Sexy new blog

The Novel Concepts blog (where you are now) has served us well but we felt the Collective deserved it’s own place on the web, so head over to the Casual Collective Blog which we will be using from this point forward to chat about the new site and games!

We have moved over all the old posts & comments and will be adding plenty of new posts… so check it out and update your RSS feeds.

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.

If I had 1¢ for every load…

Flash Element TD 1 has now had over
One Hundred Million loads!

You can see all the stats here which includes a list of the 12,000+ sites that are currently hosting a copy of the game.

What I find amazing is that for the last 8 months the loads per month has gone up, last month saw 7.3m loads!

What I find annoying is that if I had only 1¢ for every time someone loaded the game I would be a millionaire by now :o(

30 seconds of your time please.

Just over a week ago we launched our first Casual Collective Mini Game, Attack of the Buggles! A simple single-player game where your only goal is to move around the screen avoiding the red Buggles and collecting blue boxes. There are plenty of games that have similar mechanics (like this one, and this one, and this one, to name a few) so when making a game based on a popular mechanic it is always good to bring something new to the table and innovate as much as you imitate.

AotB’s average game time (that’s only counting the time you are in control of the Buggle, not the loading screen, countdown or game over screen) is 30.6 seconds, which is very short, even by casual game standards! However the average number of game plays per person is just over 66 which makes a more impressive average play time of 33.7 minutes, so it must be doing something right.

A few examples of how we made AotB stand out from the crowd can be found after the jump…

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.

Spread those creative wings and fly.

So far all my posts have been about the Collective and our games, but every now and then something pretty amazing happens that just deserves a good blogging, and this is one of those moments.

10 days in the wild

Howdy all! It has been just over 10 days since we unleashed Flash Element TD 2 (FETD2) on the world and as promised I have some stats for you figure loving people out there. Also in this post I will talk about some of the mistakes we made with the launch, what we did to fix them and some of the things I think we got right.

Flash Element TD, one year on.

A big happy birthday to Flash Element TD, my first Flash based Tower Defense game and probably one of the most popular flash games of 2007 is now 1 year old today! Here is a look at the making of the game as well as how it managed to hit 70 million loads in 2007!

IT’S aLIVE!

That’s right folks… It was 145 days ago we wrote our fist ever line of code and over 2,500 man hours of blood, sweat and temper tantrums later… The Collective is LIVE! The site is now free for all to use and register! So head on over to The Casual Collective and get your game on! (after you have read the rest of this blog post of course)

Casual gaming meats social networking, and gets jiggy with it!
We are not just another flash game portal that just lists games that it finds on the web.