Star Wars: Battle for Hoth Lite Four Word Review Challenge…
To celebrate the release of Star Wars: The Battle for Hoth LITE, FluffyLogic is giving away a few prizes. The top prize is an original 80s Star Wars action figure of Luke Skywalker in his Hoth battledress. Second prize is also an 80s action figure – but of a Snowtrooper this time. Both winners will also get a copy of the book Plug In & Turn On: A Filmmakers Guide to Internet – written by the game’s producer and designer a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away – so they can get some hints and tips to use their new found action figures to make fan films! The best runners-up will also get a copy of the book. So how can you get your hands on the the prizes? Simple via there four easy steps:
1. Download and install the free LITE version of Star Wars: The Battle for Hoth (please note, you need version 4 of the iPhone/iPod touch operating system to run it – but it’s easy to do even a Wampa could do it!)
2. Through the iTunes store submit as a review of the game in four words or less. Yes, four words or less – in the style of the famous Four Word Film Review site, for example the gives user reviews of The Empire Strikes Back as “A galaxy father away” or “Clash of the Tauntauns”.
3. Once your review is on iTunes, email us the review (to; ana at fluffylogic dot net) along with your iTunes user name under which you submitted the review (your privacy with this information is totally respected and will only be used by FluffyLogic in accordance with the provisions of the Data Protection Act 1998.)
4. On the 9th September 2010 we’ll pick the best two reviews for the first and second prize and also the runners-up. We’ll announce the winners on the website the following week (please let us know if you don’t want your iTunes user name publicised) and then contact the winners to arrange delivery.
Thanks, and may the force be with you!
PS. Please note employees of either the Alliance to Restore the Republic or the Galactic Empire are not eligible to enter. Sorry!
PPS. The full version for the Battle of Hoth is also out – and there is a help guide for the game if stuck.
EA Sticks to it’s guns in MOH Taliban Row
There is a storm in a tea-cup row breaking out in the UK about the fact that player’s can play as the Taliban in the forthcoming Medal of Honor game:
Publishing empire EA says it will not surrender its creative vision to the furore surrounding the upcoming Medal of Honor game.
EA Games president Frank Gibeau told Develop the game is a “creative risk”. He said he anticipated controversy, and he asked why films are immune to the denigration games routinely are subjected to.
The publisher is under fire from both MPs and the wider media for allowing players to assume the role of the Islamist political group the Taliban in the rebooted Medal Of Honor title, set for UK release October 15.
On Sunday Defence Secretary Liam Fox urged retailers to ban EA’s upcoming game, having expressed “anger and disgust” by its content.
But Gibeau tells Develop that the game will not be altered at the behest of politicians and media groups.
“We respect the media’s views,” he said, “but at the same time [these reports] don’t compromise our creative vision and what we want to do.”
I agree – real war is messy, ugly, brutal and I’d hate to be involved in one. Creative endeavours can and do represent the complexities of war. While most creative endeavours tend to be more sympathetic (if not totally so) the the parent culture of the creators (or funders!) some explore a little further. The first two Conflict games did not allow the player to play as the Iraqi forces. So a films like Cross of Iron or Downfall portrays some of the German forces in a positive light. Others deal with the issue via proxy, so MW2 had you playing a terrorist (but as an infiltrator).
IMHO politicians need to spend a little more time on issues such as poverty, diplomacy, more international development and supporting democratic values rather than taking cheap shots as game developers.
Patent Wars
Patents seem to be getting a fair amount of press of late. The original idea of a patent was to give the innovator who develops the idea a monopoly of time in which she/he can benefit by commercial exploitation of the patent, protect by legal means from other wishing to copy the idea. But long ago, this has become buried in legal, cultural, administrative and practical difficulties – and this is making waves. We have been patents being used (as with copyright) as a means of proxy business-competition – with a recent Wired article exposing the battle lines of patent-warfare in the smart phone market as the big player jostle for position – so Apple sues HTC (used in many Android phones), Nokia sues Apple, Kodak sues Apple, Research in Motion (makers of the BlackBerry) & Samsung while Palm and Apple argue over patents:
What has for years been a who will-blink-first Mexican stand-off between the tech giants has turned into an all-out gunfight, albeit one conducted by the toughest corporate lawyers money can buy. “Everybody started suing each other a lot more — not only in telecoms, but in software and a number of other fields — starting in the mid- to late-90s,” says Jim Bessen, a law lecturer at Boston University. “The number of lawsuits filed in the US has tripled since the early-90s.” … The struggle that’s broken out between the tech giants has a certain irony; after all, the prizes they’re disputing — patents — were invented to accelerate and encourage invention, not hinder it. The concept is fairly straightforward: a patent is granted if an invention meets a number of requirements, the most essential being “novelty” and “usefulness”. Once granted, a patent typically gives the inventor a limited monopoly of a minimum of 20 years in which he alone can market the invention or license others to take up his protected work.
The intention is to promote the rapid adoption and adaptation of ideas, benefit the inventors and reward the whole process of research and development. However, over the past two decades, changes in the way patents are attributed and patent holders’ increasingly aggressive tactics have created a situation that some claim is choking, rather than promoting, innovation. What makes the problem intractable is that today it is impossible to design a high-end tech product that does not include others’ patents.
Every product is associated with what engineers refer to as a BOM, or bill of materials. The BOM includes the amount a company has to pay in cross-licensing deals for hardware and software before it even gets to manufacture. It can be the chipset, applications, Bluetooth or the use of MP3 file formats: a smartphone’s BOM can be between $150 and $200.
I think they key sentence here is: “The struggle that’s broken out between the tech giants has a certain irony; after all, the prizes they’re disputing — patents — were invented to accelerate and encourage invention, not hinder it.”
(This is an extract from a slightly larger version of the post over at the P2P Foundation Blog.)
My Pick of Other Games from Gamescom
So I’ve been at Gamescom for the last few days – showing Eat Them! to gamers and press. But I fortunately did get a chance to go and check out the rest of the show. Highlights for me (other than basking in the warm glow of feedback for Eat Them!) were..
Killzone 3 – I played a single player demo that sees you in a flyer taking pot-shots at a helghast ice-rig thing before being shot down and having to contine the fight on foot. The icy-sea graphics look amazing and the gameplay have been solidly incremented since Killzone 2. For example the controls were subtly improved in a number of ways. I liked the bit when you pass a crate of ammo and opt to re-supply there is a cool graphic of your character grabbing clips and grenades. Small touch, but builds the whole vibe. The flying Helghast as great fun to fight against – hit thier packs and they shoot off into the sky. Great fun and I wanted more when the demo ended. (Disclosure – I went drinking with some of the developers from the Killzone 3 team on the Wednesday night and they are a really nice, funny bunch of people – from several different nations too!)
Killzone 3 combat
Crysis 2 (spot a theme here?) – I did my grunt duty and queued for a bit to get in to play this one. I’d seen, but not played, the demo at E3. We got to see Crysis 2 3D demo video in a mini cinema – which was the same content as E3 but impressive in 3D. The parallax of the HUD worked really well. Then we got to play it – I think it was a huge multiplayer game with about 30 of us playing (but it was all in German so not sure) and I played on xbox360 (judging by the controller) though I think others had PC versions. As you’d expect the console version is not as smooth and full-on as the PC demo I’d seen – but it was still impressive. The controls are solid and the game seemed good. A nice touch was the death anim – when shot you got to see your death replayed but with a cool slo-mo bullet effect wrapped onto it as the final killing projectile zaps your head. Still on my list to buy!
R.U.S.E looks interesting. Its an RTS that adds a deception layer into the gameplay. I also saw Star Wars: The Old Republic. The trailer was amazing and the gameplay had this really nice cover system that allowed you to see other cover positions near you. The Deus Ex trailer is also cyber-lovely!
And then it’s back to Blighty.
Eat Them! at Gamescom
So I’ve been demoing Eat Them! at Gamescom. What is the game about? Technabob spells it out…
The new downloadable title from FluffyLogic was shown off at this week’s GamesCom show in Germany. In the game, you create custom monsters, and do your best to avoid being destroyed by the army while you smash the town and its people to bits. To me, it looks like a modern-day remake of games like Rampage or Crush, Crumble and Chomp!
There is a great preview of the game here:
Showing at Sony’s booth this week at the Gamescom event in Cologne, Germany, Eat Them! looks like a ridiculously fun monster mash, one that’s set to eclipse the building-bashing antics of previously released PlayStation Network game Rampage: World Tour when it arrives later this year.
Here’s some gameplay video taken at the show.
With the lovely comment: “Check out one of the coolest PSN titles on display at Sony’s Gamescom press conference.” Plus if you’ve not seen it, here’s the trailer on the Sony EU blog.
Annnd.. there are images from the game here.
Eat Them! Screenshot
Hoth Lite is out Today!
Happy to say that the free/lite version of Battle for Hoth is out today. This version has 3 full playable levels (the full game has 15). I hope you enjoy a taster of Hoth action. Here’s me chatting about the game…
And there is more here…
Sony’s Gamescom Press Conference
Here’s a quick write-up of the things that caught my interest at the Sony Gamescom press event on the 17th August….
Sony is getting into social now – and that’s good ‘cos the PS3 is a networked media machine and needs it. They announced Mubi, a classic and indie film service that, yes, allows streaming films to your PS3 – but then it goes social and starts adding things like rating becoming a fan recommendations and more. This is also similar to the Live TV system they offer which has a cool feature that allows for live text chat at the same time you are watching a TV program.
On the hardware side they said that sales of the PS3 are going up (as I expected to hear) but the fascinating news is that the PS2 (remember that?) is still selling loads. They expect to sell 6 million units this year – which is only 4 million less that the PSPs they sold in the last year. There was lots of push on 3D – which I guess makes sense as Sony also make 3D TVs to (it’s that horizontal integration thingy).
On the games side of things, they had a guy from Limp Bizkit on to demo Medal of Honor and announced that on PS3 it’s going to come bundled with MOH:Frontline for free. The graphics looked nice on a helicopter mission and it had great audio but I was wondering if some of the effects for explosions were final graphics? We also got to see more of Killzone 3, which looks amazing – the multiplayer stuff looks top-notch – which is something as Killzone 2’s multiplayer is brutal but excellent. There was more of LittleBigPlanet 2 on show – looking amazing. We also got to see some of a new Ratchet and Clank game, All4One and a teasier trailer for Resistance 3.
There was more – but that’s what got my attention.
Technology Evolution in War
There is little doubt that war fuels technology development. Why? I’d hazard a guess that because the artefacts are being tested much more exhaustively and also because there is a huge amount of resources poured into the generation of the next iteration of technology. One thing we can see clearly is the evolution of a physical equivalent of a predator-prey relationship; For example insurgents in Iraq deploy a IED (Improvised Explosive Device) device that fires a molten slug of copper capable of smashing though the coalition vehicles’ armour in response to the heat of an approaching vehicle. In response the military develop a counter-object on a boom-arm in front of the vehicle – this triggers the IED to fire too early. The insurgents then simply move the angle of fire to shoot back 3 meters – the length of the boom-arm. So the coalition responds with variable length boom arms meaning the IED more often than not will miss the vehicle. The insurgents then respond by making the IED trigger not to the heat of the vehicle, but the jamming signal that the vehicle sends out to counter other IEDs. It’s scary innovation.
While there is a trend in evolution towards more complexity – we have developed into much more complex organisms than our distant relatives were. But that is not a rule – it’s a trend. In the dangerous world of aysmetric warfare we can see an example of technology evolution that becomes less complicated – that of Improvised Explosive Devices:
Late one afternoon in April, Llamas shows me the latest device they’ve been working on, just in from Afghanistan. A neatly made plywood box about 8 inches high and 5 inches square, it has a length of replica detonation cord emerging from the base. Llamas pulls the box open, revealing a layer of soft foam and a wooden plunger attached to the lid. When stepped on or driven over, he says, the foam is compressed and the tip of the plunger, which is saturated with a chemical, descends into a chamber at the bottom of the box. That chamber contains a second substance, and when the two chemicals mix, a pyrotechnic reaction ignites the end of the detonation cord, which leads to an explosive charge.
The box is the logical conclusion of years of reverse evolution in insurgent weapons technology. Without a power source, a blasting cap, or a single piece of wire or metal contact, it has no electromagnetic or metallic signature. Linked to a charge mixed up from odorless homemade explosives, packed beneath a dirt road, it would be all but impossible to detect: a Flintstones land mine. “It’s a block of wood, basically,” Llamas says.
Linking Developers and Players
One of the great things about networked forms of technology is that they can break down barriers between the content producers and consumers. This has a number of meanings – it means that anyone can now become a content producer (you can blog, post to youtube and so on) but it also means that it is much easier for those that make content to listen to and learn off those to consume what we make. I noted in a previous post that we read every player comment posted to the iTunes store – we also did our best to respond to everyone who emailed us about any of our other games, such as Savage Moon – and some of the ideas that player came up with got incorporated into the Waldgeist add-on for the game.
So it is with great interest that I read this article about self publishing games…
There are so many positives from moving into self-publishing it’s almost impossible to select one. If pushed I would say being in a position to have a direct relationship with your end user is the best.
It allows us to bring the players of the game much closer to the creative process. Our players have been involved in suggesting and even creating content for updates and sequels. They have a closeness and sense of ownership with our games as they feel, quite rightly, they are part of the development team. As a side effect, they become the strongest promoters and evangelists for your game.
Starring at the iTunes Store…
I’ve worked on a number of games prior to The Battle for Hoth, and while there is always the anticipation of how the audience will react to your work, this has been different. When you’ve completed and game and it’s mastered – the vibe is a bit like a house party – all set-up ready to go, you’ve invited people – but will anyone turn up? With boxed product games like the Conflict series or The Great Escape, I would have to wait a long time to see if anyone turned up to the party. Shop sales take time to collate and the first guide as to how well it is doing would be a weekly chart-track. Though we (Pivotal Games staff) would also be looking at things like sales-rank on Amazon and the like as a proxy measurement of sales.
Then with PSN titles like Savage Moon, the information was around much faster – for those with a login to the Playstation Store, it’s pretty much realtime but we’d have to wait to get the sales from our producer at Sony as we don’t have direct access to the data. So it was still a wait to see if people turned up to our Insectocyte party…
But with the iTunes store it’s public and real-time: So when The Battle for Hoth came out I found myself checking the various country iTunes stores realtime – almost like a share price on some news ticker.. SW: Hoth +1 … It got a bit obsessional – I seemed to be looking at it every hour (or less!). It seemed to drop during the night and then rise again in the morning – gamers buy during the day? Overall, it was at it’s highest chart price soon after release before it went on a slow elegant arc down as newer titles arrived to take it’s place in the chart (and the Lite version is due out soon…how will the paid app do then?) But checking it becomes an itch you keep needing to scratch. Why? Obvious reasons aside, making a game takes lots of time and energy – and you want the end result of the long process to be played. The more people playing it, the better you feel about the effort you’ve put into it. It’s a mix of ego and sharing. (Below is the US iTunes chart from topchartapps.com)
Star Wars: The Battle for Hoth US iTunes Store chart
Then there is the ratings on the iTunes store. Another realtime itch to scratch. Again with past products, you do get reviews, but they are most often my game review sites and the like. They are not mass-produced reviews by players. (Though Sony added a similar system to the Playstation Store recently.) As a games designer, what players feel about your games matters a lot. At FluffyLogic we read all the player reviews of our games and chat about how we can take on-board their feedback. A good rating and review makes you smile, a bad one makes you feel a little hurt – either way you re-check the iTunes store a short while later for another fix of rating drugs.
The Battle for Hoth seems to oscillate between 3 and 4 stars, however I suspect the true rating is a little higher – and not just for our game, for all apps, as the system is slightly bias towards those who dislike it. This is because you are offered the chance to rate an app once you delete it, and I suspect most people deleting an app don’t like it. This is why some developers have added an option to ask players to rate the app – as the people who like it, people not deleting it, otherwise are not asked to rate an app – they have to make a special effort to go back into the store and rate it.
And that’s one of the key things about the iTunes store – it’s a mass of feedback loops – ratings, store position etc – all feeding into and out of each other. It’s fascinating to watch, but as a developer I’ve had to learn to not scratch the itch quite so often.
Updated! More on this story here.
A Great Becoming... 