SimianLogic

Filler for the iPhone

At long last, Filler is now available on iTunes (you can see my little splash page + iTunes link here) for $1.99. I’ve never outsourced anything before, so it was a bit of a learning experience. I ended up working very closely with the team at ChaYoWo–they’re probably happier to be rid of my long bug reports than they are to actually launch the game (I kid). I’m very satisfied with the final product–even if it doesn’t sell a single copy, there’s a certain joy in being able to play my game wherever I go now. There are a couple of interesting things that happened during the development of the iPhone version.

The first thing I usually hear when people see I’m working on an iPhone version is that I should make it tilt-enabled so you can move the balls around. The problem is… that makes the game stupid easy. It’s not really that hard of a game to begin with (but man is it good to kill 5 minutes while you’re waiting for a bus…), so adding in more mechanics to simplify things just seemed like the wrong direction. Another idea I had was to use the tilt to move around the cursor, and have a button for making filler balls. We actually coded this one up, but… uh… it was terrible. In the end we decided not to use tilt and to keep the gameplay closer to the original Flash version.

One thing I noticed while playing early builds (which I also noticed while playing various clones that are already on sale) is that your fingers really do get in the way of dragging the Filler balls around while they inflate. Most of the strategies for the Flash version involve creating balls near the top of the screen and then using them as shields while they fall. “Finger-blockage” is at its worst when your finger is at the top of the screen, though, greatly diminishing the usefulness of those strategies. While playing those early builds, I did something radical: turned my iPhone upside down. Success! Sure, the balls are floating up instead of falling down–but man it was great to see the whole screen. Asking players to flip their phones upside down is just silly, though, so I did the sensible thing and reversed gravity.

ScoreCaching

While the ChaYoWo guys were coding the app to my demanding specs, I got to work on another integral piece: ScoreCaching. Most of the iPhone games I’ve played with online leaderboards do just that–global online leaderboards. I wanted a little more than that, so I figured I might as well build it myself. ScoreCaching combines the idea of online leaderboards with geographic location (think Geocaching). Instead of comparing your scores to everyone in the world, why not compare your scores against everyone nearby? Even better, why not leave your scores behind as a mark of your achievement? Just as people used to line up at arcade boxes with the hopes of leaving their initials in the number one spot, ScoreCaching will (eventually) allow players to mark specific places. What’s your high score for the Golden Gate Bridge? What about Times Square? How about the pub down the street? Those features are a little ways out still, but for now you can compare your scores with your friends and those around you.

Filler 2 (Flash)

When Shockwave offered to sponsor Filler 2 as a three-month exclusive, it seemd as if the stars were aligning perfectly. That would give me extra time to finish up the iPhone version, ScoreCaching, and the XBox Community Games version (whoops!). I didn’t quite finish the XBox version (though I did write a hell of a lot of reviews over at Worth the Points), but Shockwave’s exclusive is up and now the rest of the internet can finally enjoy Filler 2. Kongregate, the totally-kick-ass sponsor of the original Filler, is reprising its role for the second go-around. You can play it over on Kongregate here or play it on my site with the link on the sidebar–I’ll start spreading it around the rest of the net sometime next week. If you run a flash portal, feel free to snag the SWF off my site (the one on Kong is site-locked until I verify it’s totally bug-free). If you’d like to license the game for your site (ad-free), drop me a line at learnyourabcs@gmail.com.

What’s Next?

On top of everything else, I’m also one of the developers in Mochi’s Brave and the Bold Contest. A $4k (minimum) payout is okay, but let’s get something straight–it’s freakin Batman. I watched the original Batman cartoon every day for years as a kid (I was a Marvel kid when it came to comics, but the Batman cartoon was awesome). Getting to develop an original game concept with one of my favorite characters–that’s a sweet deal.  I’ve also got a handful of other finished prototypes in the pipe that are currently on hold until I can clear some of this development logjam.

As always, stay tuned to this space for interesting facts and figures on how everything is doing.

In the last week, there were a couple of newsworthy items (loosely) related to Microsoft’s Community Games initiative. Their most recent news post over at the XNA Creator’s Club web site has a list of review sites which cover community games. They got a lot of details wrong for Worth the Points, but hey–there’s no such thing as bad press! More important than the tiny little traffic bump, game developers are now more aware that there are in fact sites out there promoting their games. While I have gotten a couple of emails asking for reviews in the past, since that news post went live they’ve started trickling in with greater regularity (about 1 a day).

The biggest problem with the community games review space right now has nothing to do with those of us that are actually reviewing games–it’s the larger review sites who don’t review them. Run a Google search for pretty much any community game (for example, google two recent games we reviewed–FreaKick or Planet Crashmania 9,000,000) and you get a litany of results from the “bigger” players in the game review space: IGN, Gamespot, GameRankings, GameFAQs, GameStats, Gamespy. All of these sites automatically create pages for all the XBox games, but the problem is that they don’t actually cover any of the community games. After a half-dozen search results yielding no actual content, it’s no wonder that only the developers themselves (who are willing to scour through pages of results for any press) seem to be finding the actual reviews. Unfortunately, the only solution to this problem is time.

The second newsworthy item was the announcement that Amazon has started carrying XBox Live Arcade games. There are some kinks (you’re actually buying download codes, which means you have to punch them into your box manually), but this has the potential to be a huge boon for arcade games in general. While they don’t carry any Community Games yet, it’s a short leap from Arcade titles to Community titles (assuming Amazon doesn’t have any hang-ups over the lack of rating). Putting the community games on Amazon would instantly solve the number one request by community developers: game ratings. WTP and other review sites allow users to rate games, but for it to really be a useful feature you need a TON of ratings–something Amazon could provide. Having community games listed on Amazon would also create an instant revenue stream for any site reviewing community games (referral links). I doubt the conversions would be all that high (it would be MUCH better if Microsoft had their own referral program, as you can actualy tell your XBox to buy/download games through their marketplace site), but it would probably beat ads. The more I think about it, the more I think Microsoft should just let Amazon run THEIR marketplace–they’ve got way more experience in the space.

I’m slowly rolling a simple new game out to portals called Polar Games: Breakdown (follow the link to play it). This was actually a prototype I’d had lying around for ages and ages (originally done in Processing a couple of years ago, then ported to Flash), but never gotten around to finishing. Mochi and Whirled were both running contests that finished at the end of March, so I needed something simple that I could do in about a month. I don’t think I’m breaking any new ground here, but I just loved the idea of wrapping a traditonal grid-based tile game around a circle. I’ve got a few more of these “Polar Games” prototypes that I’ll probably finish up at some point.

The game’s main game mode was always going to be puzzles. I’d hoped to do 100 before releasing the game, but writing the puzzles by hand just proved too time-intensive. Forty puzzles are in the game now, and assuming the game doesn’t tank completely (*cough* Nibblets *cough*) I’ll think about continuing on with the final 60 puzzles. In the meantime, though, I hit on the idea of adding a “Daily Puzzle.” Using the date as a random seed, all players will get the exact same puzzle each day. There’s no guarantee that the puzzles will be solvable (most won’t be), but hopefully that adds a little more strategic competion than the longer, more-luck-based Score mode.

The basic mechanics for Score Mode are really not that different from Collapse. I wanted to break away from using a game timer, though, and create something more meditative. Instead of having new blocks come “up” every time a timer finishes, I just have new ones fill in infinitely. The polar bears “judge” your every move, and based on how many tiles you clear will either give bonus health or take away life. As health fades from 25 down to 0, the sky darkens and the music slowly gets quiet. Once you hit 0, the whole thing goes red and you’ve got 5 turns to get back into positive territory before the game ends. As you clear various colors, the meters on the right side of the board fill up. Clicking on them clears all tiles of that color, which allows you to build some pretty monolithic color groups. This transforms the mechanic from a frantic “click any group of 3″ to something a little slower, where the goal is to methodically build up giant chains while keeping an eye on your health.

To play the multiplayer version, you’ll have to check the game out on Whirled. The multiplayer mode plays much like the Score Mode, save for the fact that the board is split into four quadrants. Each quadrant is the home base of one player (empty seats are filled by AIs), and players take turn making moves. Tiles cleared in your own quadrant replenish your health, while tiles cleared in an opponent’s quadrant take away health. Every 10 rounds, a damage multiplier increases the amount of damage players do to each other. Using one of your “clear all” powerups doesn’t count as a turn, meaning you can set up an epic clear to heal yourself or attack your opponents. If your life falls to zero (or lower), you will be unable to deal damage to other players until you get your life back above zero.

Whether the game is a hit or not, building it has been incredibly valuable. The first few games I did were in “pure code” and compiled with MXMLC. Filler 2 was the first time I used Flash, and the process was… rough. This time around I had a much clearer picture of what I wanted to accomplish in Flash compared to what I wanted to do in raw code, and the actual development process was a breeze on this one. Pieces of a generic Flash game engine (and, just as importantly, a build process) are beginning to fall into place (sound and data managers, game boards, UI classes). Prototyping is still my favorite part of the game building process, so the more I can shrink the window between prototype and launch the happier I’ll be as a developer. =]

I was hard at work on the Flash version of Filler 2 when the XBox Live Community Games initiative launched, so I didn’t have time to get the XBox version out as a launch title. I was very impressed by the whole idea, but I found Microsoft’s game store to be less then helpful in finding out which games were good and which games were crap. For the regular Arcade titles, there’s an expectation of quality. If it’s a type of game you’d normally be interested in, they’re at least worth a demo download to give them a shot. There’s no expectation of quality on the community games (at least, not yet), so I found myself downloading crap demo after crap demo and thinking there must be a better way. I’d heard about CommunityEngine, which was more blog oriented and less “purely” social than something like Insoshi–and the license was a heck of a lot more favorable. I also had no experience with Amazon EC2, which was something I wanted to fix. A community games review site seemed like a perfect opportunity to test both out, so I went for it.

Without further adieu (or just click the banner above), feel free to check out Worth the Points: XBox Live Arcade Community Game Reviews. The site’s actually been “live” since around Christmas time. I’ve been slowly funneling traffic (both through a test of the MochiAds self-serve ads and from the ads in front of the original Filler, which is still being played ~10k times a day) towards it to make sure it didn’t break and fixing bugs as I spot them, but I think most of the major kinks have been worked out. We play a lot of games in my house, so I figured it was our civic responsibility to wade through the mountain of crap and try to find a few gems–and there are definitely some out there.

A lot of my crazy side projects don’t make it this far, but I saw this one as a good excuse to get some friends involved on something, so my twin brother, an old high school friend, and my roommate are all “featured writers” for the site (for the time beings). I once thought I’d open it up so anyone could write community game reviews (after all, there are more games being released than we can even keep up with)–but ultimately decided a tighter focus on just the four of us would work better in the long run.

There are already sixteen reviews posted, and I’ll try to prod everyone to do one or two a week. You can go directly to the games which got the thumbs up or which games didn’t make the cut, browse games by overall rating (users can rate games from 0-10), genre, or tags. Hopefully giving credit where credit is due (or at least finding a few games that don’t totally suck) will help legitimize the community games as a viable platform.

I’ve been a little quiet lately–and crazy busy. I’ve got a few new projects to announce in the next few weeks, but the first of the bunch just went live. As of yesterday morning, Filler 2 is officially live on Shockwave! I started working on a new version in October of last year, and I think it’s fair to say a lot more time has gone into this one than the original. Changes include:

• 100 Challenges, most of which allow you to jump right into a specific game scenario.
• Optimized physics to support more balls onscreen in higher levels.
• I rolled lives and balls into one, which was a point of confusion for some people in the first game.
• The bonus timer is gone.
• Improved graphics, with the ability too choose your ball and background.
• I added the ability to freeze time–pressing “space” will freeze all the bouncy balls and make you invincible for short bursts. Your freeze time is replenished each level, and you get roughly 1/4 of a second per level.
• When a ball pops, it now “explodes”–repelling any nearby balls. This can be used strategically on later levels to create void spaces.
• There’s now a hard level cap at Level 50.
• Past level 25, the bouncy balls will pick up speed every level to make things more challenging.
• There are three difficulty settings:
• On easy, you can’t die. This is more of a “relaxation” mode.
• Normal is, well, normal. You get two more balls each level and limited amount of freeze.
• Hard is closest to classic Filler. There’s no freeze time, and the balls are a lot more limited than the first game.
• The game will automatically track some basic stats for you (average score, highest level reached, etc…).
• A self-destruct button will allow you to end the game if you’re read to submit your score.

This game also marked the first game I’ve ever done in Flash (as opposed to pure AS3, compiled with the Flex SDK). The vast majority of the code was still done in class-based files, but it’s really a lot easier doing menus and “screens” in Flash. My workflow going forwards will likely involve doing all my prototyping with the Flex SDK before moving on to Flash for the “fit and finish.”
The game will be an exclusive on Shockwave until May 3rd–I’ll be able to start distributing it more widely to the other portals afterward. In the meantime–everyone go play it on Shockwave!

When I’m not making games, I’m still cranking away on my day job–Piqqem. Eric Schonfeld did a review of the site on TechCrunch last Friday, so I thought I’d respond with my own two cents on the company. Clearly I’m a little biased since I work there (and wouldn’t be if I thought it was going to fail), and it certainly doesn’t hurt that I know where the site is headed. I should also point out, though, that these are my own thoughts on the site and not the “company line” (assuming we had one). Read the rest of this entry »

I’m hardly the best when it comes to designing forms with usability in mind, but I came across one today that frustrated me for awhile before I figured it out. While flipping through channels this morning, I saw that Highlander was on. It stuck in my head, so when I got to work I bought “Princes of the Universe” from iTunes. Since I’d recently updated to version 10, the little Genius thing was new. I clicked on the button to enable it, and was greeted by the following form:

I put in my email address and clicked continue. Nothing happend–a message to “Please fill out the entire form.” After trying a few times (all unsuccessfully), I finally said “screw Genius” and went back to my normal playlist.

Fast forward 10 hours or so. Now I’m home, and again listening to some music. Thinking it may have just been some weird glitch on my iMac at work, I tried to activate Genius again. Same problem. I think, “Fine, I’ll try my AOL login.” I switch the toggle to the second option and fill in the second field with my AOL username. Another error. Only at this point do I look at it more closely… the second field is the password field!

There’s a good chance I’m just retarded, but I feel like I’m pretty tech-savvy. If I made this mistake, I’m sure others have as well. The issue is that the two radio buttons line up perfectly with the two text fields. If I could boil everything I’ve learned about usability into one single mantra (even if I don’t always follow it myself), it would be: “PEOPLE DON’T READ.” I’m no exception. Because there was a 1:1 correspondence between the two radio buttons (and more importantly, the two logos), my brain made the (incorrect) leap that the first field was for Apple ID and the second field was for your AOL username. I’m no stranger to multi-screen login/verification forms (especially for things with higher security, like bank accounts or apple accounts with purchase power built in), so it didn’t seem weird that it would ask for my username on one screen and the password on another.

Once I actually read the form and understood what it wanted me to do, it all worked great. What I’m wondering is, though, am I just dumb? Would others actually make this same mistake?

I’ve had my nose to the grindstone at work for the last month or so (along with kicking out a few new game prototypes which I hope see the light of day sooner rather than later), but my co-worker sent this along to me this morning. As the title reads, Filler is #68 in TechCult’s Top 150 Flash Games. I’d never heard of them, but it’s always nice when someone you know in real life stumbles across something you do for fun in your digital life.

Since I moved in May, my bike riding has fallen drastically. Since moving in mid-May, I’ve taken exactly one trip to Diana’s office and back (~8 miles round trip) and another trip to Stanford and back (~8 miles round trip) about a month later. That’s it. Sure, my office is still only about 9 miles away from the house… but that would’ve been a stretch goal even when I was biking to work two or three times a week. I could bike to the train station (~2 miles) and then to work (~2 miles), but the trip spans two separate zones. Even though it’s only a 6 or 7 mile trip, that means it would be $4 each way, while driving their and back only takes a little over one gallon of gas. Not an ideal solution. I started tracking my mileage on Zealog to further motivate myself, but clearly that wasn’t doing much either.

Instead of biking TO work, then, today I tossed the bike in the back of my car and took it with me. There’s a Subway about a mile and a half away from the office that we go to at least twice a week, and sometimes three times a week. Why drive? Today, I biked to lunch instead of driving. It only takes about 10 minutes longer than driving, and while it’s not exactly a massive undertaking, any little bit helps. Three miles of exercise is certainly greater than the zero exercise I was averaging before.

Now the task shifts into finding restaurants that are the optimal distance away. Google doesn’t really have the capacity to give you search results for “restaurants at least three miles away from point XYZ,” so it took a bit of creative guesswork to find some likely candidates. Unless I remember to lug the bike home on Fridays, this means I won’t be able to do any recreational rides on the weekend–but considering I’ve only done two of those in the last 5 months, that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.

When I originally tossed the Stockmoose up a couple of months ago, it was mostly a prototype–one that had taken a single evening to produce, and one that was based on a single request to my artist girlfriend: “Can you draw me a moose with a tie?” Well, now it’s finally back with a new coat of paint, some basic anti-gaming measures, and a few other things to spice it up. The “borrowed” Yahoo stock charts have been replaced with our own proprietary charts, and each stock now has a sort of miniature info card so the choice isn’t based solely on name-recognition. We also created a list of 25 Silicon Valley stocks that most people around here have probably heard of–just to make it a little more engaging. Some of the early results are actually a little surprising. In our SV25, TiVo is actually pretty close to the bottom while Netflix is near the top. Based on what I know of the two, I would’ve actually assumed this to be the opposite of what would happen.

Read the rest of this entry »