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.

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.

“Children and family focused iPhone applications are gaining in popularity and have become big business” said Jason Petralia, CEO of People Operating Technology, a New York-based iPhone application publisher. “We’re happy that Greystripe is pioneering research into this market.”

Highlights include:

• Over 59% of iPhone moms let their children use their iPhone with 41% downloading entertainment applications 20% downloading educational apps specifically for their kids.
• 89.25% use their phone for entertainment, whether this is listening to music, browsing the Internet or using various entertainment apps.
• 96% are involved in their household purchasing decisions, with 40% being the sole decision maker.

The complete report is available as PDF.

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.

10. You are using MS Project to schedule the project,
9. and the GANTT chart looks like a waterfall
8. and has a milestone labeled “Shipping date”.
7. You have a marketing agency.
6. Their marketing plan spends the majority of the budget on TV spots and print ads.
5. But hey, they also want to set up a twitter account for you, to “enhance virality”,
4. and a facebook “account”,
3. only to post just their press statements there.
2. You delay the launch date a couple of times, because the “product” is “not finished yet”.
1. Finally, after launch, you realize that you have no money left for further development or support.

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.

• 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”

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!