AT.LANT.IS, the online youth community, has been relaunched.
The primary business model shifted from premium subscriptions towards item sales, along with the important (and overdue) integration of SMS payment.
Secondly, today the new AT.LANT.IS app launched on schuelerVZ, one of the biggest social network for kids and teenagers in Central Europe. This makes it possible to create your character and play and chat in Atlantis within the schuelerVZ environment (well, it’s an OpenSocial container, so you do the math ). I assume launches on studiVZ and meinVZ will follow, but the target group is mainly using schuelerVZ, so that is the most important platform to launch. Good.
Thirdly, I quit my job as CTO of plazz entertainment in June. Still, it’s nice to finally see the changes and new features we have been working on for so long go live. I hope that the new business model proves itself, and Atlantis can take advantage of the huge VZ user base.
Recently, I was asked whether I can provide notes of some piano tracks of “Der Clou! 2″ soundtrack, written and performed back in 2000 by Markus Mayer and myself.
Well, unfortunately I do not have any of the Logic files, but you can at least listen to the tracks (and see some screenshots of the game by neo software) on YouTube:
I have been having mixed feelings about Flash development for a long time.
Fact is, Flash is here to stay – at least for the next 2-3 years, I assume, until maybe HTML5, Unity and/or others have gained more traction.
A question raised by a friend in a recent discussion was: What features, advantages etc. can Flash list on the “plus” side, besides an enormous installed user base? My reply was: “You already answered your question.”
The thing is, it does not actually matter how “bad”, performance-hogging, 3D-features lacking Flash actually is, if you want to reach a very broad audience, there still is no alternative to it.
Perhaps (un)surprisingly, little has changed since early 2008 when we decided to develop AT.LANT.IS in Flash.
Daniel James of Three Rings confirmed that with the Java version of Puzzle Pirates they majority of users did not even see the start screen of the game, because they needed to confirm to “Trust” the Java applet before – something they were not used to doing, raising their suspicion and in result leaving the game before it had even started. When they changed to Flash with Whirled, that problem was gone. (He was giving some exact numbers, as he likes to do, but I can’t remember exactly).
So, still a good opportunity for all you Flash coders charging a fortune for some AS3 lines…
If you have been following my updates on Xing, you know that I am resigning from my job as CTO of plazz entertainment next month.
The thing is, there are some very cool options that appeared over the last 6 months or so, and I hope to be able to share what I will be doing in the future very soon.
). I assume launches on studiVZ and meinVZ will follow, but the target group is mainly using schuelerVZ, so that is the most important platform to launch. Good.
