I’m not sure if I’ll have another “developer-focused” blog or not. Game Geek Speak was about the “behind the scenes” kind of stuff, and it’s fun to write about, but going forward, I am not sure that I’ll be able to put adequate time into it. If I do, I want it to be useful and interesting. Lately, I’ve found myself so busy that I don’t have time to post much or with any depth. Maybe I’ll try Twitter for shorter, development-oriented discussion.

Hope to see all 80-something of my readers over at the new site. Thanks so much for reading and interacting. I really enjoy it!

Please visit Otherwhere’s blog.

Update: In case you wanna, I have a Twitter account now. otherwheregames. I’ll be tweeting mainly about social and indie game development and business.

After a lot of Google digging (and no reply from Jambool support, which worries me), I found the slides to a webinar that is strangely no longer available to the public. It turned out to be the best documentation for integrating Social Gold with Flash that is on the Internet. (I didn’t even find any blogs talking about it.) Why isn’t the webinar replay public? The slides are. *shrugs*

Anyway, here are the slides, in case you want to see.

Roar Engine puts the power of an incredible social game mechanics platform into your hands, complete with management tools, payment processing, reporting systems.

Using the powerful Roar Engine tasks system, construct elaborate crafting systems: eg. convert stones and pixie dust into a magic gem (a prerequisite for your Epic Mission series of quests of course). Tag your own crafting classes: blacksmith, carpenter, alchemist, enchanter, anything!

Unlike most ‘social game platforms’ who are just mashing a database and some website code together for all their clients, with Roar Engine you get a dedicated, blazing fast, specially built, C++ driven Roar Engine server for each game you create, along with a custom URL to access that game’s API.

Earn money from virtual currency sales using real money payment gateways. Roar Engine supports premium currency purchases through supported payment gateways, as well as an admin API hook for implementing your own custom payment providers.

Significantly, I didn’t see anywhere that they intend to take a cut of your sales. Nice! Pricing is a flat fee per month, based on number of API calls. You get 100K API calls for free. Supports clients in Flash, Unity, HTML, mobile, etc.

I’m really tempted to try this out in the future. I’ll watch its evolution with great interest.

The game is hideous looking, lacks content and a bunch of functionality (and one critical feature broke when I moved it onto Facebook), and definitely isn’t ready to play. So many small holes to patch up.

That said, there is a complete game loop. You can trade commodities, manage your fleet of ships (and buy new ones or sell old ones), gain experience and level up your character, outfit your ships, and even get into a fight with a pesky test character’s fleet. It’s all very meaningless and limited, though, because there’s no content besides a few test locations and a handful of test ships. But, given some more time and love, things will improve.

It’s kind of weird, because at this point it isn’t the code holding back the game. It’s the content. I haven’t been in this position before–it’s usually the other way around.

But it’s nice. With technology, I can’t always tell if it’s even going to be possible or if I have the programming chops to pull it off. But with a big chunk of the core code finished, I feel like I can move ahead with content development more confidently. There are very few “big unknowns” surrounding the code now, as I’ve cleared most of the major hurdles. This is the first client/server game I’ve ever made (all by myself, anyway), and I’ve had to learn a lot.

Not to say I’m out of the woods and let’s throw a party (but, let’s anyway!). It just feels great to get this far. After Lila Dreams collapsed, and then I tried to get two or three other projects off the ground (each time scaling down), it felt like I might never finish another game. I stand corrected! I think I can call myself a game developer again.

So, that’s what’s happening in Jason’s world. And things are gonna keep getting more exciting as the game gets closer to launch. But I still have a lot of work to do.

This is just pure hogwash. (And, please note, I’m going to use some sarcasm and exaggeration in this post because I can’t help it.)

First of all, saying something like, “If you make a Facebook game, you can get rich because Zynga is projected to earn $700 million this year” is totally irrational. Zynga is the #1 game developer on Facebook. Never, ever compare your company with that, unless you have nine-figure venture capital funding–in which case, you are not indie, and you have different problems entirely.

The other half of that is, “If you are not Zynga or making at least $100 million per year, you can’t be successful with a social game.” This is equally as ridiculous.

Now this leads to the “If I can just make 1% of what Zynga makes, I’ll still make $7 million per year!” But that’s the wrong end of the stick when you are doing financial planning. (And that’s another post itself.)

My beef is with setting up very false expectations. This is what makes a “gold rush” insane (read The Madness of Crowds sometime), even when there’s not nearly as much gold as you think because the only company ever being talked about is the #1 company. Pandemonium ensues.

There’s a huge gap between Zynga’s revenue and the #2 company. And that’s the #2 fricken company on all of Facebook! There’s only room for one #1 and one #2. Unless you have the VC funding, why are you even thinking about what they are doing, much less talking about it as if it matters to anyone with less than $100 million in the war chest? Does. Not. Apply.

Hey, I’m just asking for some common sense when talking about the realities of commercial success on Facebook.

The fact is that there are a lot of small and mid-sized game developers making some sweet money on Facebook (and elsewhere). You don’t need a team of 700, like Zynga. Try a team of 30 or 10 or 3. You might find that you can cover costs with a much smaller player base. You won’t have 80 million monthly players, but–like Neo in The Matrix–you won’t need to. (Sorry, possibly obscure reference there in the service of “humor.”)

All I’m saying is that there is more than one way to skin this cat, so everyone stop talking in absolutes about how if you are not Zynga, you can’t be successful, and, therefore, the fad is over, Facebook sucks now, and let’s all go eat worms. If you’re indie, you’re probably small. There’s a big chance you can succeed on Facebook (and elsewhere) because you are nimble and your overhead is low. Yes, you might need to spend money on ads. So does everyone who sells anything. It’s called marketing.

Second of all, no, virality is not dead on Facebook. Spamming is dead, but not virality (aka “word of mouth”). Make a game people want to talk about, and you won’t be impacted by these “draconian” changes. On top of that, Facebook isn’t the only fricken social networking site out there, people! Diversify or die.

Thirdly, you don’t need to host your game on a fricken social networking site at all. There are plenty of games “in the wild” (that big, scary place!) that have millions of monthly active users and rake in money. No, you won’t be able to spam a million people and get 7 figure MAU numbers in a week. Most people, at this point, say, “Oh no! Then you can’t survive! Just quit instead. I’m not Zynga–” *sound of self-inflicted gunshot to the head*

Cheer up. You can survive–and thrive. Just ignore the news about companies that are nothing like yours, and you might find your way.

Lastly, this kind of alarmist hyperbole is just feeding back on itself and creating more hysteria. Please stop, and think!

The economy sucks, and will get worse, but you don’t have to make $700 million a year to be commercially successful. What are your costs of living? Now double that, and make that your goal instead. Gee, that seems to change all the parameters.

Interesting.

An example is Amazon gift certificates — you could buy them but there’s always a large amount of remnant value on the card that isn’t used. In an economy like [the Facebook] platform, that will lead to developers never seeing the value even though they created it.

…we all know at this point that Facebook is not that straightforward for distribution — we all have to spend money on distribution. So you’re not just paying 30 percent for payments, you have to spend on top of that for advertising.

Apart from some of the things mentioned in the article, there is one big issue that bothers me: I don’t want to be controlled by outside forces. That’s the reason I don’t work at a company, and I don’t want outside funding. I’m freakin’ independent, ya know?! I want to reap the full benefits of my potential, not give it away after all this hard work.

If I exclusively use Credits for my game and Facebook makes policy changes to either pricing, their fees, or how Credits can be used within an app, my business and livelihood becomes subject to their whims. In my game, the currency is integral to the game design, not just a slapped-on form of payment like a PayPal button. Can I risk that being controlled by a third party who doesn’t have my best interests in mind?

There is a counterpoint article which supports the idea of Facebook Credits as a universal app currency, and the main gist is that, overall, this will increase the market size by way more than the 30% fee. I see the logic there, and that sounds great. But my biggest beef is that I lose so much control over my own product by using Credits.

This feels a lot like the argument in the downloadable games world between relying on portals for profit versus staking out your own chunk of territory on your own website for the long term. I’m really tempted to host my game off of Facebook but use Connect for logins and social features to get the benefits of Facebook’s reach.

One solution might be to accept Credits in exchange for hard currency in-game (a separate currency from Credits). Essentially, this would abstract Credits away and still allow me to control the in-game economy. Then, players would not spend Credits directly in the game, but would only use Credits to fund their in-game account. Would that work? I don’t know.

But it’s a tough call. What would you do?

Update: Tangential, perhaps, but with features such as the new behaviors of the Like button that can be used off of Facebook, it seems more and more compelling to host a game on its own site, because you can still leverage a lot of what makes Facebook such a “viral” platform without being hosted on Facebook.

YouTube simplified the online video world by keeping everything in the browser and not requiring anyone to install or remember anything. Everything users needed was already online waiting for them. When they emailed a video clip, their friend only had to click on it to play and bookmarks made it a snap to use the service again and again.

Simple: check. Convenient: check. Viral: check. Cha-ching: check and check.

Replace “YouTube” with your company and “video” with “games.”

The fact is that the number of people that choose to play games in their browsers will be far greater than the number of people who are willing to download, install, and then fiddle with configurations for an equivalent experience. Maybe this is deployment Darwinism at work?

This won’t happen right away, but the path is clear and things like Google’s Native Client will make the rate of moving everything to the browser even faster.

For you nit-pickers, I do acknowledge that even browser games “download” data, but it’s not the same for the user experience, and that’s what I am referring to here. The user doesn’t need to download, find, and then install the game. There are always exceptions, but that process is a huge barrier for a lot of people.

I put together this title screen from art I commissioned for an old project that never got started, but the game world is similar, so I used it here. I designed the logo. Probably a keeper.

I’m using RedDwarf (Java) for the server and Flex 3 for the client.

The game is sort of playable, which is such a nice feeling. I haven’t had a playable project to work on for at least two years. Must… finish… or… die…!

I’ll pester anyone who will listen/read with more details later.

No, a lot!

The problem is, it’s not important.

Not important?! you exclaim. Then why do people ask it all the time?

Ok, actually this is a variation on another question: “What programming language should I use to make my game?” Once you’ve made some games, you come to know that it doesn’t matter. Any language will do. What does matter is the end product! Is it fun? Does it run on enough machines to meet your goals? Does it do what you wanted it to do? That’s all that matters.

Technology is a tool, so use whatever language you’d like.

As true as that is, it’s not always true.

The one way that choosing a language does matter is in the context of what you want to accomplish. Is your game downloadable? Or is it meant to be played in a browser? Those are big considerations, and they will have a material effect on what language (and tool set) you choose.

Narrowing things to Flash versus Java (where I have the most experience if you don’t count 10 years of C++), though, the answer is still, “It depends.”

Java and Flash both do downloadable and browser deployment, so let’s assume those factors are equal and are, thus, non-factors.

Do you want to reach the broadest audience or are you more interested in fast rendering and processing?

We all want fast rendering, but I mean does your project need lots of rendering muscle to succeed? Not just, “Oh it looks so cool.” but “Oh, this is not playable!” It’s got to really matter to the end product (because, ultimately, the end product is all that matters).

Java can render using hardware and is way faster than ActionScript, so it will have more power than Flash. A great browser library for Java is PulpCore. The feel of Flash with the speed of Java (although, it doesn’t do hardware rendering that I know of–but it is very close to a Flash experience without Flash, if that suits your persuasion).

Flash will ensure that your users have a more hassle-free experience since it’s installed on 99% of computers, whereas Java has quite a few old versions that are common. Relying on hardware rendering can give rise to technical incompatibilities, though Java doesn’t have to use hardware, so that can be mitigated.

Java is getting better about updates and penetration, but Flash still wins when you want to be compatible with the most computers (especially older or quirky hardware). That’s not to mention Flash is more web-enabled (ie, has strong support for integration with many sites and game portal APIs like Kongregate and Facebook), so for online games it makes lots of sense.

So, again, your answer has to derive from the question of how it affects the end product and what your goals are for it.

I’m doing online games, so I don’t want players to have to download and install anything. That’s a huge concern to me, so Flash wins almost right away because it’s the most hassle free. My second concern is penetration, and again–for my goals–Flash wins. I design for lower quality visuals but it’s made up for by the fact that I can reach more potential players. For commercial reasons, reaching more players is more important than having the best rendering sizzle.

For my backend (a.k.a. game servers), I use Java. Java is plenty fast, works on the platform I care about (Linux for servers), and was easy to learn with my backlog of C++ experience.

To summarize: the language you use is only relevant in context of the goals of your end product.

If you’re a hobbyist and don’t have any real goals, pick anything you like. If you have commercial goals, pick something that directly supports those goals.

It’s very project-specific, and it might even change from one project to the next.

Whatever the case, just make sure you’re having fun and don’t get all serious and uptight about languages and tools. It’s about the games!

I’ve only played a human so far, and at first I found the game environments a little bland. I guess having just finished the World of Warcraft trial, I was used to the bright colors and dense designs. I found LotRO to be much more sparse and less colorful. By sparse, I mean the designs are not cram-packed with tons of over the top details like giant weapons, huge armor, and fantastic creatures. (That’s a key point here.)

So the first good bit of the game, you are among humans and fight mostly normal animals and a few slightly fantasy creatures (though still in the realm of “realistic”). Playing this, while fun, was a little like quitting the Twinkies and eating raw veggies instead. It was kind of a shock, but it was still compelling, and I wanted more.

But then we progressed farther and started to see the first fantasy creatures: goblins. I found myself really excited by them because they were very different from everything I had experienced before. Not wolves or spiders or huge flying insects, but real monsters! They had some camps in a marsh with bonfires at night, and it was really exciting.

This made me realize that most games, like WoW, give you such a constant and intense stream of eye candy and fantasy visuals that it all becomes kind of bland after a while. You meet another boss that looks incredibly cool, but your reaction is, “Meh.”

LotRO has used contrast to build up the fantasy elements simply by using them sparingly. I can’t imagine my excitement when I see something like a Black Rider or a Dragon! This is a powerful technique, and it won’t cost you more money or time to implement (other than planning how to pull it off with aplomb).

Because my wife and I started in a “normal” area without these elements, seeing them within that “realism” made them feel that much more fantastic. I’ve seen these kinds of things in games so many times before. Yet, here I was all giddy about it this time because I hadn’t been hit over the head with it to the point of being numb. I hope the rest of the game does this and uses the fantasy elements sparingly throughout.

I think this is a valuable observation for game developers. We should work to heighten contrast for maximum effect whenever possible. Less is more.