Sometimes its fun just to type “var bmd : BitmapData = new BitmapData(300,250);” and see where it takes you. This morning I went from this weird maze thing:
I also scrolled the bmd to see what would happen. You sometimes get these lovely particle emitters that look like rocket engines or space invaders. (Click to restart the swfs).
Working in advertising its sometimes nice to make something that is useful for a change. I made this AIR app as a part of the R&D initiative at Republic. Its installed on the work computers and could one day replace our paper phone lists, saving the world one A4 sheet at a time baby.
Its fed by xml and I included a few extra features, a list of the latest songs scrobbled on the public music pc and a multiuser chat panel (using SmartFoxServer).
I’ve made this blog the first thing you see when hitting tomdanvers.com. I’ve relegated my old flash home page to here. Not even Flash developers have flash sites anymore!
Carl pointed me in the direction of this excellent presentation by Carnegie Mellon University Professor Jesse Schell. For anyone working in digital who has been asked by a client to make a Farmville clone this is a must-see video. Schell talks about the Facebook game phenomenon (Farmville, Mafia Wars etc.) and how its taken the games industry by surprise. He points out the success of these games is their interaction with the real world. The traditional idea of games as an escape from reality is therefore being turned on its had by this new wave of casual social games. Players now want their game experiences to be interwoven with real life and their day to day interactions with friends and strangers. Achievement based gaming is a good example of this idea, players get bragging rights and even single player experiences become competitive. He also talks about revenue streams in these games. Schell points out that games that require direct payment often generate less revenue than games which are totally free to play but use micro transactions or subscriptions to unlock enhanced game feaures.
His talk also inspired me to think about what else makes a successful casual game. I’m sure its been commented on before but I’ve noticed that my personal enjoyment of a casual game is often related to the ratio of active to passive gameplay. What I mean by this is the amount of time you as the player have to be interacting with the game in order to progress. Contrary to what I used to think its often games with an even split of active and passive gameplay that are the most fun. Take Peggle for example. In Peggle you line up the trajectory of the shot and then hit Fire, then you watch your action play out which can easily take 10 seconds or more. The same goes for Angry Birds, you shoot your bird and watch the physics engine do its work. This mechanism works particularly well on mobile devices, it means the player is never penalised for pausing in the middle of a game session. It also makes the effort involved in playing quite low which encourages ‘just one more go’ behaviour.
