Back in good ol’ blighty… but not for long

We are back from San Francisco and the Social Gaming Summit, we had a great time meeting some new and familiar faces alike, we even had lunch with the one and only Soren Johnson (Civilization IV / Spore)

Work continues on the re-development of the CC site, we are aiming to go Alpha to a select few at the start of August and then public beta on the 17th August, EXACTLY one year on from when we first members were let into the current site, how time flies!

Paul and I are also going to be attending the Casual Connect event in Seattle 23 - 25th July. We will be stopping off in Toronto & Niagara falls on our way to join in with the first Casual Collective North America meet to say hi and thanks to some of our members, the main meet is on the 23rd but as we can not make it some of them are turning up early, awww bless :o)

We also have some pretty cool news about game releaces, the new site features and our more long term goals… but that can all wait for a future blog post >:)

We’re in San Francisco for the Social Games Summit!

We’re back among the San Franciscans to enjoy the weather and food Social Gaming Summit this Friday. The summit is “a one day conference focused on the intersection of gaming, immersive worlds, and social networking.” something very close to our hearts. We are hanging around after the event to check out perspective office space… yup, you heard it here first, the CC is moving to CA to become part of an ever growing community of casual game developers!

We will be flying back home on the 19th, so if anyone would like to meet up you can find us at the Summit or contact us at blog@casualcollective.com

Right, now that’s been posted, we’re off to go find a nice place to have some dinner and eat our way through this jet lag (it’s 2am back home now) TTFN.

Happy Birthday Desktop Tower Defense!

DTD is one year old this week! In this post I talk about how the game came to be, how it grew, how many plays it has and how much money it has earned…

FETD2 is live, Info on upcoming games & San Fransisco here we come!

Flash Element TD 2 was launched on the 14th (a week ago) and has significantly increased the activity on the Collective, it is already coming up on its first million plays! It was well received in a Jay is Games review and has gone down a storm in Norway! All those long nights I guess. Hats off to Dave for creating another quality TD. Click here to play FETD2

Now that FETD2 is live we have been planning out our game output for the next few months and we have some exciting games lined up. Well we would say that wouldn’t we :o)

Avast there me hardys!

<start silly pirate voice>
Aarrrrrrrrrrrrrgh, I be showing ye land lubbers a peep of me new time sink… Desktop Armada!
</end silly pirate voice>

OK  Desktop Armada doesn’t have pirates in it, but it is a game involving ships and I don’t need much of an excuse to talk like a pirate :o)

Week 3 Update - Part 2

Just a little update to the update. Now that we have a few friends play testing MPDTD I have started to balance the game for multiplayer. I have already had to nerf one tower quite a lot so expect the towers to not have exactly the same stats that the single player towers do. I added in a couple of player-to-player weapons yesterday and they are proving to be quite fun judging from how much enjoyment I get when Dave shouts at me for using them on him :D. We are aiming for 5 player abilities in total and I’d suggest not sitting next to the person you are using them on!

The site itself is getting close to being beta ready and Dave has done a fantastic job so far on it. The whole process of finding and joining games is very elegant. When I think about all the code that has to run when a player clicks that ‘join’ button I’m surprised it works at all, especially as half the code is mine :o).

We are hoping to start opening up the site early next week by initially inviting up to a 100 or so players from our forums and other places. Once the site is stable with that load we will open it up further.
I am going to nag Dave this weekend to put up a gameplay video so you guys can take a look.

Week 1 Update

We made a good start on the new site this week. I’ve been working on the generic multiplayer lobby and Dave has been creating the account system. Of course, we couldn’t just do any old multiplayer lobby and account system so we threw in a few of our own improvements :o) The lobby widget itself works with the SmartFox comms server which has so far proven to be easy to set up and integrate. As well as handling the lobby the widget will also provide the multiplayer API for any games that are loaded into it. We are aiming to test the multiplayer version of DTD at the end of next week. We have also started to syncronise our vision of how the site is going to function and have worked on filling out the key features. Dave’s experience of building large account driven sites is going to come in very handy!

I have also been working on the ‘Deluxe’ version of DTD which will be in downloadable form only. Flash gains extra performance when run locally so it will allow me take advantage of better graphics and larger maps. It will also contain advanced features such as save/load, tower pre-setup and end of game tower stats.

Dave introduced me to Napster this week and now I am hooked! While I am not a fan of the low quality of MP3 audio, the ability to find pretty much any album you want and play it straight away is very very cool. Oh and I also came up with a new TD concept that will use the DTD engine but will be played in an entirely different way. All you people who wanted to manually target the towers will finally get your wish, kinda ;o)

And so it begins….

We started work in earnest on Monday (2nd July) Paul came over to my house and we sat down and started planning out what ‘the site’ will look like and do. We also ordered a new server to run it all on and started the process of creating a completion to design the sites logo on worth1000. We will be sure to post on here and in our forums when the comp is open so those of you who are a bit arty can enter and have a chance of winning the $200 top prize. EDIT: the comp to design a logo will start on the 7th, I will post a link when I have a URL.

I kicked Paul out early as I got a call over the weekend saying my new PC was ready for collection, superb! Bring on Crysis & Alen Wake. On Wednesday Paul came over to mine again, Paul started work on the first of our new games and I laid down the sites database and account creation system. I got all in a twist with Regular Expressions and Paul had a bit of a headache with some game code, but that’s the way it goes some days.

I think it is about time we told you what ‘the site’ will be. You all know it will be a place to host our games but that is only the tip of the iceberg. We want to bring the social side of gaming to the forefront of on-line Flash games with a site that has everything built around groups and friends. When the site is ready we will move Element TD and Desktop TD on to it so they benefit from the new features as well as helping to test it and iron out any kinks. We feel that both our TD’s and flash games in general would be so much better if they were multi player, with this in mind our first new game will be Multi Player Desktop TD! I don’t want to give away any details of MPDTD at this stage other than that it is ‘vs’ not ‘co-op’ play and will be real time multi player using only the Flash plugin, for the rest you can use your imagination :)

I leave you with a screen shot of our servers task manager, we went to town with the specs as we both hate sites that take ages to load and we want to give you the best experience possible. Sweet looking ain’t it ;) That’s 2x Quad Xeons sitting there waiting for you to all come and play!

Flash Piracy

One of the problems of delivering copy protected content via Flash is that it is a semi-open platform and has no built-in copy protection mechanism. Flash game files (or SWFs) are just like any other file that can be copied from machine to machine. In fact when you play a flash game your PC has already downloaded the SWF file to your hard drive and is running it from there. Copying the SWF file back onto a different web server and adding it to another website is straight forward. 99% of the websites that have Desktop TD simply took a copy of the SWF file and rehosted it on their own site without asking permission. It’s technically theft but is tolerated in the flash community as a form of advertising for the developer, especially if the developer wants to promote their flash portal website. This process has worked very well for DTD due to the fact that the game redirect players back to my site when the game ends and they then tend to stay there. Most games are a little more polite and do not redirect, so maybe they are missing a trick there!

There are various things that can be done in code to lock the compiled game (or SWF) to your own domain but it is relatively straight forward to use a decompiler to turn your compiled game back into source code and the unscrupulous can simply remove any locking code and recompile. However software that encrypts the SWF file can be effective at stopping decompilers. DTD used such protection from version 1.21 onwards but the lack of protection for the earlier versions has turned out to be a problem as I will discuss below. Another problem is ‘hotlinking’ where a site is linking directly to the SWF file on your own server thereby using your bandwidth instead of theirs. Serving the SWF file dynamically and authorizing it via keys and the like is a good response to hotlinking. The multiplayer version of DTD will be domain locked and will use such a technology to ensure that it remains there!

Unfortunately both Desktop TD and Dave’s Element TD have been victim of a more serious type of flash piracy, reskinning. Reskinning is where the game is decompiled and the graphics and/or sound replaced with different versions. The game is then distributed as someone else’s work. A real slap in the face to the original developer I can tell you. Element TD was stolen by shockarcade.com (compare with the original Element TD). And in the last week Desktop TD has been stolen by onlinegamesquad.com (compare with original Desktop TD). Admittedly they have put some effort into the DTD reskin but it doesn’t have a single feature in it that wasn’t already in the code they pinched from DTD. If anyone knows a good way to deal with this type of piracy please get in touch!

Piracy and hacking prevention are now taking up a significant portion of my development time at the moment and I am learning as I go. It would be easy to blame Flash for these problems but they are really caused by success and human nature. I bet even Valve’s Steam protection gets hacked occasionally!

DTD Update

Work on version 1.5 continues… broke out my marker pen and the scanner to produce some more leet artwork for the new towers:

Ink / Blob Tower

Boost Tower

Finally plumbed in the Boost tower so it now err boosts. My request for translations on the HDG forum has gotten a good response - someone even posted Chinese. Apparently is ‘Creep’… but it looks more like someone bending down to insert a dvd into a dvd player to me! The problem with asking for translations is that I actually have to put the text into the game. Meh. French and Spanish have been completed after a marathon copy & paste session.

This is all a big experiment (and not a small amount of effort) to see whether an independant game can generate significant extra plays when translated into other major languages. I’m hoping yes, or oui, or ja, or hai.

On a side note the site’s eCPM has doubled since the start of the week. Result.