SEO Werkt!

Idle Games is launching a next-generation social game today dubbed Idle Worship. The title opens up a new genre on Facebook — the once popular “god game” — and it has an interesting and witty approach to social gameplay.

Founded by former ad executive Jeffrey Hyman, San Francisco-based Idle Games is in a “holy war against game that suck or aren’t actually social.” The company’s first game, Idle Worship, tries hard to make social gaming fun, and it is alone in a niche that has proven to be extremely popular with gamers in the past. Hyman’s team has been building Idle Worship for two years with $19 million in backing from Rick Thompson, co-founder of Playdom. Today, the game is finally available to play.

“We looked around and found that social games were derivative, and not truly social, and not aimed at delighting, entertaining, and engaging,” said Hyman, in an interview with VentureBeat. “We decided to create an original game on an original platform.”

If the company pulls it off, it could wind up with a much more engaging mass market game than the Zynga titles that currently dominate the top ranks of Facebook. As such, Idle Games is one of the biggest bets in social gaming.

Thompson said, “Social games are maturing. Idle Worship is the genesis of a new era.”

Playing Idle Worship

In Idle Worship, the player acts as a god with cute little followers on an island. Players can be nice or mean to those followers, much as with the Populous or Black and White god games of the classic PC gaming industry, or the more recent iPhone game Pocket God. The game is as zany and ambitious as Glitch, an online social game made by Stewart Buttlefield’s startup Tiny Speck. Hyman missed playing the early god games and wondered why people weren’t making more of them.

The characters and animations have a hand-drawn, cartoon style that is aimed at both men and women, young and old. The features are intelligently designed and the gameplay is synchronous, meaning it allows for simultaneous play, as well as asynchronous, where you can interact in a turn-based manner with friends who may be offline.

The object is to collaborate with friends and strangers to become the greatest god in the game. You want to build the largest faux religion and vie for the worship of friends, strangers, and a not-so-smart indigenous populace known as Mudlings.

The faith of your followers may rise or wane, depending on your actions. Your Mudlings believe in you only as long as you show your power, regardless of whether you use it for good or bad. You can rule by terror or compassion, protecting your followers from real-time attacks and competing gods.

As a god, you can “flick” a follower, or toss them off of a rival’s island. That’s an example of the cute or sick humor of the game, depending how you look at it. That attack will hurt your reputation, but it will mean your rival player god will have one less acolyte. Meanwhile, the follower will be flicked onto another player’s island. That player may appreciate the gift from you and strike up an alliance.

A smart user interface

The Idle Worship user interface is well conceived. There is no friends bar running along the bottom of the screen, as there is in Zynga games. As a god, you are at the center of the ocean on your island.

You are surrounded by the islands of both friends and strangers. Each nearby island represents the land that your friends are cultivating. But the surrounding islands shift and they change positions based on the gravitational force of your social connections.

If a player becomes inactive, he or she is moved to the outer rim of your archipelago. Those who play frequently and have the most interaction with you are moved closer to your island. The world is not divided into shards, meaning you can play with anyone in the game universe.

That enables you to know at a glance who really wants to play the game with you and who doesn’t. And that stops you from spamming all of your friends with annoying requests. Idle Worship will move strangers close to your island if they interact with you a lot or if they are equally active in the game as you. That helps you make new friends while playing, Hyman said.

In real-time, you can smite your friends’ islands with lightning or cover their domain with harmless bunny rabbits. You can be evil and set your Mudlings’ heads aflame, or rule with compassion. Your Mudlings’ faces will reflect whether they fear you or revere you.

Over time, you can customize your island. You can populate it with creatures such as a Buffaloaf or a Pugapillar. You can build altars to your friends. As a joke, Hyman built an altar to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. You can go fishing to acquire a renewable resource to feed your Mudlings. If you want to play alone, you can put a “shield of cowardice” on your island and friends won’t be able to attack you.

Building an island empire?

The game pays homage to other god games, but it is pretty original. Others may try to copy the game, but Idle Games has patented a number of its ideas. Idle Games has created an underlying platform that can be used to host other games.

Earlier this year, Idle Games hired Michael McCormick, the lead designer for CityVille, away from Zynga. McCormick is working on the company’s second and third titles, which will use the same platform, dubbed the Idle Engine, that can run any number of online game worlds.

“We put as much labor and love into the story, making it both cute and disturbing,” Hyman said. “We are going for a broad audience.”

Thompson is the sole investor in the company, which has 80 employees. The game has been live for six months in the Philippines — itself an archipelago of 7,000 islands — as the team tests the gameplay.

Each island that players have created is unique, and those who play often have multiple islands. The game already has 5,000 daily active users.

GamesBeat 2012 is VentureBeat’s fourth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. This year we’re calling on speakers from the hottest mobile, social, PC, and console companies to debate new ways to stay on pace with changing consumer tastes and platforms. Join 500+ execs, investors, analysts, entrepreneurs, and press as we explore the gaming industry’s latest trends and newest monetization opportunities. The event takes place July 10-11 in San Francisco, and you can get your early-bird tickets here.

Filed under: games, VentureBeat

Back in September, game startup Tiny Speck launched an unusual online game called  Glitch. Today, the company said it is “unlaunching” the game. The company will keep the game running, but it will take it back into beta testing so that the developers can rework the game play to make it easier for users to start the game and also to add new tools for fans to create things in the game world.

Fans have fallen in love with the zany title, said Stewart Butterfield, chief executive of San Francisco-based Tiny Speck, in a a post on the Glitch blog moments ago. But there are a couple of major improvements the company wants to make to change the way the game plays. I guess you could say that Glitch has hit a glitch.

“There are two obvious and huge improvements we need to make: the first is to make the early game reveal itself more easily to new players so they can get into the fun faster,” Butterfield wrote. “The second and larger task is to give those players who have gotten over that initial hump and fallen in love with the game — spending dozens or even hundreds of hours playing — the creative tools that they need to change the world in more tangible ways: building whole new locations themselves, designing new buildings, setting up resource flows and forming flexible organizations to create bigger things together.”

Butterfield added, “And we’re committed to giving people a square deal: we know going back to beta was not what you expected, so if you have bought anything from us and you don’t feel like you got your money’s worth or you don’t like the idea of everything changing, we will give you a 100 percent, no hassle, full and complete refund.”

The funny there here is that most other game companies do major revisions like this, and they simply require their users to download a big patch. They don’t announce that they’re “unlaunching.” It’s almost business as usual in online games for the games to change over time.

Glitch is unlike most other games you’ve seen. From the moment you log in, you know you’re not in the real world anymore. You appear inside a brain, one of the minds of eleven giants who imagine the game’s zany landscape.

“It is super metaphorical,” the greeting for the tutorial says. “Your job is to grow and expand the world, shaping it while developing your own unique character.”

This journey into the imagination isn’t your normal game, so it’s no surprise it came from a startup that’s been working on it for a very long time.

Glitch is the brainchild of Butterfield’s Tiny Speck. Butterfield previously co-founded photo-sharing site Flickr. Video games are often slammed for their blockbuster mentality, not creativity. If Glitch takes off, it will show that there is still room in the perhaps overly commercialized game industry for artistically crafted and thought-provoking independent games. The animations of the persistent world are hand-drawn. The world has its own ecology and economy.

From the very start, Glitch is different. You can water plants, but you can also pet them to make them grow. If you nibble a pig’s ear, it will give you some meat. You can find little “music blocks,” which play snippets of music when you click on them. If you find a butterfly, you can give it a massage. If you squeeze a chicken, you can get a piece of grain.

You have to do things that keep your energy and your mood high. In order to do that, you have to collect and eat things. Everything has to stay in balance. These complex systems, such as the world’s trees, have to be cared for in order to keep the world in order. Pigs have to be fed or they eat leaves off the trees. If the leaves are eaten, the trees die.

Tiny Speck’s own press release opens with a quote from James P. Carse, who said, “There are at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite, the other, infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.”

Glitch is a web-based massively multiplayer online game. It is non-violent, highly social and is played as a two-dimensional cartoon animated world. Butterfield says the designers of the game and the players create the Glitch universe in tandem, with the designers constantly tweaking and improving the platform while the players cultivate a sophisticated and irreverent civilization.

Players can do just about anything, from curating an art installation to hosting a diamond-infused dinner party. Tiny Speck provides the raw materials and a stimulating environment. “The vision is to bring a new level of creativity, beauty and social engagement,” Butterfield (pictured at top) says.

Part of the mission is to bring art to a wider audience. The game mixes all sorts of original visual styles. The look varies as you travel up and down the boulevards of the world. It changes from psychedelic to surreal, from Japanese cutesy animation to hyper-saturated pixel art, classic cartoon to contemporary mixed media.

Players can adjust their avatars, or game characters, in many different ways. They can buy outfits and customize as they wish. They can go on missions. In one, they have to get some official papers from a government agency. They have to interact with bureaucrats, who keep saying they have to check with someone to get a proper answer. At some point, the bureaucrat finally delivers the papers.

The game invites players to come back a lot by getting them to learn skills. There are about four months’ worth of skills in the game now. The game also has hundreds of different objects.

You can also come back just to explore the surreal universe. If you want eggs, you can get them from an eggplant. Then you take them to a chicken to incubate them. Dairy products in the game come from butterfly milk. And pigs are born from the eggs.

On the social side, players can go on quests together or play multiplayer sports mini games. They can form conga lines and dance. The world is unified, so friends can interact with anybody in the world. The game is built in Adobe Flash, so it isn’t that demanding, technically. But Tiny Speck tried to push the limit on how many objects can be on the screen at one time. The game has cool lighting effects and faux 3D animations.

Butterfield and his wife Caterina Fake were thinking about making a game before they did Flickr. But Flickr took off like wildfire and they sold it to Yahoo in 2005. They then returned to work on the original game that they had started. Tiny Speck’s founders include Butterfield and three other original team members from Flickr: Cal Henderson (pictured above and below in green shirt), Eric Costello, and Serguei Mourachov. They started the firm in 2009 and it now has 40 employees. Tiny Speck raised $10.7 million in April from Andreessen Horowitz and Accel. Legendary game designer Keita Takahashi (no relation to me), the creator of Katamari Damacy, joined the team in July as a Glitch game designer.

Players can stay in touch with the game while on the run. The full Glitch site is accessible from a mobile app, Glitch HQ, for the Apple iOS platform. The mobile app lets players keep up with updates and chatter from their game friends. Third-party game developers are busy creating web and mobile extensions of the game using Tiny Speck’s applications programming interface.

The game is free to play, with virtual item sales. But you can subscribe to the game if you wish to get wider access to cool things. You can’t purchase anything in the game that gives you an advantage over other players. If you buy anything, it’s mostly for the sake of decoration or vanity.

Filed under: games, social

From the moment you log into the online game Glitch, you know you’re not in the real world anymore. You appear inside a brain, one of the minds of eleven giants who imagine the game’s zany landscape.

“It is super metaphorical,” the greeting for the tutorial says. “Your job is to grow and expand the world, shaping it while developing your own unique character.” Give it a try, as the game is formally launching today.

From there on, you can explore. This journey into the imagination isn’t your normal game, so it’s no surprise it came from a start-up that conceived the game for a very long time. Glitch is the brainchild of Tiny Speck, a San Francisco company started by Stewart  Butterfield, who co-founded the photo-sharing site Flickr. Video games are often slammed for their blockbuster mentality, not creativity. If Glitch takes off, it will show that there is still room in the perhaps overly commercialized game industry for artistically crafted and thought-provoking independent games.

“This world is built with hand-drawn animation,” Butterfield said. “It is a persistent world, with its own ecology and economy. It’s totally uncharted.”

From the very start, Glitch is different. You can water plants, but you can also pet them to make them grow. If you nibble a pig’s ear, it will give you some meat. You can find little “music blocks,” which play snippets of music when you click on them. If you find a butterfly, you can give it a massage. If you squeeze a chicken, you can get a piece of grain.

You have to do things that keep your energy and your mood high. In order to do that, you have to collect and eat things. Everything has to stay in balance. These complex systems, such as the world’s trees, have to be cared for in order to keep the world in order. Pigs have to be fed or they eat leaves of the trees. If the leaves are eaten, the trees die.

Tiny Speck’s own press release opens with a quote from James P. Carse, who said, “There are at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite, the other, infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.”

Glitch is a web-based massively multiplayer online game. About 27,000 players have already tested the game. It is non-violent, highly social and is played as a two-dimensional cartoon animated world. Butterfield says the designers of the game and the players create the Glitch universe in tandem, with the designers constantly tweaking and improving the platform while the players cultivate a sophisticated and irreverent civilization.

Players can do just about anything, from curating an art installation to hosting a diamond-infused dinner party. Tiny Speck provides the raw materials and a stimulating environment. “The vision is to bring a new level of creativity, beauty and social engagement,” Butterfield (pictured at top) says.

Part of the mission is to bring art to a wider audience. The game mixes all sorts of original visual styles. The look varies as you travel up and down the boulevards of the world. It changes from psychedelic to surreal, from Japanese cutesy animation to hyper-saturated pixel art, classic cartoon to contemporary mixed media.

Players can adjust their avatars, or game characters, in many different ways. They can buy outfits and customize as they wish. They can go on missions. In one, they have to get some official papers from a government agency. They have to keep interacting with bureaucrats, who keep saying they have to check with someone to get a proper answer. At some point, the bureaucrat finally delivers the papers.

The game invites players to come back a lot by getting them to learn skills. There are about four months worth of skills in the game now.The game also has hundreds of different objects now.

You can also come back just to explore the surreal universe. If you want eggs, you can get them from an eggplant. Then you take them to a chicken to incubate them. Dairy products in the game come from butterfly milk. And pigs are born from the eggs.

“Everything is super whacky,” Butterfield said. “If you play it for a while, it makes sense. It’s a surreal wrapper around the world.”

On the social side, players can go on quest together or play multiplayer sports mini games. They can form conga lines and dance. The world is unified, so friends can interact with anybody in the world.The game is built in Adobe Flash, so it isn’t that demanding, technically. But Tiny Speck tried to push the limit on how many objects can be on the screen at one time. The game has cool lighting effects and faux 3D animations.

Some of the sections of the world reflect the influence of some of the giants, but the world isn’t divided into territories. The basic story is that one giant became to powerful at one point and things “glitched apart,” Butterfield said.

Butterfield and his wife Caterina Fake were thinking about making a game before they did Flickr. But Flickr took off like wildfire and they sold it to Yahoo in 2005. They then returned to work on the original game that they had started before. Tiny Speck’s founders include Butterfield and three other original team members from Flickr: Cal Henderson (pictured in photos in green shirt), Eric Costello, and Serguei Mourachov. They started the firm in 2009 and it now has 40 employees. Tiny Speck raised $10.7 million in April from Andreessen Horowitz and Accel. Legendary game designer Ketia Takahashi (no relation to me), the creator of Katamari Damacy, joined the team in July as a Glitch game designer.

Takahashi is busy building zany missions for the game. Butterfield said that Tiny Speck will take advantage of web-based software to release new content on an hourly basis. Butterfield showed me how quickly he could create an object, give it characteristics, and set it loose in the world. Half the development time, he said, was creating tools to quickly create game elements.

Players can stay in touch with the game while on the run. The full Glitch site is accessible from a mobile app, Glitch HQ, for the Apple iOS platform. The mobile app lets players keep up with updates and chatter from their game friends. Third party game developers are busy creating web and mobile extensions of the game, since Tiny Speck made its applications programming interface available.

“Those developers can create something and have it be in the world in an hour or so,” Butterfield said.

The game is free to play, with virtual item sales. But you can subscribe to the game if you wish to get wider access to cool things in the game. You can’t purchase anything in the game that gives you an advantage over other players. If you buy anything, it’s mostly for the sake of decoration or vanity.

VentureBeat’s readers can get a “fast pass” access to the world of Glitch by clicking on this link. The company may not be able to add everybody all at once at the very start.

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Filed under: games, mobile, social, VentureBeat

If you were into PC gaming in the early 2000s, you know what Black & White is. Peter Molyneux’s 2001 classic published by EA gave every gamer the role they wanted: God. A new startup is aiming to bring that style of game into the social space. And more broadly, they aim to be the “Pixar of casual games”.

Idle Games is launching today at TechCrunch Disrupt. Their first title is Idle Worship, a Black & White-esque game for Facebook. You play the role of a god, controlling villagers on an island to do certain tasks for you. While that may sound ominous, you can choose to be either good or bad in your actions. And overall, the game is light-hearted and fun. We’ve been playing with a beta version of the game for a few weeks; it’s solid.

This first title by Idle Games, a startup founded by Rick Thompson (a co-founder of Playdom) and Jeffrey Hyman, aims to disrupt the casual gaming market by being an “anti-Zynga” of sorts. They believe social gaming is more about entertainment, interaction, and quality — not just button-mashing or mindless clicking. In many ways, they’re also going after the MMO market too. While the games will start on Facebook, you can imagine that they could quickly spread to other platforms as well.

Like other casual games and MMOs, the emphasis for the business will be on virtual goods. But again, the Idle Games team is determined to create goods of the utmost quality so that users feel compelled to buy them and happy when they do. In this regard, Idle Games’ mission sounds a bit similar to that of Tiny Speck, makers of the soon-to-be-released game MMO Glitch.

The Idle Games team also has a number of pending patents surrounding their particular style of social gameplay, they note. One key is their use of synchronous gameplay (as opposed to other games which typically are asynchronous). You can play alongside other “Gods” in the game, visit their islands, etc. Inside Social Games did a new preview of the game back in April.

“The game must be your wingman and break the ice for you,” Hyman said on stage today, explaining why Idle Worship creates better gaming connections than other endeavors out there.

All told, Idle Worship took the team of about 50 around two years to build. Again, the focus is on quality. They’ve raised roughly $9 million in funding so far.

Expert Judges Q&A Session:

Josh Felser, Freestyle Capital; April Underwood, Twitter; Jim Lanzone, CBS Interactive; Michael Marquez, CODE Advisors

JL: Why this game? There are a ton out there.

A: We think it’s like the entertainment industry. It is a hits-driven business, we’re putting the emphasis on quality. It’s a bit like capturing lightning in a bottle, but we’re leveraging the social graph in unique ways. We think this is the first true social game on Facbeook.

MM: Is this launched?

A: In a few countries so far.

MM: What about use engagement?

A: The initial metrics are blowing away the norms. Over 50 percent are returning after week one.

JF: Can you compare this to Zynga?

A: Absolutely. I don’t know if you read last Friday’s WSJ, but it says on the front page, Zynga is an analytics company masking as a game company. We’re an entertainment and games company. Zynga is a black and white television. Everyone wants it until the color television comes out. That’s us. We care about the entertainment experience.

AU: Your game looks engaging I want to play it. Tell me about the patents.

A: We’ve invest two solid years of engineering to do the tech here. We have five patents filed for this stuff. Rendering engine, etc.