I was lucky enough to attend this year’s #GDCEurope in Germany. GDC Europe is the little sister of the main conference that takes place yearly in San Francisco, but nevertheless since a big part of the most creative game studios is located in Old Europe, this conference had nothing to envy to its bigger sister.

A lot of my readers have no clue about games. They find it childish and consider them as a waste of time. I’m not going to argue their views here, yet if you look at it from afar, games are massive software projects involving very different skills from pixel artists to assembly language developers al aiming at creating emotions through a unique interactive experience.

And those projects are really massive, seeing how CTC (EVE Online) and Quantic Dream (Heavy Rain) are handling virtual teams and subcontractors while still ensuring a high level of quality and timely execution is really impressive. Quantic Dream for instance has designed highly detailed “subcontractor pack” with all the raws elements and the artwork for a scene for the 3D artists and level designers to build. In their case managing the subcontractors and preparing their work seems something like 30% of the company’s total energy (they are about 100).

One of the main theme this year was “casual is the new hardcore”. Even non-gamers have got addicted to casual Facebook games such as Farmville and spend countless hours on them. I have a few raw notes on this topic I wanted to share :

• Setting up a 2D casual game should be around 50keur (Unity 3D game is about 250k, Java over 1Meur)
• After launch games should be updated weekly/bi-weekly with new contents
• Marketing the game is 7 to 10 times the development cost
• Social games players are 43yo 55%female play multiple times a week
• Active users lifetime around 8months
• Managing microtransactions can be a pain – bigpoint has integrated with 200 payment systems
• The lifespan of a game is hard to evaluate – social games have trouble dying
• Conversion rate to paying players : 6 to 7%
• Virality accounts for 1/3 of the new user recruitments
• Virality works best when based on a social substrate – FaceBook, MySpace…
• The viral feed must be another way for the player to express their motives – get help tools resources…
• Having people “Like” a game will ensure more stickiness since the player wants to have some level of consistency
• Most popular viral feeds include
  * Sharing reward resource
  * Offering partnership apprenticeship < best retain value
  * Cries for help
• Achievements are a big part of the stickiness – one of the main player motivation is always to be “better” than his mates
• Achievements can point of exemplar values quantitative or qualitative of ur game
• Achievements must value both for main track and side quests
• Achievements help bring ppl in places they would have missed without it

As you can see most of these techniques actually can be applied to any piece of software. Recruitments of users, ensuring stickiness and loyalty are core objectives that one should always have in mind when building a piece of software. Seeing your software as a game and designing it as such brings a lot the the end user experience and can drastically change the dynamics of your community.
Understanding those mechanics has been one of the key assets for services such as Foursquare to actually emerge while so many other LBS in the past have failed (software using those techniques are known as Funware).

Palm just announced on his blog that jQuery Mobile has been released.
Aside from Windows Mobile and Maemo (!?!?) All the modern platforms are supported as you can see in the chart below. We’ve seen how web apps can look gorgeous on the iPhone Safari browser, now all the mobile browsers get a leveled dynamic experience of the mobile web. It’s hard to anticipate just now if this is going to be a game-changer or simply a nice to have feature, and while many have envisioned that web-apps would prevail to native apps this certainly hasn’t been the case till now.
Nevertheless, it’s an amazing news and for sure web developers will have to upgrade their mobile site to take full advantage of this new dynamics.

The jQuery project is really excited to announce the work that we’ve been doing to bring jQuery
to mobile devices. Not only is the core jQuery library being improved to work across all of the
major mobile platforms, but we’re also working to release a complete, unified, mobile UI
framework.
Absolutely critical to us is that jQuery and the mobile UI framework that we’re developing
work across all major international mobile platforms (not just a few of the most popular
platforms in North America). We’ve published a complete strategy overview
detailing the work that we’re doing and a chart
showing all the browsers that we’re going to support.

I’ve started running again 2 years ago, never been a rock star when it comes to running and never actually really got to learn how to run (and no it’s *not* straightforward).
In my case, using a heart monitor has been critical in getting to run up to 15km tracks. Indeed, the heartbeat tells you in which effort zone you are in and for instance I know that when i get above 176bpm I’m starting to burn out and need to relax a bit if I want to run much longer.
To evaluate the effort my requirements are then:

• heart rate
• distance / time
• elevation
• custom workouts
• social integration

I’ve had a Garmin Forerunner 301 for some time now and recently tried the Nike+ since I got my iPhone 4. Basically as a gadget geek I was counting on Nike+ to add to my running experience the “fun” and “social” and maybe replace the Garmin which had been doing a great job till now. Yes the Nike+ solution is way below my expectations. Whenever you do some speed workouts, alternating faster and slower pace, the distance measured by the podometer becomes totally irrelevant, the website (full Flash – kinda weird for an apple partner) is far from being ergonomic, I always have trouble navigating between my runs, the social aspects are limited to publishing to facebook or twitter and of course the soft on the mobile is not using any GPS at all thus no cool map to share online.

on the other side Garmin has released Garmin Connect based on Motionbased acquisition last year and while the service is far from funky it gives perfectly good stats and overview of the run to share.

Finally the fact that the Nike+ software is burnt in the Flash of the iPhone just makes it hard to update and breaks any hope of getting anything decent from this service. On the other side, iPhone has some other nice software such as runkeeper to try out which are taking advantage of the GPS to build nice track logs to share.

Keep in mind that Unity is a 1500USD game engine … which totally can stand the comparison with Gamebryo’s or UT’s ! (who are priced with 2/3more digits…)

Jaron Lanier is a Silicon Valley visionnary who created back in the 80s VPL Research, the first Virtual Reality company who pioneered the VR product industry (and made the amazing Nintendo Powerglove !!).

In his first book, written more than two decades after the web was created, Lanier offers this provocative and cautionary look at the way it is transforming our lives for better and for worse.

As I was having a nice summer evening near my engineering school I got an unexpected demo of a cool student project called “glip” – glips are connected bricks with a colored LED display built-in that can interact together to create animated patterns. Apparently those were created before the MIT’s siftables started buzzing around. Good to see that engineer schools still train resourceful actual engineers !

RIM’s consumer-grade protection software for BlackBerry smartphones, dubbed Blackberry Protect, has just been officially announced. Rumored for months, the new service lets customers not attached to a BlackBerry Enterprise Server:

The application is currently in limited beta trial and no date for General Availability has been communicated

Gotta love the idea idea – turn your todo list into quests and level up as you go through them. When GTD meets with RPG and Funware : “Epic Win” coming soon on the app store !

Grats to “comex” who is apparently getting somewhere in porting flash to iPad. He is basing his work on the libflashplayer.so made by Adbobe for Android, and indeed since both are ARM devices, with a lot of hacking around he got it right !

When at WaveStorm we built the Spykee spy robot  we wanted to build Skype support inside the beast since the hardware had everything it needs to support proper VoIP. unfortuantely at that time Skype was very un-cool with 3rd-part hardware makers and would not release the necessary libraries so we ended up doing an integration with the desktop app through the official APIs.

Things finally changed with Skype announcing the SkypeKit beta SDK. SkypeKit is a collection of software and APIs that allows Internet-connected devices or applications to offer Skype voice and video calls. SkypeKit is designed to work with a wide variety of chip sets, operating systems, and audio/video devices.

Can’t wait to see a Skype-ready TV enabling a telepresence-like HD experience at a decent cost (Cisco’s is 100k+) .