Friendster = Social gaming platform? Wha?

This is interesting news.  Friendster is relaunching as a social gaming platform.  They have quite the challenge ahead of them.  Ultimately any 'social media game' has to compete with users of Zynga's products (Cityville, Farmville, etc).  Tadhg over at whatgamesare.com made the point that Zynga won Facebook, and they did this by being a really smart company.  To compete Friendster would need to bring something to the table that Zynga can't provide.

Or maybe Freindster isn't trying to compete with Zynga.  Maybe they are trying to provide a new platform to Zynga and get some cash by putting new faces in front of Z's games.  This puts them into the old position as trying to provide something new that Facebook can't.  Viximo already plays in that space and is capitalizing on putting games everywhere that Facebook ins't.  We Americans tend to forget that there are some really big social networks out there which are not run by Zuckerberg. And Viximo has a big head start on taping that market over Friendster.

All this just as Google+ is happening?  We have no idea what the impact of Google+ will be on social gaming.

In any event, it seems Friendster has a real challenge ahead of them.  They are trying to solve their own problems by playing in a highly competitive space and just may be positioning themselves between a good number of rocks and a couple hard places.  The mantra of any company that wants to make money is "Find out where customer pain is, and remove it".  I'm not sure there is pain that Freindster can remove, or at least I don't see it yet.  Maybe you smarter folks can point out to me what I'm missing in the comments.

Learning Java

To be less of a bad game project manager, I'm learning a coding language.  I've chosen Java.  It may not be the best language to learn for game programming (we can go over the reasons that have been explained to me once I know how to code better), but as an object oriented programming language it's a good place to start.  Also Minecraft was written in Java, and it would be excellent to code mods for the game.

What resources were used to learn Java?
thenewboston.com  (Progress: Tutorial 25 of 87)
"Head First Java", full review on the way.

Minecraft Specific Resources?
Bukkit Tutorials.

Cheap game design

Hypothetically lets assume you're a gamer with an idea for a game.  This should be easy to imagine.  You want to make a game but have no money.  Once you have chosen your team, and gotten some idea of what you are building (with a game design document), and picked your distribution/coding platform, you realize that you need to keep track of a lot of different kinds of information.  Specifically bug and issue tracking.

There are many great services out there with the ability to track issues, but there is another method which is often overlooked.  You can build your own bug tracker using sites.google.com.  As we were starting the ZoRTS project the Lead Coder asked me to find bug tracker to use.  As a manager on a project with no money something with low cost is ideal.  The following video on youtube provided the answer.



Pros:

• Works with other Google services
• Cheap! As in free.
• Hand built to do exactly what you need it to do.

Cons:

• There are other methods which may be better
• Basecamp (Which the ZoRTS project would like to use)
• Assembla (Which the ZoRTS project is using)
• 50 others.

There are a couple factors left out of the pros and cons.  For example using sites.google.com as your issue tracker takes effort to build and maintain.  You have to have and idea of what kinds of things you need to track ahead of time, and how the page is going to be used.  The ZoRTS website includes an example page so that you can get an idea of the kinds of columns that you might need.  However this is a moot point as you still need to spend time and effort updating and recording in any bug tracker.  It might just take a minute or two more to use google sites.

So what do you use to provide an infrastructure for communication of issues, bugs, design changes?  Why do you like to work with it?  If you have experience in the area please leave a comment below, let us know your opinion.

thenewboston.com

As you know I'm a business guy.  Having been out of IT for 10 years, there is some rust on those old coding skills.  It has been suggested to me recently that learning Java would be a good idea.  Although  Java is not the best language for game design, it seemed like a good idea because Mojang is going to release the code for Minecraft at some point and allow people to mod the game.  Which is super exciting.  Also the more coding that I know the more help I can be to The ZoRTS Project as the project manager.  Even if we use QT or C++ to code the game with having a good understanding of the specifics of coding means better communication with my team.

We have a new coder interested in working on the Project, and he recommended thenewboston.com.  The website is so great that this special post was made to point you in Bucky's direction.  I cannot recommend the site more.  They have some amazing tutorials on every major programming language.  The Java section starts with downloading the necessary programs and coding environments.  This is head and shoulders above other tutorials on youtube, where they assume you know that already or don't think to provide assistance.  There are 87 basic Java videos, 27 intermediate Java videos, and then 30 Java game development videos!  That is just Java.  The site also offers C, C++, Visual Basic, Python, iPhone development.  Even better the website doesn't seem overwhelming.  Really important for a newbie to coding.

To supplement Bucky's wonderful website I have a couple books are on their way.  They shall get reviews once they have arrived and been read.  It's tempting to post them as Amazon Affiliates now...  But it's in better taste to plug them on a review instead of taking the lime light away from thenewboston.com.  So watch my blog for those reviews!

I would love to find a website that specifically targets people learning Java for Minecraft.  If you have any suggestions on ways to learn Java please, I would love for your to post them in comments section!  Thanks!

The Most Important First step in game design.

Just so that we get this out of the way right up front, I have never made a computer game before.  Fortunately I have made a game before (a LARP in fact, edited the 8th edition).  That puts me in the classification of Amateur.  If I ever get Zorts made, look here on this blog for a big post with lots of joy and wonderment.  I am on this step with everyone else.  My edge on this situation is my business degree from BU.

Most gamers at some point realize that they want to make a computer game.  Some game concept that they want to see, or some story that they want to tell.  You have some kind of an idea that to them makes a great game.  Hopefully you have 100 ideas, or better yet more.  Some spark of inspiration has hit and from that the beginnings of a computer game arise.  Assuming that you are an amateur, what do you do next?

Start talking about it.

Your first instinct is going to be fear that someone else is going to steal your idea.  While that may happen, it most likely won't.  And there are many reasons why.  The best thing that you can do is get over the fear that your ideas are going to be stolen.  Especially in the design doc phase.  Start finding people that want to talk about making computer games.  You will find that 9 times out of 10 they are already making their own game.  But talk to them anyway.  Networking.  Get over the fear and create a web page for the project.  This advice was provided to me from Community Management/Marketing folks at Pax.  Yes I was one of the 12 people that went to a Community Management/Marketing panel at Pax.  And it was awesome.

Ultimately there is no right answer.  For the ZoRTS Project the game design doc came next.  What do you need next?  A game design doc?  A road map?  How about a Gantt Chart?  Stay tuned folks, more steps to follow!

Notes from NERD

Notes from Getting the Dough to Develop: Video Game funding

@Microsoft NERD Center.

#NEGGamesSiG Hash tag for the night.

New England Game SiG.

• Drives awareness and growth of the New England games industry.
• Mike Cavaretta @gamelaw Lawyer specializing in the games industry.

Monty Sharma moderating.

Tim Wright: Grand Banks Capital – VC Guy, Not a game guy.

• They want to see a product with users on the product.
• Make sure the person that you pick as an investor knows something about what you are doing.
• VC's can get talented people to help work on a project. They can bring expertise to the table.
• The First VC in the door is responsible to help sell the company to other investors. To help facilitated additional rounds of investment.
• Mobile social gaming. Will be or is the fastest growing thing ever.
• Unity is an amazing way to create a game quickly and publish it to multiple platforms.
• Whatever you do, make it reproducible, make things plug in.
• Company invests between $750,000 to $2 million for %20 ownership.

Micheal Dornbrook: Board Member Common Angels 

{finds passionate people builds the product, and then feeds them to Grand Banks Capital for additional rounds of financing when necessary}

• Don't have one game.
• We're looking at the team.
• Harmonix went through 6 rounds of investment. 3 Angels who know nothing about what they were investing in.  They believed in the team and invested based on that information.
• People who invested in Harmonix waited 10 years for payoff.  ROI: 100 times investment.
• Disruptive is usually done wrong: People tend to look at whats out there and go after the big guys who are doing well.
• Just like Guy Kawasaki's advice about attacking the unfortified hill.
• Company invests between $50,000 to $100,000. But individual members of the group may invest outside of the group itself. Can even be a personal check.

Jamy Nigiri: Jagex Games Studio

• Have something they can play, playable vertical slice. Go beyond the concept.
• Passion test, is someone on their team passionate about a game brought to them.
• How are you going to monetize. Very important answer. Give a pat answer.
• Jamy says: “If you can fund your game yourself do it.”
• Jagex says: We bring a trust and user community to the deal. They have passionate users.
• They have knowledge and experience in the game world. They already know how to do it.
• Currently working with one guy in his garage. Developer friendly!
• Disruptive Opportunities: How do you get an audience that don't consider themselves gamers to get into the game? How do you get them to spend money? How do you turn casual gamers in to spending gamers?
• Likes resource gathering.
• No deal is the same, so the percentage, the valuation, the revenue on the backside is different on each deal. Would generally split things 50/50. Each group has skin in the game, each group is passionate about the project. (Where typically the developer[you] might get 15%, publisher takes 85%)

Jamie Gotch CTO – Founder of Subatomic Studios

• Plan for your audience.
• Beware of feature bloat.
• The game that I make is not the kind of game I would play.
• Understand your audience.
• If you are a hardcore gamer, your audience may not be a hardcore gamer.
• Balance between deep experience and simplicity.
• Look for people who are highly motivated folks, who will stick it through to the end.

Game Dev Story

• Play this game. A game about building games. Remarkably detailed game about the contract traps.

The job of an Analyst.

Carl Manneh, CEO of Mojang, replied to my tweet plugging this blog post.  I was in gamer/business nerdvanah.


Jspringfield211: @notch @carlmanneh Mojang Forecast, just for fun.blog.zorts.net/2011/06/minecr…
Carlmanneh: It sure is. Nice post, but I think your evaluation is a bit modest ;)


The strategy of being a business analyst is that you provide data based on calculations and reasonable expectations.  Did I undershoot the number?  Absolutely.  Because the numbers I generated are not for investors, they are internal business numbers.  There is a big difference between a number generated for internal use and a number generated for external use.  If I were making such predictions because the marketing department wanted to know its budget for the next three years, I would want to undershoot the number as well.  "Worst case scenario you have x% of this projected budget to sell ads with next year."


What I did wrong in that post was state "Were Mojang Specifications to do an IPO they could be worth as much as 50 - 70 million Euro" without the qualification that the numbers were internal.  To the untrained eye it might look like I was forecasting for a different group of people then I actually was.  Or forecasting as an investor, which I was not.  I was pretending to be an employee of Mojang.


Minecraft has no reason to EVER do an IPO and never should.  Becoming a public company fundamentally changes a company in unpredictable ways (And I don't even know the difference between a Swedish IPO and an American one).  The culture of the Mojang would be altered in a bad way.  At the moment they can take advice from fans or not as they see fit.  Pistons for example.  They are free to add or not add anything based on what they feel Minecraft is about.  In a public company situation they might feel pressure to add a 'feature' simply because the shareholders wanted it.  Or because the customers wanted it.  Even if it goes against the spirit of the game.


And besides, if things are going we well as Carl indicates...  They really don't stand to gain that much more money than they already have from an IPO.  ;)

Minecraft Bonus Post!!!! Mojang Forecast.

Another week, and another bonus post.  Lucky you.  This bonus post, however, is going to be a bit less project oriented and  a bit more analysis oriented.  Which you may or may not find interesting.  Consider yourself warned.  This post started because I was replying to someone on the escapist about Minecraft.  

I'm a bad Project Manager...

And I may fail.  Failure is always an option.  But as long as I learn something from the experience, that's what counts.  This is the same place that all new project managers start from.  Even professionals are bad project managers sometimes.  Magicka almost didn't happen because of bad project management.  Moral is very important on a project.

My project management class was one that I was not prepared for.  I passed academically, but somehow missed the emotional impact that happens when you realize something is really important.  In retrospect it was perhaps the most important class in my time at Boston University.  As a Creative Lead/Project Manager on the ZoRTS Project what was taught to me in that class gets used everyday.  There is a distinct likely hood that I will end up becoming a Project Manager professionally.

There are two reasons why this is likely to be the case if I have a career in game design.
I am not a coder...  Well not anymore.  I was really good at C++ in my first college career (Aced my final without studying and without even knowing I was taking it, there's a story for another time) prior to the tech bubble bursting, in 2001.  Scott MacMillian says that if you want to become a game designer learn how to code.  That is wise advice, which at some point I am going to have to follow.

I am not an artist.  I have ideas, (100's, 1000's) in my head and no real way to get them out.  Having spent some time as an intern at a graphic design firm I have witnessed the artistry that goes into tweaking pixels to make them look just right.

Fortunately these two things mean that I can communicate with programs and artists.  Which is key to correctly scheduling them in a project.  So what do I have going for me?  I can write an amazing outline.  And turn that into a Gantt Chart.  MS Project is not foreign to me.  And the PMBOK is my friend.

What I do need to work on is actually implementing the ideas of basic project management.  Most likely following up and getting feedback from the team is what I have to work on the most.  I'm not afraid of calling myself a bad project manager, because the ZoRTS project is teaching me how to be a better one.  If you are also a bad project manager the best thing you can do is create your own project and practice.  Even if you are a good project manager between jobs, the best thing you can do is keep in practice.

What advice do you have for a bad project manager looking to get better?  Do you have a team leader horror stories?  What would you love to hear from the manager of your project?  Comment in the links below.

"Be Fearless"

I first heard about Beta House in Scott MacMillians Pax East presentation on his own game company.  They had used Beta House as an office location.  Working there got them out of the house, serious about work, and provided a community structure.


Beta House as a concept interested me, so I dug around a bit for information about it.   This Boston Globe article is from 2007, and their talk about the opening of Beta house.  Newer (although still outdated rumors) claim expansion.  But most people I talk to think it has closed, and speak wistfully about it as part of some by gone era.

The creator of Beta house said "Be fearless”. “It’s a hard thing to start a company. If you’re doing anything interesting, you’ll have lots of naysayers…It’s important to forge ahead and have confidence. Boston needs to be more confident, I think. We’ve got a lot of talent here.”

I love this advice.  Starting a project, a company, an organization can be really daunting.  There is a lot of emotion involved in it.  The best thing you can do is simply forge ahead, learn as you go.  Remember failure is always an option.  Go ahead and jump in.


What kinds of things have you done that exemplify being fearless?  

"How to Think like Leonardo daVinci" by Michael Gelb

At the moment there are so many blog posts scheduled, that everyone gets a bonus post this week!  This post is inspired by 101 ways to draw more traffic to your site. In case you don't know The Traffic Blogger I highly recommend you check him out.  More then just blogging about blogging, he runs the incredible Just My Two Copper forum/post/community (marketing machine).  I've learned a lot from both of his ventures.

"98. Write about someone famous who has been dead for more than 200 years. Incorporate their story into a lesson about your niche."

That line caused instantaneous inspiration.  Leonardo Da Vinci.  We know that he's one of the smartest and most creative people that has ever lived.  Have there been people as smart, and as creative since or before?  Sure there have.  But we don't know them because Leonardo was genius enough to write his thoughts and ideas down.  He kept a journal.

Years ago, while working at a bookstore, I found a book called "How to Think like Leonardo da Vinci". The cliché "It changed my life" is true.  Although I would add "In a subtle but profound way".  I have held onto this book for years because it contains great lessons learned by studying the life and genius of da Vinci.

Keeping a journal is the piece of advice that is life altering.  Applying that advice to game design is brilliant.  Write down all your game design ideas; no matter how big or small.  All RPG character ideas, all LARP ideas, and CCG ideas.  Anything.  Once you have all these little ideas floating around in your journals, start to connect them together.

Another approach is to refine and collect those ideas in a new medium.  You might think that this blog is the original journal.  However it's actually a refinement, a revision of that journal.  The ideas of this blog are culled out of ideas from journals.  Ideas combine and form, and become something new.  Like Alchemy.  ;)

This method of taking notes and then refining them is a good way to study something.  The difference between knowledge and understanding is application.  If you can apply knowledge (data on something) in some way you gain understanding.  Start by writing down notes in a journal, and then rewriting those notes into something useful to someone else (or yourself later).  I feel that it's important to have a hand written journal, and from that create a digital version.  Each format is a very different medium and that helps the brain process the knowledge into understanding.   

When younger I wrote angst ridden emotional junk about my current circumstances, thinking that a journal was a catalog of every emotional thing that happened mixed in with all the ideas.  Good journals are not diaries.  Avoid that temptation.  Years later you will want to throw that crap away.  Luckily I kept one diary full of angst and one journal full of ideas.  All the drawings and ideas had a much more positive emotional association years later then all the drama.  The diary got thrown out because it was too embarrassing to look at.

I should reread the book and write another book review to go with Inbound Marketing.