Facebook Indie Games

The 4 Ps are the most basic of marketing basics but many game developers only give much thought to the first: product. A successful game will need to get the other 3 Ps right too so it makes sense to have some idea of what each of them will be before you embark on building the damn thing or even designing it in too much detail.

The filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission could come as early as this week, or next week at the latest.

The move is not entirely unexpected, given how well the recent IPOs of several Internet companies have done recently, including business networking site LinkedIn last week and Russian search giant Yandex today.

http://allthingsd.com/20110524/exclusive-zynga-about-to-file-for-ipo/

Nicholas Lovell at Games Brief is in a twist over a new Facebook game called N.O.V.A. Elite. Its crimes:

1. Playing loud music as soon as you start playing it. Great way to get your players sacked.
2. A stupid name that requires searchers to type full stops between every letter.
3. Requiring a 3D graphics card, 1GB hard drive space, and a bunch of stuff that even I -- as a technical person -- don't know if I have

We'll see...

Meanwhile, the basic concepts of Facebook game design: simple controls, low requirements, discrete play, and cartoon graphics are well established and it's a fool who tries to bet against all of these factors.

Read it all at Games Brief.

Once upon a time there was a rich man who owned a lot of land. But he hated farming and didn't want to do it himself. His land was very beautiful and things grew there very well. He knew lots of farmers would love to have a farm like his.

The rich land owner said: "If you pay me rent you can set up a farm on my land. You must give me a third of all the food you grow. If you can feed your family with what's left and you pay your rents you can stay as long as you like. Otherwise you can leave any time and your farm will be destroyed."

And the farmers said: "Your farm is so exciting and wonderful and we are so excited about having our own farm. We can't wait to start."

The rich land owner was very pleased. Now he had farmers to work his land and he didn't need to pay them anything at all. They were paying him! But he wanted to be sure this would work... it seemed to good to be true! So the rich land owner said: "There is a catch. You can only grow special kinds of crops on this farm ... crops that won't grow on any other kind of land."

The farmers said: "That is not a catch to us! The land here is so wonderful we never want to have a farm anywhere else!"

The rich land owner said: "Very well... but do you agree that I can send people to come and burn all of your crops any time I like?"

And the farmers said: "We trust you, for you are wise and handsome and your land is green and lush. You will not burn our crops unless we really deserve it".

Some of the farmers did very well on their little patch of land. They grew strong crops and made a lot of money. News of this wonderful farm spread far and wide. Soon there were so many farmers that every space was full. The rich landowner tried to make the farm bigger but by now other land owners were setting up their own farms and there was not much spare land left in the whole kingdom. So he made everybody's plot a little smaller and squeezed more farmers into the space.

The rich landowner saw that some farmers were growing a lot of delicious food. He wanted more than one third of what they grew, so he hired servants to grow those kinds of crops for him. He could produce the crops cheaper than the farmers who had to pay rent and one third of their money to the rich landowner. Eventually these farmers could not make enough money anymore. They wanted to leave but they had no seeds left that would grow on any other farm so they had to stay until they rand out of food and died.

What happens in Part 2? Make predictions in the comments or write your own Part 2 and blog it yourself!

iFlowReader today announces that it's closing its doors. They built their ebook business on Apple. They thought they were friends... but then Apple decided to get into the ebook business itself.

The killer sentence:

We bet everything on Apple and iOS and then Apple killed us by changing the rules in the middle of the game.

If you are an iOS developer then no matter how much money you're making diversify now. If iFlowReader had put out HTML5, Flash, and Android apps while times were good they may be in a different position now. Still painful but at least sustainable. Longer quote:

We put our faith in Apple and they screwed us. This happened even though we went to great lengths to clear our plans with Apple because we did not want to make this substantial investment of time and money blindly. Apple's response to our detailed inquiries was to tell us that our plans did not infringe their rules in any way, which was true at the time, but there is one little catch. Apple can change the rules at any time and they did. Sadly they must have known full well that they were going to do this.   Apple's iBooks was already in development when we talked to them and they certainly must have known that their future plans would doom us to failure no matter how good our product was. We never really had a chance.

Who doesn't want to be Al Gore? You get to fly around the world telling everybody else to stop driving their cars to work. It's a dream. And now he claims to have written the first ever full length interactive book.

I'll leave it to you to decide whether "full length interactive books" are an apt description for most of the CD Rom content published 15 years ago, and instead direct you to some tools you might use for developing your own interactive books:

Adobe Digital Publishing Suite: you can try it for $10,000. Serious stuff with some serious big name users.
Demibooks Composer: develop interactive books right on the iPad itself. In private beta now. The creators of this app have previously developed interactive childrens books on behalf of Penguin.
Interact Builder: another company that develops interactive books themselves and has decided to start selling its own dev tools. It's also "coming soon". No sign of a price.
Al Gore's book is actually the first book developed by and with "push pop press", a self publishing platform for interactive books.
On Stackoverflow some advocate Cocos2d for interactive books. Alternatively you have the Baker Framework for doing interactive books in HTML5, currently limited to deployment on iPhone and iPad.

Are you developing interactive books? If so, what frameworks or languages are you considering?