Here’s what you can do with a terrible costume idea and an hour and a half to kill:

The idea, naturally, is a robot that changes into pants to blend in with his terrestrial surroundings. i can picture such robots waging fierce battles against each other - say, a necktie (the evil “Neckotron”) vs. a pair of pumps (the sass-talking “Heel It”). i’m not sure what my Pantsformers name is.

Perhaps “Pantaloons Prime”?

Post your favourite Pantsformers name!

i’m astounded at the news reported by Joystiq today, that the cards for Sony’s new Eye of Judgment game can be copied and played.

This blows my mind for a few reasons. For starters, the game is packed with a camera peripheral, a starter pack of cards, and the game disc, and it costs about the same as any other game. Clearly, they were taking a loss on the product so they could earn their money back tenfold on card purchases. With players photocopying cards, that business model goes out the window.

i’m also really surprised because i remember trying to fake out Nintendo’s ill-fated e-Reader peripheral. The e-Reader’s cards had a strip of dots printed in super hi-resolution that could not be reproduced by machines crafted by mere mortals. “A-ha,” i thought, “But what about the office laser printer?”

i tried and tried, but i couldn’t get the printer to hammer out the dots small enough or clear enough for the e-Reader to register. And then i threw my e-Reader into the ocean, where all of my unwanted things end up.

The marketing machine is in full swing for MindHabits, the Montreal-based winner of Telefilm Canada’s Great Canadian Video Game Competition. MindHabits launched their inaugural effort this week. Familiarly titled “MindHabits”, the game is based on years of research by McGill psychology professor Dr. Mark Baldwin and friends. Baldwin claims that playing MindHabits habitually can make the player feel happier and more self-confident.

Putting on my best angry face, i sat down with Dr. Baldwin to ask him all about it.

In the Matrix mini-game, players race against the clock to click the happy faces in a sea of grumps
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i snapped this pic down a back alley here in Toronto:

i love the fact that Open Book Toronto’s ads are entirely dependant on the singles ads that are reliably plastered all over town.

My dream, my Holy Grail of ad warfare, is to see a third ad campaign contained within or wrapped around the first two ads. Maybe in this case it could be a boxing ad that says “Wanna see two real opponents duke it out?”

i dunno. Submit your best idea, and i’ll send you a pen.

i worked for over a year as sr. game developer on a massively multiplayer online casual game for kids and tweens called GalaXseeds. i learned a great deal, and am happy to share these tips about MMOG development.

Tip #2 - Reward

One of the key elements of good game design is the principal of risk vs. reward. Every time your player risks something, he gets a reward. The quality of the reward should be proportional to the degree of risk. If the player risks losing a health point by fighting an enemy, the defeated enemy could drop additional ammo, coins, or health. If the player risks losing an entire life by battling his way through a level, the reward for completing the level could be a new weapon, extra lives, or a new story segment. This is nothing new - if you’ve played a few games in your life, you’ve cottoned on to this principle.

Every challenge you set up in your MMOG should be rewarded. If you have too many unrewarded challenges, your players might see your game as a waste of time and will move on to something more fulfilling. Gone are the days when players can play a game, and are rewarded by the simple joy of playing. Virtual capitalism has run amok in the MMOG space; assuming you’re developing a game that falls in line with its competition, you’ll have to reward your players for every task, big or small.

Launch day is too late to start thinking about your maintenance plan and the rewards you’ll offer. The structure you plan for and build from day one will determine how often and how richly you can reward your players. The better your reward structure, the more addictive and exciting your game will be.

1. The fastest reward you can develop will overrun your game.

This is a very easy trap to fall into. When your product is live, and you have a finite maintenance budget and a limited production schedule, you will gravitate toward whatever is easiest to build or implement. Before long, your game will become overrun with that one reward type.

In the Sitekick Project, an online collectible loyalty program/game hybrid i designed for YTV.com, players own a little yellow robot. The robot runs on Chips, which are programs that can be discovered and collected throughout the site.

Chips can do many amazing things! Some Chips change your robot’s appearance - you can dress up your bot with different hairstyles and costume pieces. Some Chips contain MP3s that you can listen to using a music player Chip. Some Chips change your robot’s environment, while others launch or contain mini-games. One Chip lets the user print out a customizable cut-and-glue 3D paper model of a race car.

Obviously, the fastest, easiest Chips to develop were the “Face Pieces” - the paper doll Chips. Extra functionality takes extra time, so it’s very easy to just sit and bang out a series of Chips that are essentially still images. Since these were the fastest, least costly rewards to produce, they soon became the only Chips that were produced.

You can look at the encylopedic “Chipendium” to see this … most of the interactive or animated Chips appear early in the list. As the project went on, paper doll Chips become more and more prevalent, until they entirely take over.

The result is that the application became the reward type. With nothing but paper doll elements being produced, Sitekick has become a paper doll application. As such, it’s quite popular. Paper doll apps do very well online. Most MMOGs avatar systems are essentially paper doll apps. But now that the majority of the 500+ Sitekick Chips are paper doll pieces, it seems odd to have that handful of functional Chips. From a player’s perspective, they feel like they belong to an unsupported feature.

So make lean rewards!

When designing your MMOG, maintain a strict bottom line cost for your reward development. Try to get the development time and cost per reward as low as possible through shared code libraries, a streamlined production process, and fast, easy-to-use admin tools.

2. Commit to Supporting Your Feature Set

In your maintenance plan, commit to developing x number of “easy” rewards, and y number of rewards that are more costly to develop. Bite the bullet on that one! There’s no sense in developing a reward feature that you will never support because its rewards are too expensive or time-consuming to build. Eventually, players will start wondering why there’s a pet shop with only one kind of pet in it, or why there’s a crafting system that always produces the same three swords.

3. Structure your rewards around numbers.

The simplest way to reward your player is to make a number go up or down. In GalaXseeds, players can be rewarded with (among other things) money, XP and Level numbers. Numbers go up, numbers go down. Easy. Your software handles this “reward generation” for you. You can even link number rewards together. When you level up in GalaXseeds (number goes up), your inventory capacity increases (number goes up). Countless RPGs have blazed this trail - many of them amount to nothing more than baseball box scores with a graphics overlay. Kill a monster for more experience (number goes up). Gain a level (number goes up) to improve your Strength stat (number goes up).

The more items and features you design around numbers, the more quickly, easily and abundantly you can reward your players. GalaXseeds has a few different item types - among them are Gear (furniture) and Get-Ups (costumes). Developing an item is obviously more costly and time-consuming than allowing your game to dynamically tweak numbers up and down. But you can wrap a costly reward in numbers to get more bang for your buck.

Sure, you have a fridge … but do you have a level two fridge (number goes up) that can hold three more pieces of food (number goes up)? How many style points does your bowtie have? (number goes up)

Then, just design a mini-game or activity to tweak those item numbers up and down (furniture battle? i dunno:). There you have it. Lots more gameplay, lots more reward … much less maintenance work.

You can even tie simple programming mechanics into this reward system. Maybe you give your player a telescope. When the player looks through it, he sees an empty starfield. But the more games he plays/trades he makes/things he buys etc, the more random stars appear in that starfield. This solution is simple, it’s programmatic, and your artist just has to draw one simple star.

3. Overdoing one reward devalues it.

While it’s easiest to tweak numbers up and down, be careful not to lean on this too heavily, and be careful to go easy on your in-game economy. If you keep giving players money with nothing to spend it on, money as a reward will be devalued. No one will want money any more. And once your player stops desiring your reward, there’s no incentive to play, and all but your most loyal fans will move on to a new game.

This goes beyond money. If you keep giving players the same item - the Golden Whatsit - no one will want a Golden Whatsit any more. If you keep increasing a player’s level, and there’s no power or privilege associated with higher levels, players won’t care. It becomes a meaningless stat with no inherent value, like score. One type of gamer is highly motivated by seeing his “score” number (money number, level number, etc) go up and up and up. The rest of us are after something more meaningful.

4. Create aspirational rewards.

One of the rewards in GalaXseeds is room access. Reach level x, and you can enter Area Y. Accessing a new area may not be a compelling enough reward. It’s not enough for players to simply visit a new area. They had to do something there. As GalaXseeds progressed, more and more content was added to these special access areas.

This makes sense. There’s this whole idea of functional vs. fashionable items. In some cases, having a non-functional hat is enough of a reward. Being able to visit Area Y isn’t a compelling reward because there’s no way to “wear” Area Y … you can’t take it around with you or brag about being able to go there. To solve this, you could put a special item in the Area Y that only players who went there are able to wear. That way, they can parade their success and privilege in front of the other players, inspiring those players to pursue the same reward. GalaXseeds does this with its monthly parties. Club Penguin does this with its visiting pirate. Puzzle Pirates puts rare resources on different islands that only more experienced players can access.

You have to do some soul-searching when it comes to developing aspirational rewards (just as you have to commit to developing more time-consuming and costly rewards to support your feature set, even though the temptation is to just bang out the quick content.) The challenge when you develop level 70 Happy Pants is that most of your players are at level 1, so you’ve just spent time and money on content that most players won’t experience. But if you DON’T develop level 70 Happy Pants, there will be no reward for your level 70 players. They’ll feel that your game was a waste of time, and they’ll leave angry. And the level 1 players will have nothing to strive for. They’ll think “what’s the point of levelling up?” Suddenly, your whole levelling feature is a wash.

World of Warcraft handles aspirational rewards very well by ensuring that the experience at its maximum level is exciting and rewarding, and it’s different depending on your character type. The result is that there are many players reaching the top level and then, instead of leaving the game because there’s nothing left to do, they choose a different character type and start all over again. That’s the kind of player commitment MMOGs should strive to foster.

i’m a huge advocate for aspirational rewards - game content you can’t experience until later - for its sheer stickiness. These are some key factors to making aspirational rewards work:

a. Your players have to be able to showcase, flaunt, or brag about an aspirational reward. How are you going to know that you want the +99 Sword of Ass-kicking unless you see a level 70 parading through the town square with it?

b. Aspirational rewards have to appear attainable. If i get the sense that i’m going to lose 90 hours of my life trying to get that Sword of Asskicking, i might move on to something else. If there’s some glimmer of hope that i could get that sword - me, a brand new bright-eyed player - i might give it a shot.

c. Players must know the path to the reward. Microsoft released a game called Viva Pinata that messed this one up.

Their game is all about collecting pinatas. As with Pokémon, the game gives players a blank encyclopedia (do this in your game!!), providing players with some idea of which pinatas players are missing. At no point did the game drop a hint has to how players could collect certain pinatas - they left that up to the extra $40 game guide, i suppose. i stopped playing that game after checking a cheat site. In order to earn one of these special pinatas, i had to use a certain tool on a certain object on a certain frame of animation. In a game with many tools and hundreds of objects with thousands of frames of animation, this was too much to bear. There was no way i could discover these pinatas on my own, fair and square. If the only way for me to complete the game was to cheat, i was ready for a new game.

5. Find clever ways to reuse rewards.

Japanese role playing game designers figured this one out quickly. Their games were huge, but cartridge memory was small, so the enemies in the back half of the game were just repainted versions of enemies you fought earlier. Green slimes? That’s so first level. Powered-up players battle golden slimes!

They used the same technique of tweaking number values. Crank up a green slime’s attack, defense, and hitpoints. Then paint the sprite yellow and change its name. Voila - the golden slime is born.

i, for one, hate battling golden slimes. What a chincy way to add enemies to your game.

But furniture? Bring it on! If i can get a blue couch to match my blue dresser, and the colour “blue” isn’t available in the GalaXseeds paint shop, i’m a happy player. It’s a very easy reward to set up, and somehow repainted furniture doesn’t seem as chincy an addition to your game as repainted enemies. Ditto Pokémon. i knew that if i searched long and hard enough, i could find colour variants in the game’s creatures. No special abilities - i would just have a blue Pikachu. And i could show off my blue Pikachu to other players via the “trade” and “online battle” features. Rewarding.

6. Start building items now, and don’t stop until your graphics guy dies.

My final tip is this: of all the rewards you can muster, items will likely be the most ubiquitous, and therefore the most needed. And of all the items you can create, functional items will trump vanity items. Players don’t just want the pointy hat - they want the pointy hat that enables them to fly.

Plan ahead now to get your item development flow as tight and speedy as possible. Then start churning out items. Create a massive stockpile of items. Pile items to the virtual ceiling. You will always, always, always need items. Better still, create a crafting system whereby players can create their own items.

Give your players a book or catalog or encyclopedia to keep track of which items are in the game. The bigger the list, the more exciting your game will be and the longer people will hang around trying to collect all the items. (See: Sitekick Chipendium, Club Penguin Catalogs, Pokémon Pokédex, etc)

Reward items with more items. If your player collects all of the superhero costume pieces, reward him with a special additional mask or cape.

Do these things, and thy game shall be awesome.

We are pleased to announce the release of Jigsaw!, our featured game for October.

This is a simple jigsaw puzzle game from the player’s perspective, but there is a bit of fancy tapdancing going on behind the scenes. i mentioned in an earlier post the security issue that was hampering the Custom puzzle feature. It’s all solved (thanks, John!). Now, players can load any online image into the app, and it will be dynamically carved into a jigsaw puzzle.

This flexibility makes Jigsaw! a very attractive option if you are looking to license content for your website. The gallery of images is entirely dynamic. You or your content co-ordinator just has to drop an image into a special folder on your web server, and it will appear in the Jigsaw! gallery.

This allows you to easily add and announce new content on your site with very little time and effort involved. You can also change up the images so that your theme changes monthly (or weekly). For example, you could drop spooky pictures into the folder to give your visitors a Hallowe’en-themed experience.

You can play Jigsaw! here. Enjoy!

Microsoft released survey results today polling people about their business email usage, to announce a number of VOIP products they’re launching. The intent is to justify their new product line with the findings in their survey. Obviously, the product came first and the survey was a PR move. Here’s one of the findings in the survey:

When asked why they opted for e-mail given these challenges, respondents admitted that the act of physically switching from e-mail to the phone interrupts their workflow and many can’t be bothered trying to track down multiple phone numbers. In fact, 72 per cent say they would be more likely to call the person if they could determine whether they were available to take the call, and could make the call by clicking the person’s name in an e-mail.

The survey goes on to mention that many people read and re-read their emails to ensure their writing sets the correct tone; emotional intent in emails is often misunderstood.

Any regular user of email knows this, but is voice over IP really the answer? i agree that it’s high time phones started acting more like computers, offering us the organization and searchability that comes standard with most productivity software. But the survey discounts a number of distinct advantages that email offers:

1. i can answer emails an instant messages on my own time. When someone phones me and i pick up, i am captive to the conversation. i have to answer their questions right there, in that time frame. In fact, it’s a known technique to use phone calls to squeeze answers out of an otherwise elusive contact.

2. Email leaves a searchable paper trail that phone conversations do not. If you want something “on record”, you send an email, fax, or letter. Phone calls and conversations disappear into the ether. Even if all of your phone calls were recorded (requiring faster machines and larger hard drives), “audio search” technology does not yet exist. You can’t type “i will make that milestone on the 12th” or “yes, this price is fair” to bring up a certain agreement in a conversation.

3. Email makes me 85% less boorish. i can’t think fast enough or process my thoughts so that what comes out of my mouth when i speak is correct, inoffensive, true, tactful or life-affirming. i usually have to roll a sentence around my mind, slow-cooking it, until it’s baked appropriately for the conversation. But live conversation doesn’t move like that - it’s rapid-fire. Email affords me the opportunity to write a sentence, walk away from the computer, mull it over, have a sandwich, and then stroll back to re-read and re-write it until it works.

Microsoft, in touting their new VOIP services, calls this iterative and refining process a waste of productivity. i call it a life saver.

Below is the press release in full.

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Here’s a bit of a snag with the fantastic Bitmap Data functionality that was introduced back in Flash 8. The class allows you to manipulate bitmap images at the pixel level to pull off all kinds of fancy tricks.

i’m working hard to launch a jigsaw puzzle app on the Untold Entertainment games page. Here’s a special preview screenshot:

One feature that i feel very strongly about including is a “Custom” button on the gallery, where the player can enter any image URL and the app will dynamically cut that image into a puzzle.

The trouble is that Adobe forbids Flash from snagging pixels outside its own domain. Their reasoning is fascinating - user vineet_sc, posting on Frédéric v. Bochmann’s Flash Forever blog, emailed Adobe about it, and this was their response:

a policy file will let you BitmapData.draw() from a non-SWF image that comes from another domain. In addition, Security.allowDomain() will let you BitmapData.draw() from a SWF that comes from another domain.

As far as justification… here is a real case that we worry about. Attacker wants a copy of a confidential early financial report from a publicly traded company - insider information. Attacker knows or guesses that this company has FooChart accounting software installed, and knows that FooChart puts its output at a certain URL. This URL is inside the company firewall, so attacker can’t get to it directly. Attacker makes a South Park animation and promotes it heavily. Company employee, inside the firewall, views this movie. While showing animation, attacker’s SWF attempts to retrieve FooChart output GIF into an offscreen or obscured DisplayObject, then uses BitmapData.draw() to extract GIF’s contents. If successful, SWF posts the contents back to attacker’s domain. All this without the employee knowing what’s happening.

That is one reason why cross-domain pixel theft is bad. There are others too. This policy will not be changing.

If Flash Player security seems excessive, consider that many enterprise customers will refuse to allow the player to be installed on their systems unless it is safe technology. Security is not sexy, but it is a requirement.

Wow! Trojan Horse South Park animation espionage! It warms my heart. You can read the whole thread here.

i’m kind of upset that Adobe doesn’t provide some kind of button or security option that says “i’m only using it for jigsaw puzzles”, but i suppose they can’t rely on the honours system when it comes to matters of security.

The same user, vineet_sc, used a workaround where he (i think) hits a php page to load the image to his server, and then brings it into his Flash app. i’ve contacted him for more details, because i’m very new to php.

If you know how to do this, please let me know and i’ll post the method here for all (including myself) to enjoy. Or maybe Vineet will grace us with his presence? Who knows? Here’s hoping.

Once i figure it all out, i will announce the official launch of Jigsaw! right here. Keep reading!

KULT: The Temple of Flying Saucers, or “Chamber of the Sci-Mutant Priestess”, as it was called in America, is a graphic adventure game from the late 80’s.

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

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i’ve been developing games in Flash since version 4 in 2000. Back then, they had recently added scripting to the program, which had been primarily focussed on animation and design. The original Actionscript author said that he created the scripting language with Lego in mind. This was pretty clear from the Flash 4 coding interface. Instead of typing code, you just chose lines of script from a list and filled in the blanks, like variable names and values. It was an experienced programmer’s nightmare, but i was not an experinced programmer. For me it was a great introduction to programming, which had baffled me since i was a young kid trying to learn AmigaBASIC so that i could make video games about my favourite Muppets.

Flash 9 and Actionscript 3 have been available for about a year now. At my last job, despite a commitment to Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, the folks controlling the budget were very slow to upgrade our software. It was a full year past the release date before we upgraded to Flash 8, despite the massive workload reduction we demonstrated thanks to the new movieclip bitmap filters. (With Flash 7, if we wanted an animated character with a uniform outline, we’d have to create that outline by hand for every frame of animation).

It was the same story when Flash 9 arrived. The jump from Actionscript version 2 to Actionscript version 3 is significant, but my company was in no hurry to ensure that everyone kept their skills current. i could have learned it on my own on evenings and weekends, but that would have left me little time to run and jump and play.

So here i am, a year late, plodding through Colin Moock’s new book. i’m on chapter five. Here are my early opinions for you Flash AS1/AS2 programmers who are fearful about upgrading your skills:

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