I heard that Google has released its newest Nexus smartphone and short googling on “nexus iphone” gets me series of threads where Google vs Apple wars are going pretty heated. There’s video reviews that point out how “Nexus obviously is better on this and that feature” and “iFony fanboys” (as some guy commented – heh) shouted back.

Over and over.

I have a really, really basic cell phone. It cost like… I dunno 30 eur? 50 eur at top I’d say. Can’t even remember. I use 2 features of it: (A) phone (aka talk with people) and (B) text messages (aka send text messages to people).

Maybe 3rd one is the calendar that tells me when somebody’s birthday is… but that’s pretty much it.

For game development, I simply haven’t seen much use for smart phones.

I know many game devs have smarty phones (and I’ve mentioned this topic earlier), but now as Nexus was released I started to ponder again: for what would game producers (indie or not) need a smart phone?

Here’s a very simple question to anyone who is thinking leaping in the social games (whatever that means) bandwagon:

Would EA/Microsoft/[insert big company name here]/Google/Apple clone my idea and beat me?

Big players have money. If they smell money somewhere, they’ll come there. iFart wasn’t the most popular iphone farting app. There was some other (which name nobody can remember – including me) that was dominating the fart apps, but then iFart came and pretty much cloned the app (changed something to make sure it doesn’t look like a clone) and did better SEO and better marketing – and got the first place. Funder of iFart was actually a marketing guru dude (who isn’t really into gaming at all) and he doesn’t have a big corporation (Apple/Google big) but compared to the other farting app developer, he was a bigger player with bigger marketing.

This same thing happens everywhere.

So, how this thing about “ask the question works”?

Here’s an example. If you would like to do a new innovative social game… you can then ask this question. “If I was to do this new social rpg. Would Zunga clone my Book of Face RPG with better marketing, bigger budget and eventually ruin my biz?”

If the answer is yes, don’t come back later saying I didn’t warn you.

Should you stop… and do nothing?
Sadly, the previous question might lead to a situation where you start thinking “RTS? EA… FPS? EA… 3D Simulation? EA…” and so on.

Which is good.

That means now we are getting closer to what indie dev means.

Nobody has made a zombie MMO, and big corporations didn’t the subject. Well, small indie studio did it (it’s not typical mmo, but tons of players anyway). And now it’s been online for quite a time already. Nobody has created 3D zombie MMO and for some reasons no big corporation is touching the subject. Maybe they thing there’s too little market potential or something. Well, small indie studio started doing it (should be out this summer I believe).

Can you find any big gaming corporation doing any 2D RPGs for hardcore gamers? No, they are busy doing Diablo clones with 3D graphics. Well, one small studio has been doing this type of RPG development in a basement filled with spiders for over a decade, and has been doing pretty darn well.

One guy stopped working at Lionhead and started doing his resource management games, all in 2D. And this guy has been be doing pretty well.

So… should one do “social games” (dunno what that means)?

Well, possibly. If you can find a good angle on things and do something that others might not be able to clone (I don’t know if that means creating a social zombie game that’s so grouse that big corporations won’t touch), or that has something that they cannot clone (people are one thing that are not so hard to clone – just some food for thought). “Working for free” cannot be cloned either by big corporations.

There’s many ways to be unique.

Your thoughts? Are you into this “social gaming” stuff?

For the year 2010, I have very simple goals.

Personal goals for the year 2010
1. Release Dead Wake
2. Learn how diapers function.

That’s it.

After I get these 2 successfully covered, I’ll set more goals, but for now – I’ll stick with these two.

Industry related thoughts for the year 2010
I have some thoughts about couple of things:

• Spotify will either (1) leave this planet (go bankrupt, filled with juridical issues) or (2) become a huge, huge success that everybody love. I kind of feel that #1 is going to happen, but hope for the #2.
• Every real game dev pro will tell people how “social games” and “farmville type of games” will be a huge thing and define there future and stuff. Some other people think differently… but can admit that there might be something going on. My guess is that there will be tons of spam in Facebook by the end of year. Maybe some devs actually make it and some good stuff will come out of this.

Both of these things will be shaping the digital distribution and the future of gaming, although I don’t know in which direction.

We’ll see.

Now I have Dead Wake to finish.

Year 2009 is over – has been for a few days now – and to me this means taking a look back in time. In the upcoming post I’ll lay my plans for the future, but now it’s time to take a look at my own predictions for the year 2009 and see how they went.

Industry related 2009

• I anticipated that Valve’s Steam would publish “program crafted for indies to publish their games”. While this didn’t exactly happen, nowadays they have the Indie Genre. I think they had this genre earlier… but at least they are getting more and more indie games in their distribution.
• World of Diablo never happened. Maybe later…
• Big Fish Games has acquired more developers but I think people like them. It’s good portal to go with. Right folks?
• 89% DX9 support was quite close: about 92% was the figure in December 2009.
• DX11 supported Crysis 2 has not been released yet… but I guess the devs have put some info out and this has been discussed.
• Not sure if Windows 7 was delayed, but I think people actually liked it and went buying their products.
• Alan Wake was not released, but it’s anticipated to arrive in summer. (Too bad they ditched the PC version. Oh well.)

This is actually pretty fun to do these random guesses educated observations and see how things go – I definitely recommend you to do the same.

Own goals 2009

• Daily updated blog pretty much happened, and I like this way of updating the blog. One year I tried doing “longer posts” but it didn’t feel natural and updating the blog somehow was just not good. With smaller pieces… this is more fun. Trafficwise there’s room for more ;)
• Dead Wake release did not happen (definitely not in first quarter of 2009 as planned). I’m slightly disappointed that I couldn’t manage to release the game yet, although I am happy that I attended IGF first time and although there has been many technical issues (surprisingly Dead Wake ranked worst in technical excellence, and best in visual arts) I’m getting there… It’s been a huge learning process and great fun to see the game shaping.
• Prototyping: I did try some experimental gaming but felt that prototyping actually requires more time, thus it’s away from other development – and I stopped this.
• Insiders press release service is in wide use and we have new different sparring program going on.

I’ll be doing another post about the plans for year 2010.

The list is here. (Dang. Dead Wake didn’t get there this time. Sob, sob…) – Congraz to the finalists!

I was checking in the Lord of the Rings DVDs (was checking to see if there was background music available to listen) and just happened to spot Peter Steve Jackson commenting music in movies. Jackson mentioned that visuals and characters can affect to what the viewer sees, but the music is the key to determining what the viewer feels at certain point.

I don’t recall the exact words though (was reading Finnish subtitles you know), but I think this message makes a valid point. If you think of games that have background music – they definitely impact on what player can feel in the course of the game. Naturally there’s things like experiencing the joy of victory and thrill of challenges, but I think music indeed can greatly affect on what players feel in the game.

It can create suspense (I’m thinking of some horror games). It can also create that “action feeling” (Kane & Lynch – in my opinion – does this nicely during action scenes where they start to play rock music for action scenes).

Your comments?