Game g = new Game();

These are my links for October 28th:

• Grails Quick Tip #2: Getting Access to SessionFactory and MessageSource « Brain Flush –
• 500 Internal Server Error – 500 Internal Server Error
• Eludamos. Journal for Computer Game Culture –
• Proper way to use JDK6 for IntelliJ… :: JetBrains Developer Community –
• The Escapist –

Very interesting summary of a GDC Austin keynote by Blizzard about WoW (thanks Frank!):

• They try to structure the teams around the people, and not the other way around. They feel strongly that employee strengths should dictate organizational structure, and as a result all reporting structures within the company vary by team.
• Each team on the game aims to be made up of 5-8 people.
• The programming department currently consists of 32 people
• In all, the programming team is responsible for some 5.5 million lines of code.
• The art department is currently sitting at 51 people.
• Overall the art department is responsible for some 1.5 million assets.
• Production department is 10 members strong.
• Creative teams to not report to producers, he pointed out. Team leads, instead, take up leadership roles within individual departments. The art lead, for example, still creates art.
• Design department is 37 members strong.
• Over the years, the team has created some 70,000 spells and some 40,000 NPCs.
• The QA group has tackled some 180,000 bugs since the game launched.
• Localization currently tracks 360,000 text strings and some 2 million words.
• Data centers from Texas to Seoul, over 13,250 server blades, 75,000 cpu cores, and 112.5 terabytes of blade RAM.
• As an organization, World of Warcraft utilizes 20,000 computer systems, 1.3 petabytes of storage, and more than 4600 people.

Frank Pearce: “World of Warcraft has completely changed the organization”

Over the weekend I attended an iPhone game development lecture/workshop, presented by the dudes from radiolaris, an indie studio focusing on iPhone games. Their first release Radioflare, a music shoot’em up, received an IGF nomination.

Besides “pure” development topics, we covered a lot of diverse ground, from the economics and politics of the AppStore, to development methodology (note to self: have to read on Scrum-ban, a crossover between Scrum and Kanban), compared various game engines and middleware, and exchanged opinions about “indie” and “commercial” games in general.

To summarize my key take-aways of those 3 days:

Not one, but two AppStores
The AppStore is split into two parts – one (“AppStore A”) contains games and apps that cost 99 cents, the other (“AppStore B”) contains games and apps that are more expensive.

Each of them attracts different users – games in AppStore A are appealing to impulse buyers who browse and download mostly directly from their iPhone (so the games must be <10MB in size). Users can always get new games very cheaply, and probably do not spend much time with a single game.

The other, AppStore B, contains “bigger”, more expensive games. Users interested in those games are the more traditional gamers, reading blogs, and expecting the game to be a service that has to be maintained by the developer.

An iPhone developer should chose wisely in which AppStore he wants to play, and take this into account when deciding not only on game design details, features, etc., but also on marketing. AppStore A is a difficult territory for professional game development studios, in terms of ROI.

2D is good (enough)
The iPhone download charts are dominated by 2D games; 3D is not a real factor whether a game is going to be a success or not.

Metrics
90k active apps (98k total apps seen in US AppStore), growing rapidly
21k publishers

29 game submissions per day to Apple for approval, vs.
138 non-games submissions per day

Current avg delay from submission to approval: 10 days (maximum: 43 days! yuck)

The profit margin is better for non-games:
Current avg app price: $2.80
Current avg game price: $1.39

Free/lite vs. paid/premium version – 3-5% of users downloading the free/lite version buy the premium version.

All metrics from 148apps.biz (highly recommended!).

Middleware
Facebook and Twitter integration is expected, not optional!

OpenFaint, Plus+, Agon and others make it very easy to integrate.

Also, Pinch Media offers a free (for now) solution for ingame tracking and analytics (though I have to check out whether it would make (more) sense to use the Google Analytics AJAX API for that purpose).

Input methods
Accelerometer (tilt control) should be used for one axis only (tilt left/right or up/down), as difficulty increases dramatically when trying to control 2 axis at the same time.

When using up/down, use an offset of 30° up as default, as users tend to use their phones tilted up.

Cocos2D
Cocos2D seems to be the primary open sourced 2D game engine for the iPhone. It has a ton of features (sprite actions, scene transitions, audio, 2 different physics engines, particle effects, etc.), and especially the many samples give a very good overview and can be used as a starting point for a new game.

My favorite quote of the weekend comes from martinpi:

“Memory Management am iPhone dürfte ziemlich intelligent sein, auf eine dumme Art und Weise.”

Overall, it was a very interesting and inspiring weekend – thanks to everyone involved!

I try to force myself to use Things on a daily basis. I had put the library files on a local server, but with “Back To My Mac” enabled, I had troubles accessing it over the net sometimes.

When I read about Dropbox, I reminded myself that I’m spending quite some money every year on Apple’s .mac (now Mobile Me) service, but 99% of the time I am just using the email part of it.

So, I wanted to see if I could put the Things library on the iDisk, despite the fact that their FAQ says it’s not possible.

It is possible.

1. Quit Things.
2. Enable “iDisk Sync” in the Mobile Me preferences pane.
3. Move your Things library (if you have not changed anything, it sits in ~/Library/Application Support/Cultured Code) to your iDisk.
4. Create a symlink from ~/Library/Application Support/Cultured Code to /Volumes/iDisk/Documents/Cultured Code.
5. Launch Things – if a request comes up, browse to ~/Library/Application Support/Cultured Code/Things and select it

Voila. Life can be easy sometimes.

Here are some more updates about what’s currently going on in AT.LANT.IS:

Recently, we introduced a more detailed differentiation between the basic and the premium members.

Premium members now have unlimited access to all emoticons and animations, and can change the color of their chat messages.

Also, received mails do not expire for premium members, and they can invite their buddies or other users in their personal home room.

Furthermore, we made it even easier to gain premium membership status:

First, we now support ELV as payment method.

Second, and even more important, we just started a “Invite a friend” promotion – for each successfully invited friend, you gain 1 day premium membership for free.

This is only active for the next couple of days, so spread the word now!