Actually it was yesterday, read about it on Google+ and already posted on Facebook about some of this.

Download Flash 11 here.

Check out Alternative Demos here.

But news that struck me most were this. Epic Games is ready to release support of Unreal Engine 3 for Flash platform. And they showed Unreal Tournament 3  working in Flash at Adobe Max 2011. Ouh boy what a year it will be for browser games. Unity shared a sneak peak recently too, and now Unreal Engine.

Flash is well posed to become a console of the web but I have hard time figuring out how it all will play out. We still have Flash agnostic iOS, not all devices will work well with this, we still have traffic bottlenecks. Years back it was considered useless publishing a game ove 10Mb in size. Today? May be over 60mb is useless? We will see but considering that modern games rarely take less then a gigabyte of space and some up to a dozen of gigabytes, it will be interesting to see how developers work around this

P.S Also turns out there already is a game using Flash 11 on Facebook. Its actually a re-release of older game developed on Java called Battle Punks.

Little bit more then a week ago I left my job at innoWate . Here wanted to share a little summary on what I did during my time there.

I worked there since November of 2009. By ProcrastiTracker stats I was collecting since April 2010 I spent 2040 hours behind the computer out of which 800 were spent in Firefox, 500 in Flash builder and 250 in SkyPe. Interesting to keep track of such stuff, sometimes shows unexpected things.

What I did there

innoWate is Latvian firm that develops social games. Mostly they are targeted at Russian social networks but there are some ports to other international(Facebook), western and Asian networks as well.

During my time there are I worked on 3 projects and here they are:

Awatars

It was my first project at innoWate. It was planed as series of games starting from avatar creator + various social stuff like giving gifts, poking and interacting with friend avatars in all kind of ways. Then games like gorodki and bowling should have followed. And they did till beta stage. Little bit later project was put on hold both because of technological issues and not much promise in what was coming out. I was transferred to more “promising” project.

My responsibilities in this project were pretty wide and I liked that. Programming UI, working on serverside scripts and protocol, game features/mechanics programming, integrating to social networks and developing related features. Design and engine behind 3D stuff were made by another guy who was doing similar stuff for XBox games before.

Sushi world

And here is second project I was involved in, a lot more people were working on it at once which brought lot more problems with sub version control and related stuff. Basically it was a restaurant type social game. You play as sushi restaurant owner, set up the place, hire and equip workers etc. Had some mini games like raising a turkey or simple fishing, various special events and quests and lot of other stuff.

Here my responsibilities shrunk a little. Was working on UI and client side game features, client side bug tracking system, social network features and integration and often was responsible for game client update process aka keeping track of features and content that are going to live version etc.

My Country

Then last January I was switched to another team with “promising” project that was in development for some time already. This time it was a new city building game, something innoWate done well before with SuperCity almost a year before. This time it was planed as a bigger, better looking and more complex city building game. Well I must say it is very pretty Eats too much of resource too though.

My responsibility were social network features and integrations with related UI work. A more narrow field again. Mostly because by that time I had most experience with that stuff on client side while there were plenty client developers to fill other needs of the project(3 beside me).

Hassles of social developer

In the end I must say that working as social games developer is pretty crazy job. Firstly you are working with many technologies and platforms all of which have issues and may break something at some point:

• Currently games with complex graphics  are mostly made in Flash so its you client technology
• You also use JavaScript/HTML to integrate with social networks and communication with Flash is a point of failure
• You are working with many social networks and social APIs that are different,  buggy and have conflicts with browsers and other technologies you use sometimes
• There is also your server side which is point of failure too, admin mistakes, spike in traffic, bug in software etc
• And there are browsers

All those technologies and platforms together make it very hard to predict where problem is when you find it. Is it client, your server, browser bug or social network issue or may be even something on your players side you can not reproduce from your side?

Then there are issues of social network APIs polish. Currently most firms make ports of their games to many social networks to maximize audience and profits. Segment is hot, things change rapidly and over this 1.5 of year Facebook was making significant changes to their API and policies scrapping old API altogether and introducing completely new and and different while changing how things work overall. And other networks are no different. Thus old ways games worked sometimes break or start to violate policies, or just become pointless. There are even some ridiculous cases when with all that hurry to do something new known bugs in APIs are not fixed for months. And after that they are not fixed because games already built on top of them and would break if they fix them… And no imagine if your game needs to work well on 4+ social networks and use their API feature to the max to attract and retain players. One hell of juggling.

Then there is testing. To have products with rare bugs means to invest in to testing. But how can you test something if pretty big part of those games are dependent on social networks, communication between users, use of various social network features. With some networks its a nightmare. You can’t use many features unless you game is approved but how can it be approved if many features are not testable by developers… In other networks there are pretty good testing environments. But joke is that when game is released from test environment it turns out that real world environment differs and things that worked in test state do not work after release. And its actually a moment when your game gets in to “new” category and thousands of people are coming to see a buggy release and leave a bad review. Feels bad unless you do not care about, and if you do not care about it then its probably even worse if you know what I mean

Then there is things just specific to life of social game projects. Firstly they are released as not well tested, polished and balanced games and your users are used as testers. And that’s fine by me. Its not some AAA two years 100 million in budget project, its 1-3 months small team and small budgets project so that’s how they are developed. But then other stage of project life comes, iterative polishing and adding of new features, levels and other content. Thing is that you most keep people entertained so that they return to your game. So you need to prepare content and events for various celebrations and when there is none still think of something new each week. So new game releases come regularly with deadlines(what’s point of releasing new year content if new year already passed). I remember being at work for 12 hours sometimes before such important releases. Why the hassle? Well its competition with other games that will make interesting stuff on those events and thus will get players back. I guess TV channels have similar hassle, just not as regularly especially considering that same team is not preparing for whole world important events. There are months when each 1-2 weeks is important event somewhere.

Now what it all means from development point? That we are always late, that we are trying to cut corners, that its all a mess. Building on and around bad decisions that come to bite us later etc. In the end bad development process that goes against many things I believe about software development and also not knowing how to fix that all. Feeling powerless and as if this it is impossible to succeed in that environment. Though I do think that it is possible, just not like that, and sadly I do not know how. Anyways in the end it all is aether a turtore or you stop caring with in my book means stopping doing your job well.

Leaving and what’s next

So, since December I was thinking about leaving and kind of summarizing it all for myself. Little bit later as I mentioned above I was switched to My Country project and decided to leave it be for some time and see how things will go. Well they went the same so here we are.

Currently I am in self payed vocation for few months during which I do plan to start spending something like a half time(4 hours a day, 5 days a week) curing my “don’t care” attitude towards programming, games and web. There are bunch of things I want to learn and try and I can allow myself to do it now. As for other free time, vocation, friends, work unrelated courses. May be travel a little.

In the end I was not very active here for last months(though I did play with stuff a little at wonderfl.net) and am planing to slowly get back

For a little bit more then a year I work at company that makes games for social networks. Before that I never worked with social networks APIs or developed games(except for LudumDare game in 48 hours). Wanted but never did. My main appeal in going for that job was experience and possibility to learn something about this new market and how things work out there. After a year here I want to summarize some thoughts on “social” games.

Bear in mind that I am in no way a game developer, just a programmer with interests in interactive media and games. I consider myself an average gamer usually spending at least few hours per week playing something(but usually more, when I have good games then half an hour a day, more on weekends) I started to play somewhere in 90′s on Sega consoles and later switched to PC. So I have a rich experiences in playing PC games and casual browser games(or so I believe) and also have my “purist” views in what games and play represent for living things(not only humans) and our culture. Also I am male which adjusts my tastes too. All that probably makes my views on current popular games kind of biased and is just my opinions.

There will be few posts. In this one I will speak about social part of “social” games.

Social? Are they social?

So why social? From what I can see all “social” games usually include:

• Friend list, usually real friends
• Sometimes relationships between friends like being neighbors
• Gifts and other activities to help each other with game
• Means of messaging between friends in various ways(status posts, notifications, messages, emails, etc)
• Sometimes leaderboards

Usually that’s all. Now that’s usual thing when you look on games in social networks. But what bothers me with this list is that in no way it really distinguishes social games from multiplayer games that existed before. Lets take other big multiplayer game. For example let’s take WoW:

• You have friends
• You can communicate with them in various ways
• You can trade with them, give gifts etc
• You can get in to guilds and parties as special relationships that have attached game mechanics to them
• There are various leaderboards

So, does it make WoW a social game in a sense in which Facebook games are called social. Well, not really. What then distinguishes Facebook games from WoW? Here are some more features that are inherent to social games but do not make clear cut aether:

• Those are games that are embedded in to social networks ,but there are ports of social games to mobile, are they the same then?
• Use in game purchases,but many other games start to use them too including WoW or Battlefield Heroes
• Core mechanics of social games seem simple, shallow and casual, but they also may demand much time from players and there are both casual and hardcore players playing them(spending a lot of time and effort)
• Social games are in constant refreshing cycle with new content added repeatedly, but same goes for WoW and Angry Birds

So they don’t make any real distinction aether. And as we go forward social games will evolve coming closer to desktop and console games in some aspects while desktop and console games will be taking some features from social games too. So things will be becoming even more blurry. But I think there are some aspects that do define and distinguish social games from desktop games:

• Social games are designed as freemium games with in game purchases
• As such their main aim is to get as big number of users as possible and keep them playing
• So they are designed in a way that forces you to invite friends in to the game one way or another(bonuses, easier to play, some things can be done only together)
• In same time they aim to make friends call each other to return to the game in various ways
• To make game spread as much as possible those games are designed to be as attractive and as positive as possible
• That leads to positive game themes and simple and familiar game mechanics that allow users to enter the game and start playing as fast as possible

Conclusions

Many things may sound good in that list but sadly they are not(at least for me). “Social” games are not really that social at the moment in comparison to many other games. For me they even seem to be less social then other games but more about that in next post.

Just bought one Humble Indie Bundle 2 for my self. And two as gifts for later. I already have Cortext Command but I always wanted to buy/play Osmos and Braid but never was getting my self to but them. Thus Humble Indie Bundle was a hard offer to resist Revenge of the Titans seems good addition too

Open game development

Things that Wolfire do interest me a lot. I was thinking for a while(few years) about how AAA games industry and often indies prefer to stay at a distance from their clients. For AAA industry it often feels as if you are facing a faceless giant that does not see, care or bother with you. For that reason I slowly start to pay them with same disrespect. They may make good games but it feels like some large soulless machine spiting out stuff for consumption… Something that makes me feel bad about the purchase.

For few years I was thinking about various ways and business models that would make game development closer to the people where customers know what’s behind the scene, can influence, interact and engage with development and developers while supporting them in various ways be it testing, ideas sharing and crowd funding.

And Wolfire with their Overgrowth are trying to do just that. Good to see such developments. Humble indie bundle initiatives Wolfire made are interesting in same sense though probably not exactly what I want. But still good.

Interesting features of HIB

Here are things I find to be brilliant about Humble indie bundle:

• Allowing people to choose their own price is a jewel here but it is hard to foresee all the cases where developers loose or earn money with such an offer, but it definitely is a buzz generating part of this
• EFF and Child’s play charity are part of this, but even more important that project allows users to choose what proportions of payment go to what. This I think brings more meaning in to the purchase by making users to make a choice. Now it is not meter of pure consumption. As with amount of price here user makes a choice about who he is and what he wants in various dimensions. I think it engages user more with action of purchase making him more aware of what goes where.
• Stats of average price given by OS platform. It is interesting in many ways. For example you can see that Linux users pay twice as much then Windows users and Max is in a middle. And you can see proportion of platforms. That actually shows that Windows market is bigger in numbers but almost equal in money to Linux here Interesting observation considering AAA companies prefer to say “There is no money to be had on Linux market”, yeah right… If you do not try then yeah there is not money to be had. Another interesting thing about this is that it provides a base point and forces user to answer a question of who he is. Are you cheap? Are you generous? Are you average and just like majority of people?
• Then there is top 10 contributors top. This one partially works like a previous adding moral and competitive motivation for users to pay more but this time I see what I hoped to see with first HIB. Advertisers. At the moment 3 out of 10 top payers are advertising something paying the project together something like 2k$. Not not that much I guess but I think there is promise in that idea.
• Also majority of games are selling for a while. Hype already ended for them. As I mentioned I was thinking but not bringing myself to buy some of those and basically my money was money they would not get otherwise.
• They picked a right time to do this in combo with gift option. As I mentioned I bought few copies as gifts as well.
• There is number of less significant things, no DRM, probably a world wide release, digital download being available for a while etc

There are of course some things that bother me a little:

• Bundle version bothers me a little, last time I had 50%+ of games, that was alienating me to not participate or motivate to lower a price as I payed one already for some of them. And low price because of that may lower average price stats and in this way influence others choice as well. I guess you could tackle this with trying to sell new games like that or adding ability to say which games you want and which you do not even though you still get all of them.
• This offer is 7 days long… This bothers me because as usual with such stuff people would manipulate it. Buy like 100 and resell later for bigger price when it will not be sold anymore. Of course such exploit is little bit effected by “pay what you want” and “no DRM” parts of this but still it holds.

Conclusion

HIB and Wolfire explore things that I am very interested in and my respect to them for this. All that is very interesting on many levels and could be a start of many interesting game development business models I wish will succeed. Bringing all models together is what is right and what HIB tries to do may be not in very refined way so far. Motivation, morals, engagement of buyer. Social media. Charity. Advertisement place for big contributors/sponsors. All it together in as easy to buy form as possible. Right way to go don’t you think?

Introduction

(Warning, this post is LARGE)

With raise of large audiences in social games and trend of micro transactions and “in game purchase” a lot of big and small companies started to makes Flash games. This results in heated competition to deliver next game that stands out in various ways. In AAA games (sadly to be honest) one of the edges to stand out was and is graphics. Probably because of spend effort and gained attention ratio and that after seeing good graphics old starts to itch the eye. Now with this competition for hundredths of millions of players market same starts to happen in a browser with Flash being the most popular technology at use at the moment. This leads to Flash rendering being pushed to the limit and wondering in to uncharted combination of rendering techniques and various pitfalls they bring.

Recently some discussion rose around using Flash display list vs using custom based rendering based on BitmapData. One of such conversations was risen by SocialCity developer discussing what kind of compromises they did making SocialCity. And such compromise is pretty common among various desktop developers coming to Flash as that’s very similar to what they were doing there I  guess. Anyways that article got attention of a Flash developer who was making games using Flash for a while before that market heat up that much. So he made number of his own tests and comparisons on how good Flash display list is vs BitmapData blitting.

continue reading…

So here is small addition to my previous post/summary on Molehill 3D

So here is one more session on Molehill 3D from Away3D and Alternativa3D representatives. Second part from Alternativa is not that interesting after Away3D + Alternativa stuff was mostly showed already in other videos and you will not see much new.

Some summary of things Away3D mentioned that I find to be interesting:

• 4 million of triangles with shaders applied runing at 50-60FPS, ouh boy… I just can’t wait
• There are vertex shaders that allow offload animation calculation to GPU which means that animations of very large models is probably possible, if you read my previous summary on Molehill 3D that is big concert and possible bottleneck(things not possible to do on GPU and too slow in AS3, for example physics too)
• Away3D too will try to leave current Away3D structure as intact as possible so you could effortlessly port current projects to Molehill 3D without noticing. At least in theory. But there will be a lot of new stuff added

So I am watching Adobe Max 2010 Monday session live. And writing this live so it may be emotional at some parts So here goes my notes on it.

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Well for many I guess this is an old news as such event is hard to miss. If not then in short:
Pay what you like and get 5 great indie games. Money is split between childs play charity, EFF and developers according to your ratios. Here is video and here is site:

Games

From those 5 games I played 3(demos or full).  Gish, Aquarium and World of Goo. They all are great games and examples of indie creativity. I seriously recommend you playing them and with this action it may be a good chance to get your hands on them

Gish is a physical platformer that is pretty fun to play. World of Goo is physical puzzle/construction game but this short explanation does not honor it, it is more then that. And finally Aquaria. Very beautiful game may be not with best scenario but with interesting one, also game mechanics are fun. Those three are a must!!! Seriously

As for me I think I would try to find some time trying Lugaru HD as I haven’t played it yet.

More interesting stuff about it

Wolfire are providing stats for this event. You can see top of contributors, average amount payed, whole sum gathered and how many payed. At the moment they are closing on to 600K$ with average price of 8$.

Also they posted number of blog posts and I guess more coming up about stats they collected and some other stats and conclusions. Interesting info.

Well read this and then this today… Good food for thoughts. And here I decided share my two cents.

Why it is hard to compete with Zynga?

Well firstly we do know that Zynga can skyrocket new games to the top of niche quickly. Then they are strong in number and they are expending not only in numbers but culturally too. So they have money, work force, people with different cultural views and large user base that allows them to make new products popular fast.

Those two articles above suggested 2 ways of competing with Zynga. One by making  a game that would be very hard to clone. Well on the surface it seems that Zynga can clone anything fast enough right now to get to the top before competitors no metter how late they start. Or does it? I actually thing that innovation can throw things of balance in even most stable markets.

And in other article it was suggested to pick some small niches where Zynga will not want to go. But that’s not really a competition. It’s rather and evasion of competition and does make sense. Especially for independent developers. So not a competing but a good way to work.

But reading it and thinking about it I come up with the way I would have tried it.

My recipe for competing with Zynga

And it consists of two parts.

First part of course is innovation and probably on the back-end. Making a game that is good but that requires some innovative algorithms running on the back-end(stuff I like) which makes it clear, easy and enjoyable for players (easy to understand what it does) but hard to clone for competitors (hard to understand how it does it).

Another part of the recipe is to make a game in a niche that Zynga already occupies but with major (complete) changes making it a completely different game. Kind of a fresh air breeze in the same niche. It should be so different that changing game Zynga already has would hurt Zynga more then not doing it. I mean players never like drastic changes to product they already like. But at the same time (not shore actually about this part but it is important) I think that it would not make much sense for Zynga to make a new product in same niche to compete with your product because they will compete with their own product at the same time.

So combine those two things and you get a product which will make hard time for Zynga to decide on what to do with it. Hard to clone, and confusing to compete with as both strategies I see for it will also undermine their own product. And that means that you will at least have more time on getting attention before Zynga manages to do something (probably just taking what they can from your idea in to their original product, but only things that enhance and not change it).

Well that’s my two cents. Of course it is probably close to impossible to do all that at once and get an interesting game too But that’s how true innovation happens.

What is Ludumdare

Ludumdare is a 48 hour game development competition that is made for fun. It is always fun to throw all those rules out of the window and just make some game or game prototype in 48 hours

Ludumdare 17 theme voting

Ludumdare 17 theme voting has began. Not much to say about that so far. Haven’t participated in wiki theme list generation this time but seen some interesting theme for myself there.

Will I participate?

Don’t know yet. Probably. If yes then it will be something very very small. Depends on the theme and if some other plans for weekends will kick in or not…