Human Computation

Here is a talk about crowdsourcing from 2006 which should be adapted to online flash games. Think of how many plays you guys have and what you actually could do with that much attention.

Gems I’ve picked from this video:

• A single person can play with prerecorded actions as their partners – the ghost mode. Both actions and timing needs to be recorded.
• A zero player game means prerecorded players play with each others – think bot arena.
• Games with purpose
  • Locating objects in image – locate and name the object (peekaboom)
  • Common sense fact – this is what allows humans to act intelligently (Verbosity)

Maybe I should do an ESP game – meet your soul mate? Did you know that an ESP game will give you a sense of achievement?

Reasons 4 Upgrade Tree

Found this at freelanceflashgames.com…

1. Cater to different play styles
2. More customization
3. More possibilities for upgrades
4. Great for replayability

Stress testing Google App Engine

So I have this idea to utilize Google App Engine as a multiplayer game lobby. Flash games tend to peak high upon the very first days of the release. As there are quotas for free service I had to run some tests to get an idea what to expect. At this time I am using memcache as a game server registrar. The registration was set to expire within 1 minute. I prepared a stressor program to issue game server registrations an a continuous loop.

In 12 hours I had issued about 40000 game server registrations.  It seems the CPU time is quite high. The average response time was also 22 seconds. Now I need to implement the logic that a game would first try to connect another game before promoting itself as a server.

Update: You can use a naked domain with google app engine with an URL redirect.

Understanding Lag

To make faster games you really need to understand lag in order to defeat it. While browsing I found this great article to explain all of it.

To understand why lag occurs, you need to understand the sequence of events that occur [...] Mick West

Update: Read about prediction.

Update: Read about stateless card dealing.

1. This same technique applies to algorithm design. The more state that you need to keep track of, the more likely the state is to get out of sync and be wrong. And the harder problems can be to diagnose.

2. Try dealing cards this way. While you may be laughed and mocked, you at least won’t lose count.

Doom Platformer

Jens Winterstein finally made a Doom platformer! Cool!

In another studio the isometric doom is coming along nice and steady.

[...] The If Software website may not be around much longer due to lack of funds. The forums will stay however, and updates will be focused to the ModDB page rather than the website. It sucks, but what can you do. – intmain

Nobody likes the records that I play

It is time to make yet another release of my jsc compiler. This time around you can finally use anonymous non generic delegates with java. Coolness! Subscribing to events and threading is now much easier. For applets you’d need to write a delegate to interface wrapper tho…

In the release you have a project template at C:\util\jsc\templates\OrcasJavaConsoleApplication.zip

At this time I modified it to show off the anonymous delegate support. In debug build mode this project can be debugged using F5 in Visual Studio on .net. If release build was selected the jsc compiler will be invoked as a post build event to generate java source code then javac and jar will be invoked. To run the new java package you need to start the tools/run.jar.bat.

How will that delegate keyword work out in java source code you ask? Here is the Program.java for you to inspect.

As you can see there is some magic involved, where magic is the compile time code generation. While jsc has been around for years – it took just that long to actually implement the delegate support. It is running via reflection and as such not really that performant, but at this time we cannot take a function pointer in java can we.

PS. It seems sourceforge is not showing statistics for me anymore – whats up with that?

Sense of accomplishment

This is exactly what I need to do next – a trivial game with a trivial task just to trigger the sense of accomplishment of the players.

[...] It’s satisfying and addictive to feel like you’re improving yourself and your environment.

Client Vendor Relationships

via miguelcarassco