Drop beats from your iOS device with Audiobus and Drop Beats! Learn how to DJ and live stream from connected music apps on your iPhone or iPad. :)
we're not kids anymore.

titsay
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occasionally subtle
KIROKAZE

pixel skylines

Andulka

❣ Chile in a Photography ❣

tannertan36

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styofa doing anything
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
Claire Keane
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
Xuebing Du
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Kaledo Art

roma★
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH

⁂

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@omarabdelwahed
Drop beats from your iOS device with Audiobus and Drop Beats! Learn how to DJ and live stream from connected music apps on your iPhone or iPad. :)
New demo video is up! See how you can easily live stream your musical performances and DJ sets right from your iPhone or iPad with Drop Beats!
Now live on the App Store, Drop Beats!
Bit of a work of love and a reminder that in a previous life I worked on “digital music” (it’s just music now) and a new file format called “MP3”. A worldwide revolution unfolded around me back then. This little app pays homage to those times with hopefully a new twist in location-based music streaming. Enjoy!
Create a beat. Drop a beat. DROP BEATS.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/drop-beats/id1400920743?ls=1&mt=8
Audio from PAX Prime 2015 Panel, "Can We Make Mobile Games That Don't Suck?"
Panelists: Omar Abdelwahed [Founder, Agent Disco] Scott Crisostomo [Game Design Manager, Ubisoft] Warren Price [Senior Game Designer, Ubisoft] Justin Woodward [Founder, Interabang Entertainment] Jordan Blackman [Independent Game Designer]
“We're hardcore gamers. We have mobile phones that play games. Why can't we find any games we want to play? Join our panel of indie game developers and veteran game designers as we discuss building mobile games that go beyond "mid-core" and creating deeper experiences for gamers.”
We had an AMAZING audience at PAX! Take a listen and feel free to leave new comments. We learned a lot from the Gamers that came that day. Thank you to all that joined us at PAX Prime 2015! :)
PAX Prime Panel Presentation!
Here’s a link to the presentation that guided our conversation during our PAX Prime panel on mobile games and Gamers. At the end is a list of links and contact information for all the panelists. Enjoy!
Panel Presentation
Original panel description: Can We Make Mobile Games That Don’t Suck?
Play The Null Society, today! :)
We had an AMAZING panel discussion on Gamers and the state of mobile games today at PAX Prime! Thank you to the awesome people that attended the panel, to our great panelists and the PAX for having us! So happy at how this turned out. :) #PAX #Gamers #indie #gamedev
Play The Null Society, today! :)
On Monetization and A Gamer’s Soul Worth Saving...
Let’s get this point out quickly: Monetization is not inherently evil. Free-to-Play is not inherently evil. Making money from games is not inherently evil.
There.. we good? No? Well, I don’t blame you given a lot of the “free” games out there today. But give me a moment... just one chance... to tell you how I think it can be different and how I did so in my own game, The Null Society.
1. Premise: Good content is worth paying for.
Yes, I’ve heard the player complaints and I’ve opined as such myself. Variants aside, these reasonable critiques boil down to this statement: Free-to-Play is just an attempt to nickel-and-dime players.
This is patently wrong. “Free-to-Play” (F2P) is a business model. Judge how it is implemented and brings value to players ... or fails to do so.
Ideally, F2P allows players to decide how much of an experience they want to pay for. The model allows players to essentially invest as they go and to buy further content if they feel the experience has warranted such thus far. In this manner, F2P is like buying individual songs from an album or television episodes from an entire season. F2P is like a subscription that you can opt-out of at any time.
More importantly, F2P allows players to decide with their pocket books that content is valuable or not. F2P starts by giving players a portion of the game for free, normally a complete game limited only by further gameplay like missions / quests, special items or, usually, time (see below). Players can decide not to pay at all, ever, or pay until they’ve had enough.
So, if the content is deemed good by you, the individual player, then decide to pay for more or not. I believe good content is worth paying for. You get to decide when that is true.
Example: Jokes aside, League of Legends (LoL) is a helluva game and it is Free-to-Play. According to an October 2014 article by VentureBeat, “... League of Legends has racked up $946 million in in-game spending revenues since the beginning of the year [2014].” The data comes from SuperData Research who also reported that this revenue breaks down to an Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) of $1.32. Why is that ARPU interesting? Because as popular as LoL is with players, the conversion rate of paying users must be low. That is, a small number of paying players are supporting the game so a much larger number of players can enjoy a free game.
2. A Typical Example: The Energy Mechanic
In many F2P games, there is an “Energy Mechanic”. Put simply, this is a content gate that manages how quickly players can consume content. It is a method by which game designers can pace the game play. It is also a method of monetization where players can decide to invest more time or more money in order to progress in the game.
It works like this: A player has a certain amount of points called “energy” or “action points”. For every action a player can make in a F2P game, there’s an associated cost. Often, different actions cost different amounts of points. This creates an opportunity for players to come up with strategies that best maximizes the number of possible actions for the current amount of energy on hand.
Once the player’s energy is depleted, the game is over. Either the player must wait some amount of time for their energy to replenish (ie: “rest”) in order to play again or they can pay for more energy right away. It is worth noting that this does not affect how well a player does in a game. It merely allows the player to keep playing immediately if they so choose. (I recall one game industry professional comparing this with putting more quarters into an old school arcade game when you run out of “lives”. Indeed, similar, but not exactly the same.)
Example: In The Null Society, the Energy Mechanic associates the point cost to use a particular weapon in combat. In the image above, the weapon, T Riddle (aka “You Know Who”), fires at a cost of 53 attack points (noted by the crossed-daggers icon). From the HUD, you can see the player currently has 80 attack points. T Riddle is a heck of a weapon, “Epic”, in fact. But for this particular player, the cost is 66% of their current attack points. That’s a rather expensive attack. If the player uses up all their attack points during combat, they must decide to quit playing for a while or use Gems (the purchased or “hard currency” in the game) to replenish their attack points, immediately.
3. An Hybrid Approach: Loot Drops, Gacha, Fusion and Slots
When I decided to make a F2P mobile game, I did not want to make yet-another Clash of Clans or Candy Crush. I am not judging those games and they are clearly very successful. But I wanted to make something different. I wanted to create an RPG, a genre I’ve spent my life both playing and developing. But, most attempts at mobile RPG’s were merely copies of how successful PC and console games were designed. Leveraging a successful design is not a terrible idea at first blush. But it does not account for the differences in mobile as a platform and the associated player behaviors.
In future posts, I’ll discuss in more detail my game design for The Null Society. For now, let’s talk about a hybrid approach to monetization that I designed for the game. It involves a few well-known mechanics:
- Loot Drops: This is a classic RPG mechanic. Players find a chest or defeat a monster and by doing so earn some loot, a weapon, armor, money, resources, etc. The type of loot and its value is proportional to the difficulty of the quest / mission or monster the player defeated. There is also a “loot table” that is quite literally a spreadsheet that determines the percent chances for particular loot to drop. The more valuable or powerful the item, the less percent chance that it will drop for the player.
- Gacha: “Gacha” is a Japanese mechanic that started with physical vending machines. People put money in the vending machines and receive a toy prize. The toy is part of a set and collectors attempt to complete their sets by putting more money in the vending machines. Of course, some toys are rarer than others and repeated attempts are necessary. Essentially, Gacha is akin to gambling where players are betting money for a rare outcome they hope to achieve. Japanese game developers started adding Gacha to their games with huge success, particularly for Card Collecting Games (CCG). (Read here for more of history of Gacha.)
- Fusion: “Fusion” is a mechanic often seen in CCG’s and card battle games. It is a method where players can upgrade or level-up their cards with more abilities and powers by sacrificing lesser cards. Usually, the art of the card also changes to indicate that the item or character or monster leveled to a greater status. Players get to decide what cards they feel are the most valuable to their style of play and can then focus on leveling just those cards. Thus, Fusion adds another level of strategy to basic card collecting.
- Slot Machines: We’ve all seen these. Put in a token. Pull the handle. Watch the reels spin and hope a bunch of fruit or bars line up just right so you make a lot of money. Slot machines are insanely popular. A quick look at the Top iOS Apps shows many casino slot machine games. I’ve personally worked on slot machine games and they are surprisingly addictive. The seemingly simple combination of spinning reels and sound effects - which our friends in Las Vegas have spent a huge amount of time on to hit the pleasure centers of our brains just right - is very effective.
For The Null Society, I wanted to have classic Loot Drops which all RPG’s contain. I decide to marry a Slot Machine user interface along with Gacha and Fusion to add both collections and a means to level-up weapons.
Here’s how it works...
Example: A player finds a locked briefcase. (It’s a spy game, ’natch.) Players use earned currency called “Intel” (ie: “Information is currency!”) to unlock briefcases. This causes the briefcase to open and become replaced with a spinning reel animation of all the possible weapons found in the game. The reel starts out fast and then slows down until it finally stops on the found item.
If the player clicks “Collect”, the weapon is added to their inventory. The first time a weapon is added, it unlocks and reveals three stars on its interface. Every time the player collects another weapon of the same type, their current weapon automatically levels-up and gains more abilities, increases in Intel value and a star is added. When a player hits three stars, the weapon additionally levels in rarity. (For MMO fans out there, rarities are color-coded: Gray - Poor, White - Common, Green - Uncommon, Blue - Rare, Purple - Epic, Orange - Legendary.)
If a player doesn’t like what they got from their spin, they can click “Spin Again” at the cost of Gems, hard currency. In this manner, players are again choosing to pay for further play. It isn’t required. Eventually, given a lot of play time, any item can drop. But if the player wants to trade money for time, they can certainly choose to do so.
4. The Importance of Choice
Successful monetization is not just about optimizing a single call-to-action for players to make a purchase. Indeed, implementing several vectors of monetization is beneficial for the game developer to test and maximize revenue, but also gives players a choice in how they wish to invest in your game. If your game sells energy packs and nothing else, well, you’re effectively telling players you have nothing else interesting for them to purchase. Imagine walking into a store with a single item on a shelf. Yeah. Not so much.
So what else can we sell to players?
5. Other Monetization Ideas...
Buffs: The Null Society has a store like most F2P games. It features several items and resources, called “Buffs”, that players can purchase for Gems. Buffs temporarily increase a player’s stats. For example, a healing buff might heal a small amount of hit points over a period of time. In many fantasy RPG’s, healing buffs look like vials and potions that a player’s character consumes. These types of buffs are usually a one-time use resource. There are also wearable items that might have permanent buffs that increase a player’s stats when equipped. In The Null Society, for example, there is a pair of “Nerd Glasses” that heals a player slowly over time when worn.
Unlockable Content: Some F2P games have content that can be unlocked only by purchases. Again, these types of content are optional and offer a greater experience for players that wish to pay.
- Dungeons & Dragons Online is a F2P MMO that has several character races for players to choose from. A few of these races, including Warforged, must be unlocked via a store purchase.
- In Neverwinter, players may receive a Dragon Chest loot drop. These chests contain items not normally found, ranging from “uncommon” to “rare” to “epic”. The only way to unlock these chests is with a Dragon Key purchased from the store. Note, the actual items dropped are guaranteed in rarity but not in terms of the exact items received. This is also a form of Gacha!
Advertising: Yeah, I said it. I also struggle with adding adverts to my games. But, just like implementing F2P as a business model, there are good ways to add adverts and bad ways. My suggestion here is to only use adverts at point-of-sale opportunities. For example, when players are prompted to replenish their energy for Gems, give them an option to watch a short video. So, you’re not interrupting their game play - it was already halted. You’re giving them another choice that both benefits the player and yourself.
Conclusion
Well, did I convince you that F2P is not inherently a bad thing? Still have your doubts? Send me a note and tell me what you think! Feel free to ask questions. I believe good content - great games - are worth paying for and F2P is a business model that can benefit both players and game developers to that end.
Cheers! :)
Play The Null Society, today! :)
So you want to make a game?
That’s awesome and I applaud you, vigorously. What you read below should not dissuade you, but simply inform. If you read nothing else, know this: Try.. Fail.. Try again.. Fail again. Just keep trying. You will make it one day, in some fashion, most likely better (and different) than you thought.
If this is your first attempt, or even if you have had some experience, here are some basics that have helped me along:
1. Think small. This cannot be over emphasized. Start with a basic idea and make that. Nothing else, but that. Inevitably, your idea will become bigger than you planned in some way. But the point is to realize small successes and build upon them, iteratively.
Example: The core game mechanic of The Null Society is a variant of Minesweeper. My “a-ha” moment was realizing a board in Minesweeper could be a room and instead of just finding numbers and bombs players may encounter NPC’s, find loot drops and, eventually, a lock and a key to unlock the next rooms. This simple idea became the basis for an entire mobile RPG!
2. Know your skills. Never played an MMO before? Don’t make an MMO. It’s great to want to expand your skill set and experience, but if this is your first rodeo, don’t go for the hardest bronco out there. After considering point #1, above, think about where your skills lie relative to the games you want to make. If you’re an artist, you have a lot of range here, but who will do the programming? Who will identify the scope of the project and create a schedule? Funding?
Example: I actually know more than one game studio that decided to take on an MMO project. These are very experienced game studios in particular genres, but they never had worked on an MMO before. None of them succeeded. I use the MMO example on purpose even though it is literally one of the most, if not THE MOST, expensive and complicated form of game to make mainly because people that play them a lot assume they can then create one. I have even considered this and, luckily, caught myself before I fell too far into madness. ;)
3. Build a team. I’m sure you’ve heard plenty of people say, “You can’t do it all yourself.” Actually, I did exactly that with The Null Society. But, I have many years of experience as an engineer, game designer, writer, artist and musician. It was still an immense struggle and it was a lonely struggle. I don’t feel we talk about this enough: A team is a cooperative that ideally supports one another. There is nothing more amazing than a team that is truly harmonious. There is nothing more exciting than crossing that finishing line with your team, your comrades-in-arms. It’s glorious! So, besides needing a group of people with skills that compliment one another, you need a team just for those moments where you need someone to carry you for a moment or to discuss ideas or to buy a pint. Maybe two.
Example: For your independent game, consider these complimentary roles. Think of them as your very own superhero team where everyone’s super power compliments the others to form a very talented team. (ie: You need someone that flies, another that runs really fast, another that’s super strong, etc..)
- Producer: Ultimate owner of scope and schedule. This person isn’t simply a commander who barks orders. (yeah, yeah.. I know we do this some times.) This person makes sure everyone understands and agrees to what is being built and how long it will take. Then, they put that information into a calendar and other tools so the entire team is well-informed and is kept up to date on progress. What tools? It doesn’t matter. What development methodology? It doesn’t matter. What matters is that everyone agrees on the plan, the process and executes together. Success is all about execution.
- Lead Developer: Responsible for defining and returning technical deliverables normally in the form of source code and documentation. The lead developer has the most input on how scope can be delivered, both in time and technical details. Your team may have several developers or more. For a small team, there is normally one lead that sets the overall technical direction and helps farm out assignments to other engineers.
- Lead Game Designer: Much like the lead developer, the lead game designer is responsible for how the game works, the underlying mechanics & dynamics and, ultimately, what is fun about the game. Before any code is created, there should be a game design that clearly defines what the game is about and the player experience it attempts to achieve. If you don’t have a clear game design, you will fail.
- Lead Artist: Also called “Art Director”. This person gives the first aspects of life for a game concept in the form of images and sets the tone for the entire game. It’s terribly important that the tone of the game is set early. First, it brings the team together as they can see beyond words on a page what it is they want to build. Second, through story boards, you can clearly show player actions, interactions and game responses. This helps inform game design which then informs art again. You may have more than one artist and the lead should help assign work to other team members.
- Other Roles: You may have a writer if your game has any amount of story. You may have a composer or musician to create original tracks and sound effects (or you may choose to go with licensed sounds and music.)
4. Prototype. Make small working demonstrations of your game ideas before moving forward with a full project. These may take the form of paper prototypes or use presentation software like PowerPoint or Google Slides or whatever tool you find handy and easy to use to test your ideas with your team.
Example: Early on for The Null Society, I wanted to test my Minesweeper idea in it’s rawest form: A chain of Minesweeper boards (ie: Rooms) that opened up as the player progressed through the game. As an engineer, it was easy for me to prototype this in HTML and Javascript, put it on a web server and allow anyone to test the idea over a browser. For my fellow engineers, the prototype had only a few components to create:
- Map Manager: Defined the overall size of the world as a grid of tiles. Given a Room of size (width, height), the Map would randomly determine where it fit in order to connect with at least one other room.
- Room Builder: Defined a single room as a set of tiles given (width, height). The Room Builder would randomize the tiles and decide where bombs were located as well as a single lock and a single key. The remaining tiles were either blank or had numbers indicating the number of connecting tiles that had a bomb underneath it. I built the algorithm myself, but there are a ton of resources on the Web on building a core Minesweeper game.
- Visual Manager: Asks the Map Manger for the set of Rooms to draw. For the prototype, I merely used DIVs with CSS borders and managed everything using JQuery, which is extremely easy to use and fast for prototyping.
- Game Manager: This component managed the overall game loop, player inputs (clicking tiles) and rendering results.
The above took maybe a couple days for a first look. Maybe a couple more to deal with small bugs. But, this is because I have experience with these tools and the point was to make a simple playable prototype, not a polished game. I could have done this literally on paper too using grid paper and cut-out tiles to build out the map of rooms. In this manner, I would have played the role of the computer, while a player physically turned over paper tiles.
5. Create a portfolio of ideas. Your first idea won’t be your last idea and it won’t even be the one you deliver upon fully. Build a portfolio of ideas over time. Choose your best ideas to prototype. Remove those ideas that don’t work or are not fun. Add more ideas as you come up with them. You’ll see some surprising results, including disparate ideas that you have at different moments of time that suddenly come together for a great player experience when you go back to review your portfolio. The amount of serendipity in such a list of ideas becomes greater as the list grows and matures. For such a list, I absolutely love using Trello, which also makes for a simple software scheduling tool for those that use Agile Development practices. Again, you could also simply have a journal. Simple technologies are beautiful.
Example: The original premise for The Null Society was a set of stories I wrote more than 10 years ago. The stories centered around a group of post Cold War spies that now had to deal with living in the Information Age where most of the gadgets of old were readily available in the average person’s mobile phone.
I left this comment from one of my characters, Mr. Black, in one of the early missions of the game:
“Used to be a guy could do a mark and then disappear. Now everyone has a camera phone and a social network.”
When I set upon creating my indie game, I sat with my portfolio staring at the water in Venice Beach, CA. I wanted to make a mobile RPG - one that fit the platform and wasn’t just a port of a PC or Console game. I found my old stories and then later realized my “a-ha” moment around Minesweeper. Without my portfolio of ideas, I would have to rely on memory for such connections. (Speaking of connections, you must watch this.)
In my next posts, I will go more into detail about developing The Null Society for iOS. I’ll cover specific game design and engineering topics and also the business of game development. So check back soon and tell me what you think! :)
Play The Null Society, today! :)
A Small Boy’s Dream...
I’m often asked how I got into the video games industry. That’s a story that will take quite a few posts. For now, let’s start with this...
I grew up in the 80′s. I collected comic books. Read scifi & fantasy novels. Watched Saturday morning cartoons. Played Dungeons & Dragons. Listened to early British Punk and the starting days of Rap Music.
I also grew up in Minnesota. The first born son of immigrant parents from Egypt and the Philippines. I attended a parochial school. I went to mass each morning. I wore a uniform.
Nothing about me was “cool” nor “popular”. I was a small brown kid living in the Land of Snow Giants. I drank from the firehose that was Catholicism and I washed my soul in the dark light of authors such as Gibson and Moorcock. I realize now that without such dichotomies, I would be less than who I am. As I look back, I see I was one of a small group that would be the start of something big: A reset of popular culture. The beginning of Otaku. The rise of Geek Rockstars.
I have never had a dream of being cool. My fantasy is to create stories that move people. I strive to make entertainment that drops jaws and wets eyes. I want people to stand in awe of something I created and demand more. It’s art, yes, but I think it’s how I connect with my fellow Terrans.
This blog is where I will share my experiences as a game developer, as a gamer, and as a geek with anyone who cares to listen. I’ll post everything from actual code snippets for games I’ve made to inside knowledge of the industry to best practices for indies and just plain exuberant rants as a fan. Hope you enjoy it. Feel free to ask me questions.
Play The Null Society, today! :)