November 2007 Archives

Well, by the time you read this, the Playyoo Game Creator Beta will be open to all comers (or I'll be giving away confidential secrets). All you need to do to try it out is sign up. No strings attached (well, apart from the fact that we might end up giving you $10,000)

In no time at all, you can actually start making your own games. So far, we've got 6 different types for you to use as starting points. "Revenge" is our take on the classic "whack a mole", and I've immediately confirmed my status as a hopeless geek by choosing a target so obvious, so old, that I should be ashamed of myself...

Whack A Bill. Note the humourous blue screen of death

A slightly more creative undertaking, and one I'm a little more proud of, is a memory game made up of images of Iceland, and which reveals an Icelandic flag when you solve it. We've got a few tricks up our sleeve for this one...

But for me, the piece-de-resistance (that's French for" pretty tricky to implement") is Line Lander, a cross between the famous Line Rider and the venerable Lunar Lander. Build your own planet and land your own spacecraft on it, fiddling with the laws of physics along the way (oh yes I can, Scotty):

Unfortunately, we haven't yet solved the challenge of making me any good at actually playing the things...

Well, it is a Beta.

It's true. I'm not into games. And yet almost all my waking hours are devoted to designing a service built around gaming. So how does that work ?

Well ok, it isn't 100% true that I'm not into games. I was really hooked by Myst (when it first came out. Yes, I'm that old), and the last PC game I played was Myst 4 (not entirely sure why, but never mind). For a while, I looked for similar experiences, and spent a few weeks here and there obsessed with games like Amber: Journeys Beyond, Obsidian, The Forgotten, and Starship Titanic. Shooter and RPG games of all types just left me cold - I just could not be bothered with all the trivia you have to learn.

I've never owned a games console, although I have enjoyed the odd post-pub Playstation session. I sort of feel I should own one, but I really can't be bothered. Anyway, I'm afraid I'd get hooked.

However, the most enjoyable of my job now has to be testing our prototype games on mobile phones. Just in 20 minutes or so, on my daily commute, I can fit in 10 or so plays, all good fun. And I'm not eating into precious time. And when I get into the office, I can plug into the social network, check out the leaderboards, and claim my bragging rights. All good fun.

An early version of Playyoo's social networking tools

And the other part of it is that we are opening up a channel for people's creativity. When we say that Playyoo is about user generated content, we really mean that, and we're doing our best to make it happen. I can't say much about this yet, but suffice it to say, it has certainly got me into both making and playing games - casual games, which are fun, inventive, diverse, satisfy an inherent desire to play but don't take over my life.

I doubt that this is going to be terribly attractive to Halo addicts - then again, what do I know about Halo - but it does look like the idea of games for "people who are not into games" has legs.

We've been going through quite a lot of phones whilst developing and testing Playyoo. Personally I've had my hands on the Nokia N73 (s'okay, I suppose), the Sony Ericsson W810i (not bad but small screen), the Nokia N95 (a loose collection of partially debugged applications rattling around in a box designed by a large committee), and now the Sony Ericsson W910i.

The W910i is, without a doubt, the nicest phone I've ever used. It is small, slim, but has a huge screen and fantastic build quality. The software is well integrated, and whilst it adds new features, none of these will prevent a long term Sony Ericsson user finding the stuff they already know about immediately. It has an excellent slider keypad and the usual top level Sony Ericsson ergonomics.

It makes my personal K810i look very old.

For anybody who appreciates good industrial design, it is a real treat. I just demands to be picked up and played with.

I haven't even used the music features yet, or even read the manual. But I have used the built in Flash Lite 2.0 player extensively, testing Playyoo prototype games...

I'm still hopeless at Lunar Lander, but I'm getting pretty good at snake. Hopefully when we go live in a few weeks, somebody will use our authoring tools to build a lunar lander that is actually easy enough for me.

But if anybody is looking for the perfect Flash Lite games phone, I'd say the Sony Ericsson W910i fits that description.