Getting married soon

My wedding date is closing in June 26th and the thing I was most worried about was the conversion to Islam but that will all be sorted soon in Indonesia.

So now I just have to sit back and let is happen. As it's in Indonesia I didn't have to organize anything which was good. I just sent money over :)

The photo at the top is the pre-wedding photos which I'm told we needed for an indo wedding. These will be printed large and around the wedding reception.

The wedding will be a big one 500+ people but in Indonesia that's a normal size. Here's a 1,500 people wedding and it doesn't seem that big. Although I didn't take any crowd shots.

Funny, after being with Ervi for 10 years now the marriage part of things seems like a small part.

Lean Pockets Quesadilla Breaks

In addition to the 2 huge games below we also launched another game on Miniclip for Lean Pockets. Quesadilla Breaks is a series of mini games that fill in the 3 minute it takes to microwave a Lean Pocket Quesadilla. Mmm I could go one of those right now.

And if you think that's a lot of games we have two more for Marvel done but not live and another multi-player game that involved shooting chickens. You could say "shooting at your cock" but that would be rude and in poor taste. We're also starting work on 2 more for various clients now.

So yeah it's been game central at Soap lately but the quality and level of games we have been producing is better than we have ever done before. I look back at the games I made in 2000 and laugh. Although I still think Bogan Surf is a classic.

Civil War Online for Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2

The biggest game Soap has ever worked on is now live. Civil War Online is a turn based multiplayer game which launched as part of the site for Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 which falls under our HeroHQ site we built for Activision for all their Marvel games.

This is a small dream come true for me as when I was in highscool I played Heroes of Might & Magic the game all the time. And the best part was the battles. Civil War Online took inspiration from this. It's also our second multiplayer game we have made. The first being Biggest Battle in History for Night at the Museum 2. The good thing about CWO is that the Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 community we have is very active. And since the game launched 2 days ago we have had over 3,000 battles. Considering the shorted battle we have recorded is 3 min and the longest 1hr with an average of 12 min for each battle that's quite amazing. Every time I login I see between 20-70 people online battling away.

We still have a couple of bugs in the game which we are fixing which is understandable for such a complicated game.

The game also works on 2 levels.

1: 1 vs 1 battles: This is the main game. You battle another person with your team of 4 Marvel Superheroes

2: Pro vs Anti: each battle is part of the Pro-Registration and Anti-Registration sides. Which ever team controls the most grid positions on the battle world wins the round.

We took inspiration from Tom Clancy's End War for this one. Rather than just having your battle mean only something to you, your battle is now part of a greater war. Picking where you battle is also a strategic choice. You want to control the map so battling on a position which is dominated by the other team is a waste. Choosing a neutral or even position is the way to win. It seems the Anti side are less strategic with their choice as they are losing bad this round (rounds reset every week) but in terms of overall battles are not far behind.

We also got to make a sexy PV3D world map. Although we failed in creating a Earth representation in hexagons that easily wraps to a sphere. We had to change it to a generic grid just days before live.

We also did something sneaky to the MUA2 community. Initial forum chatter was heavily weighted towards the Anti-Reg side. So before we asked the community to choose a side we threw them a curve ball. We offered 500 hero points to the users who sided with Iron-Man and the pro side. Not only is this true to the comic book story but it also convinced some of the heavy hitters in the community to switch sides. It also generated lots of talk and debate which is exactly what we wanted.

I've had a blast working on HeroHQ as Ive found comic gamer fans to be the most passionate and active people on the web. They really get into it and are really appreciative of our efforts. I've never been thanked/praised so much for doing work from a community before.

The added benefit is that we have learnt so much as a company from HeroHQ as to what works and what doesnt when running a community and forum of this size. We now have 10,000 members who have posted over 220,000 times on the forum. That's in 4 months! We now get over 50,000 posts to the Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 part of the forum a month.

The previous game had 30,000 members who contributed 120,000 posts over the entire campaign so we are punching above our weight right now.

I look forward to seeing the community grow as we get closer to the release date in September 09. Having a 6-7 month lead up to a release has been an interesting one. Considering the first MUA game is 3 years old now it's surprising how much traction this has gotten.

Oh and if you want to say hi on the forums I'm DrTruffle.

Oh and here's a sketch I did for CWO I found which we used to pitch the idea. Amazing how you can hardly tell the difference between my sketch and the final game.

Oh we pushed for Hexagons as they are 50% better than squares.

Autobot Stronghold

We just finished a new game for LG in Australia called Autobot Stronghold. To promote their new kick ass TV and the cross promotion with Transformers 2 we created a tower defense game (defence for us Aussies) that uses all the product attributes in a seamless way.

This is one of my fav type of games and the level of polish on this bad boy is amazing. Not the norm to tell the developer and the designers to STOP working on it we need to push it out there.

The average game time on this so far is 20 min which is 2x our normal standard. It's understandable as the game mechanic is for longer games.

When you get a brief such as "game for a TV and HAS TO integrate with the product features" it's quite tough. Trying to convey 2ms, 200mhz, divx and engergy saving into the one game was a challenge. In fact if LG had not of liked the Tower Defense game idea we were all out of ideas.

Online Advertising Categories

Recently we have been working on a lot of flash games at Soap. You can call these advergame, branded entertainment, brand games brames whatever but the fact is that online advertising seems to be far more valuable to the consumer than any other form of advertising. In fact the only thing traditional advertising is good for is funding free content. There would be no American Idol without advertising.

When I look at online I see these major trends in categorization of how brands advertise online.

- Plain Advertising: Product message here and buy now
- Entertainment: Hey enjoy this piece of content created by Brand X
- Useful: Here's an application or service that will help you. Created by Brand X
- Social: Chat about a topic related to brand X on a platform sponsored or brought to you by Brand X

On most traditional advertising mediums such as radio, TV and print you usually just got "Plain Advertising". But with digital there is a heavy shift away from this.

The added bonus is that with online you can do all 4 categories in the one solution.

I feel bad for traditional advertising people who provide no real worth to any of their consumers. They just sell stuff to people who don't need it. As interesting as the 90 second epic TV (read short film) is it'll be forgotten once the media campaign is over. Where as with online you have a chance to affect peoples behavior and have them using your solution for years to come.

Now I need to think of examples of where this happened. Nike+ seems a good example, various online communities from brands have done well too. I'll follow this up with examples once I have had time to think.

Wisdom Teeth all Removed

My left side wisdom teeth were removed today

The dirty one is the top one which I had no idea was so bad. Glad that's out.

I found there are quite a few photos of people's wisdom teeth on flickr. I only wish I took my camera with me and got a shot of the bloody tooth. These washed teeth have much less "character" I guess the dentist assistant wanted to make it all clean for me. Oh well.

It's funny how events like this are ones I want to capture. The dentist and the assistant seemed OK with me having the teeth but I got the feeling not everyone keeps the teeth they have extracted. Why not it's a great souvenir.

I wish I owned a camera when I sliced my finger open in highschool and when I was badly sun burt in primary school and had to go to hospital. Not having any record of these events annoys me now. Kids these days have camera phones and will be able to keep a record of pretty much everything that happens to them.

Games are Going Off

Our latest game Gripz has seen 1.3 million visitors clocking up 1.8 million games in 3 days. Gripz Globe Skater is doing really well. Oh and an average time of 9 minutes 41 seconds. Buzaaang!

MRD Escape has clocked up 8 million visitors and 13 million games since Feb 9 again with an average game time of 10 minutes and 14 seconds. Seems that 10 minutes is our benchmark.

I can only imagine the stats for games like Peggle and Bejeweled would do. And hope one day I will be involved in a game that takes over the world like that. I could then go around saying "Oh your mum likes to play XXXXXX?...... I fucking made that game!"

Also a different type of game we recently did for Lynx called Primal Instinct is now at 18,000 registered users and still going strong. Thats with cinema and press advertising kicking in this week. The average game time on this is our biggest at 11 minutes 31 seconds. We're getting 80% return users to the site too which is great.

Iron Man Flight Test is still out #1 game which just broke 25 million visitors and I don;t know have many games but the usual is between 1.4 - 1.7 games per user. So let's call it 35 million games to be safe.

We've done over 150 games at Soap but it's only lately with the talented crew that we have really done some awesome games. My skills behind flash were never good enough to push it and we are finally getting to a point where the games we do are right up there with the best of them. We still have a little way to go in terms of stripping back ideas to core gameplay and also generating unique game plays but we're getting better.

I know it's cheating as games are easier to create than a highly strategic campaign and the brands and clients we work with are more fun than a bank or bum creme but we sacrificed quite a bit to get to this position. As banks and boring brands pay much more for boring work than fun work.

Compare the stats for these games above to "viral" campaigns and games blow viral out of the water. Both in terms of visitors, engagement levels and consistency in results. Unless you're "The Viral Factory" which for me can't seem to do wrong and make the best virals in the world and have done for years.

TED: Malcolm Gladwell 2004

Spaghetti sauce has never been more interesting.

Seth Godin Sliced Bread

Remarkable

My Google Reader Trends

Here are my Google Reader trends which I'm disspointed in seeing that Google Reader only keeps the last 30 days. Very lame. I have made a huge effort lately to keep on top of my Google Reader as I used to let it just pile up and then "flag as read" but now I've made an effort to keep on top of a few of my sets of feeds.

Comparing this to my Google Search history it seems there are no trends between the two.

I dont seem to read anything on Wednesdays and Sunday is my day to catch up before the start of the new week. 8-9am is a big time too as I read when I get in early to work and 3-5 is either catchign up on a few during the day or that's the time I read most on the weekends. Then you have the 11pm and 1am last minute reading before bed.

I'd like to see other people's trends and see if they match mine.

Also I have been sharing and starring heaps as I've used this as bookmarking and a way to share items with friends. I see this as the way I blog now. Rather than just reporting stuff I'll just "share" it on my reader. Check my shared items here. So much good stuff these days it's hard to keep track.

Wolverine Game Widget

Water Tank 3D screenshot

Creed Fight 3D Screenshot

New Orleans Casino 3D Screenshot

X-Men Origins Wolverine Game Featureette Video

Love these feature videos for the games the Raven team shown above did a pretty good job with these videos for X-Men Origins Wolverine Video Game. I hope they also do some for Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2

Why there will be no Spider-Man 4

Chances are there will never be a Spider-Man 4 or an Iron Man 2. There will be a 4th Spider-Man movie but it won't be named Spiderman 4. Why?

Because every studio now is against using numbers in their squeals. Every! C'mon you are exaggerating. Do we have The Dark Knight to blame for this as well? Maybe..... Indiana Jones has been doing it for decades but The Dark Knight is different as it's a film that didn't even share the same name as it's other predecessors and it made the studio a shit load of cash.

Also movies that aren't even a seqel are being primed for it. Like the recent X-Men Origins of G.I Joe movie.

Take the recent examples below and tell me this is not a trend.

Imagine if a kid who has been in a coma for 15 years wakes up today. Good fucking luck trying to work out which Harry Potter to watch first.

In Australia (and Asia) though we are still using numbers. This dropping of the numbers is a USA thing.

If I had it my way every poster which is a sequel will be required to have someone doing the peace sign to signify the number 2

Luckily we still have the SAW series holding the flag for numbered squeals. Although they do use roman numerals so it technically doesn't count.

And when studios must use numbers they do it ironically like Tr2n or H2 or Taking of Phelem 123. Oh wait that last one doesn't make sense.

I know I've missed a bunch so let me know in the comments.

Samurai Weapon

Working with US Based Companies

We got a document that outlined how US companies do business. It had some tips for us Aussies. Matt from our US office found these points.

A few truisms from the Austrade doc that I found funny when called out…

US business persons will rarely leave their office to meet you, so meet them at their office or at a venue of their choice.
Makes us sound like hermits – which is sad but very true.

Americanize your website and preferably have a URL ending in ‘.com’ or ‘.us’. The ‘.au’ is
unfamiliar to U.S. business persons and reminds them you are foreign.
This is definitely one to keep in mind in general.

Voicemail is used by companies across the USA as a filtering device. Messages are rarely
returned.
Haha – for cold calling, definitely – but this one’s mostly a generalization.

Do not provide an Australian mobile phone as your point of contact, many U.S. business persons maybe unfamiliar with dialling internationally.
I bet 20% of people could tell you how to dial international.

They forgot to mention "The title on your business card is very important" as we found out last year.

Pffft Samual L Jackson as Nick Fury

Doesn't every one know that David Hasslehoff is the real Nick Fury.

Coincendence

Considered for a long time getting pasta from Dominoes tonight be resisted only to find an email from Dominos in my inbox?!?! MMM pasta from a pizza chain.

Also spoke about someone tonight who just tagged a photo of me (that wasn't me) on Facebook.

Freaky.

Anonymoisty

Anonymoisty: a mysterious wet patch usually found at Swingers parties