Smartphones heh? Apparantly there is a sudden surge in the market and we're all going to be rich! Great. But, um, what exactly is a "Smart" Phone and does everything we currently call Smart Phone really fit the term?

Smartphones.. what have we got?.... we've got 3 serious contenders and a whole lot of cheap but crap alternatives. Blackberry, Android and the ever popular iPhone. So what makes them smart? Outside of the normal "it can do interweb see" and "hey, I can pick up my mail" I think there are a few really SMART things:

1) Applications

One major feature that all the smart phones share, the ability to extend their functionality through 3rd party applications. For quantity of application the clear winner here is iPhone. Astounding! Unfortunately due to Apple's rather draconian approval process it takes a long time from a new web technology becoming provailant to an application actually being available. Android and Blackberry have significant application numbers and their model seems set to make them more desireable platforms in the long run.

Applications are cool, cute and fun. But smart? Not very.

2) Integration

Integrated applications. Now, thats smart. I add one application to my phone and I get one feature. Install another, and I get another feature. Ha! Brilliant. What if when I installed those two applications together they knew about each other, or at least each others features. Maybe they could work together to get me yet more feature(s)!

Integration is key to future technologies. One application builds on another on another. We have a chaotic growth of feature set in which we should be constantly surprised by what our smart phones can do for us!

Unfortunately this isn't really the case for iPhone. The platform doesn't lend itself well to this. Nor does the programming environment. The applications are locked down, intentionally for ease of use but this limits the future possibilities pretty horribly.

3) Aggregation

We have integrated applications, what about integarated data? My mail needs to feed my calendar. Ok, thats basic, and I think phones have been doing that for years before smart phones came along. What about twitter and facebook and . Each new technology/network/fad is going to produce a new set of data. I want the smarts on my phone to aggregate all the incoming data and feed it into my other applications.

I want location based twitters which enter stuff into my calendar and then remind me and the other participants via email, prompting me to take a video of it which will automatically be fed back into the facebook event. Aggregate my inputs phone! Aggregate my outputs! I want it all to work together.

It's all possible, and with the right framework.. well thought out and secure, it's all going to be possible. Unfortunately a locked down platform with the tight constraints isn't going to lend itself that way (read iPhone)

So, what makes your phone smart? What is it doing above and beyond exactly what you told it to? How is it using it's smarts to make your life easier? Does the iPhone really stack up here? Seems more like an mobile gaming and gimmick platform to me? Give me Android! Give me Blackberry! Hell, give me Maemo! Give me a really smart phone!

A couple more variants..

If you use just rectangles, it doesn't work out well


Mixing ellipses, rectangles and polygons gives the best results yet at only 500k generations.

Shannon commented on the last post, why don't we use circles instead of polygons on the generation stuff. What a fantastic idea? I swapped Ellipses for Cirlces (to leave more room for mutation) and update the tool, results:

How cool is that? Now I'm starting to wonder what about mixing the shapes and allowing shapes to mutate between each other? What other shapes are there to reduce data, rectangles next?

What a fantastic comment and idea!

I've been out of the loop again! Apparantly this very cool stuff by Roger Alsing was posted on Slashdot last year. Well I didn't see it, if I had I would have jumped to trying to implement the same thing - it's just so cool. I'm not sure there are any practical uses for it (maybe some texture compression stuff for games?) but it's just such a cool idea.

So, given that I saw it posted on JGO a few days ago, I ran at it and tried to implement the process. A few painful bugs later and I had a command line tool. Since I had the day off I spent some time tidying the whole lot into a GUI based application.

Whats happening here then? First we generate a set of polygons. Next we mutate the polygons (move them about, add some, remove some, change colours). Compare the first set and the new set of polygons to the original image. Choose the one that is closest and mutate again. Repeat. Alot.

Update: Couple more examples using 150 polygons

You can get some pretty cool results with a bit of time. The image above was captured over 2 hours. My version of the GUI tool looks like this:

The tool is available as an executable jar (i.e. you'll need java installed). The source code is also available here in an Eclipse project.

There will of course be bugs and improvements to be done. I might find some time but even if not, a very enjoyable distraction!

Now, I don't claim to be an expert on this topic at all, however I have tried all of the methods below with varying success and regularity. As you can tell, I'm still here typing, so I haven't made it "big" with any of these methods. I've been writing games for the love of it for years, I like everything about it. However, for me it's important to have my games played and appreciated - how better to gauge that then to try selling them? What's more, when it's just hobby, the extra cash for beer money is just like icing on time wasters cake!

1) Shareware

The original way for indie types to make money. You give away a free version (or the full version if you're daring) and nag the end user about paying the money for the full/unlimited version making sure to point out the wonderful features they're going to get. In short, it's proven, it works. Letting people really play the game beforehand gives them confidence in the purchase. However, give away too much and they might just decide they've played enough and don't need the full version. I used this method with Tiltilation and it wasn't too bad, making a couple of thousand pounds sterling for 6 months work. It was also my first commercial endeavour and almost killed me. Shareware works well for full scale desktop games but the game needs to be a certain size before you can split it into the free bit and full version and leave both parts providing enough to play.

2) Adware at Home

Adware comes in a few forms. First you can stick adverts on the website around your web based games, most common for this is Google Adsense. Next if you're using the right technology you can embed adverts right into your game. If you're using Flash you have a multitude of options for this, most popular being MochiAds. In other technologies you can always opt for Google In-Game. Both methods essentially rely on the context adverts being smart enough to entice your players to click the adverts. This may of course annoy your players some, so it's best used carefully.

Now the "at Home" bit - one way of using these things is to keep your game (and idealy a bunch of your other games) on your website and try and drive traffic there, much like I do here at Coke And Code by writing blog articles like this (oooh, meta). The upside here is that you've got the exclusive on your games. The downside is you've got to drive that traffic yourself and that's not as easy as you might think. Here at C&C I make enough money from Google Ads to pay for my hosting (read about 25 quid a month) which can't be bad really. I get the odd special deal, but the traffic really isn't enough to making any real money. However, there are other options...

3) Adware at Portals

So you're happy to advertise in your game and/or around it, but you can't get the traffic. Well you might consider submitting the game to a portal and having their huge collection of games drag the traffic in. If you're working in Flash there are a massive number of portals to choose from including my faves Newgrounds and Kongregate. Both offer deals on advertising revenue including extra bonus percentage for integrating with their APIs (highscore, achievements, etc). If you're using other technologies you're going to find yourself limited, although the rather wonderful Game Jolt has just opened up their revenue scheme. For once, they take pretty much any technology and the games selection is starting to look really good!

Putting your game on a portal has a downside of course, it can easily get swamped under the mass of other people doing the exact same thing as you. Your game has to be good enough (and more important, re-playable enough) to actually drag people back to it. That said, my rather limited collection of flash games has been dragging in 15-20 pounds a month for the last few months on portals, so I guess that isn't not too bad. If you had a really popular game on there you could be getting some reasonable cash out of it, but it'd be unlikely to be sustained given the number of new ones every day.

4) Sell or Brand It!

You've written a kick ass implementation but average idea game. Putting it on the portals might get you some money long term but wouldn't it be nice to get a quick lump sum payout. There are a few portals around that will buy games in any technologies but they are few and far between. I've sold a Java applet to a portal (I can't mention here but) only for $250. That's nice for what was a week's work, but it did take an awful lot of finding. However, if you're working in Flash then you have a wonderful option left open to you - Flash Game License. This site lets you upload games for viewing by sponsors and publishers. If your game is quality looking and feeling, but the idea is average (or its a remake) then this is a great option. The downside is that at times you see games getting stolen and published elsewhere, but that's pretty rare these days.

There are a few deals you can do on lump sum game payments. You can sell an exclusive deal - this means the game only goes on one portal but tends to be a decent deal. You can sell a branding deal, where the game goes anywhere you want but carries the branding of a portal. You can just sell the game outright (with or without source), this is a rare occasion but sounds like you can write your own ticket (never happened for me). Each of these deals also may or may not let you keep your own advertising in place. In the best case you might end up with a branded game in which you can keep your own advertising and are actively encouraged to distribute. This is like having option 3 with a bonus :)

The deals vary alot from around $50 up to a few with $10,000+. Obviously game quality and appeal controls how much you're going to get offered. On Flash Game License it's a bidding process where publishers may try to out do each other. Moreover, in some cases you can sell the game to multiple publishers! I've made deals from $500 up to $1500 here, with games not taking more than a few weeks to put together. The problem is keeping going. It's a very dry process designing games to be explicitly appealing in this context - but it's probably a good cash in if you can stick it.

5) Go Mobile!

In the last couple of years the iPhone market place has become hot property. Now, with Android market launched and host of mobile providers itching to release their own versions, there may be money in them there handsets. There are a few great success stories about iPhone applications but not many given the number games released. The process for getting games up on iPhone is labourious but the market is very rich. In contrast the Android market is wonderfully simple to get games up on, but the market is still trying to find it's customers.

Getting your games out there and charging is pretty easy on both accounts. The APIs for developer are also pretty simple. Mobile games seem to work in a similar way to shareware. You push out a free lite version, then charge for the full game. So, why not port your game to a mobile?

I've got a few games out on both iPhone and Android at the moment. Nothing massive, but neat games, with polished looks. Android is selling, well not a lot, I can't imagine I've sold more than 3 in a day of anything so far. This isn't going to make me rich. On iPhone I don't current have "lite" versions and even then they're out selling Android 5 to 1. It's an interesting market. Probably one I need to spend more time on.

6) Trust in the good nature of people

If you really can't bear selling out in any way, but you'd like to make some cash then you consider the infamous "Donate" button. I've tried this on one game (that is no longer available), you're essentially saying "be nice, I wrote the game, drop me some cash". It could work, really it could, but I've yet to see it. The game would have to be something that people felt part of, that they came back and played over and over, that they were committed to - and even then you'd need your players to have enough disposable income to not mind shelling out some cash on something they could have for free. Tricky business!

Conclusion

While it's important to choose the right method for you, it's also to have a great game and put the hours in - which is probably where I keep failing :) There is no get rich quick and there is no easy win. If you work really hard, and choose the right business model and get lucky... you might make enough money for a pub lunch. If you get to be the one in million who makes it's really big, congratulations!, but for most of us it's best to accept that while you can make money on games it's unlikely to become your primary income. Write games for the love it and appreciate the beer money when it's there.

I have a new laptop desk. It means I sit properly to use the computers. That's good. After putting it together I came back from a drink to find the competition had taken it over and were busy working on their next ground breaking game...

She's just a bit too good at this stuff, though apparently Java is a baby language for amateurs and I should be using C++ like her :).

Go take a look at Game Jolt, it's a games site that will be accepting Java applets soon that just smacks of quality and independence. They of course accept other technologies (flash, silverlight, standalone) as well but it's the first site I've seen accepting Java that:

a) Wasn't specifically designed for Java Games
b) Looks so professional
c) Appears to be gathering momentum

Go and take a look! I've already found a few flash games on there I hadn't seen before that are great. Top stuff!

Just signed up as a developer so I can submit stuff (just need to sort them out now) - I'll probably use the blogging facility over there for player yore updates I guess.

Anyway.. do your self a favor, go take a look.

2D games, why and when do they make sense. Read it, love it:

Positech Blog Entry

Also note the very important part at the bottom of the entry, exactly my feelings on the matter:

3D isn’t new or exciting in 2009, It’s just another option 
in the toolkit. Game designers need to get over the 3D obsession 
and make more considered design decisions. Some genres work 
great in 3D, some don’t.

My desk, says so much about me:

If you look carefully to the left of the coke cans you can see the designs for the last two 4k games and some other ideas that never got off the paper.

• Eye opening
• Exciting
• Scary
• Motivating