Adobe wakes up

THIS should have been Adobe's first public response to Apple dropping Flash support. It's an HTML5 animation editor (in the prototype stage) called "Edge".

If they had announced this when Apple publicly declared they were going to drop Flash support, instead of posting petulant rants about how Apple is doomed as a result, Adobe would have looked forward-thinking, professional, capable, and supportive of their users with whatever technology they choose to deliver to. It would have saved them a lot of bad press, and it wouldn't have fostered an Apple vs. Adobe mindset (or a "dang it, I'm going to have to choose or double my work, aren't I?" mindset) among its customers.

This is the first thing to come along in years that has given me hope for Adobe's product strategy. With the standout exception of the excellent Photoshop, Adobe has been nothing but disappointing with its product decisions of late. But this is smart; it's going where the web developers are going instead of trying to drop anchor and keep us where we are for as long as possible.

Gotta give kudos to Adobe on this one; I'm already a customer of this product, if they can deliver it before a compelling alternative emerges.

Okay, this is the geekiest thing I've ever done

I've done some geeky things in my day, but then there's today.

Today, in my sci-fi tabletop roleplaying game I'm refereeing, that I wrote the rules to myself, I let my players use their iPads or iPhones to connect to a web application I wrote which emulated the actual sci-fi personal data assistant their characters use in the game world.

Let me reiterate this so it sinks in. I wrote a web application for fictional people to use on fictional devices. For a sci-fi tabletop roleplaying game. I am geek.

Here's the thing, though - it was a hit! The campaign is about unraveling a mystery about a murdered friend in a dystopian future, and this allows the players to investigate, analyze, and explore on their own, in a way that evokes the setting. The web app tracks the leads that the characters can follow up on, provides background information about the game world, and gives them a way to "receive data files" from characters. For instance, I was able to drop in new leads on-the-fly using my own iPad as they appeared in the story. It worked really well; the players were using it practically the entire time.

In fact, they're requesting new features for their in-the-game-world PDA. I'm about to get even more geeky - I'm going to be a fictional software developer responding to in-game-world software update requests... Gah!

This is exactly what I was afraid of

I remember the first time I heard the idea floated about "microtransactions" in gaming, the so-called "freemium" model, where instead of paying $20-$50 up front for a game, you get it for free, and then pay for small bits of content or on an as-you-go basis.

I remember thinking, "yeah, that's going to suck." Why? Because it sets up a situation where the developer's goals and the gamer's goals are at odds.

In the traditional model, the goal of the developer is to maximize fun for the gamer - the more fun the game, the more the gamer is willing to pay for it, and once the game is purchased, there is nothing standing in the way of the game developer trying to make everything as fun as possible.

In the "freemium" model, the goal of the developer is to not maximize fun for the player, but instead maximize the frustration of the player, without having them quit the game altogether, so that they are willing to pay as much as possible.

I remember trying to make this point with some fellow gamers, and being told, no, no, I've got it all wrong - it will just be used to deliver more content. In other words, it's the same model, but the framework for delivering content is free.

Well, some games may follow that model, but those weren't the ones I was worried about.

Lo and behold, I was bitten by the freemium model recently. GodFinger, by Ngmoco, for the iPad, was a casual little game with charming graphics and some fun, toy-like mechanics. My boys enjoyed watching over my shoulder as I played it. At its core, it is a "grinding" game, namely, it takes exactly zero skill to play; instead, you advance by patiently and dutifully issuing commands to your units, buying new resources for them with the in-game money they amass, etc.

Now, as with most "freemium" games, GodFinger also allowed you to buy "Awe points" with real money to skip over the things that require patience. "Instantly recharge your mana!" "Build this building now instead of waiting 24 hours!" And so on. But for the time being, I was willing to patiently grind away without buying Awe points. I saved up for a long time to buy a Deluxe Tavern, which would allow me to refresh four units at a time AND earn income while doing it. It was an expensive item, and took a long time to save up for, but after getting it into operation, it was working well.

Then a game update hit. Suddenly, all money-generating buildings began giving less money, and instead of yielding gold multiple times before needing to be recharged, would only yield gold once, and would not start on this process until they were fully charged. Moreover, you could no longer "top off" buildings, so you had to let them fully drain before recharging them, which not only made your time spent between playing inefficient, but also removed a fun gameplay mechanic wherein you could place multiple buildings together and recharge the next building with the over-charge from the first.

But worst of all, my new Deluxe Tavern now only refreshes three units, and it no longer yields income. My $2400 Deluxe Tavern now does the same thing as a $400 tent.

Now, I can see no way this update, nerfing players across the board, was done with the players' interests in mind. The effect of this update, across many changes, is to slow everything down and make mana less productiv, presumably to get people to buy more "Awe Points" with real-world cash. Heck, they even added in-game goals to award experience points for spending Awe points. This was nothing but a transparent, deliberate change to add frustration to all players to wring money out of them.

Now, lest you accuse me of being a freeloader, consider this: Awe points add nothing to the game. All they do is allow you to not wait for something to happen. The rate at which things happen in the game is arbitrary, is set by the developers, and may be changed at a whim on system updates. This is not paying for new scenarios, new gameplay capabilities, new fun. This is pure and simple throttling back the gameplay to extort money out of people. (There are a few buildings which can only be bought with Awe, but each of them has a nearly identical alternative that can be purchased with the in-game currency, so I am not counting these.) Ngmoco is not really offering anything content-wise for the money you give them; only a different speed at which things happen.

And what if I had invested some real-world cash in Awe points to buy that Deluxe Tavern instead of grinding for it? That Deluxe Tavern would have cost me $5 in real world money to purchase in Awe points. Days later, its capabilities - that which I was buying, essentially, would have been arbitrarily removed without warning or recourse. It's one thing to hold back some special premium-only game features, but it's an entirely different thing to offer players cool new in-game gadgets they can buy with real-world dollars, and then after they buy them, remove the capabilities that prompted you to buy the gadget in the first place. At this point, I'm glad I didn't buy any Awe points, and I feel sorry for anyone who did, because every dollar they spent was turned into a fraction of its in-game value with this last update.

It's also relevant to note that while the value of mana and gold you buy with Awe points has gone down, because they can do a lot less now than before, the cost of Awe points has not gone down proportionally to the value of what it can buy. All of the above might be excused if it was balancing everything across the board, even Awe, but that is clearly not the case.

Basically, this has all been a very telling (and sadly, predictable) experience with the "freemium" game model. Ngmoco is "freemium" at its worst - starting a game on false pretenses, and then slowly throttling back the fun to frustrate the poor saps who have been playing the game into buying Awe just to get an approximation of their old experience back. This is why I like to own my game instead of rent my game.

The sad thing is: this game was actually very nice. In other circumstances, I'd have given it five stars. It had excellent interface elements, beautiful graphics, a unique tone, and high production values. I'd gladly have picked it up as a for-pay game in the App Store. And I would have even dropped money on Awe points if the for-pay model was to use it to provide new content like a story mode or scenarios. But this nickel-and-dime model feels like money-grubbing, and is antithetical to the relationship between developer and player wherein both are pulling for the best overall experience.

Okay, I've ranted a lot. I do want to say that there are a few developers who "get it." I'm still convinced that a scrupulous developer can make the "freemium" model work. Examples include:

• Ramp Champ by the IconFactory, wherein you get honest-to-god new content, artwork, challenges, and other ancillary benefits when you buy a new ramp pack.
• WarpGate HD by FreeVerse, which does let you "buy forward" in the game by purchasing a big, pointy ship, but they don't also run down the fun of the "normal" gameplay to make you want to buy it out of frustration
• Crosswords by Standalone, which lets you subscribe to premium crossword puzzle providers in exchange for honest-to-god core content. Here, the payments go to the crossword puzzle provider and not Standalone, but the pay-for-play model is still there, and offers real, tangible value aligned with the interests of the player.

Sadly, these seem to the the exception rather than the rule.

We are hiring!

We're hiring at NMSU Media Productions:

Web developer - Develop web applications for NMSU internal and external clientele using PHP, MySQL, XHTML, CSS, and Javascript. If you are good at coding the back end of a web site AND good at crafting excellent UI's, we want to talk to you.

Game developer - Develop educational games, mostly using the Flash platform, although we may also be moving to Unity and Objective C (iPhone OS). Artistic skill is not as important as capability to write games and game logic code, as you will be integrating art assets by our artists and animators.

NMSU Media Productions is a great place to work - talented and personable people, fun projects, supportive management, and work that has societal benefit rather than just being for generating revenue for investors. We're located in sunny Las Cruces, and the green chile is bountiful.

"Letter Writer Space" now available

Our new educational iPhone game, Letter Writer Space, is now available in the App Store!

This sequel to Letter Writer Oceans lets kids learn and practice their lower case letters while learning about fun astronomy concepts.

They begin by selecting a letter against a scrolling backdrop of the Very Large Array in New Mexico at sunset, and then they blast off to an animated scene where they can practice drawing the letter. Each scene is about an astronomy concept starting with the letter, so they can learn to draw their "q" glyph when viewing a "quasar", or learn to draw their "c" glyph when viewing a "comet".

A little space shuttle prompts the child where to start the stroke, and follows along as the child follows the pulsing dots to the end of the stroke, reinforcing the stroke before, during, and after the child's action. If they make the stroke correctly, they move on to the next stroke, and when they complete the letter, they earn a star. (This encourages correct strokes, rather than just allowing for random scribbling, as other letter writing apps do.)

When the child has earned four stars, an info panel with more information about the animated scene becomes available. Touching the info button shows the info panel, and fun facts about the scene are fully narrated, sharing the wonder of astronomy and the space program with kids while they play.

Buy it now!

Apple's approval times for iPhone apps dropping

As I mentioned earlier, our latest iPhone app, Vile Haberdashery has been released.

And guess what? We submitted the game on February fourth, five days ago. Apple has reduced its turnaround time on app approval from two weeks to five days. I'll leave the debate on whether the app store approval process is a good idea to others to hash out, but I think we can all agree that less time is better. Thanks, Apple, for putting the resources behind reducing the turnaround time on releasing apps.

Vile Haberdashery released!

Good news! Vile Haberdashery has been approved by the App Store, and is now available.

I'm afraid the murder rate at creepy victorian mansions among disreputable nobles is about to increase.

Vile Haberdashery

This past weekend, I participated in the Global Game Jam, and our team came up with a really fun and innovative game like I haven't seen anywhere before.

It's a creepy, unpleasant turn-based strategy game about murder and intrigue called Vile Haberdashery, and it borrows a lot of play elements from my old "Death in the Family" card game, but slides them all over to iPhone casual party play.

The premise is that you are one of four would-be heirs to a fortune, and you're trying to kill off your siblings so the inheritance all falls to you. You accomplish this by blackmailing, flattering, and intimidating your subordinates into doing violence to the other players.

The game is played on the iPhone. You take your turn, then hand the phone to your friend to take his turn. He hands it to the next player to take her turn, etc. Audio cues give clues as to what each player is doing. The goal is to gain influence over your subordinates, get one of them a weapon, and then send them over to hang out near other nobles. If you have enough influence over the subordinates around another player, and one of them has a weapon, then they kill that player, and you're one corpse closer to winning! (Of course, the other players are trying to do the same thing to you.)

We built the game in 48 hours, and the artwork is excellent thanks to the involvement of the three artists who worked hard for those two days to draw all 19 characters in the game. I programmed the game and did interface design.

The game has been submitted to the App Store, so you should see it in a few weeks. In the mean time, head on over to the Vile Haberdashery web site to check out the screenshots.

Keywords in the Apple App Store

In the last several months, my wife and I dove into iPhone development. Frustrated with the quality of apps for kids, we decided to take matters into our own hands and create the sort of app we wished was generally available. My wife has a PhD in educational technology, and I'm a multimedia developer, so we've been creating educational multimedia for almost a decade.

We worked long and hard on LetterWriter Oceans, a game to teach letter writing to kids. When we started development on it, there wasn't quite the glut of cheap letter-writing apps that there is now on the app store, but the steady rise of cheap apps in our target space didn't really bother us, because we were confident that we could grab a good niche because we were shooting for higher quality, better interaction, and a different tone - less "Saturday morning cartoon" and more "trip to the aquarium".

Unfortunately, the sales numbers have been only slightly better than abysmal, with only a few sales per day. We're aware that the days of the iPhone App gold rush are over, but this was even worse than we expected.

And here's the main reason: people just aren't finding our app.

I'm convinced that if our app was listed alongside the other apps of its ilk, we'd fare much better than we are, but we're struggling to get in even the first page on any search of the app store other than an explicit search for the name of our app.

The reason appears to be due to a new policy for App Store applications: keywords.

Recently, the App Store has started asking for keywords. Near as I can tell, new applications are required to add keywords, and only these keywords are used in searches. But legacy applications, added before the keyword mandate, are searched for based on the full text of their application description.

Thus, if you search the App Store for "letters", something that a letter writing application should come up very high on, you'll see things like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic books before you see our app. Why? Because they list the person who drew the letters for the comic in the application description.

Worse, you won't even find our app in the search results. We used the word "letter" as a keyword for our app, but we didn't use "letters". I had assumed that Apple's search engine would match simple plurals for nouns, but I was wrong. If you search for "letter" in the App Store, you will see our app in the first page. If you search for "letters", we don't exist.

Furthermore, Apple's search engine doesn't filter out what we'd all assume are "noise" words. Our other app, Tap Treats Halloween comes up on a search of "trick treat", but not if you search for "trick or treat", because I didn't include "or" as a keyword, thinking that Apple would either filter it out as a noise word, or at least display our app if two of the three words matched. Nope.

Oh, and you only get 100 characters worth of keywords, and that includes the comma delimiters.

As far as I can tell, there are no recommendations from Apple for crafting your keywords (if you know of any, please share!), so we're left to do it by trial and error. But even that is problematic because your keywords are set in stone and unchangeable until you upload a new version of your app. You can't even change the title of your app from, say, "LetterWriter Oceans" to "Letter Writer Oceans" without submitting a new binary.

The net effect of all this is that we have been practically absent from the App Store, even with very relevant searches. And that directly affects our sales, perhaps moreso than any other factor. I really enjoy making iPhone apps, and the iPhone development environment has rejuvenated my desire to create apps like no other environment has in recent memory. But this one piece has been a real letdown. Hopefully, Apple engineers are working on ways to make the keyword searching smarter (plural-aware, noiseword-aware), and this problem will go away. But in the mean time, my competitors are snaring sales that I can't even compete for.

And what's going to happen when we have thousands of developers submitting incessant fake updates so they can tweak their keywords? I can't see any outcome other than the approval process slowing to a crawl.

Update: Our new version of LetterWriter Oceans is up on the app store, so if you try the above-mentioned keyword search for "letters", it might start showing up, since this means our new list of keywords is live.

LetterWriter Oceans featured at Playgrounder

LetterWriter Oceans was featured today at Playgrounder.com.

Playgrounder is the brainchild of Dan Benjamin, usability and lifestyle blogger of HiveLogic which features quality children's products. Unlike some sites, Playgrounder is not a "pay for play" site - they feature products based directly on quality of product, rather than kickbacks from promoters, so we're very happy to be featured there.

LetterWriter: Oceans Now Available in the App Store

It's official! We're a published iPhone developer now!

LetterWriter: Oceans, our handwriting training game for kids, is now available for sale on the iPhone App Store. It's $1.99, and packs a lot of underwater fun and poetry into a little package.

If you download it and enjoy the game, I'd appreciate it if you write a glowing review for us, and tell your friends about the game. We need some word of mouth to get the news out, because a whole raft of letter-writing games showed up on the App Store in the last couple of weeks. (Bummer for us!) So far, ours looks like a standout, but it won't take much to get lost in the glut.

We hope you enjoy it!

Gameplay Video for LetterWriter: Oceans

I uploaded some gameplay video of LetterWriter: Oceans last night to YouTube. You can get an idea of what the game looks like and how it plays.

In the clip, you get to see several of the features:

• The panorama where you select the letter to practice.
• Several of the letter backgrounds.
• The earning of starfish as you complete letters.
• Earning four starfish unlocking the storybook.
• The options screen.

Enjoy!

LetterWriter:Oceans

I just submitted our first iPhone game for approval at the Apple App Store. It's a game called LetterWriter:Oceans, and it's an educational app that helps kids learn how to draw the capital letter glyphs in a fun undersea environment. Follow the link for more screenshots.

We've been working on this for several weeks, because we have a child who is just learning to write, and we've been unhappy with the quality of iPhone apps out there for this. So, for our anniversary, my wife and I took a vacation up to Cloudcroft and designed the game we wished was available, and now it's done.

Watch for it at the app store in a couple of weeks.