sir Tim Berners-Lee (the guy who really "invented" the internet) recently spoke at Rensellaer Polytechnique Institute (RPI) in Troy NY. TBL was at Rensellaer to keynote the launch of the Tetherless World Research Constellation. A research initiative focused on understanding the internet from both the computer science and social aspects. He had this to say:

"The World Wide Web changed the ways people work, play, communicate, collaborate, and educate. But without new research aimed at understanding the current, evolving and potential Web, we may miss or delay opportunities for new and revolutionary capabilities.

To model the Web, to understand the architectural principles that have provided for its growth, and to ensure it supports the basic social values of trustworthiness, personal control over information, and respect for social boundaries, then we must pursue a research agenda that targets the Web and its use as a primary focus of attention."

The concept of a research project that focuses on the internet like this is very compelling to me. Particularly the idea that internet startups are like petri dishes.  Little experiments whose results inform how people use the internet, what form people want the internet to take, what the technological possibilities are, as well as what entrepreneurs think people might want. 

At one point I was considering pursuing a thesis topic somewhere along these lines.  I am still very interested...  

Full article @: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/startups_social_science.php

John Maeda on the simple life

This is a great talk by one of the pioneers of the field of design and technology. He talks about how to create good work and live simply. Worth a look at.

meme and temes

TED talk. Susan Blackmore.

This talk gave me a whole new set of tools for thinking as well as a new perspective on my own pursuits, for real. Richard Dawkins first coined the term meme in his 1976 book "The Selfish Gene". The definition of a meme is something that replicates itself, it can be anything from biology to an idea. In this talk Susan Blackmore expands on the concept and introduces temes, the next phase of meme-ary.

The Story of Stuff

These videos come from TERRA, a weekly video show exploring the melting pot of nature and culture. They have a video channel on blip.tv their home page is here: http://www.lifeonterra.com/
Below is an excellant podcast on the "story of stuff." Parts 1 and 2.

I spent a portion of my undergraduate studies (Industrial design) thinking about these issues. This documentary does a great job of framing the problems of our consumer culture.

The Story of Stuff part 1


The Story of Stuff part 2

Ants!!

This is another TED talk, as I mentioned in another post, there'll be a lot of them.

This talk is all about ants. Individual ants are pretty dumb, but when you put a bunch of them together amazingly complex order arrises. Debrah Gordon has spent the past 20 years of her life studying ants and has figured out how it happens. The emergent behavior of these small individually acting entities results in a complex living commuinty. Each component is essantially the same, capbale of every task the colony requires, how the colony organizes itself is akin to a mesh network where components communicate locally resulting in actions that spread throughout the entire colony. The workings of ant colonies could help inform artificial intellangnce and I am tempted to model a colony.

I would also have to model an environment. It would have to be some kind of sand box where users could go in and mess with the ants, such as place food and obstacles.

This seems like it would be a neat thing to do and a fun challenge, now where to find the time...

World Wide Web of Ritual and Belief

I watch a lot of TED talks, and I will be posting a lot of them here. I have a piece of software called Miro
Once you download the player you can subscribe to the channel here
It'll ask you to download something, choose open with... Miro. and you'll be TED-ing like crazy.



Wade Davis is a westerner who lead a life of self exploration living with spiritual people around the world. It's a very interesting talk and reminds of the fact that our civilization isn't the pinnacle it's only a branch.

Unity Game Engine

The Unity Game engine is a "Drag and Drop" middle ware game engine. It offers a ton of features including push button publishing for the Windows, Mac, Linux, and (wait for it) the Wii! This seems like an interesting product, it has a free trial and an Indy license that goes for around $200 bucks. I will definitely be playing around with in the coming months. Look for a review in the research section of the site.

Here's a link to their site: http://unity3d.com/

MIT Course: Videogame Theory and Analysis

from http://ocw.mit.edu

If you didn't already know, MIT offers all of their courses online free of charge. I've attemped a few Comp Sci courses but to be honest the benifits were mostly entertainment and novelty, but here is a course I can get into: "Videogame Theory and Analysis" Here's the link:
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Comparative-Media-Studies/CMS-998Fall-2006/CourseHome/index.htm

From MIT's website:

Course Description

This course is an introduction to the interdisciplinary study of commercial videogames as texts, examining their cultural, educational, and social functions in contemporary settings. Students play and analyze videogames while examining debates surrounding how games function within socially situated contexts. Readings include contemporary game theory (Gee, Squire, Steinkuehler, Jenkins, Klopfer, Zimmerman and Salen, Juul, Bartle, Taylor, Aarseth) and the completion of a contemporary commercial videogame chosen in consultation with the instructor.

(this site came to me courtesy of my very dear friend Jia Zang)