For Self Aware Games, I wouldn’t consider us a team guided by an auteur. I would suggest that our primary strength is that we work really, really well as a team, and the creative input from the group gets amplified, and the result is better than any initial idea from a single person. It’s a collaborative effort. It’s not a democratic one, to be clear. Decisions are not made by consensus, but the designers are… uh… self aware enough to understand that they (myself included) don’t always have the best ideas – but that we can take the best ideas & synthesize them into something that is the team’s best output.

So I wouldn’t say that we’re auteur-driven, and I don’t feel any shame about that. Maybe a bit of pride that our process can be an expression of a wide variety of ideas from a wide variety of sources while still remaining coherent, with a coherent “feel”. I believe that if you’ve played a Self Aware Games game, you should be able to recognize another one after playing it. Maybe not on sight (Fleck & Casino are very, very different beasts), but they share a lot of the same fundamental ideas – that you want to play together.

The second thing stems from something a bit weird. It’s probably overly reductionist, but I’d say there are two fundamental types of game designers – “practical” designers, and “whimsical” designers.

A game like “World of Goo” is a work of whimsy, for me. It’s got practical elements, of course – all the core interactions are really well suited to motion control, a mouse, or any kind of pointing device – but so much of what sets it apart is its style, and the vision for the whole world it lives in. Frankly, its’ brilliant, and not the kind of thing I would have ever come up with. If you’ve never played it, go check it out. World of Goo. 2D Boy. Whatever it’s currently priced at, it’s totally worth it.

I consider myself a really practical designer. Even the whimsical elements to me often start with practical considerations. So an idea often starts not with, “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if…” and more, “Hey, what can we do with…”

There are a few obvious considerations:

• Who are we making the game for?
• What platform are we making the game for?
• What can you do now that you couldn’t have done before?

Word Ace Prototype Kit

Take Word Ace, for instance. We’d just finished Taxiball, and we heard about the Palm Pre & knew we wanted to try to get in on the ground floor there. So, we were making a game for what was likely a more business-oriented player than a normal iPhone user. We were making something for a phone that had a keyboard. Something that was persistently connected to the internet. So you could do real-time multiplayer, on your phone, and make it a really social experience. Word Ace was the sort of “natural” result – something that really put the keyboard to good use, and was an online multiplayer game you could keep in your pocket.

When we find ourselves with an opportunity to make something new, that’s often where we start. What’s new? What would we want to do that we couldn’t do before? With Fleck, the lynchpin was the maps, and the fact that a lot of location-oriented data was becoming available. There was also a boom of games that used “friends” as basically “ammunition.” The huge wave of Mafia games that required you to have N users on your Friend List, etc.

So, as we started thinking about what we could do, we wanted something that was a real-time game, where it mattered how many friends you had. The first doodles I did were basically a game that was sort of similar to thatgamecompany’s game fl0w, but where your avatar was basically created by your Twitter account, and any Twitter activity, in real-time, had an effect on the game. If someone tweeted, it’d act as an immediate powerup. You’d eat other players’ Twitter friends, and then they’d be notified via Twitter DM or something, and have a chance to exact some sort of revenge.

It was a kind of novel concept, but ultimately, the problem is that I didn’t really like fl0w (no offense to tgc), and as a result, using it as a starting point felt like a mistake. In the end, the thing that I liked about the idea was the concept that real-world information could have an effect on the game in some sort of real time.

The second thing that really formed the basic idea for Fleck was simply that there was this huge wave of “social games”, and something about it was just constantly irritating. Spamming Facebook wasn’t social, and the “games” themselves were barely games. For me, growing up playing multiplayer games meant doing things together - sometimes against each other, sometimes cooperatively with one another, but that you shared an experience, and then got to tell stories about it later.

That was the magic of socialization through gaming – it gave you a shared experience. You could talk about it afterwards, whether it was moments after the game was over, or months later, reminiscing about that time you got completely owned. There was something that was obviously hugely appealing about this kind of instantly-accessible, simple experience, and something about needing your friends to help you make progress – but that the games that had come to embody the idea of “social games”… sucked.

So how could we make a game that was genuinely social? Something that had enough depth that you’d consider it a game? Something that used real-world data, ideally in real-time?

If you’ve played Fleck, those questions are starting to have a solution that sounds at least a little like Fleck. We needed to have real-time interaction, but also some elements of asynchronousness, because not everyone’s online at the same time all the time. We needed to have something that had an extraordinarily simple interface. We wanted something that had real time interactions that involved some strategy, but weren’t brutally punishing, where people could work together to achieve some sort of success.

We had these conversations, outlining the basics of what we wanted to achieve, around my dining room table. At the time, we were working occasionally out of a shared office, and occasionally out of each of our houses. I remember doodling on the whiteboard, and mocking up the Twitter-Eater concept in Photoshop. The conversation carried on over the course of a couple of days, but then the last piece fell into place.

“What was the ultimate practical expression of what the hardware could support in a few years?”

Gyroscope. Persistent connectivity. Camera. Maps. Location. Access to data about the world via a wide (and ever-increasing) variety of APIs.

So, a massively-multiplayer online game that takes elements of asynchronous and real-time games, deep enough to be a lasting experience, broad enough to support a wide variety of interests, fundamentally social, and accessible as possible. Somewhere the API discussion then hit on maps. And then we were off to the races.

Next: Why Fleck is completely insane, and no rational developer would ever make what we’ve made.

First. It’s great that DF’s got the money. I firmly believe that they’ll make something wonderful, and I think that’s why it attracted such quick & fervent backing. But at the same time, it’s not just the funding that changes, when something like this happens. Accountability is another big thing that’s changed. While you could say theoretically that having THOUSANDS of people who have a vested interest in this getting out, the pressure will be on for them to deliver, that’s very, very different on a practical level than having one producer with the authority to say, “This gets cut so we meet budget/deadline.”

DF hasn’t been known for its punctuality. Their smaller recent projects seem to have been less crazy than earlier ones, but it’s not like DF has an absolutely ironclad reputation for getting their games out the door on time/budget. And with no one in their face, with the authority to assure that they do, I have what I think are “realistic” expectations of the potential outcome. I think most of the people who threw in money will want a game, on the date promised, come hell or high water, and I’m not 100% sure that’s what they’re (we’re, rather) going to get. We’ll see – ultimately, the impact that this is going to have isn’t going to be understood until the end result is in peoples’ hands, and they’re either happy or furious with the result.

The second point is perhaps a stranger one, and maybe it’s just obvious to me because we’re cranking away like crazy people on Fleck & Casino. In essence… we already do exactly what everyone’s claiming is the big revolution. Yes, there are differences between what Kickstarter is doing and what we’re doing. But with freemium games like ours, where we’re taking in scads of feedback from REAL users who are ALREADY playing our game, we’re essentially doing Kickstarter in real-time, rather than queueing up all the funding up front.

Yes, we worked on Fleck & Casino for a substantial period of time before they saw the light of day, but that’s really no different than what’s happening in this situation. DF is leveraging funding/technology from previous projects, but essentially cutting out the middleman for funding. Same deal, except a user can actually play the game, decide how much they like it, throw in some money, and keep playing. It’s not an all-or-nothing sight-unseen proposition. And yes, “freemium” brings with it a ton of baggage. Everyone assumes “freemium” = Zynga-squeeze-blood-from-a-stone-style-Skinner-Box.

But that comes back to who you are, and why you make games. I hope if you’re reading this blog, it’s because you’ve spent some time with us, and you know why we make things. We make things that we want people to love - to steal the way Joss Whedon phrases why he makes things.

Ultimately, the parallel is simple – in most situations, there is a middleman between the developer and the customer – the publisher who pays the developers’ bills & often asserts some unwelcome “creative” input. In both the Kickstarter case, and with our games (both Card Ace & Fleck), the customer is, quite simply, you. Directly. And I don’t think we’d have it any other way.

In the spirit of LOVE and a little guy called Cupid, we here at Self Aware have put some PRETTY cool little items into Fleck today!

If you haven’t yet, you should make your way over to the Fleck marketplace and check it out!

For starters… Cupid statues! – ON SALE at an introductory price TODAY ONLY! Be sure to head over to Fleck.com and snag a couple of these up before the clock strikes midnight! We dont want anyone turning into a pumpkin…. its not Halloween and well…. pumpkins are out of season!

All of these awesome Valentine’s Day themed items are currently available as well:

Valentine’s Mailbox – people can leave you Valentine’s Day messages, just like on a signpost!

Lovely Roses – two options to get these. You can send them as a gift for coins, or purchase them for yourself using gems!

Valentine’s Box – This is a gift box that contains a special prize. It’s possible to find all of the new Valentine’s objects inside a box, and it’s even possible to find epic rare plants!

 Forget about the Valentine’s Day decor? -  Electric Heart gift and the Sweetheart Flamingos!

Another nifty little change you guys might enjoy… Replanting will always use coins! Instead of using seeds that you happen to have in your inventory, all replants will cost coins! No more accidentally losing seeds you didn’t remember you had!

We will be hosting impromptu sales and events in Fleck regularly!

Many thanks to the users that did this. We had a large handful of awesome people working together to make this sale happen! If you are not playing Fleck, you should be. There are some PRETTY awesome folks in our Fleck universe.

Self Aware Games sends all of you an air hug for being the best!

Be sure to tell your friends! Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus for exclusive content, sales, and general jibber jabber about anything and everything you want to talk about!

Have you noticed the Rock Paper Scissors minigame in Fleck? If you haven’t, you’re missing out.

This is a great way to show your friends what you’re made of and make some serious coin. We have some pretty intuitive players… I would love to see who in our game can play 10 rounds and come out undefeated.

This could be you. If we have enough interest, there are surely tournaments in our future!

We introduced RPS into Fleck over the last few weeks. For those of you not familiar with the rules of the game, I will explain:

• Rock beats Scissors.
• Scissors beats Paper.
• Paper beats Rock.
• Rock is what you are living under if you don’t know the rules already!

The ante is 1000 coins for each of the two users involved.
THE ANTE IS ONLY DEDUCTED AS SOON AS A CHALLENGER HAS ACCEPTED. You wont miss out on 1000 coins if people are to scared too battle you.

Once you have activated the RPS battle, any user willing to try their hand (pun intended) at battling you has the option to select the initiator and accept the challenge.

• The winner takes 1600 coins.
• The loser is out his or her 1000 coin ante.
• Ties result in both players getting their full 1000 coin ante back.

If you see a moderator wandering around in Fleck looking a little down on their luck… CAPITALIZE!

Surprise RPS battles are one of the NEW and most effective ways to call your Fleck friends over for some minigame fun!

Have any more suggestions for minigames you would like to see in Fleck? If so, feel free to email support@selfawaregames.com with your ideas!

Changes to planter boxes: Plants in planter boxes now mature in 1/2 the normal amount of time (because they can’t be Wonder-Grown). More updates coming to plants in planter boxes soon. Wonder-Grow was taken out of planter boxes to address an exploit, which is going to be patched in a different way soon – so Wonder-Grow is probably coming back to planter boxes as well.

Change to combat loot calculation: Battling with multiple people no longer reduces your odds of finding epic and rare seeds. Previously, the odds of finding rare seeds were divided by the number of players participating in the battle; this modifier is being taken out, so you have the same chances of getting great seeds no matter how many people are participating. This also makes the Lucky Horseshoe item much more useful – previously, having multiple people in a combat using the Horseshoe did improve your odds, but now they will be substantially better if multiple people use the powerup.

Revised timers on Zombie Plants: When the timer in a ZP’s popup runs down, the ZP will either mature to the next stage, or be removed from the world. The growth/removal timers used to be inconsistent, which was confusing and misleading. The general rules are staying as they were (4s don’t mature into 5s, etc.) – this is only a change to the timers involved.

Additionally, Gem Shards are now active! On the iPad you can watch video ads to earn 1 Gem Shard each. 10 Gem Shards can be combined together to form 1 Gem!

LOADS of bug fixes as well, especially in the user interface.

Vampire Energy Drink, Roboclaw, and Horseshoe power ups now give 30 minutes of actual *game* time. This means that if you log off for a few minutes, you’ll have the remaining time on your powerup when you return to the game, as long as you finish using it up within 1 hour of activating it. There have been a couple of bugs relating to the tracking of this time that will be fixed today, so if anyone had issues with prematurely expiring power ups over the weekend please write in to support@selfawaregames.com.

Also, there is now a limit of 16 turrets in an area (roughly 80 hexes across). And Valentine’s Day special items have been added to the market – ask your friends for an Electric Heart, and put a pair of Sweetheart Flamingos in your yard!

Share, follow, circle, tweet, like, and friend our pages listed below. We are going to start offering exclusive sales, offers, discounts, updates, and more! The only way to find out when these deals are going on is by adding!

Share this with all of your Self Aware Gamers and be sure to add us on all of your networks! Don’t be the only one of your friends to miss out on these deals.

Also see what your friends are saying about Self Aware, talk to the devs, and interact with the SA community!

Each network will have different and exclusive sales as well as users for all of your favorite SA titles!

Self Aware Games on Facebook:
http://on.fb.me/wTm8uD

http://on.fb.me/xSL5f8

Self Aware Games on G+:

http://bit.ly/yIMBdw
http://bit.ly/AfZwu6
http://bit.ly/xR7F6H

Self Aware Games on Twitter:
@selfawaregames
@cardacecasino
@fleck

Zynga claims that all games are essentially iterative, based on previous games that have come before, and that their iteration is no different. That’s obviously untrue to anyone with game development experience, but that may not be obvious to non-developers. First, there’s plenty of documentation showing that Zynga intentionally does this, and it is a core part of their strategy. Their CEO is “on record” with the following quote:

“I don’t f***ing want innovation. “You’re not smarter than your competitor. Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers.” – Mark Pincus, CEO and Founder of Zynga

So let’s not pretend that they’re being honest when they deny that they’re cloning other games. That’s who they are, through and through. That’s where they found their first successes, and it’s where they’ll find all their future successes, because that is what they know how to do.

Let me relate an experience I had a handful of years ago:

I was working on a version of the Sims 2 for consoles. For a variety of reasons, the console versions of the Sims 2 weren’t running on the same basic codebase as the PC versions of the Sims 2. Not that big a deal, lots of console games at the time were very different than their PC counterparts. But the issue was that the two games had to feel similar – they had to behave in basically the same way in the same situation.

The problem was that none of the underlying technology was the same. So even if we had access to the specific values in the PC side’s tuning tables, we couldn’t just import them into the console game and have them be the same. A value of 5 has one effect on the PC side, and the same value might end up in the same behavior acting as thought you’d input 5.5. And the variations were completely inconsistent.

As a result, we had a designer whose job it was, was to sit there with a stopwatch, time all the critical actions in-game, and reverse engineer new tuning tables that would match the behavior of the other game. Why make them the same? Because the other tuning worked. It was fun. It was “The Sims” experience that everyone expected.

This is a really critical thing when it comes to cloning. For all the whinging about a game like Dream Heights copying the large-scale ideas behind Tiny Tower, it’s actually only one part of the problem. There have been dozens of tower-themed games in the last decade, from Yoot Tower (Sim Tower in the US) to any number of time-management games that Tiny Tower also drew inspiration from. But part of the issue that was made clear in Nimblebit’s response to Zynga’s craven defense of their practices was that it wasn’t just the “tower” concept – it was the specific details of the tuning that they stole.

Here’s something that’s not obvious: Every detail matters. Everything. You can have a game where 99% of the things work and are awesome, and one value can screw the whole thing up. This is specific experience I have, and I can tell you with 99.9% certainty that a game that I worked on, which shipped with a value of 0.28 in ONE variable field would have been a measurably better game if that value had been 0.32. I would have bet money at the time, and now, that if you’d had ANY reviewer re-review the game with that single change, the score would have been at least 2 (on a scale out of 10) points higher. Minimum. Probably more. That was, by itself, the difference between very good and almost unplayably poor.

I’m not joking, and if you want to understand why, you have to understand the difference between the terms “overdamped,” “underdamped,” and “perfectly damped”. Which is a bit longer of an explanation than I can get into here, but the difference was a game whose controls were awful, and a game whose controls were interesting and accessible. It took more than a week to change that one variable to that value. Why? Because that value interacted with dozens of other things, from other tuning values to the animation system to the camera system to the framerate. One value change had a ripple effect that affected almost everything. And there were thousands of such values, each with their own ripple effects.

Every detail matters.

And good developers will slave over every single cell in a giant Excel spreadsheet. They will invest weeks, months, even years of effort into crafting an experience that works. With Fleck, we have been tuning those variables for more than a year, and the end result is the game that it is. If you’d started by making a game in the same “genre”, but you had to tune it yourself without “stopwatching” Fleck, you’d end up with a radically different experience, because a LOT of the subtleties would be lost, and all the systems would interact differently.

This, strangely, is where a lot of the effort of game development is. This munging of numbers is where the difference is between a game that is massively fun, and utterly tedious. And I’m not talking about optimizing for monetization, or blah blah blah – I’m talking about the behavior of everything in the game. What it means to be in combat. What it means to plant something. What expectation a player has about how something in the game will work, and what kind of representation of reality (or fantasy) we’re creating.

The devil is in the details. The work is in the details. The craft is in the details. The love is in the details.

The risk is in the details.

What Zynga does is that they steal the details because it eliminates the risk. Making a clone of Tiny Tower that is substantially different – actually iterative – means that you have to take on the risk of making those new systems work. And it means you have to also look at all the old systems, because any meaningful change will then force you to at least reconsider almost everything. By stopwatching the game & literally cloning it, you have no risk of the game not working, of not being, at worst, as fun as the source material.

Which means if you’re a company whose sole expertise is in outmarketing your opponents, you’ll basically be guaranteed victory. The weird thing, given their massive resources and marketing advantage, is why they’re not doing even better with this strategy.

But maybe it’s not that strange. Because making something new is hard – it’s a labor of passion, of dedication, and of love. And even though the game systems can be cloned to the millisecond, the love can’t. And while a very “casual” gamer may not be able to tell the difference between a game that’s made by people who love making games and people who are sitting in cubes with stopwatches, as that audience becomes more sophisticated, and more aware, I hope that they will begin to feel that love, that craft, and they’ll start to understand what’s missing. But that’s the optimist in me speaking.

Unfortunately, what’s clear right now is that the only thing that really matters right now is not who’s made the better game, but who’s made the game that more players know about, and right now, no one does that better than Zynga. They’ve shown the wider audience simply doesn’t care about who crafted the original experience, and that cloning a game like this only has upside to them with no material negative consequences.

The bulk of their users will never hear of Tiny Tower or Nimblebit. They’ll never hear that all of their other favorite games are clones of other games that someone else created.

Until one day, when Zynga’s succeeded in cloning & outmarketing their opponents; when they’ve cornered the industry and crushed their enemies.

What will their stopwatches time then?

—

* As a weird aside, whenever I think about Zynga these days, I’m reminded of the Once-ler from Dr. Seuss’s story The Lorax, which I’ve been reading regularly to my son. If you’ve never read it (as I hadn’t until recently), I’d highly recommend it.

And that’s all she wrote for 2011.

To everyone who’s played our games, thank you. We have the best job in the world. We’ll be working hard to make sure 2012 is even better.

Cheers, and Happy New Year to you all!