Let's Play: Blackwell Legacy LP walkthrough

Let's Play LP walkthrough of the Blackwell series from Wadjet Eye (for future reference and entertainment purposes).

Also to mask the fact that I have not played through all 3 games yet, when talking to Dave Gilbert. :-)

Fwd: Future of connected games

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Begin forwarded message:

From: Solveig Zarubin <solveigp@gmail.com>
Date: March 14, 2010 9:05:41 PM PDT
To: "solveigp@gmail.com" <solveigp@gmail.com>
Subject: Future of connected games

Future of connected games panel

SteamPlay
People do not want to be a pc or apple player of a game.
They want to be a fan of a game.
Want to play at home on pc and connected.
Pc and mac versions at once

Facebook has not made it easy to present different sides of a person.
Notifications - all these different people - I don't want to spam them all with the notice a turnip just blossomed

Compare control over xbox and pc
Bioware
Uses telemetry across all the platforms
See social.bioware.com

Portal guy - valve
pc is an open platform- can ship updates

Beta requirements are diff for connected games - you make changes in public for all to see
min from nexon
We really gotta get people in, it is part of the design process
We make mistakes and fix them on the fly

Zynga guy
Ngai asks - I have heard that games ship with 30 percent cimplete
What does that even mean?
There has been a team on farmville for months after 5 week start

Min does not know what 30 percent complete is
They have games that have been out for 10 years - are they done now?

Ngai - do you think of "old content" differently ?
Old content is new content to new player

Zynga guy
Look at the new user experience and make sure it is not too overwhelming for the new player
Wow must have that issue too

Blizzard guy
New exp pack out
We get better at making content
But the people who benefit are the people who have gone thru he old content laready
All the new players are mostly casual
New exp - looks at the whole content from level 1 to 6o and makes better

Ngai asks abor mass effect 2 - casual audience coming in at lower price?
Bioware - we also add expansions, etc
Story features for kotor
Development philosophy as a service.
Continuous dev process

What is the smallest unit of willows

Connected gaming future is not one that can be built with less people
Can the industry survive it's connected future?

Easier to be smaller now
Don't have to ship to gold master to get space on the retail shelf
Everybody can do it

Look at lifetime revenue per user
Games as a service
Change tw metrics used to measure success - some are the metrics used in social games or on steam.

(why would anyone use playground now)

Min talks on korea
Pc cages function as a hub for players

Don't be binary
Give some away, sell some ..
Dlc is what used to be an expansion pack

Zynga

New content and features for retention and revenue
Revenue not necessarily the MOST important.
Build cimmunity by giving away content which builds revenue eventually

Bioware giuy
Can't replace a really creative person

Escapist question
Asking about arg
Valve game team came up with it
The people making it saying "I really know my audience and this will work"

Battle.net- are they going to aupport 3rd party?

We are not just game creators
We are entertainment creators

Min - you are creating another relationship with the user.
People are not going to think about your game as much but they will think about the other people they are playing the game with.

If you are a fan of your game - make cool shit that people will want - that's why we made action figures.




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Indie Summit Keynote: Randy Smith, Spider

Here is a long writeup on this talk from "mittens" - aka Trent Polack.

My Notes:
Basically, as Trent said, he is calling out the importance of:
* depth
* immediacy

I was glad to see that Trent and I were both kind of surprised to see the amount of time spent discussing all the case studies.
And also giving his blunt opinions of the other games.

My notes:

What does it mean to be indie?
Does not mean bad design

More powerful indie - better design

Canabalt
Flight control
- high level of engagement without reading rules

Discusses affordances
- stuff you can do
- large impact on the game state
- weaker - jump in place
- stronger - jump between things without dying
- mimal effort to experie

Crayon physics deluxe
Scribblenauts

Social games can learn from virtual worlds

What social games can learn from virtual worlds
Hangout games guy
Decided not to go to the indie game marketing one.

People who invite fewer people over a period of time are more effective.

Importance of retention increasing

How do virtual worlds retain their players
Player investment
-persistence
-creativity
Deep content
Fresh content
Service
Find ways to spend more on service vecause it pays off hugely
Concurrency
- community events, hosted, emergent
- most compelling - find ways for concurrency - fb is now so
asynchronous.
Enough content to allow players to interact - can't make content for
years
- the game is the icebreaker that forms community amongst the players.

Community

Monetization -
Retail -grandma
Subscription - tie to virtual world

Need a diversity of reasons to pay in order to monetize.

Hybrid
Cost of acquisition and scale of social
Long term retention of virtual world.l

Hangout has a mini game that you play when friends are not here

It is a pain to be embedded in facebook - they are planning to move
away from facebook eventually - connect to fb for the social graph but
not be in facebook as soon as the market will support

Amortize customer service across all the none - paying users
100 people paid for by 5 paying users

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Tiger Style Talk

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GDC 2010: backwards order, Jim Munroe

Chris (aka @savetherobot) introduced me to Jim Munroe at GDC lunch today. He was really gracious in talking to me after Chris's departure and we walked over to the GDC Rant session together.

Here is a link to Chris's AV Club article re: Everybody Dies, Jim's award-winning interactive fiction.

Here is some reverse fandom, because like everyone else I have met at GDC, especially the people I met through Chris, I didn't realize how cool Jim was on meeting and chatting.

Even before I have seen anything that I should already know about, here's some interesting things that we connected on in person:
- on the basic business side, he is interested in making a point and click adventure game and so I tried to promote PlayGround SDK and PlayFirst in general. I hope he will pitch something to us. Maybe something even cooler than a straight download game.
- he is involved with a coalition of projects and people in support of Toronto's videogame communities called the Hand Eye Society (and is inspiring me to get involved in or start something similar here)
- I realized that I like creating communities also but I don't make the time to do it myself.
- he knows who Pat Murphy is
- he asked me if I had ever been to WisCon! (and has been there in the past and really liked it).

Here's the stuff that I was supposed to already know...
- http://nomediakings.org/about - short list
- 5 books after leaving Harper Collins, the most recent one a post-Rapture graphic novel called Therefore Repent! (he gave me a copy!)
Made this game which is awesome, as well as a text based social sim based on GDC 2009.
Everybody Dies (2008) [play it]
It starts with a metalhead, Graham, realizing that throwing that shopping cart over the bridge was not the great idea he thought it was. Even if it did get him out of washroom duty at Cost Cutters. Windows, Mac, Linux.

- also is a science fiction novelist
- and comic writer
- and movie maker (just one: My Trip to Liberty City (2003, 9 minutes) [watch it]
I try to stay out of trouble as a Canadian tourist in Grand Theft Auto III.)
- who appears to write about the same "post-Rapture/post-apocalyptic" stuff that I am fascinated with in The City Not Long After and The Stone War

Also I would like to be a fly on the wall for a panel discussion (or just a chat in a bar) between
Jim Munroe, Pat Murphy, and Richard Kadrey (after reading description of "Therefore Repent")

Female Game Industry CEOs

Doing a quick Google search to see how many more I can find, in addition to our own Mari:

Amy Jo Kim, CEO of Shufflebrain
Shufflebrain looks pretty cool actually.

And here is the top 100 women in games industry according to Edge Online: