Game g = new Game();

I started a LinkedIn group to talk about Business Intelligence and Data Mining for all kinds of games – social, browser, console, PC, mobile.

As I have posted before, I think this is a very interesting topic, but somehow there does not seem to be a lot of information available – so let’s talk about how you approach it, what kind of tools and frameworks do you use, how you integrate the various data sources, what kind of (automated or manual) decisions and optimizations you feed back into your game design and/or virtual economy parameters, and so on.

So, whether you already have vast experience in that area, or you just starting out, join now and let everybody know!

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 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…

In our youth community AT.LANT.IS we want to encourage users to participate as much as possible.

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:

Yesterday I attended Jurie Horneman‘s talk on the artistic merits of violence in video games.

Interestingly, he focused his detailed examples on Manhunt 1, and mentioned only his concepts and ideas for Manhunt 2 that did not make it into the final game. (During my time at Rockstar Vienna, Jurie was working on Manhunt 2 as producer. After the studio was shut down and Manhunt 2 was released, Jurie posted the missing credits for the Vienna development team on his blog)

Nevertheless, his points about violence being used so often because it’s (often) the easier route for game designers were going into the same direction as Doris C. Rusch in her workshops about emotions as game design concepts.