Game g = new Game();

I’m almost off to the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.

This year again, the number of sessions about social, online, casual MMO etc. type of games increased – I should be attending most of the Social & Online Games Summit on Tuesday and Wednesday, and will roam around the following days.

The plan is to cover the most interesting stuff here in the blog – we’ll see how this goes.

If you are in SF and care for a coffee or beer (or have invitations to a hot exclusive party…), let me know.

As a more positive and proactive followup on my previous post about the Top 10 of retail mentality, I cannot overemphasize the importance of the “Lean Startup” philosophy and concepts, started by Eric Ries and Steve Blank.

If you have not already done so, please have a quick look at the slides:

Or you can watch a webcast of a live talk by Eric on the same subject, “How to Build a Lean Startup, step-by-step”:

Earlier this year, a Google Group was started.

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:

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 –

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!