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Weekly roundup: how to make a Unity RPG in 270 easy steps

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Renegade

Today was the final day for initial submissions to Atari’s controversial Pong reboot contest. Semi finalists will be announced at the end of this month.

Elsewhere, Backyard Monsters finally received a much needed update on Kongregate. Kixeye has also been working with Des_troyy to fix the security issues and bugs that made the game unplayable for many players.

AddictingGames introduced a new “playlists” feature, grouping sets of games together that users might enjoy based on one theme.

Orandze has launched a new audio service, with premade tracks available for purchase, or custom work on request. You can find his website here.

Gaikai is now streaming AAA games direct to Facebook, through a patented streaming technology which allows users to play games right in their browser. However, the user’s PC must be able to handle the game, and a fairly solid internet connection is also required, along with Java.

GDC Online 2012 is looking for speakers across various tracks and summits. Applications close on May 2nd.

Finally, if you’ve ever wanted to make an RPG in Unity, a 270(!) part tutorial is available here.

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Weekly roundup: new games, great games, more games

By
Renegade

There were some awesome new releases this week, most notably Infectonator 2 and a new Monster’s Den installment on Armor Games, and Fancy Pants Adventures 3 on Kongregate. FPA3 took Kong’s weekly prize, and also leads the monthly leaderboard.

Meanwhile, Miniclip decided we were back in 2002 as they started promoting their toolbar again, offering exclusive content to users who install it. Free Miniclip credits, awards, and bonus games are on offer for toolbar users.

If you missed last week’s verbal sparring between OMGPop and a former employee, you can catch up on that here.

The top game for the week on Addicting Games was Mega Miner, a mining game with suspicious similarities to Motherload. Still, at least it wasn’t CurveBall again.

NotDoppler has a new update for the site with some of the most popular games featured in a promoted content box at the top of the page. There’s also an ad campaign running for The Last Shelter, a new tower defense game due to be released on April 12th.

Have a great Easter everyone!

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Controversy as OMGPOP CEO and former employee battle it out in public

By
Renegade

Controversy involving Zynga? Who’d have expected that?

Actually, that’s a little unfair in this case. Their involvement is only to the point of refusing to negotiate over a job offer with programmer Shay Pierce after Zynga purchased OMGPOP. Pierce refused the new contract, after the sides couldn’t agree on terms regarding games he had independently released in the App Store, and left the team while every other OMGPOP employee sign the new deal.

Pierce wrote a short article about his decision, which you can find here. It’s not big news: he quit because he was worried Zynga would claim control of his indie projects, and attempted negotiations were met with a flat refusal.

But then came some interesting tweets from OMGPOP’s CEO. Dan Porter first posted “The one OMGPOP employee who turned down joining Zynga was the weakest one on the whole team. Selfish people make bad games. Good riddance!”.

Business Insider also ran a story about Pierce after receiving an email from “an OMGPOP source” which heavily criticized Pierce’s work ethic and claimed he was about to be fired.

“‘He frequently took long lunches, his coding was poor, and right before his team was about to release our new Facebook game, Streets, he took off for a week to promote his own game at the GDC conference,’ says the source. According to this OMGPOP source, this all happened while Pierce’s team was pulling late nights in the office to prepare for launch.”

Pierce naturally has a different take on things, saying he attended GDC for “professional development”, and noting he was not giving any indication his position at the company was under threat.

Dan Porter found himself roundly criticized for his tweets, with Minecraft developer Notch calling him “insane”. Porter issued a new statement on the topic:

““When I saw how all the people who actually worked on [Draw Something] felt after [Pierce's Gamasutra] article, it was very hurtful,” Porter wrote. “It’s grandstanding, and I’m sure I was overly emotional, because I wasn’t thinking about Shay. I was thinking about the people [on the team] who don’t get in the press.”

Porter admitted that the he was harsh in his language describing Pierce. “Yes it was, but my point is that it wasn’t about Shay. It was about the 41 other people who made it happen,” Porter wrote. “Those are the people I would throw myself in front of the train for and those are the people I want to celebrate.”” [Read more]

The internet has come out roundly in favor of Pierce here, although it’s hard to justify taking sides without a more objective view of the situation. Whether Pierce is actually a hardworking employee or not is something the two sides can’t seem to agree on, and while Porter’s comments were unprofessional, it has to be noted that Pierce was the first to take the dispute public.

What do you think? Is a CEO ever justified in criticizing former employees in public? Leave a comment below!

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Weekly Roundup: April Fools’ Edition

By
Renegade

The big news this week was the release of Flash Player 11.2, and the new features that came with it. Alongside it were new premium features for topend games, although reaction to this has been mixed. We have a slightly more indepth look at this coming up this week.

Of course, today happens to be April the 1st, and the major portals are up to their usual tricks to mark the day.

At Kongregate, they’re going 3D, modernizing the website for an experience that jumps right out of your browser. Or at least making it painful to read. A couple of users tried viewing it through 3D glasses just in case it really did display in 3D, and report the effect doesn’t work.

Newgrounds’ joke appears to be this game and / or the release of a “featureless chat”. We’re told the joke game makes sense if you’ve seen Hunger Games.

In real news, New Star Soccer won the Kongregate monthly contest, and tycoon game Inn Keeper was top for the week.  Both decision and New Star Soccer caused minor controversy by sending out mass PMs earlier in the week asking users to rate their games up to help them win the contest, but it doesn’t appear to have affected final placings at all.

And finally, on Armor Games, the new Monster’s Den game, Chronicles, is finally out. We thought this was an April Fool’s day joke too at first, but it’s real. You can play Monsters Den Chronicles here.  The AG team may be a little too busy for pranks today since a bot has flooded their forums with hundreds and hundreds of spam posts. Or maybe that’s the prank.

 

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Flash Player 11.2 is out; includes “premium” game targeted improvements

By
Renegade

Flash Player 11.2 is out today, and it brings with it a host of improvements designed for gaming. The catch? Using them could incur a license fee.

First the new features: mouselock, relative co-ordinates, right click ad middle click support, and an improvement to hardware acceleration. These are all shipping as standard.

Building on that innovative foundation, Flash Player 11.2 adds key new core features for gaming, including mouse lock, relative coordinates, and right and middle –click support. Combined with Stage3D, you can now build fully immersive games in the browser, whether a first-person shooter or a real-time strategy game using infinite map scrolling. It also extends hardware driver support back to 2008, enabling full hardware acceleration on more computers than ever.

Also included is a new background updates service for Windows users, and some improvements to video rendering.

So what about those premium features?

This premium features tier will allow you to publish graphically sophisticated, next-generation games by taking advantage of two features in combination:

  • Stage3D hardware acceleration (Stage3D.request3DContext)
  • Domain memory (ApplicationDomain.domainMemory)

As you might have guessed, the word “premium” implies they won’t be free. Developers making more than $50,000 from a game using them will have to pay 9% royalties to Adobe, starting August 1st.

It’s important to note that using just one of the two premium features alone will not incur charges.  For example, a stage 3D game that doesn’t use domain memory will continue to be royalty free. Flash will automatically notify developers by watermarking their games) should they require a premium features license.

For more information, you can read about the new release here, or here, or here.

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Weekly Roundup: Zynga, stage 3D, and more

By
Renegade

We’re two weeks away from Easter, but already those Easter eggs are turning up. Well, kind of. It turns out that Zynga’s popular Words With Friends has some hidden extras if you play on Facebook.

Zynga now also own the other popular word game, Draw Something, after buying out developers OMGPOP for a reported $210 million.

And if you ever wanted to play Farmville on your Xbox 360, Joystiq reports that Zynga is working on cloud saving across all of its games, along with other technology that could potentially allow cross platform play over any number of devices.

Around the web, MochiMedia have an interview with DEVM-Games up here, talking about their game UMAG2. DEVM-Games also showed a very early demo of their next project, a Stage 3D game:

Kongregate’s weekly contest first place went to Decision, a game about taking back a city from zombies.

Notdoppler has an ad up for a new sponsored game called Magic Safari, due out this Thursday. It’s no relation to the iOS game of the same name though; it’s actually a physics puzzle.

Armor Games has turned their entire frontpage into a giant clickable ad for NFL Rush Zone. Although the ad image is only viewable on the sides of the page, as you’d expect, it’s clickable from anywhere there isn’t anything else linked on the page. This is sure to do two things: frustrate players with accidental clicks, and frustrate the advertiser with accidental clicks. The ad doesn’t appear at all for users on the beta preview, however.

AG also had some problems with a server transfer this week, which resulted in missing data from many user profiles on the site. A full explanation of what happened, and why, is here.

Finally, if you want to develope Unity games for mobile devices, the program is still free until April. Install it from the Unity website.

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Zynga buys OMGPOP; wants Draw Something

By
Renegade

Zynga have completed the purchase of OMGPOP, formerly ImInLikeWithYou. The company is behind many well liked multiplayer games, including Swapples, but Zynga were after top rated game Draw Something.

The move comes after Words With Friends, itself the subject of a Zynga buyout, was beaten in the iOS charts by Draw Something.

The sale price is a reported $210 million,and means Zynga once again own the highest rated word game on iOS. At peak times, Draw Something sees 3,000 drawings per second, and celebrities including Miley Cyrus and Demi Lovato are keen fans of the game.

You’d be forgiven for thinking OMGPOP have learnt from seeing what happened when Zynga attempted to buy NimbleBit: when the sale didn’t work out, Zynga simply cloned the game they were after instead. But Dan Porter, CEO of OMGPOP, says players have much to look forward to:

“Our new partners at Zynga know how to innovate at scale, and they’re pushing the limits of social with their mobile games. With the added resources we now have, and the deep gaming experience we can draw from, we can’t wait to continue to surprise our users. If you’re a fan, a player of ours, I can’t wait to show you what’s in store — it’s going to be drawsome.”

The acquisition means Zynga once again dominate the charts in the App Store.

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Words With Friends Easter Eggs

By
Renegade

I expected 45 points, but instead I found this:

The picture is of Michael Lazer Walker, developer of Words With Friends.You’ll only see it if you’re playing the Facebook version of the game; it doesn’t appear in the mobile apps.

Lazer-Walker wouldn’t tell us if further Easter eggs are hidden in the game, but a Redditor found another:

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Weekly Roundup: New dev options on Kongregate, and free Unity for Mobile

By
Renegade

It was a quiet week for news this past week. There were no new lawsuits announced, and we thought we’d get through a week without any allegations of plagiarism at all, until One and One Story was the latest Flash game to be illegally ported to the iPhone.

Around the web, for the first time this year, Curve Ball wasn’t one of the 10 most played games of the week on AddictingGames. This seems mostly to do with a slew of new sitelocks making their way to the portal all at the same time.

Kongregate pushed out an update that gives developers the ability to mass message players of their games. The feature was previously available to “select games” (read: pay to win MMOs), where reaction was mostly favorable. It’s too early to tell how players will react as more games start sending out messages to them, though.

Also new at Kongregate is the option for developers to upload “iframe games”, aka an externally hosted game that runs within the regular game window on Kong. The site obviously wants to lead the way in hosting HTML5 content as it becomes available, as it did with Unity games, but allowing any developer to add unverified iframe games means it won’t be long before unscrupulous devs try to push malware onto users’ computers.

Top of the weekly leaderboard was New Star Soccer, which, while technically an advergame for New Star Soccer 5, is very playable in its own right. The game’s rating did benefit a little from the established fan base of the series, with its current 4.40 rating making it one of the top games on the entire site (Kingdom Rush is at 4.63), but  it’s a deserved win regardless.

Late contender Immortal Souls: Dark Crusade deserves special mention, since on any other week it would have topped the chart. And in third place was Do You Know Flash Games, an unpolished but solid game about, well, you can guess from the title.

Capcom has announced it will be moving into browser based game development, with a new installment in the Onimusha series. But fans of the action game may not feel the new installment is what they wanted, as it seems likely to be a standard Facebook MMO. Capcom describe Onimusha Soul as a “Sengoku simulation RPG”, which sounds a lot like a pitch for a game about Japanese states sending armies to fight either other.

Finally, Unity for Mobile is free until the start of April . The option to add it to your download becomes available after you select the free or professional version of the program.

Anything else we should know about? Email us or leave a comment!

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Kongregate refuses to badge ‘game of the century’; developer asks fans to protest

By
Renegade

Newgrounds’ “Game of the Century” Abobo’s Big Adventure didn’t quite top the charts at Kongregate, but its 3.92 rating puts it close. Now the developer is asking fans of his game to message Kongregate anyway they can to request badges for him game, after site administrators cited legal concerns for not promoting it further.

The game was featured on the frontpage of the site, and had a weekly challenge in addition, but Kongregate staff feel that badging it could attract the attention of Nintendo’s trademark-happy lawyers.

Developer Pestoforce is hoping player pressure will change Kongregate’s stance:

Kong is afraid of Nintendo getting mad and forcing the game off the site if they add badges (which is what happened with SM Crossover). I say they should risk it. Gamers unite! Raise a stink in forums, write emails to Kong staffers, write a letter to congress! Get badges on this game!

The idea of a big company issuing takedowns against Flash games isn’t unprecedented. Last year Activision forced the removal of the top view shooter Lead for Dead: Call of the Dead, after it was frontpaged on Kongregate, although the game remains playable on most other sites.

On the other hand, Kongregate itself still plays host to games like Super Mario Bros Flash, Pokemon Adventure, and the badged Enough Plumbers, seemingly without any trouble from Nintendo’s legal team.

Additionally, parodies (which Abobo’s big Adventure arguably is) are generally exempted from copyright law on the grounds that to parody something you need to be able to accurately represent it in the first place.

It’s clearly a difficult decision for Kongregate to make, but raises some interesting questions about the responsibility of portals to developers and to copyright laws.  By manually frontpaging the game, and noting the potential for copyright violation, they are acknowledging the content is on their servers, which means they no longer qualify for “safe harbor” under the DMCA. This means that Kongregate would be liable in the event of a lawsuit brought by Nintendo anyway.

The obvious solution would be for major publishers to relax their grip over fan made games. While piracy or direct cloning of games is something that still needs attention, characters like Mario are so well known that even the worst made clone on a game portal isn’t going to damage sales for Nintendo.

Clearly there’s more to this debate than badges for one game on one portal. What do you think? Share your opinion in the comments below.

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