Our first Facebook "game" :-D
Monday, April 20, 2009
Sunday, April 5, 2009
Games, Games, Games
One of the things we've been exploring for the past few months has been Facebook games. Altay turned the rest of us onto these games late last year and to my surprise, there have been a few that have got their hooks into me.
On Friday, we got the alpha of our first Facebook game online. A simple "gift" type game which we will do a formal announcement on in another few weeks. It's simple but addictive. Once we get that title released, so to speak, we'll be moving onto a Black Powder | Red Earth facebook experience. We've done quite a bit of design and work on it already and honestly, it's pretty exciting to be taking the first step into the BPRE universe. More to come ^_^;
Friday was also board game day. Every so often we break out new kinds of games that we don't regularly explore, because a.) it's good to try new things and b.) board/card games have had centuries to hone their multiplayer experiences whereas video games have only been around for few decades. Research value aside, they can also be tremendous amounts of fun.
This week we played:
• The Settlers of Catan
• Acquire Game
Settlers of Catan was a game we bought for Michelle's sister's, boy friend for xmas 07. He had raved about how awesome it was and at the time, it was fairly difficult to come by in his area, so we bought it on Amazon :P
Catan took about 1.5 hours to set up and play and it was awesome. We were all riveted the entire time. One of the coolest things about the game was that there was something for everyone to do every turn, meaning there's no sitting around and waiting for the dice to come back to you. There's an opportunity to take action every round.
This is something we strive for in our products. Our early iterations had a more Counter-Strike/SOCOM system with 1 life per round, but we found people, especially new players, were spending a lot of time being dead and just watching their team mates run around without them. We scrapped this at month 3 and went to a re-spawn based system which in the end turned out to be a much better match for our kind of game.
Acquire is one of Altay's finds. It had some interesting elements to it, but honestly, I felt it was long and dragged. I was bored, restless and by hour 2 I was getting up to check email between turns. I ended up winning some how, but honestly it wasn't my thing. It reminded me a bit of another German designer board game called El Grande
.
I should mention, El Grande is a lot of fun and way more engaging than Acquire IMO. It's also the game responsible for me getting into the "designer German games". If you have at least two other people to play with, these games are highly recommended.
We didn't get the chance to spin up a game of Supremacy, which is an old favorite of mine, but wayyy out of print. I got a copy of that and another game the creators made called Roll Out on Ebay over Christmas. But considering how much I like these compact 1-2 hour experiences now, I wonder how much I will like games that used to take between 5-25 hours to complete.
This might be a reflection of my taste in general these days, though. I like that single player experiences have been scaled back to 5-7 hours in general before I am whisked off to multiplayer land, the exception being MGS4 which I was hooked on all the way through.
On Friday, we got the alpha of our first Facebook game online. A simple "gift" type game which we will do a formal announcement on in another few weeks. It's simple but addictive. Once we get that title released, so to speak, we'll be moving onto a Black Powder | Red Earth facebook experience. We've done quite a bit of design and work on it already and honestly, it's pretty exciting to be taking the first step into the BPRE universe. More to come ^_^;
Friday was also board game day. Every so often we break out new kinds of games that we don't regularly explore, because a.) it's good to try new things and b.) board/card games have had centuries to hone their multiplayer experiences whereas video games have only been around for few decades. Research value aside, they can also be tremendous amounts of fun.
This week we played:
• The Settlers of Catan
• Acquire Game
Settlers of Catan was a game we bought for Michelle's sister's, boy friend for xmas 07. He had raved about how awesome it was and at the time, it was fairly difficult to come by in his area, so we bought it on Amazon :P
Catan took about 1.5 hours to set up and play and it was awesome. We were all riveted the entire time. One of the coolest things about the game was that there was something for everyone to do every turn, meaning there's no sitting around and waiting for the dice to come back to you. There's an opportunity to take action every round.
This is something we strive for in our products. Our early iterations had a more Counter-Strike/SOCOM system with 1 life per round, but we found people, especially new players, were spending a lot of time being dead and just watching their team mates run around without them. We scrapped this at month 3 and went to a re-spawn based system which in the end turned out to be a much better match for our kind of game.
Acquire is one of Altay's finds. It had some interesting elements to it, but honestly, I felt it was long and dragged. I was bored, restless and by hour 2 I was getting up to check email between turns. I ended up winning some how, but honestly it wasn't my thing. It reminded me a bit of another German designer board game called El Grande
.I should mention, El Grande is a lot of fun and way more engaging than Acquire IMO. It's also the game responsible for me getting into the "designer German games". If you have at least two other people to play with, these games are highly recommended.
We didn't get the chance to spin up a game of Supremacy, which is an old favorite of mine, but wayyy out of print. I got a copy of that and another game the creators made called Roll Out on Ebay over Christmas. But considering how much I like these compact 1-2 hour experiences now, I wonder how much I will like games that used to take between 5-25 hours to complete.
This might be a reflection of my taste in general these days, though. I like that single player experiences have been scaled back to 5-7 hours in general before I am whisked off to multiplayer land, the exception being MGS4 which I was hooked on all the way through.
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