Aside from giving me flashbacks to a gawd-awful Roy “Chubby” Brown remix, it got me thinking.

You see I’ve been playing it for a while.

A FarmVille Farm in All It's Glory - Sadly Not Mine

I think for the most part it entertains the desire to explore part of my subconscious.

There’s an entertainment value of seeing what’s around the next corner or getting the item further up the tech tree, or, in Farmville’s case, seeing what new stuff you can get as you progress through the game.

Marie, my wife, is in to it far more than I am but I think it was telling that when she has reached the point where the only way to proceed was to pay Zynga money to buy items, thus effectively halting natural progression through their tech tree, then my desire to play the game came to a complete stop.

The other game issue is the grind aspect which is also designed to make you pay money, you have to plow, sow, harvest by clicking on each tile individually.

You can buy tractors, harvesters and seed sowing machines that let you do 2 x 2 tiles at a time but they have a limited amount of fuel and don’t last for the whole of a big field.

Of course you could pay Zynga real cash for more fuel

But then I guess I’m not the target audience, I can’t see me ever wanting to pay money to play the game which makes me wonder how many of the reportedly 60 million + players do.

Given that Zynga has, according to InsideSocialGames.com, reportedly 100 million unique visitors a month to it’s numerous Facebook apps, not counting its MySpace versions, and is estimated to make more than $200 million in revenue this year, although some estimates put that at over $1 billion, then there’s clearly enough people who do.

Other problems people are finding is that they’re getting lag.

I haven’t experienced too much lag when playing, but then I’ve been using a laptop that happily runs Fallout 3 with a hefty ftp transfer going on in the background (as I found out the other night ).

However, my wife’s laptop chugs like a student at a beer-drinking contest while playing it, which also puts her off the game.

Going full screen helps because Flash can use hardware acceleration in full screen.

It does make me wonder though what the game’s doing in the background to cause that much lag though, even taking into account Flash’s complete lack of multithreading, and assuming it’s constantly maintaining server state, it’s really not that big a game to cause such an issue :-/

Still, I think it’s a good game for students of game design though, as it has everything pretty much boiled down to the essentials.

• Fairly simple but effective game progression with obvious benefits.
• Shows how the effect of grind can be used to drive player progression, in this case for the Dark Side of game design to encourage the player to spend money to avoid having to do it).
• It’s a very simple to play.
• It has a series of interesting choices: do you plant one type of crop and hope to come back in 4 hours to harvest them or plant the crops that take 48 hours to grow but you won’t make as much money in the same period of time. Not harvesting your plants then results in a ruined crop and loss of money.

It’s hardly the pinnacle of game design but it probably stands out most as a way to play socially without competing with anyone, which is known to appeal to female gamers.

As a good example of the emerging mass-market social game design.

• You are encouraged to spread the game by asking your facebook friends to join as “neighbours”, and are rewarded with unlocking pre-requisites.
  Thus encouraging new players via word-of-mouth.
• Secondly, you are encouraged to send gifts to your current neighbours, and them you, in return for unlocking achievements.
  This has the effect of keeping the game in peoples mind as the message of a gift waiting for them shows up when they next log on to Facebook.

With apparently 60 million + players on Farmville, it’ll be interesting to see if their simple mechanics can keep that going or if they’ll descend into a churn and burn approach of building simple games then marketing them to drive players, then letting them die once the player base starts to leave.

Time will tell…

I know! it’s been far far too long since I posted to my blog.

I try to post relevent items rather than making it a longer text version of Twitter like some people, but sometimes that’s hard to find the time and energy.

Anyway, a small update on what I’ve been up to….

Not much done on Space Merchants sadly.

I had some small contract work with the guys at Tag Games working on the high score backend system for the iPhone / iPod version of their new iPhone game Car Jack Streets.

The guys at Tag are always a joy to work with.

I’ve also been following the comments Paul (Farley) makes using Twitter to promote it as well, which often livens up the day.

Car Jack Streets is a great little game, the guys at Tag were responsible for the original GTA games and CJS is definately a spiritual successor for Generation Twitter.

It was only a small contract, although very welcome, and unfortunately things have dried up again on the game dev contracting front.

It’s been getting some rave reviews too. So give it a try if you liked GTA have an iPhone/iPod then I do recommend it.

Apart from that it’s still quiet on the ground though, I decided to see if Internet Marketing could help to bring in some money (yes I’ve got that desperate) but to be honest I find avoiding all the “Get Rich Quick” scams really tiring.

I’ve dug around a bit though and found some real nuggets amongst the crap. I’ve already learned a hell of a lot about SEO, PPC, and selling online in general from my foray, which has already paid for itself by improving our google ads marketing for Ferion

We are about to start on a website for a new client using Flex which if you don’t know what that is, it’s an intelligent way of making Flash movies or to put it another way, it’s Flash for programmers

I’m hoping to use this experience of making a commercial product in Flex, and apply it to remaking All Out War which is in dire need of a remake and I’ve been wanting to do it for a while.

So hopefully things will pick up, I had to turn down work yesterday!! Someone phoned up wanting a full business reporting app, and with the new website and other things on I just felt we couldn’t handle it at the moment.
Not that we can afford to turn it down and that’s the most depressing thing!

Looking forward to Cliffski’s new game Gratuitous Space Battles which looks like it’s shaping up nicely. It’s a real time space strategy game that does away with the base-building stuff and gets straight to the heart of the genre, the massive battles!
It’s looking pretty good and Cliff has been revealing bits along the way on his blog and YouTube

In other news, it was my birthday on Wednesday! I’m now 31…. not sure how that makes me feel

UPDATE: I’ve received word that Car Jack Streets is a mere 59p / $0.99 / €0.79 this weekend, so well worth the look

Well 2008 was a funny old year. It was the best of times… It was the worst of times…

We’ve been going as a business for the past 5 years, we ran out of initial capital a long time ago with a couple of bad investments in our browser based games, so we’ve kept going through contract work which sadly, together with the responsibility to work on the browser games, never quite gave us enough time or money to work on what we wanted. That all seemed about to change in 2007…

I’d managed to get a well paid contract working on a massively multiplayer mobile phone game called Football Pro for Sports Pro Games since May 2007, Football Pro v1 was completed at the end of 2007, and they paid me a retainer until they started on v2 in the April, along with a couple of other bits of work they needed doing. 
Version 2 started with a new client-side team, and was due for completion around August-September time of that year. 
So all in all things were looking up. 

Then things took a decided downward turn, Marie and I were married in July 2008 (that wasn’t the downward turn btw ) only to come back from honeymoon and be told that the contract would be cancelled as SPG had pretty much run out of money.

Unfortunately, that hit my company at exactly the wrong time as, among other things, the credit crunch hit, and no less than 5 contracts that I had lined up pulled out or were postponed due to lack of funding.

So I’ve ended up in the precarious position of having to find another job, at least for the time being.

I decided to aim for local game developers to see if they had any positions, so I hand-crafted some of the finest demos to best show off my ability.

Then Free Radical Design went bust laying off 140 staff.

Great, so suddenly the literally just one or two available jobs in the area suddenly have over 140 potential candidates.
So far I’ve had two “thanks but no thanks” responses and nothing at all from the others.
To be fair, I asked for feedback and one of the rejections basically said they’ve had to reevaluate their projects for this year and have put a full stop on recruiting until they know what they’re doing, so not only were the gracious enough to reply to my request for feedback, which is a rarity these days, but also it wasn’t a problem with me which makes me feel a lot better!
 

But, in the funny way of things, it has actually inspired me.

I found time to catch up on websites such as AIGameDev.com and join some new ones such as GameProducer.net

Also I had used XNA to develop some job-hunting demos because I do like C#, and I found it very nice to use.
One of these demos was an old demo favourite of mine called Space Merchants. It’s basically an AI  demo showing off a space ship using  finite state machines and steering behaviours to navigate and trade between two (or more) space stations.
I’ve written it a couple of times before in C++ but this was the first time I was happy with it.

Now that things aren’t working out on the job or contract hunting front I’m inspired to expand it into a full top down 2d using 3d space game with trading, tactical combat, RPG elements.
Whether it will be finished soon and be profitable only time will tell but I’m hoping to be blog about the experience here amongst other random wittering.

This brand new blog is one of the other items I was inspired to setup. I’ve been meaning to start the web logging malarkey for a while now. Besides giving air to your hot air, it’s generally considered as a good marketing tool especially for an Internet driven business, and hopefully will encourage some interesting people to comment.

I just hope I can keep it up-to-date, intelligent and witty enough to inspire people to regularly visit… I make no promises

So here it is;

The Beginning…