Flammable Penguins Blog The internet home of Claire Blackshaw

14Oct/100

Penguin Presentation: Social is not Evil

So I've lost sleep over the last week because I've been trying to convince people Social games are not evil. I've had some good counter arguments thrown at me. Sleep lost. Counter Arguments and finally I hit on the key. So I recorded a Presentation With AUDIO

....but then the audio didn't record. At almost the same time a great article was published which said it better than I could. Though I still have some things to say on the matter.

Read that great article here - Facebook Games Level Up

My point is basically this, stop treating time, money and friends as currency and instead as an investment. If the player is not gaining something from the experience your wasting their time and money. If your using their friends as currency in a fashion which degrades rather than improves friendships your damaging them socially.

Have a slide share of the slides (without audio), most the content was audio :'(

Flammable Penguin Presentation: Social Games doing Good

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1Oct/100

COP: Game Flow

Game Flow

Game Flow

So basically that's the game flow detailed there. The mission select is of course random.

Tonight development goal is as follows.

Build a blueprint and save it

One Page Designs

I am becoming a bigger fan of vector based one page designs. The 80 page word document which never gets read gets trumped by the A1 wall poster with overview.

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27Jun/100

Podcast #2: Life of a QA guy

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So I pulled in our two Testers, Andy Bell (@acidphire21) and Stephen Rowe to talk about the joys and realities of being a games tester.

Here is a rough order of things we talk about, no transcript I'm afraid.

  • What Reality Bomb would you drop on someone looking to be a tester?
  • The Best Parts of the job?
  • Qualifications and Skills
  • How do you keep things fresh and test in new ways?
  • Software and Reporting Tools
  • We talk about Glo and the unique challanges of QA internal IP
  • What's the difference between a fix, feature or pipe dream?
  • Difficulty how do you test that?
  • How do you test a Tutorial for something you already understand?
  • Motion Controller Testing
  • Favourite console to test on?
  • QA Pains and Nightmares?
  • Worst console to test on?
  • Doing builds and signing them off?
  • NDA Pains
  • Blame Day, and bouncing bugs

Hope you enjoyed this week. Please provide feedback

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