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!

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:

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…

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.

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!

During the test, all items in the shops will be available for only 1 ORI, to encourage lots of item purchases and new avatar renderings at a short timespan.

So, if you always wanted to check out how that golden shark helmet fits you, register now and login tomorrow evening!

(As a side note, all beta users will receive 3 months premium membership for free !)

Now, what I find really fascinating is: if you assume that even only 0.1% of these user generated levels is actually fun to play, this still leaves you with 1.000 enjoyable levels! Even if you only play a hundred of those only for 10 minutes, you have increased the time you spent playing this game by 16 hours (which is more than some games deliver out of the box).

Obviously, the problem is finding those 0.1% – market for a new kind of search engine? Are there cross-game UGC search engines already available?

The Donau Universität Krems is offering a free one-day workshop about computer game addiction:

Online Computerspiele nehmen eine immer größer werdende Rolle im Leben von Jugendlichen wie auch Erwachsenen ein. Nach einer repräsentativen Studie der Freien Universität Berlin spielen derzeit in Deutschland etwa 20% der 14 bis 64-jährigen regelmäßig online bei einer durchschnittlichen Spieldauer von 20,5 Stunden pro Woche. Etwa 5% dieser Online-Spieler und Spielerinnen zeigen mit mehr als 50 Stunden Spieldauer pro Woche Anzeichen einer Verhaltenssucht. Auch wenn die Spieldauer alleine keine Aussage über eine tatsächliche Sucht darstellen kann, so zeigen diese Zahlen doch sehr deutlich eine der zentralen Herausforderungen der stetig wachsenden Computerspielkultur: Pädagoginnen und Pädagogen müssen heute davon ausgehen, dass sich in jeder Schulklasse Computerspielsucht-gefährdete Schüler und Schülerinnen befinden.

Im Rahmen einer „Student for a Day“ Veranstaltung können Interessenten und Interessentinnen des Masterstudiums in MedienSpielPädagogik unverbindlich einem Workshoptag zum Thema Computerspielsucht beiwohnen. Der Workshop findet am 14.7. in der Zeit von 9:15 – 17:45 im Seminarraum SE 2.4 der Donau-Universität Krems statt. Die Teilnahme an diesem Workshop ist gratis.

I worked with Alex Champandard during my time at Rockstar Vienna.

He launched his site AiGameDev.com a while ago, and is now re-opening the premium section:

We’ll be reopening the Premium Membership Area on Wednesday, May 6th. In the process of relaunching, we’ll fill you in on what’s changing in the world of game AI, show you the techniques and ideas you need to stay on top of, and give you a whole bunch of bonuses and extras from our very best content.

If you are even remotely interested in AI, check it out!