I went to the third day of the Gamecity festival in Nottingham, mainly to see Alexander Kohlhofer of
soda/plasticpilots fame speak about weewar which I fell in love with at first sight a couple of months ago. it was great to enjoy a long chat with his afterwards as well! (Thanks Alexander)

In case you havent seen weewar or played it, weewar is a very addicitive multiplayer turn based strategy game which currently has over 20,000 players. see Techcrunch, Kotaku coverage. Its a really nice recent success story and Alexander’s talk was really enjoyable all the more so because he was outlining/sharing/dissecting how they got it right with nearly every slide. He had some very valuable wisdom to impart which he presented in a very humble, well executed way.

In fact it was one of the most polished talks I’d been to in a while and one of the most inspiring things I’d been to all year sitting right next to Brendan Dawes‘ talk for our final year students.

Alexander covered many areas in his talk and referred to the key points in the weewar strategy, as well as mentioning how it came to be.

he said he was (like many of us):

• too busy to play
• stuck in an office
• had nobody to play with

..and he was interested in creating something which would make many people happy instead of just a limited number of clients.

Some of his talk was also about how they’ve dealt with the community building aspect of weewar (tangler), to the challenges of stable infrastructure and growing needs (API access, google apps use, invites mechanism to cope with server capacity), as well as principles of design and ways of listening to users and legitimising their interest and enthusiasm which had resulted in the wiki etc.

I was in awe when i realised that weewar was a two man designed and implemented game, just Alexander and Bert!

Things I picked up specifically in relation to design and etched firmly in my mind:

• you cant get it right but you can improve it all the time
• getting it wrong is okay
• keeping users in the loop
• not to try and shoehorn a game into a browser
• being agile and iterative
• release often and listen

also

• giving users self regulating responsibility (allowing them to make the rules)
• be part of the community and mean it
• dont use players with overly complex systems
• dont have a closed system

I think Weewar was essentially at one point described as a web 2.0 app and thats possibly very apt, that train of thought reminded me of Amy Jo Kim’s Etech Presentation from 2006 which is essentially about
how similar Web 2.0 apps and their features/functionality are to the mechanics and components of games.

Anyhow, needless to say weewar is very enjoyable game with lots of attention to functional detail, go sign up for an invite or drop me an email to send you a game request.

The rest of the day, well the morning I attended a panel discussion about indie games with the indiecade folk, IGF and Gamasutra as well as Channel 4 represented on the panel.

I was briefly starstruck to see Cory Doctorow behind me with his iconic specs, I tried googling him on my phone to see a recent pic to make sure. but then one of the panel members made a comment about indie games / the concept of giving away games for free and mentioned Cory and his books and my suspicions were confirmed.

I went to an ARG talk as well in the afternoon by Guy Lewis Parsons who gave a very energetic talk in place of Dan Hon.
Mr Katamari Damacy (was there with his new game nobi nobi boy) his keynote talk was covered in depth on Wonderland. It was nice to see almost full HD from the the PS3 on such a large cinema screen.

This entry was posted by Iman on Monday, October 29th, 2007 at 1:36 am and is filed under Design, Art, Games . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.