Still here!

You will be forgiven for thinking Paul and myself had dropped off the face of the earth, given the lack of posts on the blog and the shortage of major upgrades to the site, but we have been working, honest!

After returning from San Fransisco we have been very busy planning out what we intend to do this year on the Casual Collective. We have also just moved into a nice new office, hired ourselves a full time PHP programmer, almost completed 2 Facebook applications and are currently producing an advergame for an upcoming film, so it has been quite a busy couple of months.

One of the first things we are going to do is put our new PHP guy to work on Casual Collective 2.0!

I know what you are thinking… “CC2.0? So you are going to round off some corners, add some gradients and make the font larger? Maybe add a reflection to the logo, sprinkle on even more AJAX and add a tag cloud?”

NO!

You should know us better by now, we are function-over-form people and here are some of the things we will be changing for the CC2.0 release:

• Site will be re-written from the ground up in PHP (ASP is a bit long in the tooth)
• Groups will have forums, tournaments, photo albums and better administrative tools for the group owners and designated admins.
• Live chat will be improved with rooms, new game / PM alerts and will be better integrated with the radio and groups.
• The slightly lame awards will be replaced with a more well thought out questing system, each quest completed gives you points and a trophy for your profile.
• Players who want to play MP games for points will be randomly matched with similar points players, all other MP games where you choose which game to join will be no-points / just for fun.
• When you finish MP game you will be able to stay in the game and replay it with the same people or open it up to get more people in, we may even let the host change the game or modes between plays!
• There are more cool things that we don’t want to give away at this stage, you know we love to innovate, so watch this space!

While all this is being done Paul and myself will be completing two new exclusive games:

The first is one is called “Buggle Stars” a platform based single player game where you play a bouncy Buggle over 20 levels that are both skill and puzzle based. The second game is a team based multi player game codenamed “Minions” where each player controls multiple units in a 2 team real-time battle. The first real time, team-based, RTS in flash?

We realize that there is only so much code two guys can write a day, this is why we are also in the process of working with 4 other developers to bring some very cool 3rd party games to the Collective. A match 3 with a twist, a 3rd Buggle themed game, a puzzle based pool game and a physics based puzzle game. I also plan to bring over a game from my past called Farragomate, a game where you compete with other players to make the most clever or funniest sentence from a set list of words.

And in case you are still thinking “they could be doing more, lazyness!” we are also in the process of invading Facebook! DTD Facebook edition (where you can compete with friends or the global Facebook community) is almost finished along with a drawing based personality test application. We also plan to bring ALL of our single player (and in time multi player) games to Facebook and other networks.

So I hope you thirst for an update is fully quenched, I promise not to leave it so long next time… maybe.