Draw Something and Virality
So I’ve finally submitted to the craze and started playing Draw Something. Hats off to OMGPOP, it’s a great game. Simple, accessible and fun. But what most impresses me about it is the sheer virality – by connecting to Facebook to find players, it means you don’t need to have the game to play it, but it does encourage you to get it so you can join in. This is far from the first game to use such methods, but I think it is a great example of how to do it. What is also interesting is that without it, the game is nothing. It needs that connectivity and virality to work. Interestingly I was at an event at the Wellcome Trust yesterday and chatting with people about this and other games. One of the other attendees talked about how her family were all gathered in one room, all playing the game. Even though it is a networked game, it also worked as a located group game – and a family game too.
Draw Something on iOS: My piccy of ketchup
The Cthulhu Strategy of Games Development
I’ve written an article in GamesIndustry.biz on our planning at Red Wasp Design:
Red Wasp Design is a small indie developer founded by a group of industry veterans. In that respect I suspect we are like many of the other recent start-ups, nothing special so far. We’ve put our first game out, Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land. It’s done pretty well on iOS. It charted at number 1 in the Role Playing Game category in the AppStore and the reviews have been positive (“I was totally addicted to this game for weeks…” Wired.com, “The best strategy game on the iPad yet.” DigitallyDownloaded.net, 5/5 from T3 Magazine for example). Also by the time you read this article the PC version will be out on Intel’s AppUp center. So far, so good. However, while we’ve done well, we’ve still got a distance to go, and with that in mind we wanted to share our strategy for Red Wasp Design with you and see how it chimes with your own experience.
The game is now out on PC and iOS if you want to check it out!
Speaking at #RPC Germany on 5th/6th May
As you may know, we’re going to be launching the PC version of the game at RPC Germany on the 5th and 6th May. Intel have got an AppUp stall where you will be able to sign up for the AppUp and the game. Plus there will be some free copies going for people who visit the stall (A-034). Also Tomas is going to be there doing a couple of talks and workshops (Main stage 16-00hrs on Saturday/Samstag 5th) on the making of the game.
We’ve also got a zombie-me thing going on too!
Gamers! We Need to Power Off!
Yes, it turns out we’re wasting waaaaay too much money on electricity. Which means less money to spend on games and more Co2 going out…
Games consoles are known power hogs, but a recently published study from researchers at Carnegie Mellon University drives the point home. The biggest issue, the study finds, is not how much electricity the consoles pull while being actively used, nor even the “vampire” effect where electronics powered off still drain electricity. The biggest, most wasteful draw, it turns out, comes from consoles that are on but idle.
We announced it on the Red Wasp Design blog today:
Whispers in the darkness today confirmed that the critically acclaimed ‘Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land’ today announced their hit game is coming to PC. The developers, Red Wasp Design, revealed the existence of a Cyclopean pact with the Intel AppUpSM program to spread the insanity onto laptops, Ultrabooks and desktops worldwide. The Intel AppUpSM center is a service that aggregates, curates and distributes validated digital content delivering a fuller, richer experience on the PC.
(Cthulhu Thursday is a dose of Mythos to brighten darken your week. More on the idea can be found here and a list of posts thus far, here. Also for more Cthulhu news, sign up to the cthulhuHQ twitter feed. Enjoy!)
A Vision of the Future: #Prometheus vs #Horizon
OK so its fact vs fiction and we all know that Batman would beat Wolverine in a real fight, but on a serious note there was an amazing BBC Horizon, The Search for AI that was fascinating and included AI doing art and the embodied intelligence of robots learning to navigate the world around them. it was facinating and up-beat and enjoyable. Great TV.
Then I watched this:
And I want to run away from the future. Even though AI may well be the future of life on earth.
Crowd Funding Science (and finding exomoons)
So games, films and other projects have been getting crowd funded. All of which is exciting – and now science is too!
Petridish.org, a crowd-funding website restricted specifically to accredited scientific research projects, is getting close to its first $100,000 in funds raised just a month after launching, according to founder Matt Salzberg.
“We have had two projects successfully reach the end of their funding cycles and both earned about $10,000 each,” Salzberg told TPM in a telephone interview, referring to a project to discover a new species of ants in Madagascar ($10,208) and a project to locate the first exomoon, or the first moon outside the solar system ($12,247).
On that subject – that last project which has got it’s funding – the exomoon is very exciting:
Crysis 3 – I’m Excited!
You may (or may not) know that I am a fan of the Crysis 1 & 2 games. Indeed I’ve written about Crysis and the science in it over the the Wellcome Blog and a little about the game’s design too. So I was very pleased to find out that there is a new game and EA will tell all on the 16th:
EA has since revealed that “The best kept secret in shooters just can’t be contained, stay tuned for more information on April 16.” Well… that and the fact that EA’s special Origin service happened to leak the information before anyone wanted it to of course. Rumors are also circulating that fans can expect Crysis 3 to be released in the Spring of 2013, but obviously this should be taken with a grain of salt.
Which is exciting! This image has been leaked/released:
Crysis 3 Sneak View
Which is very exciting – nanosuits & powerbows! Should be fun…
A Great Becoming... 