Inside Social Games

Sharendipity is a new platform for building social games. While the company has been around for over a year, the Sharendipity platform (still in alpha) is one of the first robust tools we’ve seen that simplifies and modularizes the social game design experience. We sat down with Greg Tracy, one of the creators of Sharendipity, to learn more about it.

Sharendipity is uniquely extensible. Individuals can leverage or contribute to a growing library of modular content such as game characters, behaviors, special effects, artwork and sounds – which piece together in new and surprising ways. Anything made in Sharendipity can be shared back to the community either in whole or as smaller, reusable components. When those creations have value, Sharendipity provides a secure, integrated marketplace for buyers and sellers to transact.

Is it still possible to get in “under the hood” and make changes using code?

So it’s a lot like design programs like Dreamweaver: easy to learn, difficult to master?

How forgiving is the Sharendipity design experience? Even if it is a GUI interface, how much does syntax, event ordering, and so on come in to play?

Issues involving syntax are eliminated. However, if a user is trying to create brand new logic, there will still be a need to understand some basic programming concepts. Hopefully that user will be able to find the logic in the community and re-use it just like any other action in the system.

We’re also creating tools that allow component authors to define integration points. Sort of like a user defined wizard for every modular element in the community. Rather than having to worry about the “how” (such as order) of hooking things together, you’ll simply be instructed to provide the “what”. For instance, if you were to integrate a scoreboard into your game, the scoreboard author will provide an integration point that allows you to specify where the score value is being stored or may provide the user with an action to use when they wish to update the score. The author of the component can determine these integration points themselves.

How do art integration and animations work?

Every core object in the system has an image property associated with it. That means you can simply drag and drop any image onto an object. Actions can also be used to dynamically change an object’s image as well, or to step through frames in an animated GIF.

Since there are tools to help the programmatically challenged, do any exist for the artistically impaired?

Another great “oh, cool!” moment occurred when we created a painting application within Sharendipity called Painterdipity. It is a very primitive paint program built entirely from the platform’s core features. An interesting concept is that in the future the community might evolve this application into a more sophisticated paint program. Perhaps with special tools for the “artistically impaired”!

A designer tool for mainstream games called “Unreal Kismet” provides a visual GUI for designers that allows them to use Unreal Script without having to write lines and lines of code for level events. Essentially, they write small events, and connect them together almost like Microsoft Visio. How does this compare to Sharendipity?

We’re different in a few ways. Most importantly, the end goal of Kismet is still to produce code. They’re just trying to make it easier to visualize the logic. We want to provide total abstraction, and completely eliminate the need for producing code. In fact, when a user is creating a behavior for their evil enemy character, we never produce any code. That’s why users can instantly see, test, and tweak their logic in a live environment. There is no compilation step using Sharendipity!

For all intensive purposes, Sharendipity is one of the first “game engines” I’ve seen for social games on Facebook. Being a first of its kind, do you see it as becoming the Unreal Engine of its genre?

The 2008 Social Gaming Summit, co-produced by Charles Hudson and Jeremy Liew this past June, has now posted online video of the conference sessions. These are highly recommended for anyone interested in learning more about the “social gaming” space.

Check out video from the following sessions:

This is a guest post by Malcolm Ryan, a Post-Doctoral Research Associate and Lecturer at the University of New South Wales, Australia. The original version of this post is also available on his blog.

Wordscraper is the new attempt by the Agarwalla brothers to keep the Scrabulous legacy alive. I am not going to comment on the legal issues, as others have done already. Rather, I’d like to explore what the comparison between Scrabble and Wordscraper teaches us about game design.

Last year I wrote a detailed design analysis of Scrabble as an exercise for my game design class. (I seem to have mislaid the document for the moment. I will try to exhume it if there is interest.) In it, I commented that the layout of bonus squares, particularly the double and triple word scores, is carefully strategic. A lot of the strategy of Scrabble play is about gaining access to those squares and preventing your opponent from doing the same. Often there is a trade-off when playing a word between maximising points and minimising the opportunity for your opponent to reach a bonus. These trade-offs are an embodiment of Sid Meier’s maxim: “A game is a series of interesting choices”. They are a large part of what makes the game fun.

The bonuses also determine the dramatic arc of the game. My games usually follow a pattern: an expansion from the centre following one of the diagonal lines of double word scores into one corner and then another. The triples are particularly hard to reach and their use marks a milestone in the drama of the game, with the possibility of a major turn-around in the scoring. Once a corner is “full” there is a lull as a new phase in the game begins as play expands into another corner.

Wordscraper, by eliminating predefined boards, loses this sense of drama. Randomly generated boards don’t offer the same choices or the same progression. Big bonuses arrive far too haphazardly, upsetting the scoreboard without the same build-up of careful negotiation. The work of game design is being neglected.

Boards can of course be adjusted by players, and some players may enjoy the process of inventing their own boards, but I predict the majority of casual game players will be disappointed. The default generated boards are simply not fun to play on. It is one thing to provide a level-editor as an addition to your designed content; it is another thing to provide no designed content at all.

I think Wordscraper could be rescued if:

1. They provided a small number of pre-designed boards which matched the quality of Scrabble’s careful layout, and
2. They provided players with the ability to share boards so that the average player can enjoy the work of the more skilled and motivated board designers.

Even so, I doubt that the design space is really rich enough to support innovative player-designed content. Is there another interesting board layout that is sufficiently different to the Scrabble standard to make it worthwhile setting up and playing? If they added more parameters than just the placement of bonuses (board size? hexagonal tiles?), maybe, but as it stands I think it unlikely.

In homage to Manveer Heir, I’d like to draw two design lessons:

Lesson one: Level design is a important part of game design. A good mechanism can be ruined by careless level layout. Use random levels with caution.

Lesson two: Level-editors should be provided in addition to well-designed content, not as a replacement for it. Level editors are pointless if the design space is not big enough to create interestingly different levels.

One of the interesting things about social network application development is that many developers attempt to solve their retention problems by adding game-like elements (points, achievements, leader boards). It’s a great way to start thinking, but most web app developers underestimate the challenge of designing balanced game dynamics that both suck new players in and keep the top players coming back for more.

As Lightspeed’s Jeremy Liew notes,

Most MMOGs have built an end-game to keep their best players engaged after they have topped out on the standard game. This end-game often relies on different game dynamics to the original game. I have seen few social games build such an end-game yet, although this is actually much easier to do for a web based games since it doesn’t actually have to be built until you have end-stage players.

Jeremy points to an excellent post by Cameron Sorden at Massively who points out some suggestions that all game developers should consider for keeping top players engaged:

• Player vs player combat
• Raiding
• Special achievements/advancements
• Collecting special items
• Anti-grief patrol (protecting newbies from more experienced ones)
• Role-playing
• Cultivating trade skills
• Playing the market

Game designers invest months upon months doing this right in MMOs. Do you see any examples of games on Facebook doing this well?

Despite the fact that avatar customization is a business, while hundreds of games have been developed for Facebook, almost no successful games have them. Why is this the case?

Bret Terrill, CEO of Tenuki, identified 4 reasons in a recent blog post:

1. You’re really you on Facebook. In most situations where avatars are successful, users are masking their identities…
2. Avatar applications don’t encourage repeat usage. I customize my avatar once and I’m done…
3. It’s all lead-gen. The goal of most of the well-done avatar apps is to drive you from Facebook to another property. That’s not the way to grow a Facebook app.
4. No virality. None of the existing avatar applications have any viral hooks build into them, except the common “Here’s 50 coins if you add a friend” invite page…

Blake Commagere, developer of the Monsters suite of Facebook games, touched on this subject in a recent interview. Blake said,

I’ve also added some new things recently, including the ability to put your friends in a chicken suit. This is a very polarizing feature – users either love it or hate it. It’s a big deal when you change players’ avatars – you have to make that really expensive (all other weapons don’t affect look).

While developers have not yet created games that use avatars inside the social networking context, there are bound to be people who will get it right over the coming year. Who do you think it will be?