I love playing Zuma Blitz on Facebook – I think it’s way more fun than Bejeweled Blitz. It’s a very carefully constructed game that I’m sure monetises very well as a result; well worth studying if you want to see a shining example of a competitive social game.

Recently they added a Daily Spin option where you can win mojo. Mojo is required if you want to use powerups which are great fun and often increase your score. You get one free daily spin and can buy more spins for Facebook credits. I’ve never bought any extra spins but this week there’s a promotion on where you can get extra spins for just one Facebook credit and also the payouts are much higher than normal.

So I wanted to compare the cost of buying mojo through the usual method versus gambling on the Daily Spin. Here are my findings:

Normal Cost

You can buy 100,000 mojo for 90 gold idols, and you can buy 100 gold idols for 19 Facebook credits. A little maths tells me that 90 gold idols (for 100K mojo) costs 17.1 Facebook credits.

Daily Spin Results

I decided to burn 20 Facebook credits in an experiment to see how much mojo I could amass and if I could get MORE mojo this way than from buying it the normal way. It’s easy to think that the payout is truly random, but I bet it is not – it should be carefully balanced to be a bit more than you would get buying it the normal method.

It should be pointed out that buying extra spins is actually a bit slow as each spin requires multiple clicks and delays whilst your Facebook credit is spent. It would be way better if you could buy a whole bunch of spins at once. So it feels a bit like “hard work” getting mojo using this method.

Here’s what I got (numbers are in thousands of mojo):

8,8,4,4,4,4,4,8,8,4,4,8,20,8,8,4,20,40,4,40

Total = 212,000 mojo

At first I thought it was going to be all 8Ks and 4Ks, with mostly 4s, which would have resulted in a poor yield. But the 20Ks and 40Ks really made a big different. I was sorely tempted to carry on after spending 20! Maybe tomorrow…

Conclusion

Buying mojo the normal route gives you 5847 mojo per Facebook credit.
Doing the Daily Spin gave me 10600 mojo per Facebook credit.

So roughly double the normal amount. Of course I could try again and get all 4Ks and 8Ks, or maybe some crazy high amounts. Based on this I might do another 20 spins before the promotion runs out as it does seem like a cheap way to get mojo.

If you try it out, let me know how you get on!

Photo by John Geoffrey Newman

I went to Casual Connect in Amsterdam back in early 2008 and it was an awesome experience. I met tons of fellow casual game developers and there were lots of great talks that were relevant to me.

This week I went to Casual Connect in Seattle, which I’d never been to before. When I worked at Big Fish Games I kept asking if I could go but they typically only send “biz dev” types to it. This time, however, I was a speaker on an indie panel and so I got to go for free, which was awesome.

This post is about my experience at Casual Connect rather than being a comprehensive overview or something.

Flash Gaming Summit

On the Monday before Casual Connect I went to the Flash Gaming Summit. It was pretty informative. There was news about Flash’s molehill (now called Stage3D) which is coming soon, and Unity’s forthcoming ability to export to Flash via Stage3D.

Also there was a very interesting talk about Everybody Edits which is an online multiplayer microtransaction game made in Flash that seems to be doing well. Seeing as there’s kind of a ceiling limit on how much money you can make from Flash Game License, making an online multiplayer game and using stuff like PlayerIO to do the backend stuff is probably something we’ll be seeing more of in the next few years.

Casual downloads really are dying now

Things have changed a lot in the casual space over the last few years and now download games for PC/Mac are not the main topic of Casual Connect at all. Mobile and Social games are what everyone is talking about. In fact I’d say that social mobile games (free to play games with in-app purchases) were the darling of the show as people are realising that it’s very hard for small teams without a crazy ad spend budget to make Facebook games

Also a new term floating around is midcore – this means games that aren’t hardcore or casual, somewhere in between. I’m going to be making some midcore games soon too.

Big Fish and iOS

Paul Thelen, founder of Big Fish Games, did a talk about their iOS distribution stuff which was very informative. He said that the iOS counterparts of good HOGs (Hidden Object Games) make about half as much money as the download versions, which was $500,000. Pretty good. Every one of their games is linked to other their games so the cross-selling potential is massive and works very well.

Geordi La Forge

I got a photo taken with LeVar Burton! Recently I got one with Sulu and Uhura form the original Trek series and so I thought I’d better get LeVar while he was in the area.

Talks

There weren’t many talks about game design which was a shame, and there weren’t many indie talks. Most talks were about social or mobile and the last day had talks about sound and investment. I didn’t got to a ton of talks and panels anyway because the networking was so good (more on this later).

Portals should stop ripping off developers

The PopCap CEO said that he thought casual download portals should stop ripping off devs and pay them a similar amount to Apple or Steam (70% instead of 35% or less basically). I applauded that.

I also heard that some casual portals are going to be distributing more non-casual titles. If that’s the case then then they’ll need to boost their royalty rates to compete with better established non-casual portals anyway. Also BFG said they are going to be distributing more “outlier” content on iOS which means non-casual titles that fit into the midcore category I mentioned earlier.

Networking and Indie events

Casual Connect is great for networking. I kept on bumping into people I knew and also got introduced to many more people. I was there for two reasons: to talk to casual game portals about opportunities for existing IP and to meet up with indies. There were two indie events on in the same week, the indiegamer forum dinner which was cool, and a large gathering of indies showing off great games at the Seattle Indie Expo, which was way cool.

I also hung out with lots of Vancouverites including Shane Neville and Stephen MacDonald (we all crammed in the same hotel room), and Andy Moore from Victoria, and they kept introducing me to knew people, which was cool.

I got some Grey Alien Games T-shirts printed so I could wear them every day at the conference and this helped people quickly identify me. I’ll be wearing them at PAX Dev later in the year too.

Oh and there were LOTs of great parties with free drinks, plus I kept getting free food because I was a speaker, which was awesome.

Spring Bonus on iOS

I also had a meeting with Big Fish Games and some other publishers to show them Spring Bonus on iPad. It was well received and I hope that it will be accepted and launched soon. Stay tuned for more details in the coming months.

Overall a great week, but tiring as I find all conferences are. Glad to be home typing this up and relaxing.

How was your experience?

Did you go to Casual Connect? How did you find it?

Photo by By jiazi (Tim Wang)

I read this article and was interested to see that in the first six months of 2010 more game units were shipped digitally than via retail (although retail still accounts for the most revenue). That’s a pretty cool turning point for the industry. Naturally Steam was the biggest vendor of digital games, and who was the biggest Casual game provider? Why Big Fish Games of course!

Clearly if you an an Indie making arcade games you’ve got to target Steam and Direct2Drive (as well as selling direct of course). And if you are making casual games, that top 5 list should be a good starting point (Gamehouse is Real Arcade by the way).

Just wanted to let you know about a developer diary that a friend of mine, David Mekersa, told me about.

He says “On our blog we invite everyone to follow, alongside the Casual Box team, our progress in building Enigma, a Casual Puzzle-Adventure game.”

The game is due for delivery in Q4 2010 so it’ll be interesting to see if keeping a public diary keeps them on schedule. I wish them the best of luck with it. If the graphics end up as good as the ones I see on the blog, it should look very nice indeed.

A fellow Vancouverite, Alex Vostrov, and I recently set up a Vancouver Indie Game Developer Meetup group, and last night we had our first meetup at Soho Cafe and Billiards in Yaletown.

Clearly there was a big demand for such as group because we now have over 60 members and last night over 40 of them turned up at the meetup! There was a diverse group of people there ranging from students to industry pros, covering disciplines such as art, music, and programming/design on platforms such as iphone, console and Facebook, to name but a few.

At the meetup we asked people what they would like to get out of the meetup group and what sort of future events they’d be interested in and we’ve got some cool ideas that we’ll be implementing soon. I also talked to some really interesting people and met the other three Indies who will be on the same panel as me next week at Digitial Kung Fu 2 day. I also met a fellow BlitzMax user which was great as that’s a pretty rare event

Big thanks to everyone who turned up. Keep an eye out for the next meetup which will be in less than a month’s time.

Eschalon Book II is now out for PC and it’s a great Ultima-style RPG game. Mac and Linux versions are due out May 26th 2010.

Here are a few hints and tips I’ve built up so far:

Skills:

- Start with light armour, not heavy armour like I did, that was dumb. Probably best not to bother with shields until later too (I got it early at the expense of other useful stuff).
- Get at least level 1 in cartography. Level 8 seemed to be pretty useful and I didn’t bother to go higher.
- Don’t get divination or elemental until you have at least 15 in wisdom or intelligence respectively otherwise you won’t be able to learn any spells anyway. Spend the points on fighting or something else until you are clever enough.
- If you get wisdom 15 and divination, you can learn the heal spell, pretty darn useful. There’s also a neat cartography spell at intelligence 15 and elemental (I think it was Int 15; I got it around then anyway).

QuickSave:

- Use the quick save a lot and reload if you get a disease, otherwise you’ll be really crippled and that snooty cleric charges a fortune to remove the disease. Of course if you are purist you’ll have to grin and bear the ailment.
- Sometimes you identify something to find out it’s worth less than the cost of identify! If you have lots to identify but not enough cash, save and then identify the first one and make a mental note what it is, then reload and identify the second one etc. until you find the best thing. Again you may find this against the spirit of the game.
- Quick Save just before going into a shop. If you don’t like the selection keep reloading until it’s better because the shop’s contents randomize each time (if you went with the default game settings). Also you can do it before smashing open barrels and opening chest etc. This is dirty cheating.

Fighting:

- If you are being chased, run off the map and they’ll go away. Handy!
- Try to get monsters to chase you just one at a time to pick them off (classic technique).
- Lead monsters in dungeons to a torch on the wall so that you can still hold your shield and fight in good visibility.
- Don’t bother doing any fighting at night especially in rain storms (torches don’t work), camp it out until dawn.
- Bows are pretty crappy at first, as they have a long distance penalty and then you can only get off a couple of shots before you have to swap to melee weapon. You must swap when then enemy is still several squares away otherwise they’ll whack you whilst you are swapping. Also arrows are expensive.
- Setup two weapon configs: melee and ranged. Don’t forget to apply the same armour and rings etc to each config. If you gain a new item, switch to config 1 first, then put on the new item and save, then switch to config 2 and put on the new item again and save. Bit of a pain but you don’t want to accidentally remove it when changing config.
- Use bludgeoning weapons to smash barrels, doors, chests etc not bladed ones.

General Tips:

- Read all the in-game tips (F4).
- Use the hotkeys (press F1 to find them out). X is very useful as it beings up 3 core dialogs.
- Don’t let yourself starve or dehydrate, it’s real bad.
- If you get desperate for cash, sell a scroll, they are worth at least 60, then you can buy food and repair your cheap shoddy weapons and armour.
- Rat meat. mmmm good. Well not that good, but if you get hungry, kill some rats.
- You can carry kegs of black power and put them down where you want. They can be used to blow up special walls, locked doors, locked chests and closed barrels etc.
- Keep an eye out for small square hard to see panels on the floor in dungeons as they are switches for hidden doors, traps etc.
- Get some Lore rings early on and put them on whenever you need to identify stuff. Of course later on just get the Lore spell. Other useful rings are foraging rings and intelligence rings (put these on when you can’t learn any more spells due to low intelligence).
- Get a whole bunch of gloves that you can use at different times such as: tinkers glove (for mending whilst you are camping, this is VITAL to save lots of money), lock picking gloves, skullduggery gloves etc.
- Take off boots when quick travelling so they don’t wear out!
- Consider keeping hold of some wizard hats to boost intelligence or wisdom in the event that you can’t learn any more spells due to low intelligence or wisdom.

Quest Tips (SPOILERS):

- Ruel’s house isn’t that near the sea like the woman says, it’s somewhat inland. I wondered off into outlander territory looking for it (too far NE) and was getting ass-kicked but then stole loads of cool stuff off them and ran away.
- Kill the black molds in the pump room to get the copper key.
- Trust the first guy who tells you about the werewolf, it’s not a trick like you are led to believe
- Destroy the wasp nest with a powder keg or demon oil. Don’t use a bladed weapon for goodness sake.
- The treasure map from Everdale is for the East Fellpine Forest above the river.
- You can get into Port Kuudad via the sewers which you can reach by going the the caves near Everdale. Go North East when you exit the caves.
- For the 4 chests in the sewer that lead to a secret hideout you need: a candle, a bag of salt, a lockpick and quill. All these can be found and bought from shops. Sometimes you need to travel for a long time to make sure the shop restocks, then save and reload until the item you want is there.

Please add your tips too!

Big Fish Games just released a new game that I helped make! It’s called My Tribe and it’s a Facebook game! Check it out here: http://www.facebook.com/MyTribe. You get to grow your tribe and look after them in a tropical setting as well as construct buildings, make farms, craft clothing, discover science, plus tons of other cool stuff!

My Tribe was originally a downloadable casual game for PC/Mac and we turned it into a Facebook game in the Big Fish Games Vancouver studio. I helped with the design and programming and did the sound design.

The game is doing *really* well since we released it last week and it’s going to become a huge hit. Watch this space!

Please help me out and become a fan. Thanks!

You may not know this but BFG recently added a new feature to their top 100 which allows you to filter by a chosen genre. Previously you could see the top 33 in each genre by going to the main page for that genre, but the difference with the top 100 filtering is that it shows the peak, weeks on and date released!

However, a word of caution, be careful when reading the peak. The reason is that sometimes it shows the peak in the top 100, and other times the peak in the genre. For example, in the match-3 genre Holiday Bonus is shown to have a peak of 54 which I know was what it reached in the top 100 because I saw it, but Unwell Mel is shown to have a peak of 1 which it has not yet reached in the top 100, it’s only no. 1 in the match-3 genre. Also The Wonderful Wizard of Oz shows a peak of 30 but I knew it got to no. 10 (I took a screenshot at the time). So something weird is going on, I’m not sure the figures can be trusted properly (shame otherwise it would have been ultra awesome). Anyway it’s still useful to see the whole current 100 for that genre.

Following on from my post the other day about an iphone millionaire I’ve read another great success story about a guy who worked in a bank and coded a game in his spare time which made him $250,000 in two months. Naturally he quit his job and is making games full time now.

Also I watched this great slide show about iPhone App Store secrets with some really neat statistics about iPhone sales. Check it out if you are thinking about making a free or paid game or app as it’s great info!

The other night I did a whole load of research into making an iPhone game and even studied Objective C syntax (it’s pretty easy, just C++ with a load of square brackets and auto-garbage collection). The iPhone game/app market is booming right now but it’s also very easy to get into. Now may be the last chance to quickly and easily get a game out there which is successful before a) the market gets saturated and b) the big companies start making big budget games that small companies can no longer compete with.

Anyway I’m thinking of making something for fun, so watch this space…Oh I also may post all my research and links (FAQs and resources etc) if anyone is interested.

This The Video Game Name Generator is pretty old but I rediscovered it the other day. It’s SOOOO funny – just a few clicks will hopefully have you howling in laughter and wiping away tears.

Here’s some I generated (I had to force myself to stop):

- Arcade Unicycle Maniac (wtf!?)
- Ye Olde Godzilla Trilogy
- International Ninja Dance Party (this sounds brilliant!)
- Perfect Death Bloodbath
- Super Sexy Spatula Football (sounds pretty novel, I can see young scantily clad ladies running around hitting the ball with plastic spatulas, can you?)
- Lucky Bible Onslaught (I love this one)
- Deranged Blimp of Might and Magic (lol, this is just classic)
- Killer Punching Dungeon (sounds like 70s Kung Fu movie name converted into English)
- Biblical Motorcycle – Collector’s Edition
- Britney Spears’ UFO Revolution (OMG, they just keep getting better)
- Star Trek Dating Alpha (this one actually sounds like it has real potential)