Although I have not been able to talk a lot about my current work or employer, chances are that this will change soon.

Expect more frequent updates soon.

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.

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 the 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…

plazz ist ein Publisher für interaktive Unterhaltung für Kinder und Familie. Die Firma wurde 2007 gegründet und beschäftigt sich mit Spieleproduktionen auf Basis von TV-Lizenzen und der Entwicklung von eigener IP.

In den letzten 2 Jahren haben wir uns auf die Entwicklung und den Betrieb der Youth Gaming Community AT.LANT.IS konzentriert.

Youth Communities bieten Kindern und Jugendlichen zielgruppengerechte Charaktere mit vielfältigen Personalisierungsoptionen, eine virtuelle Welt als Ordnungsprinzip mit ausgeprägten Community-Funktionen, und Casual Games ohne Einstiegshürden.

AT.LANT.IS ist eine thematisch zusammenhängende Online-Welt, in der die 8- bis 12-jährigen User online im Chat und offline über ein eigenes Mail-System miteinander kommunizieren, sich über ihre personalisierbaren Avatare ausdrücken, Mini-Games spielen und dabei eine virtuelle Währing „ORIs“ verdienen, und diese dann in virtuellen Items und Upgrades ausgeben können.

Das Projekt wurde von einem Inhouse-Team konzipiert und geleitet und von internen und externen Teams innerhalb eines 12-monatigen Produktionszeitraumes umgesetzt. Der Entwicklungsprozess lief in monatlichen Iterationen ab. Ein Feature wurde im Wiki spezifiziert, im Issue Tracker eingetragen, einer Version und einem Developer zugewiesen, und dann auf einem Entwicklungsserver laufend integriert.

Bei der Systemarchitektur wurde auf Flash als Client-Technologie mit der OpenSpace ISO-Engine, PHP für die Website, auf einen mySQL-Cluster und den kommerziellen Socketserver SmartfoxServer mit Java-Extensions und Hibernate-ORM gesetzt.

Nach Start der Closed Beta im Dezember 2008 und der Open Beta im Februar 2009 wurde Atlantis im August 2009 gelaunched.

Die ersten 6 Monate zeigten eine Verdopplung der durchschnittlichen Zeit, die ein User auf AT.LANT.IS verbringt, deutlich differenzierte Beliebtheit der einzelnen Mini-Games, ELV (elektronisches Lastschriftverfahren) als dominierende Zahlungsmethode, und die Notwendigkeit regelmässiger Anpassungen des Funktionsumfanges an das User-Verhalten.

Oh, and apologies for the automated “bookmarks” posts, that contained more and more “Error 500″ links – I removed the post, and disabled the plugin. If I have any interesting links to share, I will twitter them.

From a game design perspective, users help to “rebuild” Atlantis by earning the ingame currency ORIs in the minigames. As soon as enough ORIs are available, a new feature in the world is unlocked for everyone – a new room, new avatar items, or a new game.

Besides that, more and more users are sending in their stories and drawings to be included in the library or the museum, respectively.

I hope we can gain more momentum with that user generated content – as always, some users seem to get into it more than others, some of them even use other platforms like YouTube:

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”

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!

From today, 9/11 to Sunday 9/13, all new and existing users on AT.LANT.IS are upgraded to premium for free.

If you have already registered a character, just login and be able to spend all your hard earned ORIs on lovely items to style yourself, or send your buddies Atlafon mails.