Flying Lab Launches Casual Division

Pirates of the Burning Sea developer Flying Lab Software announced the launch of a new division, Flying Lab Casual, which will develop casual gaming MMO environments “from the ground up.”

The casual arm’s first project is a family-friendly universe built in partnership with sports trading cards collectibles company Upper Deck. Further details behind the new title will be announced in the next couple of weeks.

Founded in 1997 and based in Seattle, Flying Lab Software was comprised of three development teams and 83 employees before the new division was revealed. The studio says that Flying Lab Casual, like its parent company, will “always create original games that feature expansive universes to explore”

“Flying Lab Casual gives our company and its partners the ability to take our vast online experience and apply it to other arenas, in this case a more family-friendly MMO environment,” says Flying Lab CEO Russell Williams.

“The Casual division has its own core team that has grown out of the talented development team and success of Pirates of the Burning Sea,” he adds. “This new division not only expands our company and its audience reach, but also gives our developers a chance to work on new genres and different types of games.”

Flying Lab Software is best known for its PC MMORPG, Pirates of the Burning Sea, published by Sony Online Entertainment in January 2008. The title combines naval and swashbuckling combat, and is set in the Caribbean of the 1720s.

The developer is celebrating Pirates’ one-year anniversary with a revamped sword-fighting system, and new skirmish and player-governed ports under development.

Feature: ‘Ragdoll Physics On The DS’

In this technical feature, Sensory Sweep Studios’ senior programmer Eric Brown explains the Verlet integration method for ragdoll physics, and how it enables sophisticated tech goals on the Nintendo DS.

Though the Nintendo DS’s computational power is certainly limited when compared to its bigger console brothers, Brown says programmers can still implement ragdoll physics on the handheld, provided that they dismiss their restricted expectations of its performance.

The idea he used to successfully include ragdoll physics was the common Verlet integration technique:

“The Verlet particle system is ideal for representing a ragdoll skeleton because constraints can be infinitely rigid without causing the system to diverge, thus the distance between joints can more rigidly be maintained. For this reason, you may find that a Verlet particle system is a nice thing to have around, even if you are not planning on doing any ragdoll physics.

The main idea behind the Verlet integration approach to ragdoll is that the positions of the joints are determined by point particles. The ‘bones’ of the skeletons, represented by length constraints that enforce two neighboring particles, are an exact distance apart.

Extra length constraints can be added as necessary to prevent unnatural poses, as well as self intersection of the ragdoll. Updating the positions of the particles is relatively inexpensive, and calculating a length constraint is the equivalent of resolving a sphere collision, so the overall cost of updating the particle system is pretty low.”

After updating the positions of all of the particles and applying constraints to ensure the appropriate distance relationships between them, programmers can add collision.

“I decided to allow the particles to collide with the world as independent spheres, rather than trying to construct a closed collision volume that encompassed a ragdoll limb.

This decision was based on two factors. The first was the cheapness factor-sphere collision is much cheaper than some kind of ellipsoid or oriented bounding box collision. The second was that I succeeded in convincing the artists and designers who were creating the collision worlds to “play nice” with the ragdoll — meaning that they should try to make the static collision geometry as smooth as possible, with no really sharp kinks or protrusions that the ragdoll might get hung up on.

However, I still ran into pretty big problems using this approach. If you are using spheres to represent the collision volumes of joints, then the spheres generally need to be pretty small. After all, they are representing things like a hand, shoulder, or hip. Using such small spheres, I immediately began to notice that all of my collision routines would generally fail, due to the numerical imprecision introduced by fixed-point arithmetic.”

You can read the full technical feature, which details what Brown learned in order to overcome those precision-related issues, as well as how he interfaced with the animation system (no registration required, please feel free to link to this feature from other websites).

THQ Vet Launches Mamba Games, Plans Flight Sim Expansions

Startup publisher Mamba Games today announced both its own existence as well as its first four game projects across PC and console platforms.

The company, co-founded by former THQ executive Robert Nielson in November 2008, laid out its release schedule for the first two quarter of 2009, signing various worldwide and territory-specific distribution deals.

Interestingly, amongst the company’s revealed products are the global rights to six third-party Microsoft Flight Simulator X add-ons to be released over a two-year period.

This comes less than a week after news that Microsoft effectively dissolved ACES Studio, the development team responsible for the Flight Simulator series. The first of these third-party expansions is developer RealFlight’s Grumman F6F Hellcat, which is slated for March 27.

The Lost Crown: A Ghost-hunting Adventure, also a PC release, is scheduled to ship on March 27. Mamba will give the Darkling Room-developed horror title, from veteran independent adventure game creator Jonathan Boakes (Dark Fall), a “global” release (with the exception of North America, the United Kingdom, and the Commonwealth of Independent States).

Pyroblazer, a combat racing PC game from Serbian developer Eipix, will ship in Germany, Australia, and Switzerland on March 27 as well.

Mamba’s fourth announced title, Matchman (pictured) by Chinese developer TF-H Co Ltd, will debut for the Nintendo DS globally in the second quarter of 2009. Nintendo Wii and PlayStation 3 versions of the scrolling shooter will be released later in the year.

“Due to the difficult economical situation at present throughout the world, we have had to carefully asses each project and the risk margins in significant detail, but we are delighted to have such a strong portfolio for the first 2 quarters of 2009,” said Neilson in a statement, adding that The Lost Crown and Matchman have received positive reactions from the press.

Smedley Talks EverQuest Franchise, PS3 Possibilities

Sony Online Entertainment’s pioneering MMO EverQuest is still chugging along, and SOE president John Smedley says it’s still a significant revenue driver.

This March, the game will reach its ten-year anniversary, with over a dozen expansions so far and no plans to stop operations any time soon.

Meanwhile, the company continues with a slate of other PC MMOs (including the sequel EverQuest II) as well as intentions to invest more heavily into the PlayStation 3 platform.

Gamasutra spoke with Smedley about the challenges of operating an MMO in its tenth year, experiments in emerging business models like free-to-play and real money trades, and console plans.

How do you keep the original EverQuest popular after this long?

John Smedley: The game is still going very strong. It’s still one of the mainstays of our revenue. I don’t give out numbers, but it’s still very profitable for us, and it’s also coming up on its 10-year anniversary on March 16. We’re still doing expansion packs for it; we’ve still got a live team on it. We’ve managed to keep the costs in line.

How’s item commerce working out for you?

JS: It’s just started, so it’s a little hard to tell, but it seems to be going fine. We’ve maintained the number of people — there was a worry that this would cause people to leave, but that simply hasn’t happened. Slowly but surely, we’re starting to see people use it, and as we introduce more items, we expect that to continue. It’s going well for us.

It’s the same game, we just added some items for convenience — to change your appearance, to make it more convenient to do some things that maybe before would have taken a little longer.

Have you found it to be a workaround against illegal real-money trades?

JS: No, this was just that we wanted to sell people things to customize their character more and make it more convenient. It’s nothing to do with RMT.

With the original, how much leeway do you feel you have to change specs and graphics?

JS: Over the years, we’ve increased the engine capacity such that the EverQuest engine is right in line with what EverQuest II can do, and what modern MMOs can do. We’ve made sure to keep that pace. But EverQuest still supports the widest number of graphics cards of any of our games.

Is it a challenge to maintain that level of compatibility?

JS: It’s a challenge, but it’s something we’ve focused on; we’ve had engineers on nothing but that since day one. Over time, we feel it’s been a big reason we’ve been able to keep so many players for so long: we never drop players for technical reasons.

In part because the EverQuest community has been going for ten years at this point, some people say it’s narrowing down to only including the most hardcore of players. Do you agree with that assessment?

JS: Well, it’s still one of the largest MMOs in North America. It also happens to be one of the most profitable, and we’re still acquiring new customers. So I don’t think we’re there yet.

I think it is certainly harder-core than EverQuest II or [World of Warcraft] or some other games, mostly because we made the game we made ten years ago — actually thirteen years ago, if you count the development time — and gaming tastes have changed. There are a lot of things in EQ that we probably wouldn’t do twice, but that’s part of the attraction for some people. I think it’s fair to say it’s harder-core.

Do you think it’s easier to cater to that hardcore group? It could potentially be that they really understand what they want, or it could be that they’re extremely finicky.

JS: It’s a base that we know real well, so over the years we’ve spent a lot of time researching what they like and what they don’t like. If you’re reading a series of books by a particular author, the fans of that author know what they’re getting when they read him.

It’s the same kind of feeling; when we’re making EverQuest expansions, we try to add new things and change things up and do as much as we can in ways we think they’ll appreciate.

How do you feel about EverQuest versus EverQuest II? It seems interesting to have both going in tandem.

JS: It’s been a challenge for us. Definitely, we didn’t know what we were getting into when we made the quote-unquote sequel. It’s been interesting keeping both games going, but they both developed their own userbases, and they are pretty different userbases, so over time we’ve been able to figure that out.

How much of a lifespan do you see for the original EverQuest?

JS: It looks to me like there’s no stopping it. I don’t even want to predict it. Ten years ago it looked to me like it would be two years. So, it’s got years to come. And when we say “the EverQuest franchise,” we’ll be visiting that world again, and we’re definitely in development on some things. I don’t want to comment yet, but we’re not going to leaving it stale.

How has EverQuest done on consoles?

JS: Well, EverQuest Online Adventures on PlayStation 2 is still operating to this day. There aren’t a ton of people playing it — I think we were about two years two early for that. We released with the launch of the PlayStation 2 network adapter, and I think we were a little early to market with that one.

Will that be revisited?

JS: Oh, absolutely. We are committed to doing PlayStation 3 and PC games. We want to see our users be able to access stuff from as many places as possible.

It seems like you could also do something like a monster hunting game on PSP.

JS: We have done some exploration outside of MMOs, and for now we’re going to stick with MMOs.

What do you think of the state of the MMO market right now? The economy is a little weird, studios have been closing — what is the effect?

JS: What we’re seeing is that the MMO space has real competition right now. It’s still growing — the latest DFC numbers I saw had it growing at 17 percent this year. So it’s still growing at a very healthy clip. Look — it costs you 10 bucks to see a movie now, 12 in some places, and in many MMOs you have a subscription paid for right there. It’s a good value.

A lot of people seem to be going back to basics, and while an MMO may not seem like the basics, it’s a good value for the money. We haven’t noticed any downturn due to the economy at all.

Do you think the subscription model will be the model that wins out?

JS: It’ll be a mixture. You’ll see some free-to-play, some subscriptions, some microtransactions, some advergaming. You will literally see a very wide variety here.

How much are you looking into the free-to-play model?

JS: We have a product, FreeRealms, that is free-to-play and will be launching in a couple months.

Are you feeling out the market with that?

JS: We are, but we have serious plans with other stuff too. We’re pretty committed to making more games free-to-play — not EverQuest and EverQuest II, or Star Wars Galaxies, or the [other] MMOs we have now, but the future games.

It seemed strange to me that you guys weren’t involved with Home — I would have thought that an online experience for the PlayStation 3 would have involved Sony Online Entertainment.

JS: Well, we only recently became a part of the Sony Computer Entertainment group. Now, that group is a sister company of ours, but before we were in different divisions of the company, so it made sense.

How does it feel to have reached the ten-year anniversary point with EverQuest?

JS: We’re really proud of the tradition and the industry EverQuest helped build. At SOE, EverQuest is the main pillar of our company, the thing that got it all started, so we’re excited to see it grow.

Opinion: Creating Balanced In-Game Economies

[In a fascinating opinion piece originally printed in Game Developer magazine, EA Maxis designer and programmer Soren Johnson (Spore, Civilization IV) visits a wide variety of games both past and present to examine the complex issue of designing player economies.]

Game design and economics have a spotty history. Designing a fun and functional economy is no easy task as many design assumptions tend to backfire when they come in contact with the player.

For example, the early days of Ultima Online were infamous for the game’s wild and chaotic economy. Zachary Booth Simpson wrote a classic analysis of UO in 1999, detailing some of the more notable problems experienced at launch:

- the crafting system encouraged massive over-production by rewarding players for each item produced
- this over-production led to hyper-inflation as NPC shopkeepers printed money on demand to buy the worthless items
- players used vendors as unlimited safety deposit boxes by setting the prices for their own goods far above market value
- item hoarding by players forced the team to abandon the closed-loop economy as the world began to empty out of goods
- player cartels (including one from a rival game company!) cornered the market on magical Reagents, preventing average users from casting spells

MMO economies have come a long way since then; World of Warcraft’s auction house is now a vibrant part of the game’s economy and overall world, with many players spending much of their time “playing the market” to good effect.

CCP, developers of EVE Online, even hired an academic economist to analyze the flow of resources and the fluctuation of prices within their game world. Indeed, understanding the potential effect of market forces on gameplay is an important ability for designers to develop.

Can the Market Balance the Game?

Many designers have used economic game mechanics as a tool for balancing their games. For example, in Rise of Nations, every time a unit – such as a Knight or Archer – is purchased, the cost of future units of the same type goes up, simulating the pressure of demand upon price.

This design encouraged players to diversify their armed forces, in order to maximize their civilization’s buying power. By allowing the “values” of different paths and options to float during a game, designers present players with a constantly shifting landscape, extending replayability by guaranteeing no perfect path to victory.

However, if taken too far, efforts to auto-balance by tweaking the economy can destroy a game. In 2006, Valve conducted an interesting economic experiment within Counter-Strike: Source, implementing a “Dynamic Weapon Pricing” algorithm.

According to the developers, “the prices of weapons and equipment will be updated each week based on the global market demand for each item. As more people purchase a certain weapon, the price for that weapon will rise and other weapons will become less expensive.”

Unfortunately, the overwhelming popularity of certain weapons trumped the ability of the algorithm to balance the game. For example, while the very effective Desert Eagle skyrocketed to $16,000, the less useful Glock flatlined at $1, leading to some extreme edge cases (such as the “Glock bomb”). A game economy is not a real economy; not everything can be balanced simply by altering its price.

Gamers just want to have fun, and if the cost of the option considered the most fun is constantly tuned higher and higher until the price becomes prohibitive, players may not just alter their strategy – they may simply go play another game. The current price of gas may be making our real lives “unfun”, but only one real-world economy exists, leaving us no choice. Gamers are not in the same situation.

Ultimately, designers should remember that achieving perfect balance is a dubious goal. Players are not looking for another game like rock/paper/scissors, in which every choice is guaranteed to be valid, essentially encouraging random strategies.

Players are motivated by reasons beyond purely economic ones when playing games. Raising the cost of a player’s favorite weapon is simply going to feel like a penalty and should only be done if the imbalance is actually ruining the core game.

Putting the Market Inside the Game

Perhaps a more appropriate use of economic dynamics is as a transparent mechanic within the game itself. The board game world provides some great examples of such free market mechanics at work. German-style games Puerto Rico and Vinci both use increasing subsidies to improve the appeal of unpopular roles and technologies, respectively.

In the case of the former, every turn no player decides to be the Craftsman, one gold piece is added as a “reward” for choosing that role. As the gold increases slowly, few players will be able to resist such a bounty, which nicely solves the problem of making sure all roles are eventually chosen.

Puerto Rico still has some clearly better and clearly worse options – they just change from turn to turn based on the current reward. In this case, auto-balancing actually keeps the game fun because players are rewarded for choosing less common strategies, instead of being penalized for sticking to their favorites. Perhaps more importantly, the effects of the market are spelled out clearly for the players ahead of time, so that no one feels the game is biased against them.

Perhaps the most elegant example of a pure free market mechanic based around actual resources and prices can be found in Power Grid, another German-style board game. In this case, players supply their power plants with a variety of resources (oil, coal, uranium, and garbage), all of which are purchased from a central market.

Resource pieces are arranged on a linear track of escalating prices. Every turn, X new pieces of each resource are added to the market, and players take Y pieces away as purchases. As the supply goes up and down, the price correspondingly goes up and down, depending on where the next available piece is on the market track.

By making the supply-demand mechanic so explicit and transparent to the players, the market becomes its own battlefield, as much as the hex grid of a wargame might be.

By buying up as much coal as possible, one player might drive the price out of the range of the player in the next seat, causing her to be unable to supply all her plants at the end of the turn, a disastrous event in Power Grid. Thus, with a true open market, price can be used as a weapon just as much as an arrow or a sword might be in a military game.

The Benefits of Free Trade

Similarly, a number of modern strategy games, including Sins of a Solar Empire and the Age of Empires series, have included free markets in which players could buy and sell resources, influencing global prices with their actions.

These markets serve as interesting “greed tests” in that players are often tempted to sell when they need cash or to buy when they are short on a specific resource, but they know in the back of their minds that each time they use the market, they are potentially giving an advantage to another player. Buy too much wood in Age of Kings, and your opponents can make all the gold they need selling off their excess supply.

Unfortunately, the market dynamics of these games tend to repeat themselves, with prices usually bottoming out once the players’ total production overwhelms their needs. This effect stems from the fact that the game maps emphasize economic fairness – in AoK, each player is guaranteed a decent supply of gold, stone, and wood within a short distance of their starting location.

Spreading resources randomly around the map could lead a much more dynamic and interesting market mechanic — but at the cost of overall play balance for a game with a core military mechanic. If your opponents attack with horsemen, what if there is no wood with which to build spearmen, the appropriate counter unit?

However, a game with a core economic mechanic does not suffer from such limitations. In most business-based games, specializing in a specific resource is a basic part of the gameplay.

Thus, a free market mechanic can become a compelling part of a competitive game. The ultimate example of such a game is the ’80s classic M.U.L.E., in which four players vie for economic dominance on a newly-settled world. Although only four resources exist (food, energy, smithore, and crystite), economies-of-scale encourage players to specialize. More importantly, players can rarely produce all the resources they need on their own, requiring them to buy directly from other players.

The game has a brilliant interface for facilitating this trade between players. Buyers are arranged along the bottom edge of the screen, with sellers on the top. As buyers move up, their asking price goes up accordingly. As sellers descend, their offer price decreases as well. When the two meet in the middle, a transaction occurs.

Once again, the mechanic is explicit and transparent – player inventories and market prices are all clearly visible to everyone. Players understand that they either have to adjust their own prices to make a deal happen or hope that their rivals cave.

Knowing how desperate another player might be to acquire the energy needed to power his buildings or the food needed to feed his labor, the temptation to pull ever last penny from him is strong. In such a case, prices tend to fall only if the player is afraid someone else might sweep in to reap the profits!

The game mechanic mined here by M.U.L.E. is deep and rich. Impoverishing one’s enemies can be just as much fun as destroying them.

Inside the IGF Student Competition: Trino

In a series of exclusive articles, GameCareerGuide has been looking behind the curtain of this year’s Independent Games Festival, interviewing Student Competition entrants.

In this case, the site has been talking to the students at the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University who made Trino.

The team developed the game, which is entered in this year’s IGF (part of Think Services, as is this website), while in residence at one of Electronic Arts’ studios, which they discuss in the interview.

The team consists of Stephanus Indra, programmer; Linhan Li, technical artist and effects artist; Youngwook Yang, programmer; Soo Jeong Bae, sound and music designer, producer; Nick Lee, artist; and Ivan Ortega, artist.

As for the title itself, Trino is an action puzzle game in which an alien must escape an insidious cyborg swarm. According to the game’s official description: “Use Trino’s powerful triangle trap to defeat the Nanites and break free from their laser prison! Evade, outsmart, and destroy seven types of deadly enemies! Collect power-ups to evolve and destroy the laser walls!”

Tell us how Trino came to be.

Stephanus Indra: Originally, Linhan Li [technical artist and effects artist], Young Yang, [programmer], and I pitched a project to create Xbox Live Arcade game during the spring 2008 semester at Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University.

Shortly after pitching, three other members Soo Jeong Bae [sound and music designer and producer], Nick Lee [artist], and Ivan Ortega [artist], joined the team.

In the beginning of the semester, we were not clear about which direction to take. Nevertheless, we wanted to make a game that was simple and easy to pick up and play. Upon that agreement, we bounced ideas back and forth between team members and kept iterating until the game became Trino as most people know it today.

The team will have another development semester to create a richer Trino experience.

What was your goal in developing the game? I noticed on your web site, there is a reference to the team being in residence at EA in southern California. Can you talk about that a little bit?

SI: Our goal was to make something new and that had never been done before at the ETC. More specifically, we wanted to make a game prototype for Xbox Live Arcade that was ready to be submitted to Microsoft by the end of the semester — 14 weeks.

Even though the project was in the academic setting, we did not intend to make a game just for the sake of the project, but also something that people would remember.

We were working out of EA Redwood Shores in northern California. This was made possible due to the strong relationship between the ETC and EA developed by [the late] Randy Pausch (ETC co-founder) and Steve Seabolt (head of Sims Worldwide Product Marketing).

Basically, ETC students were allowed to use EA cubes and facilities for project coursework. The team took this opportunity to build a game at a game company and are incredibly thankful to everyone at EA.

Explain a little bit more about working at EA Redwood Shores. How long were you there? Were you able to consult with the employees for advice and help? What was the experience like? What restrictions did you have?

SI: We were in EA for one semester, which was approximately 14 weeks. EA made it very clear that we were not to provide feedback to any projects they are developing and we did not have any access to any of their game projects and their spaces.

On the other hand, we were allowed to receive feedback from them. Basically, we designed the game and developed the game by ourselves; it has no relation with EA. We showcased our game to some of our friends in EA and they gave some feedback.

The experience was wonderful! EA has nice facilities, like a canteen, game store, gym, and a nice environment, just like a university. In ETC, there are several occasions when we can showcase our project, for example presentations and soft-opening/open house.

During soft-opening, we invited anyone to come and play test our game. Those events were the best way to collect feedback from people and we got to do that in EA. It was indeed a great opportunity and a good way to connect to the industry.

Some of the characters look like jellyfish. Where did the inspiration come from to design them in this way?

Ivan Ortega: Our art style radically changed several times over the development process. We initially began in desolate, neon-colored space, then radically shifted to a more happy, peaceful, aquatic setting.

After a lot of game design meetings we decided to alter our overall art and music style to better communicate the core gameplay. Our final look is a mix of previous styles with alien-like deep-sea creatures and clean, rounded robotics for further inspiration. The jellyfish and whale are re-designs of early characters.

What was the most difficult part of developing the game, either technically speaking or otherwise?

IO: We faced a lot of challenges over our very short development time. Game design, developing the game and graphics engine, designing characters and backdrops, and wrestling to find the right music feel, all in parallel. We kept iterating our game design, which pushed our technical and art work in new directions.

Young Wook: Let me share a little bit from technical perspective. Since Trino is developed using C#/XNA, we could not escape from Garbage Collection (GC) issue. That was in fact the most difficult part. We implemented pool system for all of our game objects to avoid memory allocation during gameplay.

Nonetheless, there were some code (e.f. foreach, boxing, and anonymous delegates) calling “new” implicitly and woke GC up. We had to track and hunt down most, if not all, hidden memory allocation. We indeed missed C++ at that moment.

Tell us one interesting thing that you learned in developing the game.

YW: “New” is not equal to “fun.” One novel idea can be a good starting point, but it is not enough to make a solid and fun game. Most of game teams who are still in school try too hard to find a new-and-never-been-done-before mechanic; so hard until they forget what a video game is supposed to be. It is supposed to be fun, right?

In fact, we made the same mistake and it took us some time to realize that our first game design was not fun just new.

[Gamasutra has reprinted an abbreviated version of the article from its sister site here. For the full-length article, see GameCareerGuide.com.]

Nintendo Files Patent For In-Game Walkthroughs

 

Nintendo has filed for a patent on a game system which would allow players to view pre-recorded gameplay and solutions unfolding in realtime.

Nintendo virtuoso Shigeru Miyamoto filed the patent on June 30, 2008, but,noted by game weblog Kotaku, it became public only recently. 

The patent hinges on a form of automated gameplay — likely sequences pre-recorded by a game’s developer — that users can turn on, described as “digest moving image.” For example, it could show a game’s character navigating a level to reveal its solutions to stuck players — or simply to allow players to experience it without investing the time for an entire playthrough.

It appears there are a few sub-sections of the system, with one mode revealing pop-up gameplay hints throughout play and another allowing players to watch a play-through. Through a third “scene menu” option, players can choose specific segments of gameplay to view without relying on existing save data.

The system doesn’t appear to allow players to actually bypass gameplay or save progress made by the automated playthrough. Specifically, the patent refers also to the method for storing pre-played gameplay data that doesn’t interfere with the user’s own gameplay saves.

The objective of the technology appears essentially to encourage completion of more games by allowing players to discover solutions more quickly and reduce the time investment required for large games.

“In some of these games, a volume of the story or the scenario is too large, and therefore a lot of time is needed for clearing the game,” reads the patent text. “Further, in some cases, various puzzles are set in the scenario, and/or a skilled action (operation to be performed by a player) and the like are required, so as to enhance an interest in the game.” 

“However, there is a problem that these puzzles and the like are too difficult, and therefore the game may be stuck halfway, and the game may not be cleared to the end.”

Simply providing hints has been insufficient to decrease barriers for players lacking in time and attention, the patent maintains. Such players “may not enjoy the large volume of game to the end and give up the game halfway even when the difficulty level of game is lowered by presenting a hint or the like in the middle of the game,” reads the text.

“Therefore, an object of the present invention is to provide a computer-readable storage medium having stored therein a game program for allowing a player to freely play and enjoy the game to the end, and a game apparatus.”

This ease of use should be balanced in a fashion that allows more traditional players to continue to play independently and be challenged, the patent text maintains, hence the need for the storage system:

“Further, another object of the present invention is to provide a computer-readable storage medium having stored therein a game program for preventing a player who desires to clear a game by him/herself from losing his/her interest in the game, and a game apparatus.”

2009’s Dark Horse Console Launch: The Story Behind Zeebo

 

No consoles are launching in 2009, right? Not so. Brazilian manufacturer Tectoy, most notable outside of South America for its long partnership with Sega and official distribution of its consoles in Brazil, will be releasing an entirely original product called Zeebo. 

Centered around downloadable games distributed only over a 3G wireless network, the console is designed for emerging markets, and has high-profile partners and games includingElectronic Arts’s FIFA, Id Software’sQuake, and Namco Bandai’s Tekken.

It will save its small, standard definition titles, many of which will initially be BREW mobile game ports, to the system’s internal flash memory. This is intended to sidestep the issues of piracy, home internet availability, and retail distribution of game titles. 

The company is 57 percent owned by Tectoy and 43 percent owned by mobile tech company and BREW creator Qualcomm. As well as the above-mentioned larger companies who will release games for the console, Zeebo is hoping to attract independent developers as well. 

English info on the console is exceptionally rare so far, with no launch yet slated for North America. But there is opportunity here; the firm feels there’s potential for a repeat of the indie-led App Store boom Apple is currently seeing with iPhone. 

Gamasutra recently had a chance to talk to Zeebo Inc. CEO John Rizzo, who heads up the operations in North America, as follows: 

What’s the market for the console?

JR: For the moment, our focus is Brazil first, and then Mexico. Then, selected parts of the rest of Latin America. Then a year from now, likely China and/or India. Those are a little bit harder to figure out, because the content in China and India is likely to be very different from content in Brazil. So we need some time to figure out what the content needs to be. 

We work with developers in the local countries; I could imagine a Bollywood dance game with a dance pad. That would be fantastic in India, much more sale-able than Prey. Or in China, a game that teaches English as a second language would be really cool and powerful for that market. 

It takes a little longer — and then, of course, in China there’s a ban on consoles, per se, that the seven ministries of the government need to lift — and that’s going to take probably six months to a year for that to happen.

Because our business model is one where we want to get a local partner in the country and put their name brand on it as well, that means it takes a little longer to get that all squared away. So, yes, we’re going to those countries as well.

It’s pretty much designed for an SD set up, right? Not high definition?

JR: In fact, it’s really more designed for the cheapest, most resilient TVs you can find. [laughter]

With China especially, MMOs are king. Is it possible to play with other people across the network with Zeebo?

JR: Yeah, it is technically possible, and in fact, Ultimate Chess actually is going to be offered in two versions. It will be offered in a single-player version and a two-player version. 

The two-player version is over the wireless connection. The reason that is going to be relatively easy to do, is that when you are playing chess, the only thing being transmitted is the move coordinates. 

So, very low data density, you can compute how many times people are going to play chess; they’re going to push it three hours a day — or how many moves they are going to make in three hours. And you can figure out how many megabytes a day you need to buy to make that happen. Then, you simply make the price of the multiplayer game large enough to cover the cost of the data.

But the problem with an MMO game is you don’t really know how much traffic there is going to be. And we have to pay for the traffic. So I think we will move into that domain, which is certainly very important, as you mentioned, in China and elsewhere, but it’s probably going to be a different pricing model. 

Right now, we use prepaid. It might be entirely a subscription model, and the subscription model might be constrained to a certain number of hours per day of play and anything above that, there’s a super pack you can buy that jacks that up.

It seems like free to play, pay for items might be a useful model.

JR: Yes. We’ve got to figure all that and navigate through it. The other thing that’s interesting, too, for us, is that I think that there is some percentage of people… I’m not sure if it’s the majority or some large percentage, that play in the middle of the night. 

And if you play in the middle of the night, with a cellular-based network, the data pipe is empty anyway during the middle of the night. 

So, we might be able to work some kind of deal whereby the bandwidth we buy at 2AM is a lot cheaper than the bandwidth we buy at 10PM, in which case we could offer an MMOG that has a different pricing structure, depending on what time of the day you play.

So, you’re still working on the business model.

John Rizzo: The remaining thing we’re trying to figure out is the business model. Because the way it works technically, right now, is that if you fill the gigabytes in flash, and you go into the UI and say “delete”, it will remove the game from flash, but it will leave a tag that says you already bought it. 

Let’s say six months later you decided that you wanted to download it again. The only question that we are wrestling with at the moment, which we won’t solve right away, is whether or not it’s free when you download it again or whether we simply charge you for the air time when you download it again because we pay for the cost of the air time — and so that’s the only question we’re trying to work out.

In any event, the customer won’t have to pay full price, there’s no doubt about that. Whether or not they pay a buck or two to download it again is still something we’re trying to figure out. and from my perspective, personally, as the CEO of Zeebo, I don’t think people should pay for it again, even for the air time. Because if you fill up your Flash memory, that means you’ve bought 40 or 50 games.

We license the right to manufacture and sell the console in Brazil to Tectoy. So, if they do want to charge somebody to do the re-download, that’s within their purview. 

How is your model working so far for the publishers? Will developers be able to release stuff directly on Zeebo without going through a publisher, or rather, having Zeebo as the publisher?

JR: So, the interesting nuance of this is that all these things here [displayed on the screen], these are assets that are stored server-side. And we upload them into the console in the middle of the night, and they’re cached. And these basically are like banner ads. 

So if a publisher comes up with a new title, they can basically place their ad, if you will, on the stage. And the way the stage works is that every click of the paddle, the cylinder [of ads] rotates and, there’s four [ads] in this case… as you move through this, so it’s like this continuous thing.

So, it’s a way for the publisher to directly market to the customer. Over time, as we get enough of an installed base, we might actually consider charging publishers for that access, but you could put videos here, you could put a GIF, you could put bitmaps and stuff…

I figured there would also be a clearer text-based list.

JR: Yeah, at some point, yes. Until there’s a huge number of titles, we try to make it more graphically rich. But in this case there’s cover art, and then you can sort by [headings such as] favorites, new, genre, and stuff. And then, this is a scroll up and down. 

When you click on one you get the game description. In this case, this is just [dummy text] in, but the cover, in this case, the parental rating in Brazil, which is required by Brazilian law, and then the number of points required.

If you don’t have enough points when you try to buy it, it will say, “Do you want to refill your console?” and you can do that by buying more points with a credit card, that we call a “scratch card”. And then you use the joypad to key stuff in to the virtual keyboard.

In the future, we could plug the keyboard into the back, a USB keyboard, and then the publishers themselves, if they want to have a custom store, we could create a custom store that’s made for them.

Can you multitask while the system downloads a game?

JR: No, the current limitation, [the system's] fully loaded, it fully occupies [the system, during] most of the downloads. But if you happen to pull the power during the middle of a download, it automatically recovers, so there’s no issue with that. 

And then, it’s like [Amazon digital reader] Kindle. The wireless plan is built in, you don’t actually subscribe to a plan, you don’t know that a plan exists, the number of points effectively covers the cost of the download as well, and you end up paying for that. Everything is secure.

But to answer your question on the publishers’ side… Either we’ve got a signed agreement in 80 percent of the cases, or a handshake agreement when we just won’t do the contract now, [with] six of the top 10 publishers, and if a publisher wants to have us be the publisher, we can do that as well.

If a developer wanted to go directly to you, they could?

JR: Exactly. 

I assume, starting out, it is mostly going to be mobile ports.

JR: Good question, good point. That’s what we thought. [laughs] In fact, when we started the company we said, “Hey, there’s lots of mobile games out there and they are easy to port, and let’s do that.” 

What we discovered is that most of the sources we went to said, “Yeah, we can do that, but what we would rather do is take console content and port it down in Zeebo, because the gameplay experience and the graphics are richer.”

So I would say in 60 to 70 percent of the cases it’s more console content. If for example, you take the FIFA game from EA, that’s an interesting port because a part of it was taken from mobile content. And then the voiceovers, we took from the PC.

In the case of Tekken, would that be a PlayStation port, or is that mobile?

JR: It’s not a mobile port, I know that. But I don’t know if it’s PlayStation or some other platform. 

I’m wondering how easy it is to strip down to this architecture, depending on what the time is.

JR: I’ll give you a couple examples. In the case of the chess game,Ultimate Chess, it is strictly from a [Glu mobile] BREW port. That took four months. Quake, which was strictly a port from the PC, took about six months. 

Some of these other games — like Prey Evil, I think, is taking seven months, maybe. So I think the best case is three months, the worst case is like nine months. That’s reasonably fast.

It’s slightly longer than I thought it would be. But I don’t actually know what the chipset and the SDK are like.

JR: It’s just like BREW. Part of the reason for it, the length of the time here, so far, has been that we really didn’t release an SDK to developers until June 1st. And the SDK that we released June 1st really didn’t become completely stable and bulletproof until September 1st. So I think the titles starting today are going to be faster, I believe.

Are you encouraging original development over ports, or are you going more for name recognition?

JR: I think at the moment we have enough of the publishers and other brand name titles in the queue that, as we enter into 2009, we are going to start shifting into more originally authored, independent titles. 

There is a possibility this becomes like the iPod Touch and the iPhone, where you get people that have never really developed before do so because they can reach a huge market and because the marketing cost is virtually nil. So we hope that’s the case.

Iwata Sees More Room For DS Growth

 

Prior to Nintendo’s announcement of the new DSi handheld, analysts frequently suggested that the company would only revamp the successful DS once it had reached market saturation and begun declining.

The DSi launched in Japan in November and has already sold over 1 million units in the region.

But speaking to the Daily Yoimuri, Iwata suggests the DSi’s new functionality might create demand for more hardware units within the same household — and refutes the suggestion that the DS might have reached its peak install base.

“Some say the market for the DS is saturated, but I disagree,” Iwata says. “In Japan, a country with a population of 127 million, we’ve sold 23 million DS units.” 

“The United States is inhabited by over 300 million people, and there are more than 490 million people in the European Union. Sales of the product could grow further in foreign countries considering their populations.”

Nintendo has been somewhat slow to penetrate certain markets in Europe, but that’s begun to shift rapidly in recent months, and Iwata sees room for growth there. “In Germany, bookstores have opened Nintendo sections and Wii software has sold well,” he says. “I’d also like to focus on emerging markets such as Russia and India.”

Although he’s optimistic about room for userbase expansion, Iwata says he’s also prepared to take on a challenging economy, and is interested to see how Nintendo employees acclimated to more fruitful times learn from the experience. 

“Nintendo workers who know only the good times of the company are increasing.” he told the Yoimuri Daily. “I hope to give them a sense of the potential critical nature [of the economic situation].”

Electronic Arts Details ‘EA Sports Complex’ For PlayStation Home

 

Electronic Arts says its support for PlayStation Home, just announced by Sony during the company’s CES presentation, will begin with an area devoted to EA Sports.

The “EA Sports Complex” (pictured) is currently in development, EA confirmed, and slated for a Spring launch inside the PlayStation 3’s 3D social virtual world. 

The company says it’s designed for “both casual and hardcore gamers” as an area where they can play Home-exclusive multiplayer games, interact with other EA Sports fans and compare against one another with various leaderboards. 

The EA Sports Complex in Home will also feature trailers and content from popular EA Sports titles.

“We’re proud to support the PlayStation Home Beta with a very robust offering from EA Sports,” says label president Peter Moore. “As part of our continued commitment to the connected experience and the digitization of our business, the EA Sports Complex is a rich new online environment that presents a compelling and immersive social gaming experience for the global sports audience.”

The EA Sports Complex is apparently just the beginning of the publisher’s collaboration with PlayStation Home — the company says it’s presently working with Sony on further support for Home, with plans to be announced in the “near future.”

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