This is me, holding/about to run off with the stand for the line of toys we recently developed a game to help promote…

This is our Emma, trying to find sound effects that don’t sound *too* much like sex noise…

And this is our Russ who is trying to remember the theme tune of a quiz show he’s developing a game for (but keeps getting it confused with the theme from Quantum Leap)

There’s a splendid no-prize for anyone who guesses all three projects correctly!

Team Cooper is a growing digital studio specialising in the development of games and other digital amusements for the web, mobile and beyond. We are predominantly a work-for-hire studio with a varied client base but also work on our own in-house productions.

As our workload continues to increase, we’re looking to hire an experienced Producer/Project Manager with a passion for digital media and games to join our expert team of developers and artists. You’ll be a (highly organized) people-person at the heart of our company, coordinating and communicating between our internal teams and the outside world to ensure the smooth running and delivery of our projects.

Your key role will be to manage the day-to-day functions of our tight-knit development team in order to deliver projects on time and maintain our impeccable standards. You’ll be combining your passion for all things digital with your planning, leadership and project management skills, often working on several projects at once. If you’re tech savvy with an appreciation of games and the web plus plenty of client-facing experience then we’d love to hear from you.

With strong regional relationships with Game Republic, Yorkshire’s indie scene (GA-MA-YO, SHINDIG) and based in the heart of Sheffield’s flourishing digital community, this is an opportunity to be a big player in a small but dynamic digital agency. This position will be crucial to the continued growth of Team Cooper and we expect your role to grow along with the company. So what are you waiting for?

Duties:

• Maintaining strong relationships with existing clients.
• Managing client expectations and approval of deliverables.
• Brainstorming ideas with the team to meet client needs.
• Wire-framing and assisting in planning project builds.
• Scheduling projects.
• Team management and supervision across projects.
• Working daily with the production team to ensure tasks are completed on time and on budget (and often to tight deadlines).
• Assisting with project pitching.
• Contracting external resources.
• Reporting back to management on project status.
• Responsible for all phases of project delivery, from conception through to completion.

Does this sound like you?

• Excellent interpersonal and communications skills.
• Good understanding of usability and user focused design.
• 3+ years experience as Producer/Project Manager in digital/interactive media industries.
• Self-starter and able to motivate others.
• Highly organised with obsession for detail.
• Able to provide concise, constructive and detailed feedback to colleagues.
• Strong general knowledge and understanding of games.
• Able to adopt existing tools and development processes.
• Multi-tasking problem solver.
• A lover of casual, mobile and/or social games.

Salary is negotiable dependant on experience – Ideally in range of £25k to £35k.

We offer semi-flexible working hours, a friendly team to work with and a nice modern working environment (We are based in the Electric Works building, part of the digital campus and Sheffield’s hub of digital media development) in a thriving region for digital and games development.

To apply, please email your CV and cover letter stating salary expectationsto Tim at:.

No agencies please!

We are unable to arrange international work visas.

  SHARK: “Hope nobody blows me up before I can reveal I’m an undercover agent for the coastguard!”

Even as a fan of LOST, saying ‘it’s not the destination, it’s the journey‘ always sounds like a cop-out when it comes to defending endings. But, on the other hand, when I finish an enjoyable session of trampolining, I don’t then look around expectantly for a shocking twist or tear-jerking epilogue to the experience. In the recent wake of upset Mass Effect 3 fans raising money to raise awareness of how ‘bad’ the ending to the trilogy is (no spoilers please!), it can be difficult to gauge what audiences expect, want and actually need from an ending to find it rewarding.

With our own Nurse Quest: Love Hurts (in which you play as hapless Geoff Jefferson trying to contrive the perfect injury to impress the Nurse of your dreams) we received a few comments on the [adult swim] site that a couple of players felt let down by the ending. Without wanting to spoil how Geoff’s quest resolves itself, it’s fair to say that Geoff’s creators (our Tim and Russ) subscribe more to the British sitcom of your Basil Fawlty-esque hero sowing the seeds of their own downfall rather than when the Adam Sandler-style schlub who messes everything up but somehow ‘wins’ back his disproportionately better-than-him better half (probably Salma Hayek) in the final act.

Granted my own bias might be obvious in that last sentence but, in delivering a punchline, the secret is always going to be in a.) The Set-Up – so how do we ensure that the player is complicit in seeding Geoff’s downfall rather than genuinely trying to impress that Nurse? b.) The Timing – If we’re building towards a funny finish, how can we keep the player on track so you don’t get bored before the punchline but also not see it coming?

Whenever a script doctor is called into ‘fix the end’ on a film, they’ll usually say the problem with the end is the beginning and the middle. When crafting a story for any medium, you should never have to ‘come up with’ an ending, it should be the organic result of what has gone before – even in a story with multiple possible endings. Anyone can all tell when an ending feels tacked on. And, as a majority of games finish with cut-scenes once the game-play is over, maybe that’s the problem – that we’re getting too much information after the fact.

Looking at films like Jaws, Alien or Die Hard, it’s a matter of mere seconds between the final action of shark-detonation/airlock-blasting/Alan Rickman-shoving before the credits start to roll. The action is over = The film is over. So why is game storytelling any more complex? Perhaps because the end actions of a game aren’t currently satisfying enough so creators feel a need to throw some mud at the wall aftwards. Defeating a final big boss will only ever be satisfying on a game-play level unless you instigate its narrative significance earlier on. All it takes for us to know that Jaws is finished is that final shot of the sea rolling onto a beach looking all lovely and inviting instead of full of potential peril. It’s the same with Portal, you spend an entire game (spoiler!) trying to escape Aperture Science laboratories and being told one thing about a cake, then the closing shot (in the game’s only cut-scene) is of a lovely sunny outside world before you then see the truth about the aforementioned confectionery item.   

Below is one of my favourite TED talks from 2007 by LOST‘s co-creator JJ Abrams (I warned you I was a fan). The whole talk is worth listening to, but in particular his section from ten minutes in discusses what films like Jaws and Die Hard are really about. In games (and, frankly, a lot of films) all the big beats like shark attacks and terrorist shootings are there – just not the little beats that make you care.

While the debate about whether stories belong in games at all rages on, I think there is an element to which audiences and game producers expect endings to magically either put everything into perspective or throw out some final shocking revelation that will subvert everything we know. But it’s very rare that one plot point can do this in isolation. The best endings – even the ones with big twists – are the ones that will have always felt inevitable.

So, if most games are about levelling up in some shape or form, how can we ensure our game stories escalate so that the final battle/cut-scene satisfies in the way that the blurb on the back of box made us buy it for? In the same way that movie car chases and fight scenes don’t work in isolation to character and theme, neither should game-play ever be separate from story.  No one went to see Aliens because of the maternal subtext – and yet they are exactly why the final uber-showdown between Ripley in her power-loader (protecting surrogate-daughter Newt) and the Alien Queen (avenging her recently flame-throwered offspring) is so damn cool. And once the battle’s done, so is the story.

So now that Bioware have announced that they’re going to release a new ending for the much maligned Mass Effect 3, it’ll be interesting to see if directly giving people what they want/think they want will actually please anyone either.

THE END.

(For Alternate Endings, perhaps read Gamasutra’s The Generational Shift in Interactive Storytelling and Edge’s Opinion: Your Play Brain And You )

We would like to meet the following peeps:

• Senior graphic designers with tons of experience delivering interactive projects for well known brands, preferably from an agency background.
• Project Managers/Producers with proven experience in delivering digital projects on time and on budget.
• Pixel artists with proven experience illustrating and animating pixel art graphics for games.
• Senior developers with a can-do attitude to new projects and experience with some of the following: PHP, MySQL/MSSQL, .NET, Flash, HTML5, ActionScript, JavaScript, C++, C#, Java, OpenGL, DirectX.
• Students looking for placement or post-graduate roles.

Don’t be shy, if you’re a contractor looking for a potential future client, or a full timer considering a change of scenery, come and say hello and tell us a little about yourself.

We just want to know who you are at this stage, portfolios and CVs would also be nice, but not essential if you just want to introduce yourself (discretion is assured for full timers).

Please contact us at jobs@teamcooper.co.uk.

It relates to our recent work at Team Cooper towers as we can glean some kind of learning from others’ experience and it justifies my ticket and a day’s beano off to London.

This interesting and relevant talk was delivered by Liz Henry and was called ‘Fake Lesbians All the Way Down’ didn’t sound the most immediately relevant, but very interesting anyway as Henry dove off into the murky world of fake internet lesbians. This traced the story of the ‘Gay Girl in Damascus’, a blogger who had apparently been taken by Syrian authorities, due to homosexuality being a crime there. Henry took up the cause of the girl, Amina Arraf, as the story was picked up by the major news agencies. Doubts soon surfaced as Henry looked more deeply into the blog posts and Amina’s previous online activity. The full tale of the investigation is too complex to properly cover here but it is a fascinating tale. It emerges that not only was Amina Arraf a fictional character created by a 40 year old man, but that many of the people who were in contact with her and promoted her were also fake lesbians, such as the one who ran a prominent web site, all apparently unaware of each other’s real identities. This all made me feel sorry for Amina’s apparently real girlfriend, who had only ever communicated with her online due to convenient blackouts and the like preventing phone conversation.

Thus far it all seems a fairly harmless, if quirky, piece of role-play. Until you look at the effects that it has. Henry displayed a book call ‘How to Suppress Women’s Writing’ by Joanna Russ, whose topic is self evident and can be extended to all kinds of minority representation. The man behind Amina, Tom MacMaster, claimed he was helping to give a voice to others in need –  his argument ran that in impersonating a persecuted woman in another country he was able to provide a voice for those who could not speak out. Yet in creating a fake voice he was helping to undermine and drown-out any real voices, he provided detractors with a whole slew of arguments that could be used to ignore and discredit any similar but truthful blog by casting doubt upon its authenticity.

The scale at which the fake story was transmitted around the media and then consumed by the public amplifies the damage. This happened due to the presentation of the fictional but ‘based on true events’ tale in which real life, which is messy, convoluted and often incoherent is simplified, streamlined and made to fit a dramatic arc or, in this case, suppositions woven into a story. This distorts reality, yet is more palatable for mass consumption despite the events it portrays no longer being true. In turn this version is easier to broadcast and becomes preferable to any other messy and ambiguous yet true tale, so becomes the perceived truth, leaving the real truth in the dark. What would have been the tale if Amina had been a real person yet has also spent her time exposing others to the authorities to look after herself? No longer a clear cut case, but full of the ambiguities that make life real.

The issue struck a chord with me with the work we’ve recently been doing with Safe@Last and the The Railway Children to create a game which tells the story of a young person navigating through life’s choices and temptations. This raises questions of accurate representations of real life in a dramatic fashion for people who actually live in that world. We certainly struggled to create a believable, if stylized world and the issue of fitting reality into a limited game frame is always an issue. The project is due to be released soon; I’d really like some feedback on how you think we did. It’s such a great opportunity to do work that can do good and it’s important to make sure it has the right effect.

It’s important because the effect of the Amina mis-representation was a silence on the internet, not on the issue of the fake blogger, but from anyone who might be in a similar (but real life) situation to Amina. The fake story made people distrust any true story, and any potential real-life bloggers didn’t want to publish anything because they couldn’t trust their online friends. Silence – denying any chance of a voice for the voiceless.

ME: Right. So maybe the player-character is striving because of their troubled relationship with their father–

M’ COLLEAGUES: John, it’s Pong. Let it go.

ME: Ugh. *throws quill down in disgust. flounces off stage left*

Hopefully the above scene isn’t too accurate but, having spent most of my working life in film, TV drama and theatre, it’s not surprising that story is my usual starting point – for describing anything really. That and the fact I’m human. For better or worse, stories are how we describe things to each other and we all have an innate understanding of beginnings, middles and ends. Everything else is just a matter of taste (and, occasionally, snobbery.)

This recent Gamasutra interview with David Jaffe on the Language of Interactivity is one of many recent articles forming a bit of a backlash against narrative in games. Jaffe highlights Sid Meier’s brilliant “a game as a series of interesting choices” quote to highlight what a game really is. I totally 100% agree. It’s just that it also perfectly defines narratives as well. No matter what obstacles or set-pieces are thrown into a protagonist’s path by bad guys/fates/studio execs, it’s the main character’s choices that create, shape and define a story. So what’s the difference?

For the record, I’m not really a fan of cut-scenes. Even when they’re done well, all they really are is a pause in gameplay. I don’t think a cut-scene of showing protagonist Chell looking all confused in the opening of Portal  could ever beat our own disorientation of just being dropped straight into the beginning of Valve’s puzzle masterpiece. Similarly, (SPOILER) the lack of definitive ending for Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption meant I was able to conclude the game’s story however I wanted. (For anyone interested, after all my vengeful murdering, I then went and completed all of the challenges that would unlock the Marshall’s outfit and, in my head, became a proper lawman in an effort to achieve the ambiguous ‘redemption’ of the title). Two powerful bits of storytelling, made all the more immersive by not spoon-feeding.

But, in thinking of games with stories, we instantly think of triple-A games that we play over a number of days as if reading a novel. So what about the ‘magazine article’ equivalents that we play every day in smaller chunks? In my opinion, Cut The Rope succeeds over Angry Birds as the latter needs a little movie to explain their war against the pigs. In Cut the Rope, we just need to get the cookie to the Om Nom because…well, who isn’t always hungry for cookies? Games like Diamond Dash on Facebook are exceptionally crafted examples of no story at all, just good game play. Or the upcoming IGF-nominated Gunpoint which conjures an awesome storyworld defined by its visual/audio aesthetic and how you stealthily interact through the (potentially infinite) levels.

With Portal, the story is ‘we want to escape’. With Cut The Rope, it’s simply ‘feed the hungry thing’. So when we say that games have too much story, I wonder if what is really meant is that games have too much BACKstory (or possibly if we just mean ‘too much talking’ – says he, waffling on). And that can be the trouble with some bigger games, the need to show you everything, to tell you and explain everything. As with movies, just because your graphics can genuinely create anything, doesn’t mean we need to see it. Similarly, unless I can play it, let me imagine it. The first thing anyone learns about narrative is that less is mostly more. Stories are not about complexity – the best ones rely on clarity.

And one thing that also seems clear is that in importing cinematic qualities to games, we also seem to have inherited a fair amount of cinematic snobbery. For years the nadir of storytelling in games seems to be in ‘creating a game that can make you cry’, when we’ve already made games that make us laugh or scared. At this time of year, the nature of the beast means that cinemas are filled with stories up for BAFTAs and Oscars. This in turn creates a predictable backlash against the Oscar-‘worthy’ films by proponents of more popcorn-driven movies which feels like an echo for the argument against narrative in games.

Isn’t there room for both?

I think so. Last week in games, indie-darling Dear Esther sold 16,000 in its first few hours of sale while the demo of Mass Effect 3 also shoved pre-sales through the roof. And there’s a good chance there were a few people out there who coughed up for both. I know what I like in games and movies so there are certain genres of both I’ll never grow tired of. But knowing I already like one sort of thing so much just makes me want to investigate what else a medium can do! My favourite game story personally is Silent Hill 2, but it’s not to say it doesn’t clunk in places. And that’s pretty much my point. No one has got narrative in games perfect. But then neither has anyone written the absolutely ‘perfect’ book, film or TV show that pleases absolutely everyone yet either.

So it’s frustrating to see David Jaffe saying things like “…if my only goal is to make people feel emotions and that’s what I really want — I want to make them feel sadness, or I want to make them think about man’s place in the universe. Think about that. If you’re really a f***ing artist. If you’re really a f***ing artist, and you’ve got something to say, then you f***ing pick the right medium to say it in.”

If the argument is that you shouldn’t try to do something because nobody else has done it yet, then maybe we should all just give up now. I like Bioshock, Fahrenheit, LA Noire, Heavy Rain and Alan Wake. None of them have got storytelling exactly ‘right’ yet but I love how they’ve all moved the idea in different directions but, ultimately, moved game narratives forwards. Storytelling techniques had to be re-invented when film and television each first emerged. Now it’s the same thing in making stories interactive and immersive. It’s easy to see how a game like Heavy Rain can be latched on to by journalists as an immediately dramatic and drastic turning point in games – but we all know that change is and will be a gradual process.

So when articles fervently tell me what games are, what games should be and where story can shove itself in relation to games, my response is that games, like any medium, should be something that evolves to match constantly evolving consumer tastes and opinions. Anything else is just stating opinion as fact or a sweeping generalisation. And you know what they say about people who make sweeping generalisations. They’re ALL idiots

The first challenge was deciding what kind of game to develop. We’re generally quite busy at Team Cooper HQ, so it seemed wise to focus on a fairly simple game design, and what could be simpler than Pong?

The game I have created is called p0ng and is a spiritual successor to the original Pong. It keeps the format of two paddles locked in an eternal struggle to bounce a ball backwards and forwards, but those of you familiar with Pong will notice some subtle (and not so subtle) differences.

Unlike Matt, I mainly used images to show graphics in my game, with the only dynamically drawn content being the score display. Using images in HTML5 was initially an interesting challenge as everything must be loaded in at runtime as opposed to Flash, where images can be compiled directly into the game’s SWF file. Other than that, the actual process of writing JavaScript code wasn’t too dissimilar to working with ActionScript 3 (this is no great surprise, considering both languages are forms of ECMAScript). This meant I could dive right into coding the game’s logic, although I had to do without many of the convenient libraries I often have at my disposal when working with Flash.

Usually when creating a Flash application I will write code using Powerflasher’s FDT, a powerful tool with many specific functions designed to make the process of writing ActionScript easier. I know Adobe Dreamweaver isn’t very popular with web developers these days, but I decided to give it a shot anyway to see what it could offer an aspiring HTML5 game developer. Dreamweaver did offer some useful error detection similar to what FDT offers, but lacks some of the most handy functions that we use in FDT every day.

To be fair to Dreamweaver, much of this is actually down to how JavaScript works compared to ActionScript 3, with the former being weakly typed and the latter being strictly typed. The advantage of a strictly typed language is that your coding tool can always tell what types of variables you’re working with and provide you with a whole host of information and shortcuts that make focusing on writing code much easier. With JavaScript, there is nothing like this which makes the code much more ambiguous with regards to its exact functionality. This makes it much more difficult for software to try and guess exactly what it is that you’re trying to accomplish with your code.

That said, p0ng didn’t take a great deal of time to produce and was a very good introduction to the world of HTML5 development. Obviously there are plenty of other things I’d like to put into the game if I had the time, but I don’t think any game developer worth his salt will ever claim any of his games are ever truly ‘finished’

I’m sure you’re itching to have a go at the game, though, so here you go (Make sure you click the game to enable keyboard interactions):

There’s been a lot in the media recently about HTML5′s uprising and its challenge for the throne of web-based gaming, so Team Cooper decided it was time to have a good look into it to determine if it was a viable option for the heavily interactive games and apps that we make.

As a consumer, the concept of HTML5 games is brilliant. Browsers are rushing to support all the new features, and new techniques and demos are being developed all the time. With no extra plug-ins or add-ons needed, it’s perfect for casual gaming on the fly. They’ll even (for the most part) work on mobiles!

As stated in Tim’s blog post back in November, Flash had been the go-to tool for creating rich interactive experiences for some time. HTML5 has been looking like it may change that, and from all the coverage it’s been getting, it’s clear to see that many people in the web community consider it a strong contender. As such, after our session in the meeting room, we went our separate ways to start playing about with what was on offer and to try and make something before the end of the day. Obviously with only a few hours left in the day we weren’t expecting miracles, but we all managed to get things moving around on our screens. Since then, I’ve been working on-and-off on my game, Shpace (You can play the game at the bottom of this post).

Shpace is a very simple shoot ‘em up, developed in a few days using solely the drawing functions provided by the HTML5 canvas element. As it was a test project for learning a new technology, there are certain things that could definitely be improved, so I will now provide a short run down of what I did and what I could do, given more time:

Controls

In its simplest terms, the game is just a set of functions that draw shapes at a specific position. The game checks for any of these shapes that might be colliding and carries out the required action depending on what they are. The player must navigate around the screen, avoiding the enemies and their bullets whilst shooting them for points. The controls I chose to use are the arrow keys and the ‘Z’ key to shoot. These seemed like a pretty universal method for controlling such a game, but a problem did arise in the form of having to cancel out any operations that might otherwise be performed by the arrow keys. Normally they scroll the page, but in this game, we really don’t want the scroll bar to jump up and down while trying to fend off a horde of angry red triangles. As the canvas element doesn’t have any way of knowing if it’s in focus, I had to use a click listener to check for focus myself.

Structuring the content

Laying out the page to work with the game was simple using CSS. There is an overall container to hold the game’s contents and within that there’s a separate container for the menu. JavaScript then takes care of what to show and what to hide at any given time. Finally, there is the canvas element which is what gets manipulated by the JavaScript to display everything. Learning and using JavaScript hasn’t been very difficult. It’s very similar to ActionScript as they both come from the same roots. The only issue I did have with using JavaScript was that, unless I wanted to have a huge list of script tags referencing all the different JavaScript files for each object in the game, it all had to be in one file. At first I found this very messy and quite annoying for scrolling up and down between areas that I was working on, but I soon got used to it and the web developer tools in Eclipse helped. In fact, it reminded me a lot of when I made a game in Python with PyGame – it forces you to lay out your file properly and comment vigilantly.

Future work

If I decided to work on Shpace in the future (which is quite possible) it would be good to add in a few more things. The game is quite bland at the moment, there are only two types of enemies and a distinct lack of any sort of ‘boss battle’. Creating some more varieties of enemy and giving them different behaviours would help to combat this, and wouldn’t take too much time. Adding in bosses may take a little longer, but really they’d just be a special type of enemy. There is also no sound as I haven’t really has time to experiment with the sound API. Another interesting addition, and one that again wouldn’t take very much time (I don’t think) would be high scores. I would also be intrigued to look into the possibility of WebSockets and a multiplayer co-operative mode. This is something that would definitely take some time however.

Mobile

Whilst developing the game I spent a bit of time messing about with getting it working on my phone and/or my iPod. I found a very good article and example on touch controls in JavaScript whilst searching for knowledge on the subject. After looking at that I managed to get touch controls working for the game on my iPod, albeit in a very unrefined manner. It worked okay, although as it was just a fleeting test, there were problems with scrolling and zooming not cancelling whilst trying to shoot the bad guys. This is something I’d love to look into more and get working in a friendly and accurate fashion so that the game could be played in a browser on a phone or iOS device. There are even tools like PhoneGap that enable you to package up HTML5 games and apps for deployment on the iOS app store and Android Marketplace, much like you can with Flash using Adobe AIR.

From my adventures in Shpace, I realised a few things. For a game like Shpace, HTML5 is definitely a strong and viable option. It’s simple, it’s easy to play and it doesn’t need a huge amount of code to make. As such, having the code laid out in one file isn’t a problem, and with the speed JavaScript executes at it runs pretty smoothly. That said, for a bigger game and a game with complex class hierarchies, I don’t think it’s the way to go yet. Something like Nurse Quest would just be a nightmare to get to grips with. I believe the battle between HTML5 and Flash will rage on for some time yet – Flash Player 11 has some great performance boosts and the introduction of Stage3D brings even more to the table. Whilst WebGL (Although not actually part of HTML5) can be used with it to create some stunning games and visual effects. I’m not sure there will ever be a clear winner between the two, but at the moment it really is just down to the project, your audience and what you want to do with it.

You can play the game below (Click the game to begin playing):

I’ve never experienced a Webinar before but I’m really impressed with the technology, there were only a few hitches that were effortlessly and quickly dealt with utilising freely available simple technologies like sharing a Google presentation. It enabled me to listen in to the sessions while still at work and, as Keri Lambden suggested, I could have been sat in my dressing gown if I liked – sadly the windows at TC towers are large and I’m not sure the innocent people of Sheffield (let alone my poor colleagues) are quite ready for that horror.

I really enjoyed Rebekah Lock’s talk about unblocking her creativity by setting herself a 365 challenge , to create a heart in whatever style or media everyday for a year. The great thing about her session was she set us the challenge to come up with our own heart, I gave myself a 20 minute time limit and came up with this. Which reminded me that at Flash On The Beach I’d promised myself to do more doing and making for myself, I’m now considering setting myself a daily creative challenge, but, I’ll get back to you about that.

I found Annette Priest’s session on mobile user experience invaluable. Taking recent apps made by Starbucks as an example of good and bad usability design. I found it interesting that the one they made for “fun” she considered to be an empty experience. I think this is a problem, finding a place for fun interactions that are not a whole game but have value as an added bonus for your audience. It’s not really wise to make something flippant intended as a few minutes of interaction as a downloadable app. The user has expectations linked in to downloading an app. It’s why frippery and fun is best handled in browser, and I would say this, by Flash.

The final panel discussion featured four highly accomplished, experienced and inspirational women who had to tackle some really big questions about being women working in technology. Well respected UI design expert Sarah Parmenter spoke about teaching herself how to code. Entrepreneurial power house Sarah McVittie spoke about her deep love for data. Julie Howell discussed her years in the industry and how she and her peers invented social networking by creating large forums where groups with similar interest and needs would discuss their issues. Jess Ratcliffe, founder of the awesome site GaBOOM, talked about having an idea at 15 and setting up a business at 19.

I think the main thing that I got from the conference was that, despite being a minority, women are a thriving vital part of the web community. We really enjoy the work and we bring a specific point of view to the market. We feel a little sad that there aren’t more of us but an event like Emerge gave us an opportunity to be more than the 12% in the room, even if it did mean there was a queue for the loos.

Admittedly, this conversation started because I got LA Noire for Christmas. Ensuing conversations revealed that Team Captain Tim had not really enjoyed scrutinising every inch of LA for clues, far preferring to battle the bad guys face to face – whereas I loved the more procedural, deliberately-paced investigation parts of the game only to instantly be obliterated whenever facing an actual gangster with a gun. (Every. Single. Time) As well as realising that we had strong potential for a mismatched buddy-cop movie, it was obvious that perhaps we were playing the game with different wants. A diverse, detailed and dramatic game – was its only mistake in thinking that it could please everyone? Or was our mistake in thinking all of LA was meant for us?

Whatever methodology you use, it seems undeniable that different games appeal to different sorts of gamers. The Bartle Test breaks us down into Achievers, Explorers, Killers and Socialisers (mostly in terms of World of Warcraft-style game play but can be expanded to general gaming) while Jon Radoff has charted the different things that motivate players across most games.

Is it ‘easier’ (or less risky at any rate) to target specific niche audiences with casual games? Maybe. But I also suspect a clear or ‘simpler’ idea also be used to appeal to all our different gamer motivations.

While anticipating the launch of our own Nurse Quest game on the [adult swim] site last December, one by one, we were all drawn into the strange world of Robot Unicorn Attack featured on the same site. A very simple game in some respects but maybe deceptively so as it seems to lend itself to all the quadrants of Radoff’s game motivation ideas.

It’s Immersive, hypnotically drawing you in with its colours and *that* soundtrack. While not so much a game of Co-operation it is certainly a social experience; a talking point – something you want to tell people about (good thing) but then ultimately can’t fully explain so you tell people to just play it themselves (even better thing).

As an endless runner  it’s also a game of Achievement and Competition, attacking all of the stars is a goal and simply keeping going as long as possible can be competitive in terms of personal bests and addictiveness – as is the notion of giving you three lives, allowing you to compare scores with yourself for each go and perhaps drawing you in for more plays than you would on the average flash game.

To an extent, it’s just a game with some (clever) gimmicks…but one that has racked up two sequels, 686,000 likes on Facebook and over 41 million plays to date. We can be loyal to game genres, game brands and our own gaming habits, but how far should developers strive to create games that please everyone? Is it better to have separate puzzle and racing games than one game which has levels of each? Or is the ‘variety pack’ approach just what we have come to accept from modern games – mostly enjoyable, but always one flavour left at the end that someone isn’t that keen on.