MumboJumbo

Some months ago, we began the process of converting one of our ‘portal teaser’ flash games to run on Facebook.  The idea was to build a set of games that people would enjoy playing, would help promote our titles online and in retail stores, and get our feet wet in the "Casual Gaming" space on Facebook.  What we ended up with, however, was quite different, and far more interesting than any of us thought it would be.

You see, it turns out that you can’t just plug a game into Facebook and make it work.  There are other things you have to do too, things that make the game more ‘Facebookish’.  For example, you have to allow folks to invite their friends to play, you should probably track their scores, and you might consider teasing people when their friends get a rockin total at the end of their game.

In order to do this, we built two new peices of code.  The first, which I was only involved in the specification of, was a rock solid Flash based loader.  The loader’s function is to find out from some mystical source who is playing the game, who their friends are, and what their scores were, along with loading that actual Flash game.  My friend Anton, and his side-kick Ivan, did a fabulous job putting together something both appealing to look at and solid functionally.

My job, on the other hand, was to write the engine that made the whole thing tick.  That ‘mystical source’, if you will.  What began as a simple platform for storing minute amounts of data about the player turned into a fairly large, fast, and intricate XML engine that still stores the least amount of data possible to meet the loader’s needs, yet still works across multiple platforms.

To begin, we designed the initial canvas page that boots up the flash loader and tells it who the player is.  Once the loader is started, it makes some calls back to the engine to determine who the player’s friends are, what their scores are, and what order they should show up in.  A simple REST call with a simple XML response.  Lovely stuff if you are a back end coder like myself.

As the game progresses and the player completes a level, the loader lets the engine know what level the player is on and what their current score is.  Since this particular game has a ‘Continue’ function, we thought it would be interesting to try out the capability for players to pick a game back up later if they wanted.

Finally, upon game completion, a final call is made, scores are tallied, and a screen of all Top Scores is displayed (via another XML feed), and the session the player was in is marked as closed.  Yay!  Fait Accompli!

The back end of the application is, of course, written entirely in Ruby on Rails, my current language / framework of choice.  The plugin, rFacebook, was used to provide the FBML and FQL calls required to integrate with Facebook.  rFacebook is a fantastic plugin that is fairly well documented, and I very much recommend it.  As part of the original design spec, I included the capability for the engine to track scores from any game we release on Facebook, or on any other platform that had a REST / XMLRPC style API.  In the future, we will be able to compare scores of players from any platform, a specific platform, or potentially even from folks playing the full version of our games from home.

In the longer term, we will be building a larger game management engine, entirely on Rails, that will work with the games that we release for more cool interconnected functionaliy, level sharing, and other neat stuff.

Every month I will reveal some cheats/hints to some of our games. The cheat below for Luxor 2 will allow you to skip to any level you desire and reveal the extremely difficult "Challenge of Horus" difficulty!

1. Start the game normally
2. At the main menu click on the “Options” button
3. After the Options window opens, push both the “Page Up” and “Page Down” keys at the same time and then release.
4. A window will appear that says “Do you want to permanently enable cheats on this profile?”
5. Click “Enable Cheats”
6. You will now notice a new button labeled “Cheats” on the options menu.

 The available cheats include:

1. Unlock All Levels – unlocks all levels up to the last successfully completed stage 
2. Unlock All Stages – unlocks the beginning of every stage in the game 
3. Unlock Challenge of Horus – unlocks the ultra-difficult Challenge of Horus Mode 

Enjoy!

Hey everybody. My name is Robert and I am a game programmer here at MumboJumbo. I thought it would be fun to share a little bit about what it’s like to make games for a living. I know that there are lots of people out there that love to play games and even some who might like to get into the game industry. It isn’t just the young crowd either. I have spoken with people of all ages who are fasicnated about the game industry. Since this is my first blog entry, I’ll start by telling you a little bit about myself and my "journey" to this point in time.

I have always loved computers. I am currently 46 (unfortunately, this keeps changing!) and I got my first job in the computer industry at 18 (so do the math!). Yes, I was programming computers back when dinosaurs roamed the earth. I have also been playing computer games since they were invented. So it only seems natural that I am a game programmer. But this is actually a relatively new development. For most of my career I have programmed business applications (you know…databases, accounting programs, fun stuff!). About 5 years ago I decided that I wanted to do something slightly different. At the same time my 16 year-old son was expressing an interest in becoming a game programmer. It only took one trip to E3 to convince me that I wanted a piece of that action. So, 5 years later - boom! - I’m a game programmer.

I really love game programming. It provides a technical challenge as well as a lot of gratification when I get a particular part of a game working. A lot of people don’t realize all of the blood, sweat, and tears that go into making the games that they play. I am surrounded by some of the most creative and talented people I have ever known: designers, artists, programmers, producers, QA, management….everyone one of them has a passion to make the best and most enjoyable games ever. And I’m not just saying this about MumboJumbo–I believe this is true of any good game studio. People in this industry are a little crazy and have a slightly different way of seeing life. We want to share this with others and it’s why I like making games.

So, now you know a little bit about me. In future posts, I’ll share what it’s like to be a game programmer and work inside the gaming industry. If you have any questions or a particular topic you’d like me to cover, drop me a line or post a comment to the blog and I’ll do my best. In the meantime, play more games!

We are excited to announce the release of Little Farm on Facebook. This is MumboJumbo’s first foray into the social network gaming platforms and we have a lot to learn. In some respects we should call this game "Little Farm beta" because it does not leverage all the cool features of the Facebook API that make games fun and social. But don’t worry, those features are coming!

Social networks like Facebook represent an enormous opportunity for independent developers like MumboJumbo. First, the sheer numbers are staggering: 36 million US-based users on Facebook and 73 million US-based users on MySpace. Second, the social networks are giving developers a wide-berth when it comes to developing games; while they are clamping down on spam tactics, they do not produce their own games (what is "co-opetition"?) and they leave it up to market forces, not business development, to determine the winners and losers. Third, their APIs enable game developers to have a direct relationship with their customers (something the portals would never allow). Finally, for the first time we can bring games to where the users are instead of forcing users to find the games. All in, it is a very exciting time for casual games.

Click here to play Little Farm on Facebook and please be sure to leave us feedback in the discussion forum!

Social Networks Meet Casual Games

By the time the third day rolled around the convention was nearly a ghost town. Most people had cleared out and were racing to get home on early flights. But I braved a third day of panels and presentations, yet this was the only one of note. Ironically, this was perhaps the best panel of the three day convention. Roman Nouzareth of cafe.com, Bret Terrill of bretterrill.com, Kristian Segerstrale of Playfish and I believe the CEO of SGN (did not catch his name!) talked about the meat and potatoes of casual games on social networks: making money. Roman had a little bird with interesting data, but I don’t think it was meant for a wider audience. :-)

There were some really interesting points made regarding the drivers of success:

• despite the fact that Flash is getting better and can deliver a richer experience, engagement will be driven by "love and emotion", not graphics or sound
• revenue is still volatile and must come from ads, virtual goods and premium content; one of the three will not cut it and two of three may work
• even though the games must be driven by emotion, the business must driven by analytics particularly since you can gather far more data than any other platform
• echoing statements made earlier in the show, the panelists agreed that simply porting games will not work; you must leverage the API and the social graph

One point I did not completely understand was "latency is something to play with, not fight"; I suppose Kristian meant you must tweak your app but do not address latency head-on since it is inevitable.

The panel made it clear that social and gaming networks represent a new and more equitable future for developers since the feedback on games is real-time, developers can have a direct relationship with the users, and the platforms/portals are not making their own games (I still do not understand "co-opetition). 

After digesting the first day of my first Casual Connect, I hit the Taper Auditorium at 9AM for Day 2. Judging by the attendance, I was in the small minority of people that went to bed at a normal hour the night before. :-)

The Social Tidal Wave: The New Definition of Casual Gaming

Dave Williams of Nicklelodeon spoke about the casual games industry from a media perspective. I found this presentation extremely interesting because the media companies are the new unknown in this space. Put another way, we should pay attention to what matters to them because they are the ones with the deepest pockets and, to be frank, can pay the large multiples that we all dream about.

Williams opened by saying that he thought there is more room for creativity in games than in any other medium. He went on to discuss how they segment the market and echoed earlier comments that games can and must reach beyond the traditional casual game demographic (older women). In my opinion, the real nugget was his thoughts on changing how games are produced. He advocated a view of games as media rather than products. Games should not be simply "designed, built and shipped" but rather developed into media properties with continuous story lines that can be expanded via episodic content. He used "Carrie the Caregiver" as an example. 

Capturing the Consumer Audience through Innovative Marketing Tactics

This panel was nearly useless. Innovative marketing tactics implies, at least in my mind, inexpensive tactics. Sharing ideas is wonderful but not much use when they are accessible to only two or three players. Sharing effective campaigns that are within reach of the ever day developer would have made the panel really meaningful. Renting a house in London is borderline useless. For that matter, renting a house anywhere and inviting the press to play a games is pretty much an absurd idea for anyone on the budget. For that matter, the other panelists did not touch upon anything meaningful or insightful either.

Social Networks - New Channels and Audiences for Your Games?

Garret Link of Gamehouse, Jessica Alter of Bebo, Paul Linder of Hi5 and Jason Oberfest of MySpace talked about what works and does not work on their respective networks. Most interesting was that Facebook was not represented, though Bebo was sort of a proxy for them. All of the panelists agreed that games are integral to the health and future viability of their platforms, but for different reasons. Bebo indicated games were a mechanism for generating page views whereas Hi5 and MySpace framed games as a mechanisms for friends to interact with one another. All echoed sentiments from the prior day that a) simply porting games will not work, b) leveraging the social graph is critical and c) games must be tuned to the idiosyncrasies of each platform. The panel spent a good deal of time talking about the comparative strengths and weaknesses of OpenSocial and Facebook; this was a particularly interesting discussion since Bebo straddles both worlds and favors Facebook. Hi5 and MySpace openly acknowledged that OpenSocial has a ways to go and that it is still not at 1.0 yet. Paul Linder made a very interesting comment that departed from the Java-esque statement of "code once, run anywhere". In his words, OpenSocial is "learn once, run anywhere" and that OpenSocial was meant to be flexible enough to let individual social networks have their own implementations.  

Driving User Behavior with Game Mechanics and Behavioral Economics

I caught the last half of Bunchball’s Rajat Paharia’s discussion about driving user behavior. The overall theme was that economics, e.g., points or rewards, and simple mechanisms such as competitions or special offers that quickly expire, can effectively drive user behavior in your favor. Pogo was often cited as the masters of this art. I did not catch enough of the presentation to get all the nitty gritty details, but I did find it interesting to hear someone supporting traditional economic mechanisms to drive behavior given that, for the moment, people are advocating social mechanisms to drive growth and engagement.      

Advertising: Get Ready for Hyper-Growth

Chris Houtzer of RealGames talked about the growing advertising model. Unfortunately it was so dark in Recital Hall (as well as Triple Door) that taking notes was nearly impossible. Real views advertising as the solution for the other 98% (e.g., non-converting download customers) but accompanied by subscription fees or something else. In other words, advertising alone will not do it.    

Let me begin, as I often do, by saying that I am a total newbie to the industry. I attended my first Casual Connect and I spent almost all of my time listening to speeches and panels. I found the first day to be, on average, incredibly informative.

Disaggregating Games

Paul Thelen’s presentation was about the raw data of the industry. Big Fish and NPD segmented the entire gaming market into 14 buckets and arrived at conclusions that seemingly proved and disproved widely held notions in the industry. For example, the largest segment of casual gamers is adult women. No surprise there. But what was a surprise was that a large number or hardcore gamers admitted to playing casual games, sometimes with great frequency. So is our target audience older women or not? Unfortunately the data came at us too fast and too furious to completely digest (much less write down). But the general point was clear - that there is overlap and diversity within the game space and there could be some unexploited market opportunities. 

Super Casual Revolution

For people unfamiliar with Trip Hawkins (i.e., people like me), listening to Trip speaking is basically, well, a trip. This presentation felt like an hour long Digital Chocolate commercial with intermittent personal plugs (he managed to weave in several stories of his early days at Apple). My favorite quote was that in 1975 he knew he was going to start EA in 1982 because he had a seven year plan in place. That said, Trip Hawkins’ has probably forgotten more about gaming then I will ever know, so this all has to be taken with a grain on salt. :-) His main point was that the game is changing and we will see an OMG - omni mega gamer - emerge that is different from the average gamer of days past.

Game Network + Social Networks: Casual Gaming Reaches the Mass Market

Andrew Trader from Zynga, Stephanie Bergman from MySpace, Richard Fields from MindJolt, Russel Ovans from Backstage Technologies and Gabe Zichermann from rmbr spoke about the challenges of developing games on the social network platforms. I felt bad Stephanie from MySpace as all but one of the other panelists seemed to openly profess their love for Facebook. Interesting observations or comments:

• MySpace users like to browse other users’ profiles, so games that appeal to that activity are most popular, e.g., Owned; games should be tuned for each platform
• OpenSocial is still is not there yet, but the most recent version appears to be more promising (this was a recurring theme throughout the conference)
• the gender split is more even on the social networks, even for games that skew towards the male audience in the download channel
• iterating is essential since MySpace and Facebook both change the rules and the architecture of the platform often (and with little warning)
• there appeared to be more anger/frustration directed towards Facebook than MySpace despite the fact that developers seem to prefer its environment of MySpace’s environment

One question that I came away with is whether or not the difference between the MySpace and Facebook gamer is a result of demographics or the channel, i.e., Oberon’s game channel. Personally (and without anything to back this up), I think it is the latter. Games on MySpace simply have a different feel because Oberon drives the user experience. It is no wonder that the "mob" and "owned" games are popular because they don’t rely on Oberon’s arcade. This is not a knock on Oberon; I just think they drive a different user experience for games and that is being misinterpreted as unique user behavior. 

Social Games on Facebook: Worth It?

Kate Connally of AddictingGames, Arseny Lebedev of Large Animal, Jason Loia of Digital Chocolate, Don Ryan of i-Play and Jake Freeman of FantasyMoguls spoke about their experiences with developing and monetizing games on the social networks. This panel was of particular interest to me because it touched upon, but did not answer, the heated question of advertising on social networks. The moderator kicked the discussion off by throwing out CPM numbers that, by his own admission, were rough estimates. He was guessing that some popular games on Facebook could be earning CPMs of roughly $0.35 via ad networks but up to $3.00 by going direct. While I have no personal experience regarding the latter, the former certainly seems like a reasonable number. If such logic holds, there are a few game developers earning super-sized returns while the rest of the development community is just eking out a living. In other words it is feast or famine. But given the low production costs, not every game needs alpha returns. Some other observations:

• there is a general consensus that the CPM market is still maturing, with the Slide/RockYou/SocialMedia CPM model faltering and the in-game Mochi model finding its legs
• advertising alone will not cut it and that alternative revenue streams, e.g., premium content and virtual goods, are necessary
• Digital Chocolate views TowerBloxx as an important vehicle for brand building and driving traffic to their site (so they can cross-sell different versions of the game and new games, too)
• AddictingGames suggested an opposite philosophy and did not see their games as a primary driver of traffic back to their site

A theme I heard here and elsewhere was that less is more / the simpler the better. Delivering an engaging, fun social experience is far more important than delivering an immersive game experience.

Ten Key Ingredients for a Successful Social Game

Kristian Segerstrale gave, in my opinion, the best presentation of the three day event. So good that it merits its own blog posting. 

From Casual Social to Socially Casual - Highlighting the Power of Community in Gaming

Andrew Pedersen of Pogo discussed the power of community and how it drives Pogo. I liked his analogy of moving away from thinking of users an audience with a one-way experience (e.g., a typical movie audience) and towards thinking of them as a community with a shared experience (e.g., Rocky Horror Picture Show audience). He went on to define the four key elements of community:

• Communication
• Identity
• Status / Rewards
• Shared Experiences

In general this keynote was a bit flat as he spent too much time defining community and why it is important; this might have been useful to a different crowd, i.e., one outside of gaming and unfamiliar with community, but to most of the audience it was old news.

I didn’t think very seriously about avatars until I read Neal Stephenson’s 1992 cyberpunk classic, "Snow Crash.” At that time there were characters that I controlled in single-player video games of course but before multi-player gaming I had no real desire to inject a “virtual me” into any digital world populated by software-generated “bots.”

Movies like Lawnmower Man and Tron presented exciting depictions of avatars but in the early days of the consumer-friendly internet and the first MMO’s, the emphasis was not yet on your digitally represented self in any virtual world. So the first avatars were pretty much limited to game characters or simple text aliases and icons found in chat rooms and game lobbies.

In the virtual reality internet of “Snow Crash”, avatars are "… the audiovisual bodies that people use to communicate with each other in the Metaverse …..Your avatar can look any way you want it to, up to the limitations of your equipment.” One particularly funny scene in the book depicts a virtual bar where the protagonist derisively points out a “black and white person” rendered with a lack of color and poor resolution—a reflection of the inferior skills of the hacker behind the avatar. The notion that a person’s technical limitations in the real world could be unavoidably revealed in a virtual world was both hilarious and horrifying. I have been hoping for the arrival of user-friendly tools for creating amazing avatars, ever since.

The first Web browser of note, Mosaic, arrived shortly after the publication of that book and over fifteen years later we have 2D mug shots in online videogame menus and primitive emoticons for IM. In many social networks the best we get are static photos, goofy 2D cartoon characters or robotic 3D human-shaped avatars that look like soulless action figures of ourselves.

I suspect that we’ve been so busy raising the production values in hardcore video games, building out the hardware and software infrastructure of the Web, and wrestling with ways to monetize content that we just haven’t gotten around to making avatars what they could be. I don’t agree that it’s the hardware or software technology limitations. I think the situation is more akin to that one light bulb you notice near the chimney that doesn’t work when you climb down from the ladder and stand in the front yard after hanging the Christmas lights on your house. I look at the avatar as simply one component that needs to improve in order to fill out the rest of the online experience, so to speak.

 To be clear, I’m not talking so much about your character inside an actual video game world. Your character in those environments is indigenous to a story and must more or less conform to the rules of that synthetic universe. This is not to say that customization of characters in online worlds isn’t lacking—It IS—one exception being the soon-to-be-released SPORE. What I am talking about is the avatar of “you”– the infinitely modifiable internet interloper, moving in and out of Web-based communities, games, virtual worlds, conferences, conversations, and user-created digital habitats. Just like in the physical world, we are all unique human beings on the Web. And we are always in search of a suitable language, posture, costume, calling card, emissary, or disguise, depending on our needs and our imaginations. A well-designed avatar can be indispensable..

Today’s internet is not “The Matrix” and the online avatar is nowhere near what Morpheus would describe as “..the mental projection of your digital self,” but I think it’s time to increase our efforts in that direction and replace the faulty bulb in the Christmas lights, so to speak. Why? Because as a communication tool the Web is so much more than a multi-directional video telegram machine. And it is only just beginning to demonstrate its power as a platform for human beings to communicate visually, virally, and if desired—via custom built persona tailored for the message, recipient, and occasion.

I was recently using the SPORE Creature Creator and it occurred to me that its myriad options would insure such physical diversity and permutations in the game that every player’s creature will end up unique.

I can imagine similarly diverse, beautifully animated avatars on the Web, some elaborate, some simple, but all of them as unique as the person they represent. And user-friendly tools for creating a broad spectrum of avatars (think fantastical, alien SPORE creatures on one end, and smoothly animated 3D photo-realistic versions of your idealized 25-year old self on the other) would contribute significantly to the evolution and growth of individual expression on the Web. This is no small thing. So much of each of us is invisible to the world, and language often falls disappointingly short in conveying many of our emotions and much of our individual and cultural identity. Highly customized, vivid avatars are another way to leverage the power of the internet to add a new dimension in the way we learn from, communicate with, and entertain each other.

Well it’s that time of year again.  It’s the beautiful month of July…in Seattle… which means it’s time for Casual Connect 2008.  For those who don’t know, Casual Connect is one of three annual conferences for the Casual Games Association where thousands of professionals come together for several days to meet, network and learn about the rapidly growing casual games industry. 

I’m looking forward to this year’s conference not just because it’s a great time to be in Seattle (the one month out of the year it doesn’t rain there) but also for the many interesting session topics ranging from whether social games on Facebook are worth it to taking XBox to the next level. They have relevant and compelling content for everyone whether you are a game developer, publisher or distributor and whether you design, program, market or sell games. 

In between attending sessions and expanding my knowledge, I will be running the MumboJumbo booth.  MumboJumbo is once again a corporate sponsor for the event and we will be previewing some of our hot, new games coming out this fall including the latest editions of our top franchises: LUXOR and 7 Wonders.  So if you’re in the neighborhood, be sure to stop by the MumboJumbo booth and say ‘hello’.  I’ll save a freebie for you.

Casual Connect Seattle takes place July 23-25, 2008 at Benaroya Hall.  For more information on the conference, check out the web site at www.casualconnect.org.

For more information on the Casual Games Association, go to www.casualgamesassociation.org.

Sometimes you stumble upon a game that is so different, so beautiful, so creative that you feel compelled to tell your friends. In the case of ferryhalim.com there is not just one game but 60! Each are so simple and so beautiful that you are compelled to play them over and over even though the games themselves are not that challenging (perhaps that is part of their allure).

What makes them even more special is the wonderful music that accompanies that highly stylized (or stylistic?) artwork. These are definitely not your run-of-the-mill Flash games. Imagine a world where all casual games had this much attention to detail. Here at MumboJumbo we try to consistently raise the production value of our games. Seeing ferryhalim.com only fuels that drive even further!