Big brands that have strong content around entertainment are finding that the best way to go online and build a successful community on the web is to create a social network powered mmo game around their content.
Disney’s pixar will be releasing a Car’s flavored mmo next year.
Cartoon networks is releasing fusion fall this month.
Thought I’d share some more art from our archives. This one being a game based around a magic academy similar to Hotter Potter and Co. It didn’t really develop into anything more than just a concept.
I did get to come up with a couple title character designs that I still enjoy looking back on. There was only a couple of days to concept the two characters, the result being wholesome Abbey and her mischievous litte brother. Oh and a couple cute and cuddly sidekicks of course. I’m such a sucker for those clean vector lines ala Illustrator.
Abbey
We just recently launched our second game called Mobties. Its a mob flavored social strategy game based off of knighthood. While knighthood was developed in a more startup fashion, we built on the success of knighthood and fleshed out a more cohesive visual direction this time around. Right now its in limited beta, meaning we are limiting access to the game while we work out the bugs.
Check it out here.
That’s what our users say when asked why they’ve still been playing our game knighthood for the past year.
I get excited when I hear this because it means we truly are doing something new in gaming. For almost all games out there, what keeps people engaged are solid game mechanics, immersive and intuitive experiences, and amazing media. It’s all about the game and building upon the game-to-player relationship.
What’s innovative about what we do is that we’re about people and building communities using a gaming framework. We’re not just building games. We build the world context, the tools, the relationships among players and let our them meet each other, socialize and entertain themselves.
I’d pick a great community over a great game any day.
In spirit of Halloween I thought I’d resurrect some artwork from a past Hive7 game that was in development around this time last year. At the time there was a push to get it out fast, so I cranked on a painterly style for the title characters, lots of detail and long nights. For this being my first real attempt to paint digitally I was quite excited with the results. But no soon after came word that the project was being shelved, and I was back on Knighthood. In the long run though, I look at it as a turning point for me as a digital artist.
So, from the archives here are 3 of the title characters done in Photoshop. They had names and back stories but I forget them now.
I get asked this question quite a bit.
Social gaming can mean a lot of different things, as it is a very new gaming market that people are just starting to explore and define.
For me, though, there are a couple of key principles that define social gaming and set it apart from games that have come before it.
Principle #1: Social games add a framework for user-to-user relationships within the game.
All games have “game mechanics”, but social games have “social mechanics” as well. For example, Knighthood uses a pyramid organization to generate ranking and power. A player’s rank is determined by the people in his/her pyramid, or in what is called the player’s “liege line.” Another use of relationships in knighthood is the idea of the war triangle of attacker-defender-hostage. I talk about this more in depth in my personal blog.
Principle #2: Social games are about giving players the tools and scaffolding to create their own entertainment within the game context.
This is another topic I’ve written about in more depth here. Traditionally, game design has been about creating controlled experiences. But in this age of the web, where users now have the tools to control how they consume, share, and create content, social games should also be about giving up control and allowing people to exercise their own imagination and creativity to entertain each other.
These ideas aren’t necessarily new. You can find cooperative or competitive group play in many multi-player console and pc games. What’s exciting is that the web makes it viable to create games that are solely based around rich social play. And I think this will lead us into new areas for how we will relate, interact, and entertain each other in the future.
When your game experience is composed of still 2D images, it becomes even more important to make every detail count in order to try to bring to life, in people’s minds, the world you’ve created.
We start with popular archetype characters taken from movie, tv, and even anime, but we spend an even greater amount of time discussing larger ideas, like what makes a powerful woman, or what are memorable contrasts we can couple together. An example of a contrast is throwing a powerful man in a vulnerable moment. By doing these things, we hope to be able to create a depth of game that people can feel, rather than realize.
Below are several artists that inspire us both for their visual tastiness and the depth of character and context that is portrayed.
The simple secret to games is fun, but for everything else from monetization to viral marketing its about getting feedback through stats and iterating based on that data.
We use different tools and methods for collecting our stats, but, one interesting breakdown is that of the users who contribute to our revenue, 38% pay us directly through purchasing credits and 62% pay us indirectly by clicking on offers. Additionally, people who prefer to earn credits with offers are typically people who don’t purchase things in game.
So, adding an offer mechanism is looking to be a good business opportunity for web games to increase their revenue streams.
I can’t read japanese, but the art style and craftsmanship makes my mouth water.
