Print Us!

Over on Kickstarter me and a splendid bunch of revolutionaries are trying to change the world of gaming with Pop, Lock 'n' Rooooll, a combination of cards and dice, which you can print and play for FREE. And it's open source to boot.

Below are some of our self advertising little Rumble Bots. Go on,, click on one to see it full size, then print and make it now!

How Much Game Is There In Gamification?

Gamification can be a distracting term. Game itself is a very loose term, some will define it as something that requires challenge and a specific win/lose state, others will apply it to pretty much any activity that doesn’t really produce something. I’ve explained whole virtual worlds, like Second Life, to folk and asked them if they’d regard that as a game. The results of my small poll can be typified with the statement, “well it sounds like a game to me”. I’ve heard jigsaw puzzles described as a game. They’re puzzles, not games!

Christmas trees and light shows - read on...

Anecdotally I’ve found that women have a broader definition of what a game is than men, but there’s nothing at all scientific about my study, and far too many of the men I know make games for a living.

My old economics teacher (he wasn’t old at all, but missing out “old” made the phrase seem wrong, what can I say, I choose beauty over truth ever once in a while) once posed the question about an expensive footballer, “is he worth it?” Naturally, there was some debate in the class before he asserted, “Somebody thought he was worth it, so he is worth it.” Economists have a tendency to oversimplifying systems, but it’s hard to argue with the pure logic of this approach to price.

I’m a pragmatist at heart so I’ve chosen to apply this logic to defining games – if someone thinks it’s a game, then it is. I can debate with someone why they’re wrong, but where’s the point in that, it’s a waste of time because they won’t change their mind. And besides, why on earth would anyone want to restrict the bounds of their occupation?

When viewing the word game through the lense of gamification you’re instantly in a world of vague to the power of vague. One way to approach the problem is to think of gamification as a self-reinforcing and (hopefully) self-propagating way for consumers to interact with your brand. Interact being the operative word.

The simplest, most obvious way of doing this is to create a game that features your brand heavily, and taps into a core aspect of its reality. PikPok and Oreo did this very effectively with their OREO: Twist,Lick, Dunk game for iPhone. It’s a simple game but it breaks down into a fast moving version of what a lot of folk do with their Oreos – twist them apart, lick the cream and dunk them in milk. An interaction from real life is mimicked in the game.

I’m really, really, really, hoping someone makes a Rich Tea biscuit game. For those not in the know, the Rich Tea biscuit is popular in the British Isles and is known for dunking in tea. Yet the dunk must be perfectly timed to get some soaking of tea into biscuit but not too much. For to linger just one millisecond too long is to see the biscuit cascade into an over-soaked state and gasp with horror as the tea stricken section shears off into the depths of the cup. Then a spoon is engaged for a spot of biscuit fishing. Surely there’s a game in there.

But not all brands or events lend themselves so well to a game though, in which case you can focus on the interaction instead. Give people the opportunity to interact with your brand in any positive way you can.

Telecom, New Zealand’s former state telco, puts up the coolest Christmas trees I’ve ever seen. Each is a cone of strings of lights that flow from the star at the top to the circular base. A total of 375,000 lights, and they can all be programmed and controlled, allowing for extraordinary flowing multicolour patterns. This alone would make these trees excellent attractions in Wellington, Auckland and Christchurch, the cities that are lucky enough to have their presence, but they’re also interactive.

Firstly, the trees have telephone booths attached to them. Children can go in the booths and call Santa, whereupon their communication visibly travels up a length of fairy lights to the star at the top of the tree. It’s not a game, but it’s certainly interactive and nicely reminds people that this is a Telecom tree, and Telecom is all about things involving telephones. The ask of asking also helps remind adults that there’s also a collection campaign going on, where members of the public are encouraged to donate presents that can be passed on to underprivileged kids.

Secondly, all those light displays on the trees are designed by people. These trees are up for a long time, yet they display hours and hours of different patterns. The reason they can do this is because not all of the patterns are designed by someone working for Telecom. Instead, the public can go to the website and design their own light shows for the trees. Light shows have little to do with Telecommunications, apart from going online to design them, but that’s enough, because the whole interaction is so staggeringly neat and the trees look so good.

Is there a game anywhere in the whole process? Not that I can see. You’d have a hard time even saying gamification, there are no points or badges. But there is interaction, and that is the critical element if you ask me. And, like I say, gamification can be a broad term.

Pop, Lock 'n Rooooll - Trading Cards meet Dice in Open Source land!

Last week me and a plucky team if revolutionaries launched a new project on Kickstarter, which we think is pretty neat for three reasons:

• Firstly, it’s a cross between a trading card game and a dice game, where the cards attach to the faces of the dice.
• Secondly, it’s open source, so everyone who plays it is encouraged to change the design of everything as much as they like.
• Thirdly, we’re giving it away for free!

It’s called Pop, Lock ‘n’ Rooooll. You should go back it on Kickstarter now, go on, please.

We set it going last Wednesday (NZ time) and so far we are doing reasonably well, we've got 14% of our 5k total. We also got ourselves some start backers:

Jane McGonigal made a pledge and tweeted about us, which isn't something she does lightly.

Peter Adkison also threw us a few shekels (his words) and as the man who spotted the potential of Magic: The Gathering I find that particularly encouraging. I should also note he has his own Kickstarter campaign running, which you should check out after you give us some money.

Of all the projects I've worked on over 18 years of game making this is the one I’m most excited about. We might be talking about a print and play game, which you have to get the scissors and glue out for (it doesn’t take long to make) but this kind of thing is the future – mass production of unique items is where it’s at kids!

Freedom, NOT freemium!

Zombie Sandcastle and its Business Model

Help me figure out whether my latest game should be free, proper free, not that freemium hogwash.

I spend a lot of time thinking about business models. And you’ll find it almost entirely surprising to find out that I quite enjoy it. This is just as well, because the modern game maker can’t really avoid the subject. As a game designer and producer I certainly can’t just avoid ignore it, I have to tackle it head on. Nowadays games don’t go away when you launch them, they linger, further begging for attention, and hopefully giving some revenue in return. This is problematic for the producer in me, but the complication of post release scheduling is nothing compared to what my game designer self has to contend with.

Zombie Sandcastle - what business model should I choose?

It’s not just a case that game designers have to worry about the business model, the business model is now a major part of the design. Even the simplest approach to the problem – we will sell the game for a price, the end, is a decision that can’t be made easily for most of us. Without having to tune any game component for retention or monetisation you reduce the number of moving parts in your design, making it possible to tune them faster; it’s more like juggling handkerchiefs than cats, it’s relatively easy. Although, if you get it wrong the handkerchiefs might turn into chainsaws and chop off parts of your body you quite like. Adding stuff to a paid app is still something you’re expected to do, but if you balance your game in a way the audience hates then they might see any post release tinkering as a sign that you were prepared to take their money before you finished the game, which can seriously lower their opinion of you, and your game may never recover, no matter how good your updates are.

Freemium games don’t suffer so much from this; if you’re making one of these then your audience already has a lower opinion of you.

Only a small percentage of players have this lower opinion because they think you’re a bad person. Those folks are often those that like their games to be more of a challenge and not just an activity, and they already think you’re destroying the very fabric of the universe. Those that do see games as more of an activity than a challenge, what we commonly call casual gamers, despite there being nothing casual about the amount of hours they play games for, have a lower opinion of you simply because your game is something they enjoy, games to them are not necessarily a pre-eminent form of entertainment, they are just a type of entertainment. They’re pretty sure you play games all day, in fact. 

So there’s paid, and there’s freemium. Not that freemium describes any one business model, there’s a myriad of options within the confines of its meaning: You can have micro transactions, where folk pay for hats. You can have adverts, which you might be able to pay to get rid of. Hard pay walls, which really just make your download a demo with an IAP unlock for the full game, or alternative pay walls, where you can annoy your friends on Facebook instead of paying. You can have buy everything for ever options, which are really good for kids games. Or the whole thing might be an advergame, which is really just the same as a game supported by many adverts, although you hopefully get paid up front. Pump and play has been brought back from the graveyards of the video arcades of my youth to be the new king of the hill (see what I did there, I apologise, but I’m not hitting backspace). There’s even the 72oz steak model where you attempt a challenge and only pay if you fail. And there’s a thousand twists on these and a whole world of ways of putting them together. 

If anyone ever says they’re using a freemium business model and fails to clarify the details of what that means then they probably don’t know what they’re talking about. 

There are also subscription models, but for the game I’m thinking about I really can’t imagine that being a goer. 

I’ve downloaded Minecraft three times now, twice on mobile touch screen devices. Now, I wouldn’t say that Minecraft isn’t still highly enjoyable on my iPad but nor would I suggest it was designed for the device, we all know it wasn’t. And we all know that although mouse and keyboard might not be the most accessible control set up, it is the best. (Rest in peace Doug Engelbart, your invention is one of the greatest tools ever devised). 

So a few months ago I decided to sit down and design a construction game for touch devices. Naturally I began with the fundamental question – how do I interact with the world? Even on a touch screen device there are a few choices here: Taps, swipes, drags, they’re all available but when it comes to construction, the obvious interaction for me was drawing. It probably helped that I do enjoy drawing on the iPad, and just with my finger, which doesn’t necessarily create great results but I enjoy it nevertheless. Perhaps the pencil in my hand also helped… curiously my mind then went to a destruction game, Where’s My Water – in that you’re always taking away, never adding to the landscape. But what if you could do both?

My little lunar lander (actually Phoenix Lander) game - note the meteorite strike forming a crater...

For me some games are pointless in 3D, one is Lemmings, the other is Worms, both of which used a destructible landscape layer in which all the action takes place. Thoughts of those two games set my scale all of a sudden and I was thinking about little dudes wandering around the landscape, and ones I couldn’t necessarily control directly.

Like a goddamn fool I’ve never learnt to code and instead noodle around with various game creators that infuriate me. One of which is Scratch, which is made and maintained by folks at MIT and is designed to allow kids to get into programming. It has a bunch of drawing functions in it and is able to run some rather interesting collision checks based on colour. 

Years ago I made a little lunar lander game using Scratch and realised I could define the landscape as one solid colour for the lander’s collision to check. And doing that also meant I could have a single colour for the BG and have meteorites strike the landscape and overdraw the ground in the BG colour, forming craters. Because the lander was checking for hitting a colour it could then enter these craters. I was pretty pleased with myself. 

In this game you and a friend can blow away bits of the planetoids or build new bits. Sadly, it runs too slowly to be playable...

Then, a couple of years later I tried to make a two player game that used the same landscape destruction technique but gave the players (it’s a two player game) have control over construction and destruction of the terrain. They also control little characters getting down to the scale of Worms and Lemmings. And they jump between asteroids, which they can also blow up, but that’s not important right now.

So I could imagine how to actually make a prototype of this construction game in Scratch. Which was kind of a pain, because then I had no excuse for not doing it. That first lunar lander game had actually been set on Mars, so I had an idea of the landscape being sand – remember, my technique only really works with a solid BG colour and a solid landscape colour. Naturally, sand deserves a beautiful blue sky. Now I was thinking about sandcastles. I’ve had a Lemmings-esque castle defence game in my head for donkeys years now. So all of a sudden I had little guys defending a sandcastle rather than a real castle. I don’t know where the zombies came from (does anyone ever really know where the zombies come from?) but I suddenly had a design for a game which had named itself Zombie Sandcastle. 

I made a prototype in Scratch and found that I had a game I really enjoyed playing and despite the environment not really being fast enough to do it justice, and really not being able to implement everything I wanted to, I found it all oddly hypnotic. This is not common in my experience. How many of you have made prototypes and found them to be promising but not compelling? I’ve been involved in a lot. Most importantly I’ve made a lot in Scratch and none have made me have “just one more go”. But Zombie Sandcastle did. 

Of course, I might have made a game that only I could possibly be interested in. But I can see the potential. And I decided to run an Indiegogo campaign to see if I could raise some cash to move the whole thing into a better state, which can be built on over time. Naturally, I’ll be hiring a skilled programmer for this task.

Tunneling zombies and guiding your survivors to new stashes of food sure does take its tole on your sandcastle...

Which brings me back to business models. You see, I was there wondering what business model I should use for a release version. Should it be a one off payment. That would work. But I could also imagine some quite interesting alternatives – I especially like the idea of selling catalogues of new gear like Steve Jackson used to do with Autoduel Quarterly for Car Wars. Of course, that was a tabletop game, but it was a really neat way of presenting new things.

But then I heard something interesting about the history of crowd funding. It turns out that someone once postulated the idea that software might be produced on a purely crowd funded basis, with the intent of releasing the product for free, thus negating any concept of piracy. That idea resonated with me quite strongly and it suddenly seemed to me that I was being a bit of a twat, asking the general public for money and then thinking I could have a second bite of the cherry and make money from a different avenue.

So the game should be free if its development is crowd funded. But then, isn’t that unfair on my backers, one of their perks being getting a copy of the game?

What do you think? Do you think it should be completely free, perhaps with an early release exclusively for backers? Folks, I just don’t know, I need your opinions! Please comment!

Zombie Sandcastle - Extreme Castle Makeover

In a version of Zombie Sandcastle that I would describe as anywhere near finished (i.e. not the current version) the player will begin with a building phase, where they get a bit of time to sculpt their sandcastle and place their survivors within it.  However, in the demo I have running there's no building phase, I simply supply the castle pre-built. Which means I get all the castle designing fun. Not wanting to let this little proof of concept go stale I've put a new castle design in the game, which I'm quite taken with. Here it is:

If you've every fancied yourself as a castle designer then sketch one up and send it along to me, it would be great fun to see how other ones play.

PS4, Xbox One or OTHER!

It's been E3 this week and games news has been awash with PS4 (simple naming convention) and Xbox One (weird chronologically screwed naming convention).

But there is a much more important announcement this week - the launch of my first Kickstarter campaign. Check it out!

By the Power of Brevity

I'm a fan of brevity, I might not be the best practitioner of it in the world, but I'm a fan nonetheless.

It's of particular benefit when trying to sell an idea - no one wants to have to read three paragraphs before you tell them what the hell your idea is all about. 

Be brief, be to the point and be exciting.

Normally I apply this to words, but recently I had the splendid idea of watching the opening sequence from Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, which has provided me with an excellent example of less being more in the world of moving image.

When I began my search I didn't expect was to bump into the the 4 minute version of Buck Rogers intro, in fact I had no idea it existed. It was used on the theatrical release of the pilot and you can suffer it here.

It's not all that bad, by itself, if you've not seen the TV intro. I guess the strange three minutes of women rolling around do convey some element of Buck's 500 year sleep, although I can't work out why he was so happy about being unfrozen, I guess all the rolling around got a bit boring. 

I certainly found it boring. Now have a look at the intro sequence from the TV series. It's a far superior piece of work, blasting the information to your ears as quickly and as punchy as possible. In fact, the whole thing is over in the same amount of time it takes the longer version to stop speaking.

Of course, if you don't have to explain anything then you can be even more brief. I expect the first teaser for Star Wars Episode VII will be a blank screen, then we'll hear the sound of a lightsaber powering up, just the sound, no visual, then perhaps Star Wars logo. Let's face it, that'll be worth $200 million in box office straight off the bat.