Inside Social Games

You are all probably aware by now of Playfish’s incorporation of in-game advertisement for their major titles when they starting working with Google back in April. You may also be aware of the integration with PayPal when they launched in-game transactions.

However, marking a new sponsorship model for the company, Playfish just announced the launch of a premium campaign with Procter & Gamble and Herbal Essences via Geo Challenge in the United Kingdom.

This new version of the game has introduced what Playfish dubs, “The Great Escape Edition” which provides players with a brand new source of game play and, as expected, advertises the new Herbal Essences range from Procter and Gamble in a rather unorthodox manner.

The game still utilizes the video ads at the end, but in addition the entire art style of the game has been changed to fully encompass the look and feel that is Herbal Essences. The new Great Escape version is full of different pinks, flowers, exotic plant life, and virtually anything else you might see in your standard Herbal Essences commercial. All of this, however, has been seamlessly integrated into the game play and art work and is 100% unintrusive to the player - unlike so many other forms of advertisement (i.e. flashing banners, pop ups, etc).

Unfortunately, those that are not in the UK are unable to play this version of the game at this time.

[via Playfish Blog]

Ho, ho, ho and a Merry Christmas to all. Okay, maybe it’s not Christmas yet, but the holidays are here and everyone is feeling the spirit. The MMOs are releasing holiday festivities in their worlds, Playfish is updating their titles with festive graphics, and other companies are releasing titles just for the season; which, as you can guess, is what Christmas Carnage is for.

Though the game doesn’t really support the title’s claim of “carnage” it is still quite entertaining to play. Santa’s sleigh has crash landed in Christmas Town and the presents and elves are scattered about everywhere. Playing as one of the reindeer, and armed with just a wooden mallet you are charged with rounding up all those mischievous little elves and collecting as many presents as possible in the time allotted (five minutes) in the hopes of saving Christmas (exactly how many times in December does this holiday get threatened?).

The game play is pretty simple, and at its most basic core, it sounds pretty boring (run around and collect stuff). However, keep in mind that games such as the legendary Mario series have a boring core mechanic too at first glance: Run around and jump on things.

However, what makes simple games like this successful is the style that is applied to it, and that is exactly what Christmas Carnage does. All you do is race the clock and pick up items, but some of the presents you unlock are so absolutely hilarious, such as fake reindeer poo and that ever coveted “brain training with Paris Hilton,” that playing is more than worth your while. In addition to these clever ideas, the sound effects are wonderful, as the game is littered with classic, slap-stick, cartoon sound effects as you whack those scurrying and suspiciously short elves with your trusty mallet.

The game also saves all of the unique presents you unlock and allows you to send them as virtual Christmas gifts to your Facebook buddies. Though this gift giving is nothing unusual, they will definitely get a laugh out of them. Unfortunately, after you have collected all of the unique gifts the game does get dull very quickly, but until then it is extremely entertaining.

Christmas Carnage also brings some new style to the social table as well. Unlike most Facebook titles, this game is fully 3D and looks fairly decent as compared to other apps. What is most curious though is that the developers, Caspian Learning, have created a platform that enables other developers to also create similar games very quickly and at minimal cost. Caspian also states that they are looking to hear from any interested parties in order to co-develop more titles like Christmas Carnage in 2009, especially those that focus on MMO and psychology based games.

The question to ask now, is will we begin to see more fully 3D games on Facebook next year? It is highly doubtful that this would not be the case, though the 2D RPG style applications are definitely going to remain the dominate “species” in the space since they are significantly easier for a wider range of developers to create. Regardless, as long as the games themselves are fun, it is unlikely that anyone will really care if they are 3D or 2D. As for Christmas Carnage itself, while the fun factor lasts only for a short time, it puts a smile on your face, thus making it worth the time invested. Consider it a virtual Christmas gift.

There’s always a distinct issue of concern for casual game players, and that is the amount of time they need to invest into a game in order to feel like they have accomplished something. It comes back to the whole core versus casual demographic battle, and how to please both. Casual gamers, however, have been more of a difficult market to please in the past, but in current time, the process has become rather formulaic. The biggest thing to remember is that they don’t want to invest a lot of time, they want to be rewarded, and they want a challenge of the mind as well as the body (twitch reaction).

The hardest part is always the time invested. How much is enough? How much is too little? It is a rather fine line and easy to take the wrong direction, and unfortunately, Fable Island takes it in the latter. Essentially, you pick a location to travel to (home, town, etc) and you either fish or explore.

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What, you were expecting more? Sorry, that’s about it. The game is almost completely passive. You set your state (fishing, exploring, or none) and come back an hour or so later to see what you caught or found. Okay, yes, you do have to manage your energy by stopping at some point so you don’t end up in the hospital, and you can buy new equipment (bait, etc) in order to fish and such better, but that’s all there is to the game play. Eventually, you will have to do this in order to catch everything in the game, but the amount of play is, at best, 30-60 seconds at a time and that includes shopping time for new bait.

As a straight-up game, Fable Island gets boring quickly, but giving the developers the benefit of the doubt, there is some merit in their creation. As far as any online game goes, they can consume vast amounts of time, but the way they see Fable Island, is as a quick app to check up on for a few minutes during a break, lunch, or during a commercial. If you think about it that way, and not as a game, the application isn’t quite so blase. People can log on, check out what they got, and move on with life.

Nevertheless, if this is the direction that the developers are going, then they will need to ad a lot more depth to the game. Currently, the it lets you compete with friends to see who can catch what, but this is no where near enough. The idea of the game seems to be the creation of a relaxing look and feel, but there’s not even that much to look at. The world needs to look, feel, and sound alive. Simply watch any of the Corona commercials, and you can get a solid idea of what relaxation truly encompasses with those calming waves, the sea gulls off in the distance, and the wind whistling through the palm fronds. That is what it means to be relaxed. That alone would create a calming sensation that would most likely entice people to leave the game running in the background just to listen to it. Furthermore, there should be active fishing and exploring of some sort. Granted, the game is meant to consume as little time as possible, but at least with the option, it wouldn’t get so boring so quickly.

At the moment, Fable Island is a good idea in theory, but not that strong in practice. The almost completely passive game play makes the game incredibly boring very quickly. Of course, if you’re not looking for a “game” and just something to look at now and again, then the light shines more favorably on the app. Nevertheless, the game does have a great deal of potential, because the idea is a good idea. It needs a lot of work, but it is not impossible to get there.

The Argawalla brothers may be best known for Scrabulous and their follow-up game Wordscraper, but they do have other titles on offer. One of those is Chess Pro, the classic game available for you and a Facebook friend to play together.

As you can see from the image above, the game has been kept very simple. The chess pieces follow a simple, clear design and appear on a numbered chess board.

Players perform moves by clicking over a piece with the mouse and dragging it to the desired board square. When happy you click the “Play Move” button and the board gets updated. One problem I had with this was the other player didn’t automatically get their version of the board updated, so you sit there constantly hitting the refresh button when it is your opponents turn.

A small chat box forms part of the interface making communication simpler between players, but this is again hampered by the update issue. Messages don’t get displayed unless you hit the refresh button. Checking the options you can select the board auto-update, but this seems to be limited to every 2 minutes. Why not just have an update for both players every time an action is performed?

One of the game’s features is the ability to not only play simultaneous games, but also continue a game when the other player is offline. This means you can have a long-lasting game without the problem of you both needing to be online at the same time to play.

Chess Pro is not the only chess game available on Facebook. Just putting the term “Chess” into the Facebook search box gets you 5 pages of results. From playing a few from the list I believe Chess Pro needs to improve in a number of areas before it becomes the chess game of choice on the network.

To begin with there is no AI option so you have to play against a friend. Having an option to play against the computer is a good backup in case your chess playing buddies aren’t around, although the option to play against an offline friend is a plus point. Graphically it is also lacking and there are some better alternatives available.

Finally, it has no aids for the new Chess player. This would be useful as if you are new to the game it can be difficult to remember where some pieces can move. Alternative Chess Fan, for example, highlights the available destination squares your piece can move to when you click on it. It sounds simple, but very useful for a new player.

Right now, if you asked me to recommend a chess game on Facebook it would be difficult to whittle the choices down to just one. Chess Pro is a capable implementation with a nice simultaneous game and offline play feature, but it is limited and there are alternatives that offer more in terms of graphics and play options. The lack of automatic refresh-on-action updates also counts against it.

Surprisingly enough, a lot of people are playing KickMania on Facebook to put the boot to their friends. One can only hope that this desire applies strictly to the game, and not some deep seeded roots within reality. How on Earth do people kick so far? Some of these coveted kicks are well over 200, even 300 meters.

Well, there are a few secrets to share that those “ass-assins” use that might help you in your quest to own your very own collection of…we’ll stop. Anyway, you have to start with the basics, which means the more obvious tips: Start owning your friends. That’s right, in order to better kick asses, you need to own more people. Here’s the deal, the more you own, the more expensive (and more powerful) kicks become available. Assuming that you have done this already and have owned enough people to unlock the $1000 kick, then it comes down to a little bit of finesse.

The trick is timing, positioning, and explosives. First off, make sure you’ve owned 500 people so that you have access to the maximum of five explosive charges. These charges will allow you to detonate an explosion near the crash dummy as he or she reaches the ground and allows you to get some extra distance, but before that can come into play the initial kick has to be perfect.

KickMania utilizes a very well built physics engine to simulate the rag doll effect. That means that momentum, trajectory, power, and mass all come into play. With that in mind, some players say that the male dummy is the better choice because it has more mass, and more mass equals more momentum. While this isn’t written in stone, it is worth considering. Despite whether or not you choose to use a male or female dummy, you still have to be both very quick in reacting to the power meter and incredibly precise on your position. Before you do anything, try to position your foot near the dummy’s waist, just where the shirt and pants meet at a 45 degree angle. Once you’re ready, be prepared to react quickly to the power meter and attempt to kick at its highest apex for the greatest potential.

$1000 Kick: Check. Position: Check. Power: Check. Okay, so now comes the use of explosives. For $50 you can detonate a charge, but you will need a kick of at least 30 meters to even see the first one. These charges activate when you get close to them, and once near, you can press “spacebar” to set them off. This, however, is where timing is critical. Remember, that this game is a simulated physics engine, thus both angle and distance from the explosion are going to affect trajectory and momentum. If you detonate too far away, you will get little to no result. If you go too soon, you might send your target backwards. What you want to try and do is trigger the explosion at the last possible second so that it goes off before the dummy’s center of mass hits the ground and is at about a 45 degree angle to the right of the charge. Each well timed charge should get you an extra 30 - 50 meters on your total kick distance.

Markus Weischselbaum of KickMania describes it in a technical sort of way on the KickMania forums: “The direction of the boost vector is an imaginary line from the explosive charge towards the center of mass of the body….the force applied to the body is inversely proportional to the square of its distance from the explosion.”

There you have it. Before you even start going for those distance records, you’re going to have to earn all five explosives and that $1000 kick. Once you’ve done that though, it all comes down to position, power, timing, and practice. Finding that sweet spot for all three major elements of the game is pretty tough, but now that you know what to look for, it should make your endeavors a little easier to pursue. Best of luck fellow ass kickers, and remember to wear padded jeans.

It’s the end of another year folks, and with the coming holidays it means parties, food, drink, gifts, resolutions, more food, and, of course, reflections on the time that has past. With that spirit in mind, and since the iPhone has been a rather interesting space for social games lately, it is only fair to see how social games are doing on the iPhone charts. Apple has been gracious enough to make this easy by releasing the Top 10 iTunes App Store Downloads of 2008.

There are a number of categories to look at, but what is of most interest here is the overall applications and the games (of course). If, however, you are interested in the other categories, MobileCrunch has a nice compilation of all of them.

Coming in at #2 in overall paid applications is the title, Texas Hold’em.  The accomplishment gives Texas Hold’em a great badge of honor and greatly displays the popularity of such card type games. Many of the other top 10 paid apps overall are games as well.

Top 10 Paid Apps (Overall):

1. Koi Pond
2. Texas Hold’em
3. Moto Chaser
4. Crash Bandicoot: Nitro Kart 3D
5. Super Monkey Ball
6. Cro-Mag Rally
7. Enigmo
8. Pocket Guitar
9. Recorder
10. iBeer

Top 10 Free Apps (Overall):

1. Pandora Radio
2. Facebook
3. Tap Tap Revenge
4. Shazam
5. Labyrinth Lite Edition
6. Remote
7. Google Earth
8. Lightsaber Unleashed
9. AIM
10. Urbanspoon

That brings us to the Top 10 lists for the games category itself. So how did social games do?

Well, no surprise, after seeing the overall charts,  Texas Hold’em hits #1 in the paid category. As for free games, we find a familiar company: SGN. Popping in at the #4 position is the ever so talked about iBowl application that turns the iPhone into a Wii-like remote. This motion based game lets players go through the motions of actual bowling and most certainly went over well with the public (so long as they didn’t look too strange playing it, and didn’t drop their phone in the process!).

Top 10 Paid Games:

1. Texas Hold’em
2. Moto Chaser
3. Crash Bandicoot: Nitro Kart 3D
4. Super Monkey Ball
5. Cro-Mag Rally
6. Enigmo
7. Air Hockey
8. Bejeweled 2
9. Flick Bowling
10. Line Rider iRide

Top 10 Free Games:

1. Tap Tap Revenge
2. Labyrinth Lite Edition
3. Sol Free Solitaire
4. iBowl
5. Pac-Man Lite
6. Touch Hockey: FS5
7. Cannon Challenge
8. Audi A4 Driving Challenge
9. Sudoku
10. reMovem

Although 2 social games broke into the top 10 lists on the iPhone this year, it’s encouraging to see just how many games are succeeding on the iPhone platform - particularly paid apps. We’re looking forward to 2009, as the social infrastructure of the web and mobile web gets increasingly mature.

It was not too long ago that Hasbro filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York against Scrabulous creators RJ Softwares, claiming that the firm infringed upon the intellectual property rights of their classic board game, Scrabble.

Hasbro had originally contacted Facebook regarding the application in question, requesting its removal from the social network, but decided to follow through with lawsuit shortly after launching its own version of Scrabble, naming Scrabulous creators Rajat Agarwalla and Jayant Agarwalla the defendants. The duo took Scrabulous down in July.

As of Monday, however, Hasbro Inc has agreed to withdraw its lawsuit against RJ Software, after the company made changes to its other games, Lexulous and Wordscraper. According to Hasbro claims, these games still had similarities to Scrabble.

Unfortunately, little has been said by Hasbro since the announcement. The only available comment was in an email stating that the withdrawal agreement “provides people in the U.S. and Canada with a choice of different games and also avoids potentially lengthy and costly litigation.”

Hasbro has declined to comment beyond this statement.

[via Reuters]

It is far from uncommon for game developers to outsource to other companies and even freelancers in times of need, but in times past those needs tended to primarily be the creation of art and code assets. However, today, more and more aspects of game development are being handled by third party services, ranging from the monitoring of virtual goods transactions (PlaySpan) to the actual integration of social capabilities (J2Play).

While it isn’t limited specifically to social games, a company by the name of Nonoba has created very cool API for multiplayer games, including a new payments API. So who are they? Well, first and foremost Nonoba is a gaming community that allows you to play and compete online through various games, but more than that, Nonoba also allows Flash developers to upload, rate, and share their games with the world.

This is a company that provides a service that allows developers to focus strictly on game play and removes the trouble of building a robust multiplayer backends. “The Nonoba Multiplayer API” is combined with their “Nonoba Game Server” handles the heavy server connections, communication systems, and connecting the various players together. Nonoba hosts all of the server side code, which means that speed and latency are less an issue than they normally would be, thus making real-time as well as turn based games possible with this platform.

In addition, Nonoba also tracks all of the connections, databases, sockets, registrations, and so on so developers don’t have to worry about it. They even include lobbies, chat, ranking systems, as well as a plethora of other features. But what is most impressive is that it can scale to any reasonable size game you have (or whatever size it ends up growing too).

Also available is the payment API, and this is where Nonoba differentiates slightly from other similar services. As you know, there are a number of games that require payment of some sort, most of which are either subscription or virtual goods based. Regardless of the type, setting up a system like this is a whole new can of worms that a number of Flash developers have never had to deal with - and is a tremendous undertaking. Not only do you have to set up an entire payment system, but a means of tracking and reconciling all payments and purchases. Compound this with a large number of users and you can begin to see the headache that will soon entail.

As you have certainly guessed by now, this is where Nonoba sets all of this up for you, and it works regardless of whether your game is single or multiplayer. Revenues are split 70/30 with the developer taking the 70%, but considering the cost of developing something like this from scratch, it is probably well worth it (at least for a while).

The API also allows you to charge for anything in your game, including items, levels, or even the entire game itself. Your shops are set up for you, and you are free to embed your game on any other site besides Nonoba and it will work perfectly fine. The only downside, is that the only current provider is PayPal. It is claimed that more are coming soon, but at the moment, this is the only choice available.

Nonoba is most certainly a powerful set of APIs despite the type of game it is used for. The fact that game developers can come to Nonoba for not one, but two very powerful and often critical online gaming features is an impressive addition in and of itself. Long story short, companies like this means more quality games for the players and less headaches for the makers.

It wasn’t too long ago that Yahoo decided to rethink its strategy. In an attempt to save the platform, they planned to allow third-party applications to plug into and link Yahoo services and user data. As of today, that vision is now starting to become reality.

Now, the Yahoo platform is becoming more open and social. Yahoo has certainly taken a shift in the social network direction, especially with Mail - which allows you to see updates, emails from various social connections, and built in services such as Flickr and WordPress - and My Yahoo.

Largely due to these new social features, many of the major social game developers made their debut on the Yahoo application platform today. These include companies such as Playfish, Zynga, and RockYou.

This application gallery is still small, but it is definitely going to grow quickly. As it stands, Zynga seems to be the biggest contributor with some of it’s major titles such as Mafia Wars and Bumper Stickers. However, Playfish has also connected its classically popular Bowling Buddies, and RockYou has launched My Emote.

It’s doubtful that any developer will ignore the new Yahoo. Not only is there a large existing user base, but the platform also has extensive developer support. Yahoo offers multiple sources of documentation and various APIs to assist in both editing your applications as well as making them social. Some of the features that Yahoo has made available are the Yahoo Social Directory API, the Updates API, OpenSocial, and access to a support and community forum.

Will Yahoo evolve into a new social network? We’ll see, but as more parts of the Yahoo platform roll out over the coming months, it definitely has the potential to become a big social gaming platform.

Owned and operated by the Finnish Sulake Corporation, Habbo Hotel, a virtual world game, has been host to a social network of teenagers for years. Since its inception back in 2000, the virtual goods based business has expanded to include communities across 31 countries in five continents.

The game allows players to create their own Hotel rooms and create a social space for themselves and their friends using furniture they buy with real currency. They can then travel around this virtual world to socialize with others within various “chat rooms.” Each room is either dubbed public or guest, the latter of which consists of a highly customized space created by a player who then has complete control over whom they admit. Public rooms, on the other hand, are created by Sulake themselves and are not customizable, but rather depict scenes such as restaurants, bars, clubs, etc. In addition, the free guest rooms also play host a number of mini-games such as Falling Furni, Quiz, and Wobble Squabble. Each game is hosted by the administrator and can reward winners various prizes such as new furniture.

The company became profitable this year, 2008, with revenues of $50 million. Habbo has 100 million registered users and there are 10 million active players each month.

Sulake has also released a mobile version of the service called Mini Friday that is nearing the 1 million registered user mark. Here’s what makes that number even better: Not only is the game restricted to users 18 and up, but it only works on the Nokia S60 series of mobile phones.

Inside Mini Friday, players can create their own avatar, customizing aspects such as gender, height, and clothing then move about and between rooms. As most of the rooms look to be bars, the chat is more mature, and players can talk between one another individually or “shout” and be heard by all.

Currently, the game is still in beta, and has been since 2006. Since that time, it has steadily grown in popularity, especially in areas such as Indonesia, and is expected to leave the testing phase soon.

Perhaps what is most interesting, however, is a comment noted in a VentureBeat article from Habbo Hotel co-founder Aapo Kyrola. While there is little to go on at this time, Kyrola did state that the company is working on an iPhone version of this application. He goes on to say that compared to the Nokia platform, the iPhone has been a significantly better experience.

[via VentureBeat]