Actually it was yesterday, read about it on Google+ and already posted on Facebook about some of this.

Download Flash 11 here.

Check out Alternative Demos here.

But news that struck me most were this. Epic Games is ready to release support of Unreal Engine 3 for Flash platform. And they showed Unreal Tournament 3  working in Flash at Adobe Max 2011. Ouh boy what a year it will be for browser games. Unity shared a sneak peak recently too, and now Unreal Engine.

Flash is well posed to become a console of the web but I have hard time figuring out how it all will play out. We still have Flash agnostic iOS, not all devices will work well with this, we still have traffic bottlenecks. Years back it was considered useless publishing a game ove 10Mb in size. Today? May be over 60mb is useless? We will see but considering that modern games rarely take less then a gigabyte of space and some up to a dozen of gigabytes, it will be interesting to see how developers work around this

P.S Also turns out there already is a game using Flash 11 on Facebook. Its actually a re-release of older game developed on Java called Battle Punks.

Little bit more then a week ago I left my job at innoWate . Here wanted to share a little summary on what I did during my time there.

I worked there since November of 2009. By ProcrastiTracker stats I was collecting since April 2010 I spent 2040 hours behind the computer out of which 800 were spent in Firefox, 500 in Flash builder and 250 in SkyPe. Interesting to keep track of such stuff, sometimes shows unexpected things.

What I did there

innoWate is Latvian firm that develops social games. Mostly they are targeted at Russian social networks but there are some ports to other international(Facebook), western and Asian networks as well.

During my time there are I worked on 3 projects and here they are:

Awatars

It was my first project at innoWate. It was planed as series of games starting from avatar creator + various social stuff like giving gifts, poking and interacting with friend avatars in all kind of ways. Then games like gorodki and bowling should have followed. And they did till beta stage. Little bit later project was put on hold both because of technological issues and not much promise in what was coming out. I was transferred to more “promising” project.

My responsibilities in this project were pretty wide and I liked that. Programming UI, working on serverside scripts and protocol, game features/mechanics programming, integrating to social networks and developing related features. Design and engine behind 3D stuff were made by another guy who was doing similar stuff for XBox games before.

Sushi world

And here is second project I was involved in, a lot more people were working on it at once which brought lot more problems with sub version control and related stuff. Basically it was a restaurant type social game. You play as sushi restaurant owner, set up the place, hire and equip workers etc. Had some mini games like raising a turkey or simple fishing, various special events and quests and lot of other stuff.

Here my responsibilities shrunk a little. Was working on UI and client side game features, client side bug tracking system, social network features and integration and often was responsible for game client update process aka keeping track of features and content that are going to live version etc.

My Country

Then last January I was switched to another team with “promising” project that was in development for some time already. This time it was a new city building game, something innoWate done well before with SuperCity almost a year before. This time it was planed as a bigger, better looking and more complex city building game. Well I must say it is very pretty Eats too much of resource too though.

My responsibility were social network features and integrations with related UI work. A more narrow field again. Mostly because by that time I had most experience with that stuff on client side while there were plenty client developers to fill other needs of the project(3 beside me).

Hassles of social developer

In the end I must say that working as social games developer is pretty crazy job. Firstly you are working with many technologies and platforms all of which have issues and may break something at some point:

• Currently games with complex graphics  are mostly made in Flash so its you client technology
• You also use JavaScript/HTML to integrate with social networks and communication with Flash is a point of failure
• You are working with many social networks and social APIs that are different,  buggy and have conflicts with browsers and other technologies you use sometimes
• There is also your server side which is point of failure too, admin mistakes, spike in traffic, bug in software etc
• And there are browsers

All those technologies and platforms together make it very hard to predict where problem is when you find it. Is it client, your server, browser bug or social network issue or may be even something on your players side you can not reproduce from your side?

Then there are issues of social network APIs polish. Currently most firms make ports of their games to many social networks to maximize audience and profits. Segment is hot, things change rapidly and over this 1.5 of year Facebook was making significant changes to their API and policies scrapping old API altogether and introducing completely new and and different while changing how things work overall. And other networks are no different. Thus old ways games worked sometimes break or start to violate policies, or just become pointless. There are even some ridiculous cases when with all that hurry to do something new known bugs in APIs are not fixed for months. And after that they are not fixed because games already built on top of them and would break if they fix them… And no imagine if your game needs to work well on 4+ social networks and use their API feature to the max to attract and retain players. One hell of juggling.

Then there is testing. To have products with rare bugs means to invest in to testing. But how can you test something if pretty big part of those games are dependent on social networks, communication between users, use of various social network features. With some networks its a nightmare. You can’t use many features unless you game is approved but how can it be approved if many features are not testable by developers… In other networks there are pretty good testing environments. But joke is that when game is released from test environment it turns out that real world environment differs and things that worked in test state do not work after release. And its actually a moment when your game gets in to “new” category and thousands of people are coming to see a buggy release and leave a bad review. Feels bad unless you do not care about, and if you do not care about it then its probably even worse if you know what I mean

Then there is things just specific to life of social game projects. Firstly they are released as not well tested, polished and balanced games and your users are used as testers. And that’s fine by me. Its not some AAA two years 100 million in budget project, its 1-3 months small team and small budgets project so that’s how they are developed. But then other stage of project life comes, iterative polishing and adding of new features, levels and other content. Thing is that you most keep people entertained so that they return to your game. So you need to prepare content and events for various celebrations and when there is none still think of something new each week. So new game releases come regularly with deadlines(what’s point of releasing new year content if new year already passed). I remember being at work for 12 hours sometimes before such important releases. Why the hassle? Well its competition with other games that will make interesting stuff on those events and thus will get players back. I guess TV channels have similar hassle, just not as regularly especially considering that same team is not preparing for whole world important events. There are months when each 1-2 weeks is important event somewhere.

Now what it all means from development point? That we are always late, that we are trying to cut corners, that its all a mess. Building on and around bad decisions that come to bite us later etc. In the end bad development process that goes against many things I believe about software development and also not knowing how to fix that all. Feeling powerless and as if this it is impossible to succeed in that environment. Though I do think that it is possible, just not like that, and sadly I do not know how. Anyways in the end it all is aether a turtore or you stop caring with in my book means stopping doing your job well.

Leaving and what’s next

So, since December I was thinking about leaving and kind of summarizing it all for myself. Little bit later as I mentioned above I was switched to My Country project and decided to leave it be for some time and see how things will go. Well they went the same so here we are.

Currently I am in self payed vocation for few months during which I do plan to start spending something like a half time(4 hours a day, 5 days a week) curing my “don’t care” attitude towards programming, games and web. There are bunch of things I want to learn and try and I can allow myself to do it now. As for other free time, vocation, friends, work unrelated courses. May be travel a little.

In the end I was not very active here for last months(though I did play with stuff a little at wonderfl.net) and am planing to slowly get back

For a little bit more then a year I work at company that makes games for social networks. Before that I never worked with social networks APIs or developed games(except for LudumDare game in 48 hours). Wanted but never did. My main appeal in going for that job was experience and possibility to learn something about this new market and how things work out there. After a year here I want to summarize some thoughts on “social” games.

Bear in mind that I am in no way a game developer, just a programmer with interests in interactive media and games. I consider myself an average gamer usually spending at least few hours per week playing something(but usually more, when I have good games then half an hour a day, more on weekends) I started to play somewhere in 90′s on Sega consoles and later switched to PC. So I have a rich experiences in playing PC games and casual browser games(or so I believe) and also have my “purist” views in what games and play represent for living things(not only humans) and our culture. Also I am male which adjusts my tastes too. All that probably makes my views on current popular games kind of biased and is just my opinions.

There will be few posts. In this one I will speak about social part of “social” games.

Social? Are they social?

So why social? From what I can see all “social” games usually include:

• Friend list, usually real friends
• Sometimes relationships between friends like being neighbors
• Gifts and other activities to help each other with game
• Means of messaging between friends in various ways(status posts, notifications, messages, emails, etc)
• Sometimes leaderboards

Usually that’s all. Now that’s usual thing when you look on games in social networks. But what bothers me with this list is that in no way it really distinguishes social games from multiplayer games that existed before. Lets take other big multiplayer game. For example let’s take WoW:

• You have friends
• You can communicate with them in various ways
• You can trade with them, give gifts etc
• You can get in to guilds and parties as special relationships that have attached game mechanics to them
• There are various leaderboards

So, does it make WoW a social game in a sense in which Facebook games are called social. Well, not really. What then distinguishes Facebook games from WoW? Here are some more features that are inherent to social games but do not make clear cut aether:

• Those are games that are embedded in to social networks ,but there are ports of social games to mobile, are they the same then?
• Use in game purchases,but many other games start to use them too including WoW or Battlefield Heroes
• Core mechanics of social games seem simple, shallow and casual, but they also may demand much time from players and there are both casual and hardcore players playing them(spending a lot of time and effort)
• Social games are in constant refreshing cycle with new content added repeatedly, but same goes for WoW and Angry Birds

So they don’t make any real distinction aether. And as we go forward social games will evolve coming closer to desktop and console games in some aspects while desktop and console games will be taking some features from social games too. So things will be becoming even more blurry. But I think there are some aspects that do define and distinguish social games from desktop games:

• Social games are designed as freemium games with in game purchases
• As such their main aim is to get as big number of users as possible and keep them playing
• So they are designed in a way that forces you to invite friends in to the game one way or another(bonuses, easier to play, some things can be done only together)
• In same time they aim to make friends call each other to return to the game in various ways
• To make game spread as much as possible those games are designed to be as attractive and as positive as possible
• That leads to positive game themes and simple and familiar game mechanics that allow users to enter the game and start playing as fast as possible

Conclusions

Many things may sound good in that list but sadly they are not(at least for me). “Social” games are not really that social at the moment in comparison to many other games. For me they even seem to be less social then other games but more about that in next post.

Just bought one Humble Indie Bundle 2 for my self. And two as gifts for later. I already have Cortext Command but I always wanted to buy/play Osmos and Braid but never was getting my self to but them. Thus Humble Indie Bundle was a hard offer to resist Revenge of the Titans seems good addition too

Open game development

Things that Wolfire do interest me a lot. I was thinking for a while(few years) about how AAA games industry and often indies prefer to stay at a distance from their clients. For AAA industry it often feels as if you are facing a faceless giant that does not see, care or bother with you. For that reason I slowly start to pay them with same disrespect. They may make good games but it feels like some large soulless machine spiting out stuff for consumption… Something that makes me feel bad about the purchase.

For few years I was thinking about various ways and business models that would make game development closer to the people where customers know what’s behind the scene, can influence, interact and engage with development and developers while supporting them in various ways be it testing, ideas sharing and crowd funding.

And Wolfire with their Overgrowth are trying to do just that. Good to see such developments. Humble indie bundle initiatives Wolfire made are interesting in same sense though probably not exactly what I want. But still good.

Interesting features of HIB

Here are things I find to be brilliant about Humble indie bundle:

• Allowing people to choose their own price is a jewel here but it is hard to foresee all the cases where developers loose or earn money with such an offer, but it definitely is a buzz generating part of this
• EFF and Child’s play charity are part of this, but even more important that project allows users to choose what proportions of payment go to what. This I think brings more meaning in to the purchase by making users to make a choice. Now it is not meter of pure consumption. As with amount of price here user makes a choice about who he is and what he wants in various dimensions. I think it engages user more with action of purchase making him more aware of what goes where.
• Stats of average price given by OS platform. It is interesting in many ways. For example you can see that Linux users pay twice as much then Windows users and Max is in a middle. And you can see proportion of platforms. That actually shows that Windows market is bigger in numbers but almost equal in money to Linux here Interesting observation considering AAA companies prefer to say “There is no money to be had on Linux market”, yeah right… If you do not try then yeah there is not money to be had. Another interesting thing about this is that it provides a base point and forces user to answer a question of who he is. Are you cheap? Are you generous? Are you average and just like majority of people?
• Then there is top 10 contributors top. This one partially works like a previous adding moral and competitive motivation for users to pay more but this time I see what I hoped to see with first HIB. Advertisers. At the moment 3 out of 10 top payers are advertising something paying the project together something like 2k$. Not not that much I guess but I think there is promise in that idea.
• Also majority of games are selling for a while. Hype already ended for them. As I mentioned I was thinking but not bringing myself to buy some of those and basically my money was money they would not get otherwise.
• They picked a right time to do this in combo with gift option. As I mentioned I bought few copies as gifts as well.
• There is number of less significant things, no DRM, probably a world wide release, digital download being available for a while etc

There are of course some things that bother me a little:

• Bundle version bothers me a little, last time I had 50%+ of games, that was alienating me to not participate or motivate to lower a price as I payed one already for some of them. And low price because of that may lower average price stats and in this way influence others choice as well. I guess you could tackle this with trying to sell new games like that or adding ability to say which games you want and which you do not even though you still get all of them.
• This offer is 7 days long… This bothers me because as usual with such stuff people would manipulate it. Buy like 100 and resell later for bigger price when it will not be sold anymore. Of course such exploit is little bit effected by “pay what you want” and “no DRM” parts of this but still it holds.

Conclusion

HIB and Wolfire explore things that I am very interested in and my respect to them for this. All that is very interesting on many levels and could be a start of many interesting game development business models I wish will succeed. Bringing all models together is what is right and what HIB tries to do may be not in very refined way so far. Motivation, morals, engagement of buyer. Social media. Charity. Advertisement place for big contributors/sponsors. All it together in as easy to buy form as possible. Right way to go don’t you think?

Introduction

(Warning, this post is LARGE)

With raise of large audiences in social games and trend of micro transactions and “in game purchase” a lot of big and small companies started to makes Flash games. This results in heated competition to deliver next game that stands out in various ways. In AAA games (sadly to be honest) one of the edges to stand out was and is graphics. Probably because of spend effort and gained attention ratio and that after seeing good graphics old starts to itch the eye. Now with this competition for hundredths of millions of players market same starts to happen in a browser with Flash being the most popular technology at use at the moment. This leads to Flash rendering being pushed to the limit and wondering in to uncharted combination of rendering techniques and various pitfalls they bring.

Recently some discussion rose around using Flash display list vs using custom based rendering based on BitmapData. One of such conversations was risen by SocialCity developer discussing what kind of compromises they did making SocialCity. And such compromise is pretty common among various desktop developers coming to Flash as that’s very similar to what they were doing there I  guess. Anyways that article got attention of a Flash developer who was making games using Flash for a while before that market heat up that much. So he made number of his own tests and comparisons on how good Flash display list is vs BitmapData blitting.

Flash Display List vs BitmapData

Compromise here is of course obvious, lets summarize a little:

Flash display list:

Pros:

• Powerful decomposition of objects that many 3D developers would be familiar with where objects have child’s and internal coordinate space effected by transformation matrices by which content of object is effected. In other words heavy but expressive hierarchical structure.
• There are various filters and effects you can apply easily and dynamically
• You get powerful animation engine out of the box
• It is native to Flash so uses some low level optimizations you can’t really achieve yourself(more on redraw regions later)
• Designers can make complex objects which programmers then can manipulate, very good for complex, colorful and animated UIs (well it is not easy often to separate design and programming that way and Adobe tries to solve this with Catalyst which I do not like but that’s for other article)
• Interactivity is built in

Cons:

• It is a black box, there are various stuff under the surface you can not effect, control etc. There are bugs or inconsistencies too.
• All that dynamic power of expressiveness costs you in performance. Sometimes a lot.

BitmapData:

Pros:

• It is fast. Sometimes very fast in comparison to Display list. Check Iain comparisons. For me it is something like 2x difference on average in favor of BitmapData even  when you do everything right for Display List
• You get your custom bitmap caching
• You build your own pipe line which you know how to use right, no rocks under the surface unless you put some yourself,and we all do sometimes I guess

Cons:

• After using Display List it feels as if after flying your wings are cut out and you are given a shovel to dig the dirt… You loose animations and need to make them yourself, doing transforms becomes harder, adding effects too.
• If you make your own animations only efficient way to do them is to precache them which costs in memory, sometimes a lot(though they are faster then native ones as a result). And making a hybrid system may be hard and make your engine work with hiccups when some animations are cached again and some are removed from memory.
• You loose ability to control Flash redraw areas well(more on that later again)
• Making complex interfaces based on this is horrible, hard to animate, programmer does all composition by code, lot of work(on other side sometimes using designers not well made UI structure is lot of work too)
• You loose all interactivity and need to build it your self from scratch which sometimes is hard or possibly even impossible

I guess there is more but I mentioned the main ones, I guess. And for sake of this article this is enough.

Conclusions

As you can see pros of one are often cons of the other. There is no clear “one fits all” here. One are strong for one thing and other for other so it highly depends on a kind of game you make and what kind of compromises you like.

Facebook games and redraw area

There are two games I would like to investigate in terms of what they use and how. Of course I can not know that but I can investigate and speculate. Those games are SocialCity I mentioned before and CityVille.

So here are game screen shots made in Debug Player with Show Redraw Regions turned on. What that means is that debug player draws red rectangles around areas it redraws on each frame.

To the left we see CityVille while to the right we see SocialCity.

From article I mentioned above we know that SocialCity to the right uses BitmapData approach. And we can see it at picture as well. We see that at bottom UI some parts of it are redrawn occasionally while whole main top part is redrawn each frame completely including UI that is above it even though it is not necessary.

Now take a look to the left at CityVille. You can see various red areas all over the screen especially around moving cloud and few characters while other things are not redrawn. This is what I was speaking about mentioning as a pro of a display list and con of a BitmapData. Flash as part of optimizations makes a very good job at figuring at each frame what changes, what areas should be redrawn and what should not without programmer even bothering to think about it(well not true but almost). Anyways all that leads me to conclusion that CityVille is using Flash display list as a “better” approach.

Lets see how they compare in terms of CPU and memory use by loading them in chrome(exiting the browser to be fair between them):

• CityVille 120-130Mb and 22-38% of CPU use.
• Social City 220-240Mb and 15-25% of CPU use.

Of course it is kind of wrong to compare them like that, they have different engines, different count of animated and not animated objects on screen and outside of screen but still results I guess are what you would expect.

Hybrid approach

As we see both approaches are compromises based on what your staff can do best, how fast you need to do things, how much graphics you want to push to the screen. But picking only one or another is only options? At work we currently are exploring that question by trying a hybrid approach that is a compromise on itself. We use a BitmapData based rendering pipeline for our main game graphics where we render a lot of stuff to the screen and we use vector display list based UI above it and it brings some new problems to the table.

This approach is closer to SocialCity and problems it has. We redraw whole game rendering are each frame and this causes to unnecessarily redraw complex UIs above it which costs a lot sometimes. Returning back to Flash redraw area thing. Flash display lists handles this efficiently and automatically but what about BitmapData? BitmapData has an lock/unlock methods that allow to control redraw areas a little. If BitmapData is locked it is not redrawn unless something else above or below it causes that. Then unlock without provided change rectangle redraws whole BitmapData. And providing change rectangle causes only that rectangle to be redrawn. And that’s it.

To test all those compromises with I made following experiment (shows redraw regions in Debug Player automatically). Also frame rate is set to 98 to completely overload Flash/CPU and see how much difference things really make, click on image to see it but read below stuff first I guess:

Lets first stop on things we have here:

1. At the back we have a full stage Bitmap that is copying pixels from 4 prerendered BitmapData objects each frame.
2. Then we have vector MovieClip window that that has Bevel and Drop shadow filters applied.
3. In it we have a TextField with text.
4. And finally probably the heaviest things are 12 copies of vectorized Flash logo animated trough frames classic tween.

Now number of switches I added to right click menu(bad idea as it will not work on phones but I am lazy already ):

1. First menu item is cacheAsBitmap, it turns it off or on for window with its content.
2. Lock bmd locks or unlocks BitmapData and stops pixel copying from cached BitmapData’s
3. Remove objects removes or adds window from/to display list along with all stuff inside it
4. Stop animations stops or starts Flash logo animations
5. And last one is break bitmaps, it brakes background bitmap data on to 8 smaller bitmaps around the window in hopes that Flash would not rerender it anymore

All those switches and objects are there to test various elements and their effects on frame rate in such hybrid model. I had high hopes on 5 switch so that by breaking larger rendering are on to smaller peaces and blitting in to them from original large area would allow me to trick Flash in to not rerendering the Window. Sadly it is not so. Anyways lets explore effect of various switch combination’s on frame rate:

1. With window removed and bitmap locked, animations turned off I have 62FPS shown in Chrome, I guess we could call it a best I can get right now(I guess that FPS counter itself slows things down from target 98 frames per second, locally though it works at 100FPS in that case)
2. Adding window back does not change much, it still is something like 61-62FPS, animations of logos and bitmap are still off
3. Turning on animations in window drops it to ~45FPS showing redraw regions around them
4. Turning cacheAsBitmap for window at that moment does not change much
5. Turning off cacheAsBitmap and unlocking bitmap drops things even more to 29-30FPS
6. Breaking bitmap on to 8 smaller ones does not change much, though I think it gets slower as it is now constantly at 29 FPS
7. Stopping animations now brings us back to ~42FPS
8. Turning on cacheAsBitmap brings us to ~62FPS
9. removing window leaves us at ~62FPS

Conclusions:

• It seems that for not animated objects chacheAsBitmap helps a lot but still this seems to be not consistent. For animated objects it can help to but here it becomes rare and things can get even worse. In this experiment it seems to not change much, also it does not seem to effect memory in any way which is interesting, in two games we currently make in one game this makes things better, in other makes them worse…
• Heavy animated objects are a disaster currently
• Having something that causes redraw under heavy vector object is a disaster
• Having complex vector animations costs a lot

It is interesting to notice 2,8,9 work at nearly perfect FPS, while difference between 3 and 5 is 15 frames. So redrawing whole screen with bitmap is perfect. Having animated window without whole screen redraw is slow but adding whole screen redraw makes things another 15 frames slower. Seems to me that there is possible 15 frames optimization here where even though staff under screen is is redrawn we could force Flash not to redraw that part of the screen unless necessary. I suspect that it is possible to have 5 working at almost the same frame rate as 3 if we could do that, that’s what I wanted to achieve with  breaking bitmap but it did not work. Flash seems to analyze redraw rectangles and merge close standing ones in to single one as it probably optimizes things on average but in this case it causes whole screen to be redrawn.

Anyways few days ago before I complete this experiment I filled a feature request at Adobe JIRA about changing BimtapData unlock parameters from single change rect to vector of change rects. This way we could optimize how we redraw stuff. Sadly now after this experiment it seems to me that it would not be enough. What we really need is not BitmapData change rects but ability to manipulate Flash Player change rects to optimize its performance manually in such extreme cases. So I am thinking to fill such feature request too but I was too quick with first one and filled it without much of thinking. Will take it slowly this time. Still if you like first request go on and vote/watch it while I am thinking on adding this second one.

So here is small addition to my previous post/summary on Molehill 3D

So here is one more session on Molehill 3D from Away3D and Alternativa3D representatives. Second part from Alternativa is not that interesting after Away3D + Alternativa stuff was mostly showed already in other videos and you will not see much new.

Some summary of things Away3D mentioned that I find to be interesting:

• 4 million of triangles with shaders applied runing at 50-60FPS, ouh boy… I just can’t wait
• There are vertex shaders that allow offload animation calculation to GPU which means that animations of very large models is probably possible, if you read my previous summary on Molehill 3D that is big concert and possible bottleneck(things not possible to do on GPU and too slow in AS3, for example physics too)
• Away3D too will try to leave current Away3D structure as intact as possible so you could effortlessly port current projects to Molehill 3D without noticing. At least in theory. But there will be a lot of new stuff added

So I am watching Adobe Max 2010 Monday session live. And writing this live so it may be emotional at some parts So here goes my notes on it.

Initially I was watching simple stream. Great quality and worked pretty good. Also I noticed a P2P version of stream demo  below. After a small hiccup I decided to try it and it worked pretty well. 33 neighbors and 500k upstream and down stream More on this later.

So first thing they talk about devices. Not much to tell there.

Then HTML time came, they did show that with their new Dreamweaver they are eating big pie of what Flash was used for these years. Beautiful sites with transitions. Probably still not enough to do something like that using HTML but its getting there. But that we knew for a while and could even do with JS. What HTML/JS really lacks is good code editor and good WYSIWYG editor. Years back when I was checking Dreamweaver and Flash I knew right away which IDE I like more. Now if such IDEs as they promise were available then my choice would have been a lot harder, I presume I would have chosen Flash still as it is still not enough. But in few years we may have right technology and right IDEs for pure HTML. Especially looking forward to WebGL.

Then lot of talks about E-Magazines, not much I found interesting there. Cool yeah, something I find interesting, probably not. Have no interest in papers and magazines anymore even in such media rich formats. Now my information consumptions are something like checking hundreds articles from one RSS feed aggregation shallowly and then dig/search/read only some of them often searching for alternative info on them. So no meter how spectacular they are, still what I need.

But there is one thing interesting about this section. All those E-Magazines are shown on something like 10 tablets, from small Android(7” I guess) tablets to iPad and something that is even bigger (Seems to be Android, firm or device name seems to be Matata, have no idea what that is, may be you do?). Anyways they show same E-Magazines re-flowed on all those tablets including iPad which is a dream. Build once and deploy everywhere. Impressive. I wonder how it will work out in real workflow, preparing sites, magazines and apps for different screen sizes is a big part of interface designers work. This has big potential of making it all more effective.

And now they talk about Flash, more precisely about video. How Flash enabled Youtube and Hulu and how it now brings in same to the big range of devices like Android TV. I am not sure how they did it but they were showing a full HD streaming looking flawlessly on a very big screen. I guess they just have good internet

And they released Air for TV Years back I never suspected that I will be able to develop for TVs… I wonder if I will though. Interesting how big market for smart TVs will be. But I guess it is not so important as simple flash content I will work one will work there out of the box (well almost I guess).

Next thing was about video streaming formats including P2P streaming I mentioned above.

Next Adobe tools ruining on tablets. Photoshop being example. Content aware fill and cool looking color mixer. Even more interesting is that color mixer was somehow connected to a PC on which mixed colors were used in real time. Seamless connectivity witlessly of devices… Not sure the type of use I would like but still cool. Multiplayer over the air games on mobile devices anyone?

Now enterprise. Hmm… Not promising? Well demo Day Software shows is impressive. Never seen site/CMS of that level , WYSIWYG editing, localization, mutliscreen testing across devices in one CMS. I guess demo of such CMS would make a lot of “WANT” effect for various site owners. I did not understood though if this is some Adobe or Day Software developed CMS.

Health care? Now that’s something I was not expecting. Some medical images viewer. Adobe and a medical application. Little bit strange combo Guess some people will like it.

Heh Blackberry PlayBook Tablet announced on Adobe Max stage showing Air running on it… Whaaa? What a cross promotion lol I guess Blackberry wins more with it getting Flash/Air developers there from the start then Adobe showing Air is available there too(including iPad and range of Adnroid devices). And Blackberry CEO shows that is indeed bigger piar for Blackberry by promising a free Playbook for Air app developers… Hmm… That’s generous or is there some kind of promotion trick?

Wow and now games time So they show some 3d/2d fighting game showing that it works across the devices using keyboard on PC, and touch interface on android phone probably with dumbed down graphics.  Hmm I wonder how much challenge it will be to have games that work on range of screens with range of input methods. Even AAA game ports from console to PC usually are pretty bad. Probably they are not developed to run on different systems from the start though.

Also they mention hardware acceleration mode that make some types of graphic running smoother. Not that impressive or new…

Hmm and now some worshiping social game for Facebook. Look pretty good actually. Remind me of Populous. Lighting, vulcanos, and lol ability to make your friends worshipers(mudlings?) to worship you Looks very fun And it is in a private beta… Idle Worship was it named? Not sure. Will need to keep and eye for it.

Wow 8) Game controllers integration with Flash!!! they demoed X-Box controller controling Flash game I guess many will really really like that. Not me (prefere mouse/keyboard combo) but good to have that option.

Omg omg omg… AT LAST!!!!!! HELL YEAAAAH!!! 3D racing game in Flash in fullscreen with 0% CPU used!!!! How? Hardware 3D at last!!! I was waiting for this for years Ahaha and he is playing it on a steering wheel joystick You can’t imagine how I feel here right now, I was waiting for hardware 3D in Flash for last 2 -3 years Actually bytearray.org already has a video online that tells about that project Ouh and it seems Alternativa guys build that demo on top of new APIs 8) I can’t wait

Hah and for the desert every Adobe Max 2010 attendee got Droid 2 phone May be I should have spent those 3$k to visit it, first session looked AWASOME

Well it seems all small sessions will be available at Adobe TV, some great sessions there so I will have some fun and useful watching later on

Well for many I guess this is an old news as such event is hard to miss. If not then in short:
Pay what you like and get 5 great indie games. Money is split between childs play charity, EFF and developers according to your ratios. Here is video and here is site:

Games

From those 5 games I played 3(demos or full).  Gish, Aquarium and World of Goo. They all are great games and examples of indie creativity. I seriously recommend you playing them and with this action it may be a good chance to get your hands on them

Gish is a physical platformer that is pretty fun to play. World of Goo is physical puzzle/construction game but this short explanation does not honor it, it is more then that. And finally Aquaria. Very beautiful game may be not with best scenario but with interesting one, also game mechanics are fun. Those three are a must!!! Seriously

As for me I think I would try to find some time trying Lugaru HD as I haven’t played it yet.

More interesting stuff about it

Wolfire are providing stats for this event. You can see top of contributors, average amount payed, whole sum gathered and how many payed. At the moment they are closing on to 600K$ with average price of 8$.

Also they posted number of blog posts and I guess more coming up about stats they collected and some other stats and conclusions. Interesting info.

Well read this and then this today… Good food for thoughts. And here I decided share my two cents.

Why it is hard to compete with Zynga?

Well firstly we do know that Zynga can skyrocket new games to the top of niche quickly. Then they are strong in number and they are expending not only in numbers but culturally too. So they have money, work force, people with different cultural views and large user base that allows them to make new products popular fast.

Those two articles above suggested 2 ways of competing with Zynga. One by making  a game that would be very hard to clone. Well on the surface it seems that Zynga can clone anything fast enough right now to get to the top before competitors no metter how late they start. Or does it? I actually thing that innovation can throw things of balance in even most stable markets.

And in other article it was suggested to pick some small niches where Zynga will not want to go. But that’s not really a competition. It’s rather and evasion of competition and does make sense. Especially for independent developers. So not a competing but a good way to work.

But reading it and thinking about it I come up with the way I would have tried it.

My recipe for competing with Zynga

And it consists of two parts.

First part of course is innovation and probably on the back-end. Making a game that is good but that requires some innovative algorithms running on the back-end(stuff I like) which makes it clear, easy and enjoyable for players (easy to understand what it does) but hard to clone for competitors (hard to understand how it does it).

Another part of the recipe is to make a game in a niche that Zynga already occupies but with major (complete) changes making it a completely different game. Kind of a fresh air breeze in the same niche. It should be so different that changing game Zynga already has would hurt Zynga more then not doing it. I mean players never like drastic changes to product they already like. But at the same time (not shore actually about this part but it is important) I think that it would not make much sense for Zynga to make a new product in same niche to compete with your product because they will compete with their own product at the same time.

So combine those two things and you get a product which will make hard time for Zynga to decide on what to do with it. Hard to clone, and confusing to compete with as both strategies I see for it will also undermine their own product. And that means that you will at least have more time on getting attention before Zynga manages to do something (probably just taking what they can from your idea in to their original product, but only things that enhance and not change it).

Well that’s my two cents. Of course it is probably close to impossible to do all that at once and get an interesting game too But that’s how true innovation happens.

What is Ludumdare

Ludumdare is a 48 hour game development competition that is made for fun. It is always fun to throw all those rules out of the window and just make some game or game prototype in 48 hours

Ludumdare 17 theme voting

Ludumdare 17 theme voting has began. Not much to say about that so far. Haven’t participated in wiki theme list generation this time but seen some interesting theme for myself there.

Will I participate?

Don’t know yet. Probably. If yes then it will be something very very small. Depends on the theme and if some other plans for weekends will kick in or not…