TOJam is not a competition. It’s rather more like camp … hot, sweaty nerd camp fueled by energy drinks and candy bars. Every year, the organizers suggest that each game feature a Toronto-specific sound effect, and a picture of a goat on a pole (rendered any way the game’s artist chooses). Here’s the goat in all its glory:

Here’s the goat’s appearance in some of the TOJam games i’ve developed over the years:

Each TOJam also features a suggested theme. Past themes have included “Cheese”, “Scale“, and “Missing“. This year’s theme is “What Just Happened?” As i do every year, i’d like to riff on the TOJam theme and explore its possibilities.

Windbag

The very first thing that comes to mind when i hear “What Just Happened?” is Fred Willard in A Mighty Wind:

Wha’ Happened?? Ha ha ha ha. This is one of those movie lines i repeat all the time, and no one knows what i’m talking about. What are its ramifications for game design? None! But Fred Willard rocks my world.

WTFism

Like “Cheese”, the “What Just Happened?” theme gives a lot of room for WTFism. You can pack your game with ton of nonsensical crap that leaves the player saying “What Just Happened?” This is kind of a cop-out. Or maybe it’s because i’m old. i used to watch terrible movies and teevee shows just to laugh at them, but when you get old enough that you really start to feel your time on Earth is tragically limited, you tend to gravitate more towards entertaining yourself with stuff that’s actually worth your time.

The Scene of the Crime

A much more literal interpretation of the theme might involve a game where the player is shown the aftermath of an event, and has to work backwards to figure out what caused the event. This would likely be a plot-driven graphic adventure-style game, maybe in the vein of Déjà Vu, where you wake up in a bathroom stall with amnesia.

Unfortunately these days, starting a point n’ click game with amnesia is a hackneyed trope used in nearly every free Escape the Room Flash game i’ve played. At the risk of calling every game contrivance a cop-out, i’ll happily call this one out too: amnesia is a tired device that should be given a 10-year breather in video games, or until somebody can do something interesting with it.

In the case of the Escape the Room games, the situation’s even more dire, because the games all begin with “You are trapped in a room and you don’t know who you are”, and end with “You got out of the room!” There’s no character or plot development whatsoever … just a key inexplicably hidden behind a scrap of wallpaper, and a VCR code in the breakaway leg of the couch.

Memory Game

The trouble with a graphic adventure game where you’re trying to figure out What Just Happened is that it’s probably not going to be very replayable, and it has a big spoil factor on it. Take something like The Sixth Sense by M. Night Shamalamadingdong: if you haven’t seen it, and someone spoils the ending for you by revealing that Bruce Willis has a penis, you may not enjoy the movie when you finally get around to watching it. You may not even bother watching it at all.

Same deal with our hypothetical graphic adventure game: once someone tells you that What Just Happened is that the Evil Dr. Douchebag created a murder machine that killed everyone over five feet tall, and that THAT was the mysterious detail linking all of the survivors, the game might be less fun to play.

Here’s a less plot-heavy, more replayable game that’s simpler to program in a weekend: there’s a child’s memory game that we play at birthday parties, where you lay out a number of objects on the table. Everyone stares at the table for one minute. Then you tell all the kids to close their eyes, and you take an item away. The kids have to guess what’s missing.

What Just Happened? Mommy stole the fork.

Time-Bending

The past-tense of the What Just Happened theme may lend itself to a game involving time-bending or time-travel, a la Braid, or Back to the Future Part II on the NES.

Picture Super Mario Bros., and you show the player the level AFTER he’s gone through it: certain blocks are smashed, certain goombas are squished … and the player has to run through the level smashing all the same blocks and squishing all the same goombas in an effort to re-create the endgame state he’s just seen.

It would be way more interesting if you did this with more of a puzzle platformer, where there are switches and doors and traps and contrivances, which would make the re-creation far more interesting (ie “How did i get the pile of blocks to fall on top of that platform? What order do i have to do things in to get that to happen like that?”)

Word Association

You could bend the “rules” a bit and play around with the words in the theme. “What Just Happened?” could be the title about a Marmaduke-like dog named What.

Your game could be about a crusading judge on an alien planet, and you have to determine the ways in which he’s meted out justice by learning the aliens’ legal system. “What Thing that is Just Just Happened?” Meh. It’s a stretch.

And as long as i’m stretching:

Whatever you decide to pull together for your TOJam game, just keep in mind the rules i’ve learned from four previous jams:

1. Keep it simple enough to finish.
2. Finishing is everything.
3. If you want to get any love from players, either on the final night of the Jam or at the public TOJam Arcade, your game MUST be fast to learn, and easy to pick up and play. If you have to sit next to the player and explain how to control the game or what’s going on or what that squiggly shape is supposed to represent, you’ve failed. So:
4. Very strongly consider reserving a number of hours in the jam to build some sort of in-game tutorial to help the player understand your game, so that you don’t have to hand-hold.

i can’t tell you how many times i’ve sat down to play a TOJam game and have thought “What Just Happened?”, as in “how did a team of six people just spend an entire weekend building a game where i can’t figure out what the heck is going on?” This year, let’s keep the mystery of what just happened thematic, and create a great crop of games where the goals and controls are clear as crystal.

See you at the jam!

One of the most popular series of articles i’ve ever written was called Pimp My Game. It was an experiment in game monetization, back before i’d ever released a game of my own. i wanted to know how much money i could earn distributing a game, so that i’d know the amount of money i could invest in development in order to break even, at the very least.

The results were … abysmal. The Pimp My Game feature predates a number of tools and tricks that have made it far more possible for Flash game developers to earn money on their creations – most notably Flash Game License and microtransactions (GamerSafe/HeyZap/Mochi Coins).

Even with those services, it struck me that the amount of money required to develop a game of significant scope and scale to catch the attention of the average portal-goer, versus the relative risk of not landing a large enough sponsorship or earning cash back through scant ad rev share, was not a racket i really wanted to be in. Untold Entertainment makes custom games as a service for a number of clients, and i feel we’re paid appropriately for our efforts. i’ve never developed a game for a client on the off chance that they’d pay money for it.

i’ve been told numerous times, not least of all by the Flash Game License operators themselves, that game sponsorships can get up into five figures, with $20 000 being thrown around most often by people trying to impress me. Who’s paying these sponsorships? The buyers are mostly game portal owners.

The Cake is a Lie

What’s a game portal? It’s a websites that aggregate games and sandbags them with assloads of ads.

So a portal can pay out $20k to sponsor a game. What’s in it for the portal? Usually, portals require the game developers to incorporate the hyperlinked portal logo in the game pre-roll, and possibly other promotional hooks – a “more games” button on the title screen leading back to the portal, portal-specific high scores – that sort of thing. The idea is that players play these free Flash games, which are distributed far and wide to tens of thousands of sites, and the players may purposely (or inadvertently) click somewhere in the game to be brought to the sponsoring portal. Sponsors will often pay extra cash for exclusivity rights.

And how does the portal make enough money to pay a sponsorship? Unless i’m missing something, the most significant source of revenue for a game portal is advertising. There are some smaller, secondary streams – for example, Mochimedia kicks 10% of Mochi Coins sales to the portal when players spend Mochi Coins in games hosted on those portals, and Mochi also cuts the portal in for a small percentage of Mochiads revenue, but there we’re talking about fractions of fractions of pennies. The bread and butter of any games portal is advertising.

If You Can’t Beat ‘Em …

At this point i began eyeing the portals themselves with keen interest. $20 000 for a sponsorship? Again, unless i’m missing something, that must mean that at some point, a portal earns more than $20k in advertising. And game portal advertising revenue is passive income, that elusive majestic money creature that i’m constantly persuing. You just have to throw up a portal, stick some games on there, surround the games with ads, and kick back while waves of money roll over you like a stinky cash tsunami. “Beautiful”, i thought. “Let’s do this thing.”

Here are the steps i followed to set up my first portal, WordGameWorld.com:

1. Register the domain name – $10
2. Pay for hosting. i’m paying $33/mo to a company called 1&1 to host a VPS (Virtual Private Server), which is essentially like having my own (underpowered) web server computer. i originally started renting the VPS so that we could power Interruping Cow Trivia using the multiplayer ElectroServer software. You can probably get away with paying a regular web host less than $10/mo to host a portal.
3. Install WordPress, which is very popular free blog software. The Untold Entertainment blog you’re reading now runs on WordPress.
4. Purchase a WPArcade theme and plugin. These guys license a WordPress theme (skin) that makes your site look like a game portal. The plugin they provide enables you to enter the game distribution rss feed address from MochiMedia and, with the click of a button, inject ten thousand free Flash games into your portal site.
5. Set up a Google Adsense account. This was the trickiest step – at first, Google denied my registration because WordGameWorld.com had zero traffic. WordGameWorld.com was live for a long time with no advertising, until i got a hot tip from a Twitter friend that once Adsense approved one of my sites, i could use Adsense ads on other sites that i owned. i leveraged the traffic on UntoldEntertainment.com to get my account approved, and then placed the ads around the WPArcade WordPress theme using their tool.

Step 4: Proft?

At this point, i had contractors come in to widen my front door in anticipation of the deluge of cash that would no doubt come blasting into my living room from men with money guns, all owing to this most brilliant idea of mine. It wasn’t long before i figured out that setting up a game portal is easy … driving traffic to it ain’t.

For the remainder of this series, i’ll document my madcap methods i used to try to drive traffic to my game portals. My journey takes me from dating services for gay nerds, to bikini-clad women in Brazil, to the very bowels of The Internatz itself … all in the name of making money off the backs of the free Flash game developers that i never want to become. i promise it will be lurid, sleazy, and informative. But mostly lurid.

Continuity is a student project (JEALOUS!), and bears the hallmark of student projects/amateur game developers/free-to-play Flash games: a stick figure as the lead character. Countless free-to-play Flash games star the very same character. The stick man is, i believe, the most famous and popular of all video game characters – moreso than Mario, Pac-Man or Tim Langdell.

Brand and Deliver

i attend many many video game events where someone in-the-know preaches from the pulpit to people not in-the-know, mostly students and hobbyists and amateurs. And the one tip that i hear repeated again and again, particularly in the free-to-play Flash (and even iPhone) climate where there’s a lot of competition and it’s tough to be heard above the noise, is to “build a brand.” Put another way, “develop your own original IP.” They say this because generally speaking, students, hobbyists and amateurs don’t build brands. But what does building a brand or an IP mean, anyway?

Well, for starters, it means not using a stick man as your main character. You can’t own a stick man. No one can. And your stick man game, even if it’s innovative like Continuity, won’t stand out from the throngs of other stick man games. No one will approach you and ask to buy the rights to your stick man game IP. No one wants to develop comic books or fridge magnets or Band-Aids based on your stick man, because it’s not an ownable or exploitable thing. And, very likely, no one will remember your stick man game. i’m struggling to keep the name “Continuity” in my head as i write this article.

i suspect the creators of Continuity are more passionate about programming than they are artwork. The bones of their game are reasonably solid. Now imagine what they could do if they found an artist and put a little English on it. Maybe Continuity’s main character is a fugitive on the run from the law, or an anthropomorphic kangaroo, or a sorceror who can bend reality to his will? Maybe she’s just a cool-looking chick in a hat? i dunno. But any of these completely trample “stick man”.

Stick Em Up

Let’s do the opposite: let’s take a strong brand and use a stick man instead. i don’t feel that the main character in Braid, “Tim”, was incredibly interesting. But he was short and wore a tie and was at least halfway there.

Now let’s wipe him out and replace him with a stick man and box art:

From awesome to n’awsome in sixty seconds.

Or let’s go with something like Super Mario Galaxy. Mario doesn’t say much, but his personality shines through the way he’s drawn and the way he animates. He’s a pleasantly plump Italian plumber who utters adorably stereotyped phrases like “It’s-a me!” and “Bowser Koopa sleeps with-a the fishes!” So here’s the game with its very broadly appealing brand identity:

And now, Super Mario Galaxy with stick men and box art:

Even though Braid has a wonderfully unique gameplay mechanic to offer (despite horrible, horrible grade 12 poetry class writing), and Super Mario Galaxy is a super-solid 3D platformer, if you take away the brand, you take away MOST of the experience. That’s right, i said MOST. Not half. Visuals are not half of a game. Even though your team and man-hours may be split 50/50 between code and art, a well-coded game with bad art (or stick men) that can compete commercially is a rare beast indeed. i’ll boldly put it this way: art and sound are 70-80% of both the player’s experience, and your ability as a designer to market and profit from your game.

Sharp-Dressed Man

The one interesting exception i’ll throw out here is Fancy Pants Adventures, a free-to-play Flash game with great programming and tight platform controls. These games star a stick man as their lead character, but dig the difference: a pair of yellow pants and a shock of hair.

Can you own a sitck man with a pair of yellow pants and a shock of hair? Sure you can. Can you build a strong original IP with such a minimally modified figure? Absolutely. In this case, the pants and the hair are all it took to elevate Fancy Pants Adventures from a generic and forgettable free-to-play platformer, to a memorable series that has done extremely well for the developer.

Now let’s take a look at the same character with no pants and hair:

Visual style and brand identity are not nice-to-haves. If you have any hope of rising above the thousands of hobbyists, amateurs, and even certain professional developers in the free-to-play space, visual style and brand identity are HAVE-to-haves. Free yourself from the tyranny of stick men and, at the very least, put a hat on that guy. Then you can go from this:

To this:

The difference is brand recognition, noteriety and, hopefully, money in the bank.

One of the most-repeated tips i heard at the Casual Connect conference a few weeks ago was to develop a strong brand. Customers like strong brands. Strong branding unifies all your … your stuff under one label. Strong brands are about striking, professional-looking logos, consistent use of colours and fonts, and maybe even some sort of manifesto or feeling that you emit.

Our over-arching brand is called Untold Entertainment. The word “untold” means “lots”. Lots of entertainment.

Our Brand’s Origin Story

It bothers me a little when i go to a conference or a function, and i’ll meet a few new people in a huddle, and someone will say “who are you?” And i’ll say “i’m Ryan Creighton. i run a small game design studio in Toronto called Untold Entertainment.” And the person will say “Oh? What type of work do you do?” And this jackass over here – the one in the sweater vest – will say “It’s untold! He can’t tell you! RAH HA HA HA!” Then he’ll slap his knee and go out and kill someone while drunk driving.

But it doesn’t happen all that often. Most people know what the word means. And most people have heard someone use the wording “untold entertainment” in casual speech, usually to describe something outlandish. Example: “So i was at the fair today, and they had a duck balancing on a ball juggling chainsaws. Untold entertainment.”

In fact – and i’m not kidding – our original company logo was a duck balancing on a ball juggling chainsaws.

This was my Facebook avatar at the time (and still is, actually):

i’m not a big comic book fan, but i had this idea of creating a corporate website that looked like one of those junk pages in a comic book, full of special offers for useless and exaggerated products like “moon shoes”, “secret decoder rings”, and “asthma inhalers”:

This is as far as i got before my friends and loved ones (thankfully) stopped me:

Thinking that the saturation was the problem, i kept the logo and moved to a completely black design, and continued to flounder:

In my former life working for a broadcaster, i illustrated a few games using a crude, sketchy style that a lot of people found enduring. (Like Dr. Seuss, i drew things all silly-looking because i’m not very skilled at drawing things for serious. UNlike Dr. Seuss, i toil in relative obscurity.) So the logo evolved into a hastily-scribbled monster gnawing on a cardboard sign, which tested very well with 18-35-year-old women who are married to me.

With our first published Untold Entertainment website, we tried to convey the outlandish “untold entertainment” theme. We had a cartoonish bomb that dropped sausages, and other strange things. Everything was in a doodly, sketchy style:

The Brand You Know

When we hired our first (and to date, only) devoted artist, Mark Duiker. i asked that he stick to the established art style. He seemed a little dismayed. But he eventually pulled off the fantastic-looking ornate marginalia you see around the site today. These doodles are also found on our company letterhead and invoices.

The official company colours are red and browny yellow. These are also the colours i painted my bedroom, a few years before starting the company.

Through the carefully-drawn but careless-seeming visual branding, i hoped to convey a devil-may-care, mischievous, even dangerous attitude that was nevertheless playful and whimsical. The blog monster in our nav shouts too loudly. The gigantic tongue menu that appears when you roll over our About button is completely inappropriate for a professional site. The Twitter bird at the top of each page is just a little out of control. And if we ever get around to launching it, the monster that plucks letters from the project abstracts on our main page to spell naughty words will delight and outrage you. (i’m not making that up either. It exists.)

The Principle of the Thing

The company has five stated principles which, if you haven’t read them, i’ll repeat for you here:

• uncompromising honesty
• constant communication
• the sanctity of childhood
• non-violence in gaming (barring the presence of zombies)
• the use of entertainment to improve, rather than degrade, the human condition

“Constant communication” is in there to give us a competetive edge over game vendors who, i’ve heard, don’t return emails or phone calls to their clients.

We list “uncompromising honesty” because i don’t think many other studios can commit to that. i’ve also heard word that our competitors will pretend that everything’s going smoothly until deadline day, and the reason they weren’t answering phone calls or emails the whole time is that the project went to pot two months ago and they were too lilly-livered to fess up.

We’re courageous enough to fess up. If something’s not going to work, or we’re not going to deliver on time (whether through our own fault or otherwise), we’ll say so. Uncompromising honesty, constantly communicated.

And the other three points stem from my own worldview. i believe in the sanctity of childhood – in other words, you shouldn’t host games about setting people on fire with no content warning when you know damn well that children visit your site regularly, because you own a kids’ teevee channel. *cough* Viacom *cough*

Non-violence in gaming, because i think every other game developer on the planet has the whole violence thing pretty much covered. We’d like to tackle something a little more innovative. (The caveat, of course, is that zombies are pure unfettered evil, and they’re just gonna have to die. Uh … again.)

Entertainment to improve the human condition … when i wrote this, i may have been thinking specifically of Joe Cartoon putting rodents in blenders, or people developing rape games, or Happy Tree Friends, or any of the dreck that people fill their minds with these days. If you catch us creating “Britney Spears Must Die” games or “Close Range“-style games, by all means, please call us out on it.

So What’s On Your Mind?

i’ve been giving a lot of thought to developing a games portal. i’ve been considering Big Fish Games, the heavy-lifter in the casual downloadable space, and what they did right to haul in all that traffic (Kajillions of players a day, i’m told – but i think that might be an exaggeration.) Here are a few things i think they figured out:

1. Define your audience. (Big Fish Games targets middle-aged women)
2. Develop a strong brand. BFG’s official colours are blue and white, with a green accent. Their logo is professionally-designed, with a fish character that stays on-model (ie doesn’t look unsettling or retarded) in various poses.

   

   A face only a mother could give her life’s savings to

3. Cook up some kind of tag line. BFG’s is “A New Game Every Day!” Our is “We Make Flash Games”, which will have to change when we finally kick Flash to the curb and indulge our new mistress, Unity3D.
4. Devote significant time and energy to customer service.
5. Track every player action within an inch of its life, and act on the stats you collect.
6. Take 70% of all shared revenues, then cackle evilly and return to your coffin before the sun scorches your ashen skin.

Surveying the Landscape

So with these points in mind, i gaze across the Flash game portal space. i think about branding, and what a strong brand looks and feels like, and then i look at the top ten games that bring traffic to our roving game Two By Two in the MochiMedia distribution network.

Let’s keep it simple and just look at the logos. Beneath each logo, i’ve noted the number of plays the game has enjoyed from each portal:

(For the record, i had not seen the Free Hobo site before writing my Cash Cow Part 2 post on Members, Owners, and Hobos. And here i thought i was so original :)

So please understand that i’m depicting these logos in the best possible light, apart from the rest of the portal structure, which goes a lot like this:

Kicking Midgets

So at this point, i feel that creating a Flash game portal to compete with these guys is like entering Lance Armstrong in the Special Olympics. There are obviously a lot of folks out there who want a quick cash-in, who will pull a few SEO tricks and surround a mountain of free content with a fence of unscrupulous advertising and call it a day.

To the victor, the spoils. Big Fish has dominated the casual downloadable space because they’ve taken additional steps to make their service successful. So here are a few things i think we can learn by looking at the good (BigFish), and the bad/ugly (nearly every Flash portal):

1. Pick an audience. Have the guts to go for a niche, and see if you can’t go after anyone but the hyper-critical (and stingy) teenaged boys that dominate the space at the moment
2. Build a strong brand – think of a style bible, a tagline, and a brand personality. Make sure that brand appeals to your target audience.
3. Listen to your audience. If you get complaints about your portal from teenaged boys, please ignore them. But if the black lesbian wheelchair-bound feminists you’ve identified as your target audience air their complaints or make suggestions, listen up! Do what they say. Then you’ll be treated to an ever-expanding audience of black lesbian wheelchair-bound feminists. And finally, you’ll have the black lesbian wheelchair-bound feminist market cornered.
4. Once you corner your niche market, pick a new, related group and expand outward. It’s like playing Risk. But you won’t land that first group unless you listen carefully, and tailor your service to them.

Let’s Fix This Mess

i hear a lot of talk about making people “fall in love” with your game. They can fall in love with your service, too. And once they open their hearts, they’ll open their wallets. i don’t know about you, but i don’t want to play on a portal that doesn’t respect me – that thrusts ads in my face and doesn’t carefully manicure its collection of games and tailor the library to my tastes and interests.

That’s why we don’t have other audiences playing Flash games. What self-respecting educated father of four adult children wants to wade through a site like Newgrounds looking for a game amidst porno Pokemon cartoons and Muslim terrorist dress-up games? That guy has a credit card, but i’m not getting anywhere near his money if i make him endure bad branding, inappropriate content, and an assload of ads.

The creator of Fantastic Contraption popped in here recently and said that the poor quality of most Flash games made it easy to compete – to totally snooker everyone out there and stand apart. i see the same opportunity with Flash portals. So why don’t you create your own? The industry could stand a little sprucing up.

When i bought my wife a knitting class for her birthday years ago, i picked her up after the session and she was in tears. She thought she’d be a total pro, but her project looked like someone had had a grand mal seizure while playing cat’s cradle.

My whole life, i’ve adored the work of Jim Henson, to the point of changing my middle name to “Henson” (while on the run from Colombian authorities during my tomb-raiding escapades searching for the legendary South American jewel of Toh-Tallei). i finally had my chance to try it out during a workshop with the Nanalan’ / Mr. Meaty puppet troupe The Grogs, only to find that my arthritis and inflexibility kept me from lifting the puppets far enough over my head. It never dawned on me what a physically demanding job puppeteering was. Acting, puppet construction, improv – i could handle all that. But lifting my arm and keeping it straight? Impossible. Another dream crushed.

Down but not Out

Another dream of mine is to create a video game that uses physical, photographed objects as graphics. i want to either make some kind of game from clay, or to build a graphic adventure-style POV game (think MYST) where the whole set it made of physical stuff, and i just drop a camera inside the set and take pictures that serve as the graphics. The player would feel as if he’s inside a dollhouse, i think. i dunno. i haven’t done it yet. Maybe it would just stink?

i’ve also been burning to do a game in clay. “Like, Claymation?” everyone asks. No – not exactly. Stop-motion animation is incredibly time consuming. i just want the look of clay. i need a game with static graphics that are programmatically animated. That way, i can build the elements in clay and simply photograph still shots – no animation needed.

Clay Achin’

i got my chance a few weeks ago while building a game for the Chumby. It’s a simple card game, and all the cards have symbols on them. Why not build the cards and their symbols in clay? i could scratch the itch in the course of a weekend!

My family was taking a trip away, and i had a bachelor Saturday ahead of my, so i siezed my chance. i ordered a pizza, turned on Goodfellas, and set up the camera and tripod. i took a little desk light from my office and shone it on a white piece of paper – that was the extent of my set. Then i modelled nine little shapes and photographed them all. In a few hours, i was able to knock out all the backgrounds and lay the pngs down in my Flash game.

Here, friends, is the assy result:

It’s embarrassingly bad. Like really, really horribly awfully bad. And bad, bad, bad. Just – just no. Just a failure. A horrible, horrible embarrassingly bad failure. But i decided to write a post about it, warts and all, in the hope that some readers would offer advice, or that i’d encourage someone else who was facing the same challenges.

Here’s a short list of things that went wrong:

1. a poor workman blames his tools, but my camera – particularly with its macro focus – is not that stellar
2. i don’t know a thing about lighting.
3. the shadow cast by the yellow clay shape was also yellow, which made it very tough to separate it from the background. i somehow expected a grey shadow (?) Clearly, my scientological understanding of optics is flawed.
4. i’m not the best hand at Photoshop. Whenever i tried to change the colour of the shapes, they’d lose all the wonderful texturing that made them look like clay (that’s why all the shapes are yellow. They’re actually supposed to be different colours)

Ply, ply again

Unlike puppetry, knitting, and championship weiner-eating, i’m determined to keep at this until i get it right. i think my main stumbling block is the photography. If you have any advice or tales from the trenches, speak up! Meanwhile, enjoy a few screenshots from some games made out of clay:

The Ontario Media Development Corporation announced last week its Screen-Based Content Initiative, aimed at putting cash in the pockets of Ontario corporations to develop content for film, television, the Internatz, cell phones, handheld gaming devices – anything with a screen. Note that the money is for developing something. You don’t have to actually arrive at a finished product. This is great news for those of us in the (ambiguously-named) media industry, because most often, paid work takes a back seat to developing new products, as new products are often researched and developed at a loss.

Given the choice between taking a work-for-hire contract to build someone else’s games for someone else’s property, and running on fumes while we create an original product that might become economically viable and could possibly break even … or turn a profit … or not … the survival instinct kicks in, and we sign the work-for-hire contract. We’re very optimistic that we’ll end up in the running for this funding. It’s amazing to think that we’ll have something to call our own.

Everyone and His Dog

The OMDC itself admits that this initiative will stir fierce competition. i’m even wondering how far certain people will try to stretch the “screen-based” requirement. Maybe silk-screen artists will try to make a grab at the funding? Or screen door manufacturers? Or people who screen their phone calls?

The screen-based development activities that the OMDC lists as elligible include:

The top prize is $100 000, up to 75% of the project budget, until the OMDC burns through up to 2 million dollars. The rest of the details are on the OMDC site.

Word.

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We were very excited to receive our Chumby today in the mail. Chumby is an adorable, squeezable bean bag with a cuddly creature-shaped charm on it. You can hold it, cuddle it, or toss it around the room, though that might not be a great idea because it has a computer inside.

The device pulls wireless Internatz content through the ether to display a chain of Flash Lite 3 displays, called “Widgets”, that can do anything from displaying the time and weather to updating you on the latest Chuck Norris legends. The designers built Chumby so that owners can very easily develop content for it, which is then uploaded to the Chumby network to enjoy privately or to share with other Chumby owners. Chumby Industries even actively encourages its userbase to hack the device, providing Chumby schematics and specs on their site.

Long before the Chumby was released, i knew it was right up my alley. i’ve long been looking for a device that will run Flash that i could show off to my friends, and the fact that this thing is encased in a cozy beanbag drove it way beyond “Daddy Wanty” on my “Vapid Materialism Metre”. Unfortunately, the Chumby isn’t the answer to my portable device fantasies that i was hoping for.

Crumby

No device is perfect, and i hate obsessing over the flaws of a device once it’s in my hot little hands, so let’s get this part over with quickly. The trouble with the Chumby, as most online reviews attest, are as follows:

1. Unresponsive touch screen
2. No hardware volume control
3. Wall power required.

This last point absolutely killed me. The Chumby has to be plugged in via its AC adapter and cable to function. My dreams of running through idyllic meadows, spinning my battery-enabled Chumby around in my arms and collapsing into a bed of fluffy dandelions was shattered. The need to plug in your Chumby precludes all kinds of interesting uses, not least of all carrying on a polite conversation with someone about all the magical things you can do, and then proving it by pulling a bizarre touch screen-enabled beanbag out of your pocket and demonstrating your software.

i haven’t owned the Chumby long enough to comment on the missing volume dial, but i immediately noticed that the touch screen was not very sensitive. Regardless, folks with meatfingers like mine are probably best off using a stylus. i can’t even wrap my sausage-digits around the P2 interface to play a lousy song or two.

Untold Entertainment

So with its mandatory wall-tether, the Chumby makes for an expensive, gadget-lover’s alarm clock replacement. i’ll wait until the hardware hackers come up with a cool Chumby Mech Suit that lets your little beanbag walk around the house shooting tiny layzzor beams at your cats. Until then, the Chumby can download and play Widgets for free from the Chumby Network.

i’m still in the process of reviewing the 50-odd games available on the Network to figure out where my Chumby ambitions lie. i am excited to exploit the more unusual features of the device, like the squeeze sensor and the accelerometer.

The Cure for the Common DJ

Even if the Chumby is destined to sit dutifully by my bedside for the rest of its life, i was more than thrilled to unplug my old alarm clock and all but hurl it out the window. For the past few months, i’ve been enduring Toronto radio DJ Bill Carroll talking about how much he hates cyclists. Just this morning, he was talking about the current Toronto police campaign to improve cyclist awarness, and complaining about the fact that he’ll now have to signal before making turns in his car just for the benefit of cyclists, because the police are watching. A few weeks ago, after a cyclist was killed when someone opened a car door in his path, Carroll put the blame on cyclists.

As a cyclist who commutes with his 2-year-old daughter to day care every morning, i don’t enjoy waking up to this guy dangerously misinforming his listeners, tacitly defending motorists who maim and murder adults and children on bicycles. Good riddance, Carroll! Say … perhaps the Chumby could use a “Punch Your Detested Morning DJ in the Face” app?

But no! i must not use my Chumby for evil. i will most likely tool up a quick little game get my feet wet with the Chumby, before embarking on something more ambitious.

If i develop anything that can be played properly on your computer, i’ll be sure to make it available on the Untold Entertainment Games Page. If i build stuff that uses the squeeze or motion sensors, you’ll have to consider getting a Chumby!

Before this company existed, i entered the 2007 Vortex Game Competition. The competition turned out to be a disappointing event catering to students, and run by staff and friends of the incredibly dodgy International Academy of Design and Technology, a school about which i’ve heard stories to curl your hair. (i almost hesitate to link to them. Well – here it is in a nutshell: don’t go.)

The Vortex entry was called Islands Untold. It’s exactly the kind of small MMO the Massively article talks about. One of the posters there says:

To replicate this sort of experience MMO’s would have to forcibly seperate people and that just wouldn’t work out.

Au contraire! Islands Untold solves this problem by grouping players together on islands.

Here is the original game proposal for the competition:

Islands Untold

Islands Untold is a casual multiplayer online game in which teams of five players co-operate to survive, settle, and defend a tiny tropical island. Every island is home to a Thinker, a Maker, a Worker, a Gatherer, and a Shaman. As each player brings a special skill to the island, success depends on teamwork and co-operation. Even so, some players may decide to backstab each other … even if it means angering the island god “the Big Pao”. As players research and create new tools and technology, they will be able to communicate with, and even invade, the thousands of other islands adrift in the endless uncharted seas.

Players will be excited to log into Islands Untold every day to feed their online avatar, much like a virtual pet. Fellow island dwellers will see logged-out players as though they are sleeping. While he is away from the game, a player’s team members might feed his avatar to keep him alive, or decide to murder him! The Big Pao keeps an account of all injustices, and will recincarnate players on different islands if they fall victim to a mutinous tribe.

Every day, a new random item will wash up on the shore of the island. This could be a common item or a rare one – players have to log in to find out! Along with the survival mechanic, the random crate reward is an excellent hook to encourage repeat gameplays.

Project Elements:

The game will utilize a Flash front-end and a PHP/mySQL solution for the backend. Communication between the two will be handled by SmartFox Server, a multiplayer gaming server built specifically for Flash.

Point of Difference:

Islands Untold will appeal to casual online gamers who claim they have no time to play games, yet end up playing as often as so-called hardcore gamers. The game’s depth and complexity will there for players who want a more enriching experience, but to new players, Islands Untold will seem a fun, survival-themed Tamagotchi game.

This game is unique in that it is technically a massively multiplayer online game, except that the potentially thousands of players are grouped together in teams of five on isolated islands. This has the dual effect of speeding up messaging between players, and focussing on co-operation before competition. Since co-operative play is often cited as an appealing element to female gamers, Islands Untold will have a broad consumer reach.

Regular content updates will be supported by micropayments.

<< end submission >>

The judges didn’t show me much love because i didn’t discuss financials, a required component of the competition. (i may have had a more complete presentation, but the organizers confirmed my entry two business days before the event!) The judges also figured i “didn’t need the help”, because i was gainfully employed at a Canadian media conglomorate.

Little did they know that within a few short months, i would leave my company and resort to scrounging for improvised loin cloths in city dumpsters to keep my body warm in the ensuing winter.

i mention it now because it had a really neat twist that has stayed with me throughout my career in game design.

*** HERE BE SPOILERS ***

The game is crazybizarre. You play a Tuner, a being with magical mind powers. You are imprisoned by the Protozorqs. Your task in the game is to pass the five Ordeals. Your first time through the game, you go into each Ordeal room, and solve some relatively benign puzzles. Once you pass all five Ordeals, you are sent up to the titular Chamber where the Sci Mutant Priestess kills you. Game over.

Of course, that’s not how the game has to end. Game with multiple endings are nothing new, but there was something so satisfying about the alternate path in Chamber of the Sci-Mutant Priestess. You really felt like you were defeating, or outsmarting the game.

At the outset, you can kill one of the prison guards and take his weapon. Then you crawl through the ducts, bypassing the five Ordeals. This path eventually leads you into a backdoor in the Chamber, where you assassinate the Sci-Mutant Priestess. Score!

By giving the player the chance to outmuscle the guards, skip past half of the game, and kill the ultimate baddy, Kult’s designers indellibly etched a chunk of game bliss into my brain. It excites my richest “escape from prison” fantasies, and i admit that i am eager to “pay homage” to this twist in one of my own games.

AIR is a product that lets you develop desktop applications. The apps can interface with the Internets and your user’s local file system. Adobe has taken pains to ensure that the product is accessible to as many people as possible, from C-language coders using Flex, traditional HTML and javascript guys, and web sugar Flash guys and game developers like myself.

i don’t know why, but the one feature of AIR that gripped me most was the file drag n’ drop API. Here it is in a nutshell:

- drag and drop files onto your app
- teach your app to recognize the file type
- teach your app to respond to the file when it is dragged into the app, and when it is dropped (user releases the mouse button)
- drag stuff out of your app and on to other apps
- bundle file info with the doodad you’re dragging so that other programs will recognize and accept it (for example, your user drags an image out of your app and on to Photoshop. Photoshop likes image files, so it loads the sucker up.)

Wow! Pretty boring – unless you have imaaaaaaginaaaaationnnn ….

(twinkly stars-and-unicorns crossfade with tingly chime sound effects)

File Fiter

Rember Barcode Battlers? Scan the UPC code from a can of soup, and the app turns the info into battle stats for a fighting monster.

This idea is exactly like that, except … well, except nothing. It’s exactly like that. Drag any file onto your AIR app. The user sees an animation of a little squirmy file being dragged by the scruff of its neck. The user drops the file, and the app starts reading the file stats. i haven’t checked to see what we’ll know about the file, but i’m counting on at least file size, name, extension, and (i think) icon information that you can extract using the BitmapData class.

So you drop your file – taxes.xls. The AIR app starts building a little monster. The monster grows tentacles because the file name is 5 characters. The monster is purple with a +10 fire bonus because the filesize is over 10kb. The monster is armed with a deadly CALCULATOR because his file is spreadsheet-related.

Viola – your badass File Fiter is ready to fite. You can drop your hotcurry.jpg into the app and watch it mutate, then let the files go at it like bugs in a jar. Or you can upload your file and watch it punch (or calculate) the crap out of some other guy’s zip file.

It could be an automatic fite, or you could take control of your file a la Pokéwhatever – it all depends on how much work you wanna put into the app.

This is the kind of completely useless nonsense running through my head as i learned about the software. It’s so useless, i am happy to share it with you. Whoever builds it first, wins.

Angry Desktop Tiki

Angry Desktop Tiki ran through my brain when i was getting worried about the destructive things you could do with Adobe AIR. Angry Desktop Tiki is a polynesian god of the volcano. He looks like that idol from that 80′s board game Fireball Island, or like your dad when he stubs his toe. You know – all angry-styles.

Angry Desktop Tiki becomes enraged every X minutes and demands a sacrifice of 1 file. He could ask for just any file, or he could specify. Angry Desktop Tiki demands a targa!! Angry Desktop Tiki demands system.ini! So then you gotta go hunt down the file it wants and drag it over Angry Desktop Tiki’s gaping maw to sacrifice the file. Then Angry Desktop Tiki deletes it, cuz he’s a dick.

If you’re away from the desk when Angry Desktop Tiki demands a file sacrifice, he randomly chooses a file on your computer and eats it. Does that sound unfair? Tough nuts. Angry Desktop Tiki does what Angry Desktop Tiki wants.

i don’t know who in their right mind would want to download Angry Desktop Tiki, but the fact remains that Flash lets you do some pretty dastardly stuff, and AIR just gives you a suite of tools to be positively evil. i’ve said before that it’s like having super powers, and you have to choose whether to use those powers for good, or for Angry Desktop Tiki.

If you would like to build Angry Desktop Tiki in Adobe AIR, please contact me. Maybe you can become my supervillain arch nemesis?