A discussion about engagement in online games
http://whatgamesare.com/2010/12/the-engagement-hierarchy.html
http://whatgamesare.com/2010/12/are-you-fooling-yourself-engagement.html
The five levels are:
- Distraction: Your game is simply something that users do because they are bored. They can take it or leave it at any time. Very low lifetime value, often worthless creatively, but might be the sort of game that players would play repeatedly if motivated with a prize or something similar.
- Amusement: There’s something charming or fun about your game that keeps players coming back. It might not be particularly sophisticated, but with the right mechanics you could spin up a decent rate of daily return.
- Connection: The game strikes some kind of emotional nerve with the player, enough that they would like to dig deep into it. That nerve might be a fantasy that the player wants to play, a game world that he finds interesting, or a game that generates social recommendation and encourages the player to get interested.
- Meaning: The player develops emotional investment with the game. There is something about the game that chimes with something in the player, and the so the game comes to have meaning to them. Meaning does not necessarily mean creative or artistic significance. It could be an urge to master, to become the best and satisfy the student within.
- Culture: The game becomes a social experience. When a game becomes a culture, it has embedded itself deep into the substrate of players such that it becomes a conversation topic, a language and an obsession. Cultures are sometimes lifelong, and they are most often the games that change the world. This means everything from Halo to soccer.
Flash community site
I’m working on creating a basic community site in flash for me and some of my friends to set up a gran turismo 5 time trial “league”. I know its super nerdy but damn if I don’t love that freaking game… So I’m setting up a little SQL/PHP/AS3 site for people to register and record their times somewhere we can all look at them and compare.
In the next few weeks I’m gonna post all the steps to create a flash based community site. The first one will be how to create a project in Flash Builder, and create the interface between Flash -> PHP -> SQL and then back again.
Android Video Tutorials
I have been checking out android in the past few days:
http://www.xtensivearts.com
Some nice beginner tutorials here.
Integrating C++ and Objective C in an Xcode Project.
C++ Objective-C integrationSo I searched for a while about how to use C++ classes in an objective C project and with the iPhone. I couldn’t find a good tutorial or anything so I am adding this so I can remember how I did it (or anyone else can).
First, this is a very simple demo but take from it what you will. This isn’t meant to be a tutorial as much as a reference guide. So if you don’t know how to do one of the steps there are MANY tutorials that will guide you through the set up process.
iPhone app Every day.
So some guy named Matt (who is crazy apparently) is writing an iPhone app every day, and started a blog about it:
71 squared iPhone tutorials.
So these two thirty something developers have come up with a series of tutorials that are really cool. You can check them all out here:
http://www.71squared.com/iphone-tutorials/
As of this post there are 10 tutorials, and they go through the process of creating an iPhone game with the OpenGL:ES framework. While it is all fun and good to use Cocos2d and so simple, there are fundamental aspects of that engine that people should understand before using it.
Two really cool mac OS X apps.
I have found some really cool applications that I have started using at work to make my workflow smoother. One is called fluid. Fluid is a cool little browser program. They say it is a Site Specific Browser (SSB), and what it does is wrap safari in basically a container to keep it from accessing other websites. So facebook cant see that you have amazon open and make adds on the facebook page about what your looking at on amazon. HOWEVER, the cool thing that this app does is allow you to add these SSBs to your menu bar at the top of OS X.
That little icon on the far right side is a SSB I created that links to the reference page for the cocoa2d game engine. So rather than open a new browser and go to the page I can just click that icon and there is the documentation. Like so:
The other app I have started to use today is called “GeekTool” It allows you to run the display of any unix shell command on your desktop. This includes everything from the time, to any script you write… Anything. It also has features for the system log, and a picture from the web. Frances Comugnai has a really cool post on his site about what you can do with it. A def must.
Changing the name under an iPhone app
http://iPhoneIncubator.com/blog/tutorial/display-a-meaningful-name-under-your-app-icon
The guys over at iphone incubator have a post up about changing the name under your iphone app.
SQLite tutorial
There are three ways to save data on the iPhone. 1 is a text file that you save to the sandbox and read from, the other is a .plist file (same basic idea only with a special extension.. Basically an xml file). The last is SQLite, the most powerful and versatile way. This tutorial will walk you through all the ways to create a sql lite app.
Creating light versions of iPhone projects
So Keith Peters over at bit-101 has a cool post about creating iPhone light versions.