Synesthetic Math Toy

I made a synesthetic math toy. You can find it here.

I'm interested in synesthesia. Many synesthetics see colors, shapes, and motion when they look at numbers. I decided that it would be interesting to see what a math toy that duplicated that effect would be like.

The toy I created doesn't attempt to closely simulate any kind of synesthesia, partly due to the limitations of working on a flat screen and partly because I developed it in a weekend. However, the dancing, colored, trailing numbers are reasonably similar to the sorts of things a synesthetic person might see.

My question was simple: how are numbers and math different if the numbers "speak" to you?

When you try the toy out, you may be very confused initially, but that's to be expected. Try playing with it enough that you begin to get used to the numbers, what the various permutations mean. There is no randomness in their colors or activities.

Let me know what you find, keeping in mind that this toy is definitely just a toy.

Caveats: it's untested. I made it in a weekend. There are no alternate sizes, use your browser's zoom function if it's the wrong size.

http://projectperko.com/Numbers/

Demo Two

Edit: Updated the prototype. Now it supports a more "ecological" system and multiple-brushstroke entities.

After drawing, scroll your mousewheel down to plant what you drew. This will also change all your brushes. Scroll your mousewheel up to discard whatever you just drew. That doesn't cycle your brushes.

Because of egregious slowdown, only one entity can grow at a time. The others will grow: it's a first come, first serve queue.

You can click on an entity to delete it. This allows you to prune "ugly" mutations. However, this may turn out to be awkward, because Flash's hitTest system leaves much to be desired. :P

Next step: make multi-brushstrokes "adhere" to each other instead of drifting independently. This is also a first step towards layered entities...

Original post:

Here's the flash prototype for my paint game, part two. This version has better brush variation and a basic system of evolution: when you stroke with a brush, it will grow in the background. The game makes a wild guess as to whether it's supposed to float or grow from the ground.

Still very prototypy, but I felt like sharing it. You can get some really nifty things out of it.

Obviously, there's a lot of work left to be done... but I have some good ideas.

Game Rating Dreams

I hate numerical ratings for games. Most people are aware of the weaknesses of these things, so I'll just go ahead and not describe them in detail.

I want to rate games based on what percentage of the player base dreams about the game.

I find that every good game - each one - gives me a dream or three. This seems to be pretty common... to the point where I think it's probably universal. Unfortunately, since most of you don't remember your dreams very well, this ranking is basically impossible. I can, however, rate games based on how many dreams they give ME.

This makes my ratings pretty skewed towards gameplay. After a bit of playing, I dreamed about Disgaea, about Bookworm Adventures, about Skate. But I never dreamed about Bioshock.

Personally, I think it's because I only dream about games that have a deep level of skill to develop. I'm sure some people dreamed about Bioshock, but it wasn't hard enough to make my subconscious notice.

The funny thing is that this method produces numbers almost identical to those I would normally produce consciously reviewing games. The differences show up only with games like Bioshock, which I feel compelled to rate more highly because of overwhelming peer pressure.

So, I think it'd be easy and effective to rate every game as "no dreams", "few dreams", "lots of dreams".

Unfortunately, rating games like that makes you look like some kind of new-age curmudgeon. "Your game didn't give me enough DREAMS, so it SUCKS. Yeah, yeah, cry me a river!"

At least when I insult someone's favorite game in my normal way, it's something they can respond to. On the other hand, maybe that's a reason to rate by dreams. They can't really call you wrong that way, can they?

:D

Anyway, do you have dreams about games you play? What seems to cause them?

Boogaloo

I'm running a game of Kung Fu the Card Game the Role Playing Game Part Two: Electric Boogaloo. This link is mostly for myself, so I don't forget the file name.

But if you want to see what a typical Craig Card Game looks like, here it is.

Sorry, you can't play unless you're on WPI campus. It's a rather "in person" game. If you want to run it yourself, just mail me and I'll tell you about the GM's role.

Ugly hub link.

(It may be slightly opaque, since it's very much a "learn by playing" game... :P )

Eeeevil

If you want to see the primitive alpha prototype of the evillest, geekiest game EVER, go and visit my newest glorious invention: Turing Prison.

If you can beat level 3, you're pretty good. Ha!

Edit: Updated to be not QUITE so unfriendly.

Edit: No extra levels, but spades more functionality.

I woke up this mornin'

Ever have one of those weeks where there are just NO ideas? No inspiration, no thinking, no nothing?

I usually try to make something - anything - to try and break that problem. Here's a shitty Flash game. It didn't work: I'm still tired and uninspired. I don't even have the energy to turn that into a series of rhyming puns. :{

Link

Easy Game

Testing an easy game to check balancing techniques.

Rules are here. If turned into a full game, templates would be needed to help players get started.

This post is mostly so that I can access these rules from any connected computer. Last time I uploaded something, I forgot where I put it. :P

Casual vs Retail Piracy

Last post, I noted that many casual games are being pirated - occasionally as much as retail computer games, often as much as half as much. Obviously, there's a lot of details which may screw this up. For example, I might be checking networks which tend to cater specifically to casual gamers, or some other unknown might be skewing the numbers.

However, with the numbers as they stand, it raises an important question:

How much is piracy affecting ANYONE?

If casual games are being pirated on a scale comparable to retail games, what does that mean? It means that retail games are not suffering piracy significantly worse than casual games.

There are a few possibilities:

The first is that piracy isn't really all that bad for either of them. After all, popular casual games are certainly raking in the cash. (Unpopular ones don't make anything, but that isn't piracy's fault...)

The second possibility is that both casual and retail games suffer hideously from piracy. This seems unlikely because my admittedly-handwaved numbers strongly imply that piracy is only eating a small portion of casual game profits. Retail games are suffering only slightly worse.

The third possibility is that retail games aren't selling very many copies at all, and their piracy levels are significantly higher, percentage-wise. This seems kind of unlikely to me, but I've been wrong before. And I'm probably wrong now.

The fourth possibility is that there is a huge "invisible market" of pirated retail games that isn't included in my study. For example, how much are Chinese clones costing you? I don't know a lot of Americans who get Chinese clones, so it probably doesn't terribly harm the Western sales. There may be other such markets that weren't in this study.

Which of the four possibilities is right?

All told, my opinion is that piracy is not affecting retail games in Western nations any more than casual games in Western nations. Now, that means that either both are suffering horribly from piracy, or neither is suffering much.

How much effect you believe piracy to have is probably largely determined by whether or not you pirate things. I honestly have no idea.

But I can tell you a few things about which casual games are pirated.

It appears that a certain kind of casual game is only rarely pirated: any casual game with a story. By that I don't mean "saving the cake factory". I mean a character-heavy story which progresses, however minimally.

There are absurdly few pirated copies of games like Outpost Kaloki and Aveyond. You could presume these games didn't sell very many copies, but Aveyond is holding in the top ten at Yahoo! Games, so it's sold a hell of a lot of valid copies.

Games like Zuma and Cake Mania are pirated a LOT. The only link I can see is that they don't have a story.

They "feel" "easier to program". "It's just a bunch of people walking in with bubbles over their heads" "it's just a random bunch of exploding gems". High replay value, but not much "personality".

That's just weak theory, though. I don't know why it's true, and I'm not even 100% it is true. But it's the only connection I can see. Games where you have a character that interacts with other characters seem to have less piracy.

Do they sell as well?

Well, out of the top ten Yahoo! Games, two or three are games with a narrative. Given that more non-story games are produced than story games, this seems about right.

However, Popcap features precisely ZERO narrative games in its top ten.

A difference in the audience of the portal, perhaps?

Anyhow, that's all that I could dig up. :)

Opinions? Comments? Fun things you can do with chicken feathers?

Casual Piracy

I've read a post that seems to imply that piracy is a big deal for casual developers.

Now, no lie, pirating a casual game is skanky. It would be evil in a way that bilking a giant evil corporation isn't. Don't argue about that last bit, it really isn't the point of this essay either way.

But is it actually a problem? Do people actually pirate casual games?

I thought, "That's absurd. People don't pirate casual games. First, they're not popular enough, second blah blah blah blah blah. Here, I'll just prove it by going and looking..."

Cake Mania, a popular Yahoo! game: more than 250 sources on the immediate net - roughly half to a quarter that of major titles such as Playboy: Mansion. (Playboy: Mansion is my yardstick. People love to pirate that game, and the numbers don't seem to go up or down much over time.)

Diner Dash, another popular Yahoo! game: 300-400 sources, although some smell like spam.

Virtual Villagers: ~175 sources.

Aveyond: ~40 sources.

Talismania, switching to popcap: ~125

Bejeweled 2: Motherlode of about 900 sources - more than many AAA games. Moreover, these are "package pirates", featuring dozens of popcap games...

Zuma reveals the same, mostly because it's in the same packages.

I'm kind of shocked. Actually, I'm just flat-out shocked, there's really no "kind of". Some of these games are pirated at rates comparable to Halo 2.

Now, if there are 250 sources for a pirated version of your game, that means that there are 250 computers actively sharing it. The net is vaster than this little region, but we'll be conservative and say that there are only 2500 sources in all the various P2P networks. Chances are, that's an order of magnitude low, because I think this P2P system stops looking at 200 sources.

These are people who keep it actively shared. For every person who keeps it actively shared, there are at least eight who download it and shlep it off to their desktop instead of their shared folders, or delete it when done. So, say, 20,000 downloads.

Now, we can argue about the validity of calling these lost sales until our faces turn blue. But many of the reasons people argue that pirates wouldn't buy are invalid here. There's no faceless corporation: at least a quarter of your payment goes straight to the devs. There's no excessive cost: these games cost, at most, $20. So lets presume that SOME of these pirates would have made legitimate purchases.

If we get standard solid conversion rates, that would be 2%. 400 copies, at $5 kickback to the developer, is $2000. That's a pretty chunk of change, and probably less than a quarter the actual loss... but how much is it, percentage-wise?

Well, Pharaoh's Curse sells about $2000 a year. However, there are NO sources for it. This implies that piracy is not a huge chunk of the profit, or there would be a few dozen sources. It could be that piracy needs a "critical mass", but that critical mass is obviously significantly more than $2000.

Galactic Civilizations 2 is NOT copy protected. How many copies of IT are there floating around?

Checking multiple spellings, there are less than a hundred (most of which claim to be "cracked". Ha!)

If I knew how much Galciv 2 sold, I could use this to frame a likely answer. It could be that Galciv is in a "middle band", not selling as much as a top ten on a major portal, but selling much more than $2000 a year. If it does sell closer to $2000 than $20,000, their unprotection may actually have brought them into a higher piracy bracket than protected games... but is that something which has affected sales, or not?

To end on a standard mainstream media note: the only thing we know for sure is that people pirate casual games.

A lot.

Bubeq!

Working on Flash. Here's a simple game. It's flash, but should be given its own window due to dimensions:

Bubeq!

This is the FIRST game I've made, but it's actually more than it seems. This is "Bubeq Flat". You play by clicking on the bubbles you want to pop. The cost of popping a bubble is noted in the upper right, and slowly increases. There are five hundred bubbles to deploy before deployment stops. Normally, you'd lose when the bubbles reach the top, but not in this build.

This game is not a final game. Not only is it missing things like win conditions and options, it is actually a restricted version of the "real" game.

The way it's built, this version of Bubeq clears three-of-a-kinds (vertical and horizontal). However, the code supports the ability to put in ANY patterns you want cleared. For example, maybe "blue-green-blue" gets cleared, or "yellow-white-white-yellow" (it's best to make them reversible). Moreover, it can be horizontal only, vertical only, or both. Plus, each pattern can be worth a different amount.

The basic idea is that you "buy" patterns. So, when you start, maybe you start with clearing only threes-of-a-kind. But after the level, you can purchase other patterns - easier or harder - to make your life more profitable. If these purchases are linked to equipment, it will not only change the way you look with each purchase, but also limit what patterns can be equipped simultaneously.

It's going to be brutally complex for the player, but not for the programmer... I think most levels will only use 3 or 4 colors.