Facebook Indie Games

Remember those sticker albums that you used to buy for about 50p, and then try to fill with stickers that you bought for 20p per pack?

I remember working out as a child that to fill the album you'd need to spend a minimum of £5 -- this assumed that you got exactly the card you needed in every single pack, or were able to swap successfully. I kind of lost interest after that -- it was out of my price range.

School friends with more free-spending parents managed to fill the albums, and this bought them significant playground cred.

You can still get them:

These sticker albums had a lot in common with recent free to play social games:

1. Cheap and easy to get started: the album didn't cost much. Each pack of stickers cost less than a Mars bar. It required no effort to put the stickers in the album. So it seemed like a cheap, harmless hobby.
2. But you kept paying for "in game items". Really, it was a stupid idea. You buy stickers and then instead of sticking them up in your window or on your wall, you put them inside a book. It was at least as silly as paying for in game items in Farmville. It goes without saying that neither the stickers or the albums had any real world value.
   
3. It was competitive. You were all competing to fill your album fastest.
4. It was co-operative too. At the same time, you'd spend a lot of time trying to help friends (and get them to help you) with "swaps" -- when you had 2 of the same stickers, and wanted to trade.
5. You could substitute effort and skill for money. If you were good at swapping and had lots of friends, you could fill the album for a relatively low price. If you weren't good at swapping or couldn't be bothered with it, you could just buy more packs -- or even send off for rare & hard to get cards, at a price.
6. It was fan based. There were as many sticker albums as there were things that kids liked. TV shows, films, football leagues, teams, and so on. Same mechanic, different theme -- meant that Panini could repeat their success over and over again.

Ryan submitted this fabulous game idea to the FBIndie fan game challenge. This is a game for fans of weddings. To me it just sounds brilliant (although I'm too manly to play it of course):

There's a lot of potential in weddings. Certain games, like Build-A-Lot, have been dervied from shows on Home & Garden or TLC. One of the hot topics on these channels is weddings and wedding planning.

i could see a game where you choose two of your Facebook friends, and decide that they're getting married. You're the wedding planner, and you have to arrange their special day down to the most minute detail. The fun comes from setting up any two random Facebook friends, juggling multiple weddings at a time, and spending the budget to get your friends the best wedding possible. The game would randomly decide how much your impromptu couple has to spend on their big day.

Along the way, you'd encounter hazards ... the DJ skips town with your deposit, the hall is flooded, a drought in the Caribbean means that the flowers won't be shipped in time, and your bride goes on an eating binge and can't fit into her dress. These are the disastrous equivalents of Godzilla stomping on your SimCity.

Wedding planners lose money if they're unable to properly manage these challenges. Top wedding planners who manage weddings successfully go on a leaderboard, based on how much $ they command per hour. Girly fun!

Don't you think this would be a hit? Any ideas to make it even better?

Or, enter your own game idea into the fan game challenge.

What School of Wizardry used to look like, before muggle lawyers cast their spell.

School of Wizardry is a Facebook RPG that's managed to claw itself a respectable and steady 240,000 DAUs on Facebook.

I posted recently that the future of gaming will be fan games. School of Wizardry is the 60th most played game on Facebook, and is built around letting players be students at "Generic College of Wizarding", which I guess is an alternative name for Hogwarts.

Right now, you should be rushing to build My Blue Tribe ... Players build a tribe of primitive blue creatures who love nature and hate machines in a fantastical world with floating islands. (I've already seen IMVU adverts that already feature cute blue creatures instead of the usual chav babes.)

Bonus tip: Notice how the top Facebook games don't call themselves "an RPG". That's useful shorthand when discussing the game -- but it's not something that makes players want to click through. Avoid the "genre trap" when you market your own games.

What fan games are you expecting to see grow popular on Facebook?

You've all heard a lot about how the future of gaming is going to be social, the future of gaming is going to be casual -- especially if you've been following GDC or were lucky enough to visit.