Mrs.Bairdy's Bread

Wahey, the “coming soon” page of my new game is up. It’s based on the very successful Hasbro boardgame called Pictureka but with some cool Pogo twists. It’s been a great experience to work on, a real change from my last few projects in scope & size, but just as fun.

Wednesday Session: Why Are Games That Suck So Popular on Social Networks?
The speaker is the designer of the very successful (and cloned) viral Vampire games on Facebook. He talked at length about what users want in social games: comparing themselves to friends, meet new people, reciprical behaviour (e.g. “poking”) either positive/negative, etc. As time goes on, they’re wanting higher production values, “more of everything”, more items, tools, toys, animations in games etc.
So why do they “suck”? Shoestring budgets at best; success makes development become a job and thus a chore; fundamentally they aren’t designers and don’t know how to balance; “scaling is a bitch” and as games grow successful, their infrastructure isn’t there either on the server side or on the game structure; sexy features demanded by users suck down bandwidth & support (e.g. realtime high score tables).
Fundamentally, it comes down to the lack of experienced game designers in the field was the takeaway point by the speaker.

Wednesday Session: Robust, Efficient Networking
A great overview of modern techniques & best practicies for networked games, focusing on the speaker’s opensource networking layer, openTNL. It was a great refesher on the subject, and the speaker’s put up his presentation as well as video & mp3 of it. It’s available here.
Wednesday Session:What Your Mother and Your Ten-Year Old Can Teach You About MMOs
The highlight of the show for me, it was focused on the contrast how the casual audience views MMOs & online worlds compared to the expectations of the hardcore gamer market. The speaker was the designer of Diner Dash and he stressed again & again how many of the online portals/worlds pitched at the casual market are not viewed as “MMOs” but meet the expectations of that definition. He summed up “casual design principles” as: intuitive, simple core experience expanded by “changing terrain” (the core experience doesn’t change, the landscape does), short self contained play sessions.

The casual audience view MMOs as either fantasy adventures with RPG gameplay, expansive continuous virtual worlds filled with “masculine power-fantasy narrrative”, or “DIY toolsets” along the lines of Second Life. Combining those two, the view is large worlds demanding time, grinding & intensive coordinated play with other people, with lots to learn.

However, sites like Club Pogo & Pogo (he stressed how good Pogo was a number of times) feature robust multiplayer spaces that still have some of the elements of ‘hardcore MMOs” without the demands of those games: “non hardcore play”, gradual learning, “casual multiplayer”, “alone together” etc. He further went into those definitions to talk about how these casual sites still have multiplayer experiences without demanding constant communication, persistance or scheduled commitments for playing.
His conclusion is “the casual barbarians are at the MMO gates” demanding a broader space to play in, and broader ways to play. There’s a proliferation of forms of multiplayer with different extremes of immersion, core play, persistance, connection and community.

Pogo Austin is now officially alive! We’ve really been in stealth mode so far, working quietly to build the studio and the first project, a Pogo connected downloadable title inspired by the Hasbro boardgame Pictureka. It’s good to be able to “officially” talk about where and what I’m working on

This week’s been the “Austin Game Developer Conference”, here in Austin, surprisingly. I only got to go to today’s conference. Definitely way smaller scale than the big GDC, but even smaller than I expected. Apparently attendance was down compared to last year. It’s very MMO/Casual focused, matching the focus of a lot of developers in Austin, meaning a lot of the sessions just had no interest to my personal or professional interests, frankly… I did go to a good “here’s how to design a robust network layer” that was a great refresher course and the final session about the intersection between “Casual gamers” and “MMOs” was really interesting too, not just because of the continual mentions of Pogo. Nice to bump into old friends as usual.

It seemed to be filled with more students/wannabe indie developers than professionals.

We had a great big busy booth, which is great, including the first showing of the game I’m involved in that’s going to get formally announced soon. The Expo was similar to the expo at GDC – dull frankly by this point; the same booths with the same companies & schools.

All in all, a strange little conference that I’m glad I got to go to.

So Austin is hot, surprise surprise

Trip out was relatively easy, we had a great flight attendant which made the trip easier with my daughter (1 and a half) and the CARES harness we bought worked brilliantly; I thoroughly recommend it for traveling with young kids on planes. Our temporary housing is atop a hill overlooking the hill country (corner of 2222 and 360 for Austinites to get an idea of location). It’s by far the fanciest apartment we’ve stayed in – too fancy for the likes of us in fact – but it’s a little too faraway from everything. Five miles for a coffee and a newspaper this morning! We bought a bunch of necessities at HEB yesterday, I reckon it cost us about $50 less than buying the same stuff at Safeway or Cala in San Francisco.

Hung out Friday night with some old friends from San Francisco who brought much needed cereal, milk, and most importantly, Wendy’s.  Spent yesterday afternoon at the IGDA picnic with some of my future coworkers at Pogo. Off to look at apartments this afternoon.

All in all, so far, so good.

Last week, I made the mistake of showing my daughter the various icons available for PSN accounts on the PS3. Ever since then, she’s been saying “Mooo!” and “Gro! Gro! Gro!” at the PS3. She thinks the blue albatross icon is Grover from Sesame Street.

Over the weekend, I downloaded the “Super Rub-A-Dub” demo and let her move the ducks around using the six-axis. Big mistake. Now all I’m getting is “Ducks! Ducks! Ducks!”. She walks over to the hi-fi stand and points at the PS3 or cable box.

The joys of being a parent; my gaming time is controlled by a 21 month old.

You can just about see the top of my head in this.

Yes, strong words in the title, but Race for the Galaxy is a strong candidate. It’s a 2-4 player card game, often described as San Juan in space, that focuses on role selection while building a tableau of development cards & production worlds. It’s short, sharp & incredibly good fun, which combined with a very short playtime make it an excellent lunch time game. We’ve clocked up over 100 games in a couple of months, often getting 4 games in one day. And it’s still fun.

Short but deep with just enough randomness through the card draws that no one person always dominates, though our system designer is definitely the best player of our group. We’ve definitely suffered some group-think at times with regards to strategies & better starting positions, but we’re getting past that. We’re well past the ‘multiplayer solitare’ mud that gets slung at the game on BoardGameGeek – play this game ignoring the competition & you will lose regularly & by a large margin. You need to know who is going to produce, when a trade is likely to happen etc.

It’s such a darn elegant system of costs & bonuses, with strong obvious strategies but some nice not so obvious card combos that lead to races & furious deck searches in some games.

I  adore this game.

Thanks to the game library at work, I got a chance to play the latest iteration of Smash Brothers on the Wii this weekend. This is a series I’ve just never quite gotten into. I appreciate why people like it, I understand why people like it, but the chaos in the game just isn’t something I enjoy. Now, that chaos suits my wife perfectly We played a bunch of this last night & had a lot of fun just playing it against each other. Random. Chaotic. Fun.  Ninty have done a great job porting it to the Wii, though it’s still a GameCube game at heart. It’s nice to see a decent single player adventure mode, with some really high quality cgi sequences by Nintendo’s standards.

I’m still not going to buy it though