Bubble Raider Facebook Based Bubble Shooter Puzzle Game

Bubble Raider is a Facebook-based bubble shooter puzzle game from UK-based developer PlayDemand. The game has been available since December of last year, but has been showing particularly strong growth since the beginning of May. At the time of writing, the game is the No. 11 top gainer by MAU this week with an increase of 220,000 (76%).

Bubble Raider’s basic mechanics are very conventional for the genre. Players fire bubbles from a cannon at the bottom of the screen using their mouse and must “pop” groups of three or more connected like-colored bubbles. Any bubbles which are no longer connected to the top of the screen after a group has been popped fall to the bottom and provide the player with a bonus. If the player takes too long to complete a level, the “ceiling” begins to descend, pushing the remaining bubbles further down. If the bubbles cross a line at the bottom of the screen, the level is over and the player must expend a life to try again.

Alongside the level-based mode, known as “Journey,” Bubble Raider also includes two additional ways of playing. “Time Attack” is a “blitz-style” mode, where players have a minute to score as many points as possible. In this mode, the ceiling does not descend, but clearing over half of the screen causes new groups of bubbles to scroll down, providing a potentially “infinite-length” level. Players are ranked against their friends on a weekly leaderboard in this mode, can send bragging Timeline posts to their friends and can make use of soft currency to purchase powerups — though the earning rate of this soft currency is very slow, making it practically essential to spend real money if players wish to take advantage of these boosters.

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Pot Farm review

Pot Farm from East Side Games and Brain Warp Studios has been available on Facebook for some time now — we last looked at it a whole two years ago — but the game has been seeing a surprising resurgence in popularity in recent months. At the time of writing, the game’s monthly active users figure is back up to 880,000 — closing in on the figure of a million MAU that we quoted in our review from 2010.

Pot Farm is a relatively simple farming game that casts players in the role of a bedraggled, bearded hippy running a “crop”-growing operation of questionable legality. The basic game flow revolves around players planting various crops, waiting for them to mature (or fertilizing them to make them grow instantly) and then harvesting them to sell and earn money.

The twist on the basic farming game formula is the fact that some of the fictional in-game crops are more illegal than others. Planting an illegal crop negatively impacts the player’s “protection” rating. If this stat drops to and remains at zero, the local park ranger will show up and confiscate the illegal plants if the player does not harvest them quickly enough. Since the illegal plants typically yield higher profits than the legal ones, players are encouraged to take this risk in order to build up their finances. Players may also build various structures to increase their protection, however, ranging from legal crops such as hops and corn to fir trees blocking the operation from prying eyes, angry bears and, oddly, inflatable sheep.

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Stylista Fashion-themed Facebook game

Stylista is a fashion-themed Facebook game from Thai developer Sandbox Global. The title has been available in open beta for some time now, but showed up as the No. 4 top emerging Facebook game last week.

Stylista casts players in the role of a woman who’s recently arrive in New York and focuses on the growth of the player character’s “style” through shopping, decorating and social interactions. Gameplay largely revolves around visiting shops to purchase new clothing items and accessories, completing non-interactive real-time “jobs” to earn money and fulfilling the requirements for various quests in order to progress through the game’s light story.

The game begins with the player designing a custom avatar. This may only be female, though the player does not seem to be referred to by name at all in the game. A fairly limited choice of appearance options is provided at the outset, though players are able to unlock additional hair, eye, makeup and eyebrow styles as they progress through the game and earn money.

When shopping, players are able to “try on” various outfits simply by dragging them from the shop screen to their avatar, and then may purchase them using one of the game’s two currencies. Upon purchasing an item, players are rewarded with “style points,” which are used to unlock new districts and shops to visit. Hard currency items tend to offer considerably more style points than those purchased with soft currency. Hard currency may be acquired with Facebook Credits, credit card, mobile phone or PayPal, though for card, phone or PayPal payments the game’s interface only displays real money prices in Thai baht rather than dollars until the actual Facebook pay window pops up.

A lot of content in the game is friend-gated. An early quest requires players to invite a friend to the game in order to progress, and the expansion of the player’s room — required to store all their purchases — also requires the “assistance” of actively playing friends to complete, or the expenditure of hard currency.

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Insomniac Games- Outernauts Monster Battle Game For Facebook

Insomniac Games’ is getting ready to release its first social title called Outernauts, a monster battle game for Facebook published by EA. While pet/monster collection isn’t new for the platform, it has proven to be a winning formula for some and it could yield another hit summer like 2011′s Monster Galaxy.

In Outernauts, players are cast as members of the titular agency, which is tasked with capturing and training alien monsters (“Beasts”) to help them make the galaxy a better place. As the adventure unfolds, players fight evil corporations and space pirates, help out local populations and investigate a mysterious group known as “The Ancients.”

When the game starts, players have to choose one Beast to accompany their Outernaut on his or her journey across the stars. There are five different Beasts to choose from at the beginning of the adventure, and they can’t be captured later in the game. EA and Insomniac are planning to give players the ability to add these creatures to their menagerie, though, by selling real-world plush versions of each starting Beast. Each plush toy will come with a code that will unlock the associated Beast in Outernauts. Every Beast is based around a specific type of element — like ice, lightning and plants — which are stronger and weaker against other elements. At launch, there will be 12 different element types available.

Gameplay is divided between adventure exploration, puzzles, turn-based monster battles and base-building. Players can visit 30 different worlds and explore world maps by clicking on areas of ground that their Outernaut moves to. Each map contains a story mission and side quests. During our time with the game, we visited a world where we had to prevent space pirates from kidnapping a young girl, which meant defeating the pirates in battle. The game will also require players to do some mild puzzle-solving; in the demo, this involved flipping switches to unlock doors and move platforms.

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Ubisoft is gearing up to launch Ghost Recon Commander on Facebook

Ubisoft is gearing up to launch Ghost Recon Commander on Facebook, the first game developed by Loot Drop after the studio’s Cloudforest Expedition was shelved last year by RockYou. The game is designed to interact with Ubisoft’s Ghost Recon: Future Soldier, a console and PC game releasing May 22. This is Ubisoft’s second Facebook companion game after 2010′s Assassin’s Creed-based Project Legacy.

Ubisoft VP of Digital Publishing Chris Early tells us that Ubisoft came up with the general theme for the Ghost Recon Commander, but was relatively hands-off when it came to designing the game’s mechanics beyond the idea of crossover content. Loot Drop co-founders Brenda Brathwaite and John Romero set out to create a Facebook game that would appeal to core gamers, while leveraging some of the lessons learned from Ravenwood Fair — the Lolapps game on which the two worked before forming their own studio. The game was shown for the first time to press at a private event at the beginning of the month.

Gameplay in Ghost Recon Commander requires players to establish and supply small squads of soldiers (“Ghosts”) that are sent on black-op missions, which include rescuing hostages, item retrieval and eliminating all enemies on a map. Each successful mission earns soft currency cash, which is used to buy new equipment for characters and to construct a base, which supports the squads. Replaying these missions increases the player’s cumulative score, which increase star ratings and net larger rewards. The game will launch with one campaign containing 10 missions, but more missions will be added soon after.

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KartRider Dash New Facebook Release From Nexon

KartRider Dash is a new Facebook release from Nexon: a kart-racing title heavily inspired by the Mario Kart series. The game allows up to eight players to race against one another simultaneously online in a variety of cartoony environments

KartRider Dash initially puts players through a series of tutorials introducing the game’s basic controls and explaining how to set up and join games. Players may either race with random opponents via the “Quick Start” mode, or with friends via “Buddy” mode. Participating in races costs fuel, which regenerates over time or may be purchased from the in-game store with soft currency. Players may also purchase unlimited fuel for either a single day or a full week if they are intending on dedicating themselves to their racing. When playing in Buddy mode, only the player who created the game session expends fuel on each race; in Quick Start mode, all racers expend fuel with each new race.

Gameplay once the race begins is very similar to the well-established conventions of the kart-racing genre set by titles like Mario Kart. At the start line, carefully timing the first press of the accelerator allows for a big speed boost. As racers proceed around the track, items may be collected to hinder other players, and a “drift” button allows players to deliberately skid around corners. The use of items and drifting can be challenging, so the game allows players to practice both of these techniques without having to expend fuel at any time.

Besides the standard racing mode where items may be used, KartRider Dash also includes a play style called “Speed Mode.” Here, there are no items on the track, but players may earn boosts by drifting around corners without colliding with the sides. Doing so fills a meter in the corner of the screen, and when this is full a boost item is awarded. This mode is ideal for players who enjoy racing but find themselves frustrated with the “full-contact” nature of the “Items” mode.

Between races, players may spend soft and hard currency in the in-game shop. Here, players may purchase visual upgrades such as new kart bodies, new characters and the ability to dye their character and kart; performance upgrades to their kart’s engine; and items which allow them to “auto-block” specific items. Certain items are level-locked, requiring players to have played the game a certain amount before being able to purchase them. This means that beginning players must learn to avoid and deal with offensive items rather than immediately purchasing the “auto-block” options, giving the game a good sense of pace and challenge.

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Social Game - Self Workout in Park for Facebook

Self Workout in the Park for Facebook is a new social game based around Self Magazine’s fitness events of the same name. The game challenges players to get their avatar fit and healthy, and hopefully inspire their real-life self to do the same.

The game commences with the creation of a custom avatar. This is accomplished through the purchasing of clothes, haircuts and other body features with soft currency, a short lifestyle questionnaire and the selection of the avatar’s “body type.” Since Self Magazine is primarily aimed at women, players may only create a female avatar regardless of their own gender.

Once the game begins, the player’s experience is directed by a series of quests from three different female “coach” characters. Through these quests, the player is encouraged to purchase fitness equipment and refreshment stands for their park, engage in workouts and invite their friends to join them. By doing so, players earn various types of “points” and level up their character.

Workout in the Park makes use of a fairly complex system of statistics and rewards in order to encourage players to think about all aspects of their fitness. Visiting a refreshment stand, for example, can provide players with water, protein and vitamin points, which can then be spent on participating in workout activities. These, in turn, provide players with experience points in Fitness, Nutrition and Wellness categories, and in order to level up all three of these point banks must be filled up to 100. On top of all this, the player has an Energy bar, though unlike many social games this may be simply restored by visiting a coffee stand. Gameplay becomes a matter of balancing workout and refreshment activities in order to earn points at a good rate.

All activities may be undertaken at one of three “intensity” levels. In each case, the costs increase with each level of intensity, but the rewards are greater. Higher-intensity activities also take longer periods of real time to complete, though it’s possible to spend the game’s hard currency to immediately finish an activity if the player desires.

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6waves’ latest title Ravenshire Castle

6waves’ latest title Ravenshire Castle is a strange beast. Combining elements of citybuilding gameplay with tactical stealth action, it looks like being the final entry in the “Ravenworld” series, thanks at least in part to the dissolution of 6waves’ internal development teams. But does this series end with a proud lion’s roar, or simply a whimper?

Ravenshire Castle casts players in the role of a lion or lioness revealed to be the heir to the titular estate. The castle in question has fallen into disrepair over the years, and it’s up to the player to restore it to its former glory by building and expanding, harvesting resources and retrieving the lost Ravenshire treasures from a series of rival castles.

Gameplay unfolds in two main parts. While at their own castle, players may build new rooms, build new items (each of which is designed to go in a specific room or outdoors) and collect income of currency and resources from objects and crops. Quests are provided by a series of quirky animal characters who gradually move in to the player’s estate as story progress is made.

Gameplay in this first part breaks with very few genre conventions — there’s building, crop harvesting, collecting items and all the usual activities — though there is a noticeably stronger focus on gathering specific resources to complete building projects than some similar titles. Most resources can be collected either by asking friends or by harvesting from the appropriate items. Some may only be gathered from rival castles, which is where the second part of the game comes in.

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Mirrorball Slots brings fairy-tale gambling to Facebook

British studio Plumbee broke out of stealth mode back in March with $2.8 million in funding and the announcement of its first Facebook game: Mirrorball Slots. The team’s fairy-tale themed slot machine title is now freely available to all on the social network, and showed up as the No. 14 fastest-growing Facebook game by DAU earlier this week. But is it any more interesting than the numerous unimaginative, uninspired slot machine sims already available on Facebook?

Mirrorball Slots, like its numerous competitors, assumes that players know how to play a slot machine with multiple pay lines, and provides no tutorial whatsoever. Players may bet on up to 25 different pay lines at once, with their maximum bet increasing as they level up. Various combinations of symbols net different amounts of winnings, and “wild” cards may be substituted for any symbol. It’s possible for multiple lines to pay out at once, and particularly huge wins prompt a “share” dialog where players are invited to brag about their good fortune on their Timeline.

“Bonus Wilds” vary in functionality depending on the machine players are currently using — on the Three Bears-themed machine, they increase the winnings multiplier; on the Rapunzel-themed machine, they “stick” in place until the player wins something; on the Snow White-themed machine they can trigger a bonus round.

Alongside these symbols, there are also “Scatter” markings that allow players to trigger a “free spins” mode, the exact form of which again varies according to the machine players are using. The player is initially provided with ten free spins of the reels, and certain symbols provide particular bonuses. On the Three Bears-themed machine, collecting “Goldilocks” symbols in sufficient quantities turns the three different “bear” symbols into wild cards; on the Rapunzel machine, collecting bonus wilds allow a prince to climb a tower, earning bonus spins and increasing winnings in the process; on the Snow White machine, players simply get triple winnings for a brief period.

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More shiny gem-matching with Jewel Journey

Jewel Journey is a match-3 puzzle title for Facebook. The developer’s name is conspicuously absent from the game canvas and its fan page, making it hard to pin down exactly who created it. Judging from the fan page in question, however, it’s possible to see that the game has been available from around January 2012, and it is also currently showing up in the “Newest” list on Facebook’s Games page.

Jewel Journey is a competent but unremarkable example of the match-3 genre, bringing no real innovations to the table. It even goes so far as to use the clichéd premise of the player being an archaeologist, but does not force this with intrusive, badly-written dialog scenes. Instead, it serves as the justification for the titular “journey” through a series of stages, beginning in the Grand Canyon and later moving on to an army base, a frozen wasteland, the lost city of Atlantis and some Mayan ruins.

The basic gameplay is conventional match-3: by swapping pairs of gems and making groups of 3 of the same color either horizontally or vertically, the player scores points. Making a row of 4 or 5 or a L/T-shaped group produces special gems which explode, remove all of a particular color or clear an entire row and column when matched. The ultimate aim of each timed level is to cause one or more fragments of a “key” to fall down to the bottom of the screen. When this is accomplished, the level ends and the player receives a bonus according to how many gems they matched and how much time remained. Levels are distinct from one another according to their shape — some have holes in the middle into which gems may not be moves, others have awkward, irregular sides.

On some levels, special gems appear to hinder the player. Locked gems may not be moved by the player until they are unlocked by matching them with the appropriate color, but they are affected by gravity if matches are made beneath them. Frozen gems, meanwhile, are fixed solidly in place until they are matched. In order to help counter these obstacles, the player has a number of items which can be purchased using in-game currency. These tend to help with clearing areas of gems in several ways or shuffling the board. There are also four powerups only available via gifts from friends — these directly help with clearing locked and frozen gems and also provide the possibility to earn more points and time for a level.

Players are nagged to add friends after every single level. Later stages are also friend-gated, making it essential to recruit other players in order to continue progression. Players also have the opportunity to share news of achievements and high scores on their Timelines as a means of viral promotion, and each level has its own leaderboard.

The game’s currency is earned through play, mostly through a timer which rewards players with free coins for every 10 minutes of continuous play. There is no energy system in place and this counter continues even when simply sitting on the map screen, so there’s nothing to stop players from leaving the game running in the background and racking up the coins for free — the only input required is to click “Collect” on the popup that appears every ten minutes. This is quite a player-friendly move but may hurt the game’s monetization in the long run, especially as the developers also host regular coin giveaways at least once per day on the game’s fan page.

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Gold Slots Is The New Facebook-based Slot Machine Sim

Gold Slots is a new Facebook-based slot machine sim, developed by iEvoGames and published by 6waves. The game showed up as the 11th fastest-growing Facebook game by daily active users in our roundup earlier this week

Gold Slots follows the model of most other Facebook slot machine simulations. Beginning with a single available machine, players may bet on up to 25 different “win lines” in the hopes of spinning a winning combination of symbols. As players spin the reels, they gain experience points and level up, which in turn allows them to place larger bets at once and unlock different machines. All of the machines work the same, they simply have a different audio-visual aesthetic.

Gold Slots puts a couple of spins — no pun intended — on the conventions of the genre that give it a slightly greater feeling of interactivity than its numerous competitors. The first of these twists is that the player may take on a gambling minigame in order to increase the payout from a winning spin. This minigame is very straightforward: players must simply guess whether the next playing card drawn from a stack will be a member of a red or black suit, with successful guesses increasing the pot of winnings and then offering a chance to increase it still further. Despite its simplicity, the inclusion of this feature adds a welcome sense of doing something beyond simply clicking the “Spin” button over and over again. Based on our testing, however, it appears the odds are stacked significantly in favor of the house — although there’s always the possibility it could just be our bad luck.

The second twist is that every few experience levels players may choose which machine they would like to try next, rather than unlocking new machines in a linear order at set levels like most other slots sims on Facebook. Since all machines play almost identically barring their irregularly-occurring “bonus” game, this decision is largely a matter of aesthetics rather than mechanics. Again, though, it gives players a feeling of interaction with the game rather than simply going through the motions. At the time of writing, there are nine different machines available, catering to a wide variety of tastes. The game’s interface suggests that at least seven more are on the way, too.

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Bubble Bunny is “blitz-style” bubble-popping puzzle game in Facebook

Bubble Bunny is a “blitz-style” bubble-popping puzzle game from French developer Ooblada. It showed up as the No. 2 emerging Facebook game at the end of last week, with 70,000 monthly active users. This number has since grown to 90,000.

The game is based on a very simple concept: In a minute of gameplay, players are challenged to pop as many groups of 3 like-colored bubbles as they can. The faster they do this, the higher they score, and the more likely they will be to acquire various powerups to make their life easier — or, on occasion, more difficult.

The twist on the usual formula is that the levels have an element of physics-based gameplay about them. Rather than the bubbles hanging from the top of the level in relatively static arrangements as seen in titles such as King.com’s Bubble Witch Saga, the bubbles in Bubble Bunny are attached to spinning wheel-like structures in the middle of the play area. Flinging a bubble and making a match or attaching it to something causes the entire arrangement of structures to rotate depending on where it landed — hitting the right side of a structure from underneath causes everything to rotate counter-clockwise, for example.

The arrangement of bubbles in the levels is identical every time, so skilled players will be able to memorize the level layouts in order to get through the earlier, simpler stages quickly. Since a bonus is provided at the end of the 60 seconds for the number of levels completed, this becomes essential to attain high scores, along with understanding what the various powerups do. This is a matter of experimentation, since the game does not explain the function of the various collectibles, instead requiring the player to try them out and see what happens rather than revealing everything immediately.

Progression is provided by a leveling system, which provides the player with a score bonus every few levels. The player may also acquire an additional score bonus of up to 5% by playing every day. Monetization is handled through the sale of lives, which are needed in order to start a new game. These are available either by asking friends or at the rate of five per 10 Facebook Credits. There are no other purchasable powerups at this time.

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King.com brings its popular “Saga” series on Facebook with Candy Crush Saga.

King.com brings its popular “Saga” series to the match-3 genre today on Facebook with Candy Crush Saga.
The game is based on Candy Crush, available on King.com’s web portal. Players are tasked with helping Mr. Toffee and his daughter, Tiffi, travel through 65 levels in a Candyland-like world, solving candy-themed match-3 puzzles and acquiring items for candy recipes. The game monetizes similar to the other Saga games, with extra lives and gameplay-boosting charms and powerups available for Facebook Credits.

Candy Crush Saga will eventually be playable via open web, Facebook, and mobile devices;  somewhat like King.com did with the match-3 game Miner Speed. Unlike Miner Speed, Candy Crush Saga won’t offer crossover experiences: CMO Alex Dale tells us the Facebook and open web versions play significantly different from each other. Dale also tells us the various Saga games will be launching for mobile devices in the near future, coming to as many platforms as possible. The titles are expected to launch for iOS and Android devices, but King.com CEO Riccardo Zacconi recently showed us Bubble Witch Saga on the Kindle Fire, too.

Clarification: Bubble Witch Saga on the Kindle was a prototype version and is not currently available.
“On our King.com portal, you’ll typically have a couple of levels of gameplay where you play head-to-head in a match or a tournament. The excitement is very much driven by the direct competitive challenge,” Dale says. “On Facebook, it’s a much more a relaxing experience about progressing through the game with your friends, and the mobile version will be ‘snackable’ so it can be played whenever someone has a free moment.”

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Social Point struck gold when it released its 2011 sleeper hit Social Empires on Facebook

Barcelona-based developer Social Point struck gold when it released its 2011 sleeper hit Social Empires on Facebook, and recent follow-up Social Wars continued this trend. Now that the company has discovered the monetization power of the mid-core games, CEOs Andrés Bou and Horacio Martos are pursuing that part of the market full bore with new Facebook games and also expanding onto iOS before the end of this year.

Before Social Empires, Social Point developed 20 casual titles that gained plenty of users and monetized via advertising, but not that well overall. The company decided to take a risk and invest in creating a new engine for a real-time strategy game, Social Empires. The gamble paid off: Even though it’s one-and-a-half years-old, Social Empires is increasing its peak user numbers. Since January, it grew from 890,000 DAU to a peak of 1.3 million DAU) and monetization on a monthly basis. Social Wars is enjoying similar success, having grown to 750,000 DAU in four months.

“Middle-core games do better on Facebook because they’re easier to play and understand,” says Bou. “When you get into deeper levels of the game, the hardcore filters appear and game becomes more interesting and monetizes better.”

This success now has Social Point focusing exclusively a male-dominated, mid-core audience. It’s continuing to maintain and expand Social Empires and Social Wars, but there are also two new Facebook titles in the works: A turn-based combat featuring mythical creatures like dragons and an online RPG. Details are currently scarce on both of these titles, but Bou and Martos say they’ll launch before the summer.

Additionally, Social Point is moving into the mobile market with iOS versions of Social Empires and Social Wars coming later this year. Both of these mobile versions will use Facebook Connect, meaning players can continue the same campaigns they’ve been playing on Facebook. Social Empires is scheduled to launch sometime within the next two months, while Social Wars is planned to arrive on iOS devices before the end of this year.

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Social Game Gangs of Boomtown is now on Facebook

Digital Chocolate’s Old West-themed social game Gangs of Boomtown is now available on Facebook following a 30-day exclusivity period on Google+.  The game casts players in the role of a mysterious wanderer who has been targeted by a gang of assassins. Throughout their adventures, the player must achieve two main goals: take down the assassins and help rebuild the ruined settlement of Boomtown.



Gameplay unfolds in a very familiar manner, combining elements of role-playing games and citybuilders. Players are introduced to basic game concepts through a brief tutorial and are then guided through the game’s story via a series of quests. These tasks will lead the player from location to location in the Boomtown world in order to fight enemies, collect items and make a name for themselves. Upon returning to Boomtown, the player is able to clear the burned-out debris of the original settlement, construct buildings, plant crops and make use of various special buildings in order to upgrade their weapons or increase their population limit. All actions in this “PvE” part of the game cost energy to perform — this replenishes over time and at every level up. Constructing certain buildings requires specific resources which can be acquired by expending hard currency or asking friends, and the construction of some special buildings (typically those which allow the player to expand their population) is also friend-gated — though as usual, this may also be bypassed with hard currency.

Players may also travel to a special “Ghost Town” location which is populated by avatars of other players. Here, the player is able to “duel” opponents in order to gain money, experience and special items often used for construction. Dueling has its own independent energy bar, allowing players to indulge in some PvP while they wait for their PvE energy to regenerate. The PvP energy bar is much smaller, however, meaning it runs out relatively quickly — it’s also considerably slower to recharge. The odds of victory against each opponent are clearly displayed above their heads, allowing players to pick their targets carefully — though taking a more risky gamble potentially offers greater rewards. Unlike some other PvP-based social games, there is no means of notifying an opponent of when they have been defeated, nor is there any way to communicate with them beyond manually searching for their Facebook profile.

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Inside EVE Online’s Fanfest 2012

CCP Games held their annual Fanfest last week in Reykjavík, Iceland and I was on location checking out Dust 514 and everything new happening in EVE Online. While DUST may be the newest property to come from CCP, they aren’t backing away from EVE. In fact, they demonstrated during the show how they plan to bring the two together in a way that has never been done before.

Attendance numbers were relatively low, compared to other gaming events I've attended. But Fanfest is a big deal to both CCP and EVE Online fans. There were just over a thousand people in attendance (not including CCP staff or press). But that’s a pretty large number of people willing to fly to Iceland for a week, considering that the game has just over 400,000 subscribers.

The Harpa Opera House. Quite a lovely venue.

Having outgrown Iceland’s Laugardalshöll Convention Center, Fanfest took over the Harpa Opera House this year. It’s a beautiful location, and allowed more room for panels and keynotes as well as a place to actually sit down! It was one of the most enjoyable convention venues that I’ve ever been able to nerd-out in.
There was a big focus put on Dust 514 –you can read all that about in my hands-on preview– but EVE was still the main reason that people were there. CCP detailed the points of the upcoming Inferno expansion, as well as cleared the air on what went wrong with Incarna – a tumultuous expansion that saw a large number of players unsubscribing from EVE Online.

CCP releases several free expansions for EVE Online every year, adding new content for players to dabble in. Incarna was supposed to introduce avatars, and see players finally leaving their ships to walk around space stations, to interact with each other face to face. When Incarna launched, players were given a single room to meander about in alone – a colossal disappointment.

During the keynote, there was a surprising level of transparency, which we don’t see much of these days. There were detailed graphs and explanations of what went wrong with Incarna, and how CCP plana to continue to fix it. The presentation was filled with jokes about monocles (woefully expensive micro-transactions were one of the biggest failures of Incarna), and players were repeatedly reminded that CCP acknowledges that spaceships are the core of EVE, and need to be made a primary focus again.

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Fling a Thing brings physics-based game to Facebook

Fling a Thing, developed by Canadian company Big Blue Bubble, is a physics-based game that has previously seen some success on iOS and Android devices. Its Facebook incarnation is one of the first games to be released under 6waves’ new focus on publishing rather than development.

Fling a Thing says almost everything it needs to say about its gameplay with its title. Players have a Thing, which they must Fling — in this case, at floating, moving bubbles which seem to cause the Things some degree of offense. This is achieved by clicking and dragging on the Thing’s tail to pull it back and aim it in a particular direction, then releasing to fling it into the air and hopefully bring down some bubbles. The Thing will bounce off the sides of the screen but is also rather strongly affected by gravity. Each fling consumes a life, and when the player’s lives are depleted, the game is over, though completing a level rewards players with additional lives, as does collecting special “+1″ powerups that occasionally float onto the screen.

Fling a Thing currently has 30,000 monthly active users and 2,000 daily active users. Follow its progress with AppData, our traffic tracking application for social games and developers.

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The Facebook Platform Roadmap in 2012

For Facebook, 2012 will be the year of the third party app. News, videos, and songs streaming down your newsfeed are just a “small taste of overall vision,” said Carl Sjogreen, director of product management for Facebook at the Inside Social Apps Conference.  The focus for the coming year will be on enhancements to Open Graph, mobile and games.

Facebook recently reinvented the user profile as a timeline of major life events rather than a static “about me” page. The social network also extended the Open Graph platform for third party apps to include things like Spotify playlists on users’ tickers, newsfeeds, and timelines. Said Sjogreen, the apps are “a way for you to tell your story and to discover new things.”

Each of the activity streams serves a different function. According to Sjogreen, Timeline and Ticker are on opposite ends of the spectrum. “Timeline takes everything in your life and make it digestible,” said Sjogreen, and focuses on a user’s general interests and hobbies. “Ticker and Newsfeed are much more about what’s happening right now.”

In particular, Timeline favors apps with longer-term engagement, like Spotify, where users can say something like, “Hey, I listened to these artists the most this month using this app.”

With games, Facebook can take activities like high scores and other achievements to populate users’ newsfeeds while they play. On Zynga’s “Words with Friends,” for example, players can share their highest scoring words or the words they play most often.

Because games are inherently social, Sjogreen encourages mobile developers to create Web-based rather than native applications in order to make them available to more users. “I want to play ‘Words with Friends’ with my mom,” he explained. “I don’t care what platform she’s on. If I can’t play with her, it’s not a useful application to me.”

Facebook is working on making it easier for developers to integrate their apps with Facebook using a single API. Right now, said Sjogreen, “We are trying to figure out which [connections are] going to be the most meaningful for developers, and which we are going to want to build richer experiences around.”

Added Sjogreen, “Games are a shining example of how Facebook integration and social design can really be transformative for an industry.”

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Raptr Social Gaming Network Launches New Reputation System

Raptr is an interesting beast.  It’s been around for 5 years now and has always promised to integrate the social elements of games into one place.  It sucks in your XBox Live, Playstation Network, Steam, Google, Facebook and Windows Live accounts into one seamless chat, and lets you assemble a meta-profile that you can share with friends.  The feather in the cap, though, is that once you’ve done that, you can add video games to your profile and track achievements that you’ve gained in various games.

Raptr has just released a new gaming reputation system designed to measure a user’s skill in the games they play.  Gamers are able to upgrade their ranks by playing games and getting achievements.  This new gamification certainly amps up the competition at the social network and highlights the fact that there still is no leading hardcore gaming social network.  Raptr is certainly trying, as is Steam and even new players like OnLive, Raptr and GFace.  There’s a lot of potential in having a social network dedicated to highly competitive complex games — if only as a place for dedicated gamers to take reprieve from the onslaught of casual gamers on Facebook.

About Raptr, CEO Dennis Fong said:

“Earning ranks gains more than simple bragging rights,” said Dennis. “Our goal is to leverage a user’s gaming persona to make their experience better, via giving them an outlet to show off their accomplishments, discover more relevant content, or earn rewards simply for playing games.”

Gamers will start as “newbie” and advance all the way to “elite” if they are in the top percentiles in time played, achievements unlocked and other factors.  Benefits for being an Elite may include real rewards, although that program will be developed in the coming months.

A list of new features are given below, so if you’re a hardcore gamer head over to Raptr and give it a shot.

• New, dynamic user profiles, interactive charts, and genre maps
• A percentile-based ranking system that tracks a user’s hours and achievements and compares them with the rest of the community.  The ranks are as follows: Newbie –> Amateur –> Experienced –> Dedicated –> Hardcore –> Elite
• Social leaderboards to see how a user stacks up against friends
• Highly targeted and personalized news feed that delivers relevant content based on a user’s game collection, rank, most recent activity, and progress in a game
• Real rewards as users rank up in the games they play

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Social Gaming Summit - May 2012

The second annual Berlin Social Gaming Summit is a two-day conference focused on the intersection of mobile gaming, immersive worlds, and social networking. Given that social games raised a record $807 million in funding last year, it's no surprise that game developers are scrambling to devote more energy than ever to building compelling social interaction into every game they create. Likewise, with the mobile app market predicted to top $38 billion by 2015 and the global total spend on virtual goods expected to reach $4.1 billion by 2016, the stakes for mastering the business and technology of successful social and mobile games has never been higher. Social Gaming Summit unites established industry leaders along with emerging start-ups in free-to-play games, social networking, virtual goods and payments infrastructure for two full days of illuminating keynotes, lively panels and engaging discussion on the convergence of gaming and the social web.

Event Date & Place:
23-24 May, 2012
Kalkscheune, Berlin

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