I was doing some Monday Night Data Analysis (you know how it is) and I got to thinking about the microtransaction models in mobile games. When deciding on the values of Keys To The City in Fire & Dice, I just kind of stuck my finger in the air and let some math cushion my fall. Here’s what we ended up with:

7 Keys, $1, 14.3c/key,
50 Keys, $5, 10c/key,
250 Keys, $20, 8c/key,
1,000 Keys, $50, 5c/key.

That makes sense according to the Greater McNugget Law of Economics which has something to do with decreasing marginal utility and states that a 20-piece Chicken McNuggets should cost less than buying 5 4-piece Chicken McNuggets separately. Otherwise, McNugget arbitrage would throw commodity futures into chaos. Or something.

So we know that the cost per unit of MTX currency should go down (or stay steady) as the amount spent goes up. If I buy 1,000 Farmville Bux at a clip, it should cost me less than buying 100 Farmville Bux ten times. But how much should it go down per dollar? How much cheaper should it be?

A currency that provides no “bulk savings” would be just a flat line across at 1 because at any price point you would always be getting the same unit cost. The higher the curve goes up, the greater the “bulk discount” is for users. If there was an easy secondary MTX currency market, you would see all of these pressed flatter and flatter because arbitrageurs could just buy huge bundles of MTX currency and dole it out at cheaper than the supplier’s $1 level.

Here’s a zoom-in of the 1 to 2 range:

The sample of thirteen games available to me at the time that had easily divisible amounts provided quite a variety of suggestions.

• First, Danc is a saint because Triple Town‘s $5 currency bundle is either the most wonderful affordable currency bundle out right now or the $1, $2 and $3 bundles are vastly overpriced. The $5 bundle in Triple Town gives 25x the number of coins of the $1 bundle for 5x the cost. No one else does that. Why not? Are we afraid of over-saturating our whales? Give the people that buy the biggest bundle as much as they could possibly ever use. user.giveTokens(MAXINT);
• Every single game I looked at had a $5 bundle, but not every game had a $1 bundle.
• Someone at Ludia can’t do basic math because their $40 bundle on Family Feud & Friends provides more bang for buck than their $100 bundle.
• Who buys $100 bundles? Why aren’t they buying the $50 Fire & Dice bundle? Do we devs just put those out there to see if people will hit the button by accident like the I Am Rich app?
• Newtoy’s (er, Zynga with Friends’) games have the flattest curves. They really don’t offer much in the way of bulk savings.
• Ignore the weird curve thing going on with the Zynga Poker line from $3-$5 and the Triple Town line from $2 to $3. Google Doc’s curve smoothing wasn’t up to the task.
• While there seems to be similarity in the <$5 range (if you average the curves, you get about what we did for Fire & Dice!), once we crack $20 we get into crazy bux funtown. The curves diverge quite a bit. I think everyone can agree on 10%-50% bumps in the $1-$5 range, but the parabola gets so stupid when you get into $100 games that I guess you just pick a large number and throw it at the user.

*And lazy. I didn’t even out the space between x-axis points.

Fire & Dice is Kotaku’s Gaming App of the Day! Many thanks to Stephen Totilo. This is many of our guys’ first real press exposure, so they are significantly thrilled. Here’s some favorable excerpts:

“[I]t’s good.”

Should I stop there? Nah:

“It is a strategy game complicated by lucky and unlucky dice rolls, a mix of intention and happenstance that makes games like Angry Birds and Peggleso much fun, too.”

I’ve never courted being compared to Angry Birds, but I’ll take it if it isn’t meant as an epithet.

“To describe Fire and Dice as a game of, well, putting out fires with dice, makes it sound strange. But the systems and style of play work well. It all makes a lot of sense when you play and feels fresh and right for a phone game. [...] It’s an odd idea, well executed.”

Version 3.0 is out on iOS and Android. 3.0.1 will be incoming (There’s always a bug you miss…)

I like to document what I read that is book-length so I can go back and review later. I get dogged down by reading only the Kindle samples of dozens of books because it is usually enough to get “the gist” of what the book is doing. I don’t count those. This is totally for me, but the public-facing-ness and tradition of it keeps me doing it. I don’t claim any insight as to reviewing or critiquing these, below are just notes that will help me remember these book years from now:

In 2008, I read 31 Titles, 7,967 Pages, 21.77 Pages/Day
In 2009, I read 18 Titles, 4,960 Pages, 13.59 Pages/Day
In 2010, I read 36 Titles, 11,574 Pages, 31.71 Pages/Day
In 2011, I read 30 Titles,  10,163 Pages, 27.84 Pages/Day

In 2011, I moved back to Florida so I did not have the two hour of subway riding per day which really cut into my reading time. But still, I managed a closely respectable total.

Fiction

The Damned Busters: To Hell and Back, Book One (416) by Matthew Hughes

Normally I shy away from books that are explicitly set up to be a series (And to think later in the year I’d read Game of Thrones!). I know publishers love their predictability but they tend to be a bit overextended for me. Nonetheless, I had to get this one based on my fandom of Hughes’ sci-fi work. The first third of the book was featured in novella form in Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine and I found it to be excellent. Chesney Arnstruther is an actuary that accidentally summons a demon, refuses to sign over his soul and causes a labor dispute in Hell. Through a series of events, he ends with his own demon two hours a day (a self-styled James Cagney) and uses said demon’s infernal powers to turn him into a masked crime-fighter. The second act is a little dull, but overall it was pretty-fun and certainly nowhere as overwrought as your John Constantine fightin’-demons tales. There’s an essential sense of humor which makes up for the sort of caricatured characters. Nonetheless, I wholly recommend.

Embassytown by China Mieville (368)

Mieville is probably my favorite author. So take my opinions on him with a grain of salt. In Embassytown, he shifts to a sci-fi milieu that reminds almost of a futuristic version of his New Crozubon stories. Whereas Kraken was all about the pulp influences mixed with the New Weird paradigm, with a couple elements removed this could be a straight-up sci-fi novel. My favorite speculative books are all about Big Ideas and Embassytown has them in spades, especially if you are interested in language. Highly enjoyable.

Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott (124)

A classic I nabbed free on the Kindle. I never actually read it before. I like to drift towards Sci-Fi and Fantasy that is more philosophy than story sometimes and this scratched the itch. I was surprised at how sexist it is given modern sensibilities!

The Grendel’s Shadow by Andrew Mayne (140)

I found this for 99 cents on Kindle and the reviews made it seem highly enjoyable. I found the universe the author created to be interesting (I searched only to find that he has not written any other books in this universe) but the actual story to be dull. Without enacting spoilers, there is one major plot point that is just completely forgotten and never resolved. There is very little in the story that ends up being surprising. Since everything was so straightforward, I was waiting for The Big Twist only to be disappointed. It’s competent but not particularly compelling.

Penny Arcade, Book 7: Be Good Little Puppy (128)

You know, you either like Penny Arcade or you don’t.

A Song of Ice and Fire: A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin (720)
A Song of Ice and Fire: A Clash of Kings by George R. R. Martin (784)
A Song of Ice and Fire: A Storm of Swords by George R. R. Martin (1008)
A Song of Ice and Fire: A Feast for Crows by George R. R. Martin (784)

I know I said that I don’t like series, but I cracked this one open and got addicted… Yes, the quality does trail off in Book 4, but I think it picks up again brilliantly in Book 5. The series breaks a lot of “rules” with regards to storytelling, so it is illustrative as a writing lesson despite its flaws. Rarely do I find something this popular that I devour so insatiably. The fifth one is about half-done as the year ends. I don’t think I’ll be able to keep my enthusiasm to wait for a new tome.

Spin by Robert Charles Wilson (464)

Normally, I am less enthusiastic about science fiction as I am about fantasy. SF has fewer degrees of freedom; it has to be both internally consistent and consistent with the world we know where as fantasy only has to be the former. But every once in a while a book has a “What If” that is just as compelling as anything else out there. In Spin, one night the stars go out – or so it seems. Satellites fall from the sky, looking as if they had been in orbit for hundreds of years. The premise gets even more surreal after that, but always stays in the realms of consistent internally and without the use of magic. Wilson leaves great cliffhangers, peeling back the onion further and further with every chapter. Only Mieville’s The Scar did that as masterfully to me. What finally is most interesting to me is that in a market recently saturated with post-apocalyptica this novel shines as a sort of pre-apocalyptica: humanity knows it is the last generation, what will they do about it? Less dystopic than Children of Men, but still seemingly at task. Excellent read. Don’t read too many reviews of it or you will get spoilered.

Nonfiction

250 Indie Games You Must Play (280) by Mike Rose

IndieGames.com’s Mike Rose gives an overview of a number of indie games. I was disappointed in this. The analyses pretty much always covered the game’s setting and visual theme but rarely did it cover what was mechanically interesting about the game. It contains such insightful analysis as “the story is nice and long.” I’ve seen enough indie games to know that story generally isn’t the selling point – it is how the mechanics work in inventive ways. This didn’t need to be a book. It could have been one long web page.

How to Do Things With Videogames by Ian Bogost (180)

Anyone who follows me on Twitter knows I’m a big Bogost supporter. How to Do Things… is a great collection of essays about the different areas games can address, but I found the title and form misleading. The book should be called What Video Games Can Do since it answers what and not how. The essays are mixed in quality, but I found that the ones that connect hit it out of the park. Others are less of the form: “Did you know video games can tackle so and so?” and fit more as decent Gamasutra articles. While a little unfocused, it is still full of great insights and clued me into a number of projects of which I’d never heard.

Marching Bands Are Just Homeless Orchestras by Tim Seidell (80)

Barely a book, this is a collection of Tim Seidell’s (better known as Twitter’s @badbanana) Handy-esque quips. Hilarious, but you can get the same quality for free by following his Twitter account.

The Making of Prince of Persia by Jordan Mechner (330)

I wrote about it here. No book this year made me sadder or feel less alone.

Propaganda by Edward Bernays (168)

I was a bit disappointed in this. It’s a tract from the 1920′s that is essentially an apologia for propaganda. I was hoping this would be a little more intriguing as to the how-to but this is mostly about things that we consider as basic PR these days. It was a bit repetitious and a chore to get through, honestly.

The Rape of the Mind by Dr. Joost A. M. Meerloo (320)

Wow, where to begin? Dr. Meerloo was a prolific Dutch psychologist and Dutch resistance member during the Second World War. Under the Nazi occupation, he witnessed firsthand the methods of brainwashing and mental torture and became one of the world’s leading authorities on totalitarian mind control. Provocatively named, The Rape of the Mind hits on a lot of topics: freedom, philosophy, nature of Man, politics, advertising, faith, authority and strategy. I even picked up a little on design in there. It’s a timeless book with more to digest than you could grasp in one read. I plan on saving it.

The Revolution by Ron Paul (208)
Liberty Defined:  50 Essential Issues That Affect Our Freedom by Ron Paul (352)

Yeah, go ahead start judging me on politics. This one is a campaign book from his 08 run. It’s honestly a little slapdash, not as convincing of a libertarian argument or as organized as Browne’s Great Libertarian Offer. It’s great if you already buy into what he is selling, but he does a poor job of providing supporting materials in comparison to Browne. Liberty Defined is the same way, but better structured, although it never sufficiently defines liberty. I suppose what causes his books to be more about principles than evidence is summed up in his chapter on Statistics and their drawbacks. While I didn’t find either of these to be too convincing, he does keep a good bibliography for further reading.

Tasty Morsels of Sonic Goodness by George “Fat Man” Sanger (528)

I’m torn on this one. One, I’m forever in debt to the Fat Man for starting project Horseshoe which I now go to every year. I now understand so much of its origins just by the stories that Sanger loads this book with. There’s a lot of folksy abstract storytelling in here and if you get easily distracted, you will lose him in the first third of the book. He spends a lot of time on this persona of his and it’s tough to give a shit about any of it until you get a “why” you should give a shit. For some reason, whoever formatted this for Kindle liked to highlight phrases and words with light grey text making them nearly impossible to read on my Kindle 2. The last third of the book (except a wonderful excerpt in the Appendix) is only of real value to audio guys, a cohort of which I do not identify. But if you peel back that first third and last third, that middle juicy core is full of wonderful philosophy about living a creative life. Whether or not you have the patience to peel away the irrelevant stuff is really a testament to how much you want what is in the core.

Instapaper / Longform

I discovered Instapaper and Longform.org this year. The latter collates high-quality bits of longer-form journalism from around the web. The former converts those articles into a handy, Kindle-readable form. When I reach 20 articles or so, I dump them into a .mobi file and there I have the most interesting magazine I could possibly find. Unfortunately, I’ve been using Instapaper to save far more than my ability to read all the saved articles. Since these don’t have a normal page count, I’m dividing words by 350 to get pages.

Instapaper Compilation #1 (362)

Instapaper Compilation #2 (309)

Instapaper Compilation #3 (304)

Instapaper Complication #4 (370)

Other (Graphic Novels, etc.)

Achewood Vol 3. Worst Song Played on Ugliest Guitar by Chris Onstad (136)

Achewood’s fallen off in recent years strictly on a quantity basis (but has just resumed), but if you digged (dug? dig-dugged?) the strips of the 2002 era when characterization was just knocking on the door (really the hallmark of the series next to the Mexican Magical Realism which is forthcoming) then these are the first strips that matter. What gets you to buy the book is the great commentary bits and the essays written in character. Top notch stuff.

Book-Length Magazines

Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine 11-12/2010 (260)
Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine 1-2/2010 (260)
Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine 3-4/2010 (260)
Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine 5-6/2010 (260)
Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine 7-8/2010 (260)

Steam Cleaning n. 1. The futile attempt to play all the games you’ve bought on Steam during sales, bundles and promotions.

I don’t like Tower Defense games. Like everyone else, I played Desktop Tower Defense a few years back until I got bored and then I called it a genre. My main problem with it is the passivity of the actual game-time. The bulk of the important decisions are made before the action and then during action, it is just triage. Tower Defense reminds me a lot of a less interesting version of The Incredible Machine games, where one sets-up and then hits play and watches him or herself win or lose. The difference being with the Machine games that there were multiple dimensions to deal with: gravity, flammability, wind, etc whereas many Tower Defense games deal with just Put Damage Here.

Orcs Must Die is different. It has the pre-game component of Tower Defense, but the action is done in third-person shooter style and is largely dependent on your skill in that regard. Interesting decisions happen in the pre-game AND during game action. While it is still in the realm of Put Damage Here like most Tower Defense, the added constraint of having to ferry your warmage around to deal with situations adds a level of complexity that is sorely needed. Additionally, the art/animation/sound is slick and really adds to the experience. I’m starting to tire a bit of games using Captain Hammer-esque protagonists, but in this case it works.

The gold standard of my enjoyment of a game is if I will go back and replay levels and I did this in spades. I have only the final (*^&%$*&^ impossible!) level to complete, so I’m going back and trying to ace the previous levels. Ignore any pseudo-intellectual normative “should I like this?” internal dialogue and use this as the metric and see what results you get.

I’ve been reading Jordan Mechner’s “The Making of Prince of Persia“ which is selections from his journal in the period from 1985-1993. It’s fascinating in a way that I don’t think it would be if the method of delivery was a retrospective or biography. His entries are deeply personal as fits the journal method. He names names of people he feels are incompetent or standing in his way. He has a task to do; he wants to make the greatest game of all time and he gets frustrated when people aren’t on the same page as him.

But what really stood out to me in the journals is his single-mindedness that this was just a step to becoming a filmmaker.  What Jordan will always be known for is Prince of Persia, yet so many of the entries are about wanted to be done with it so he can move onto films. Perhaps it is because he grew up in a time before video games were something you could be respected for, yet for most of the time that the journal covers he cannot see that he is on the top of the world with true creative freedom and control and mastery over an area of creative expression! The grass is always greener. I was literally frustrated when I was reading the period just after POP released and Jordan became a gopher for a student film and was nothing but excited about it. He went from the very top of one industry to the very bottom of another. I can’t criticize him for following his dreams, but I also cannot help but be sad for what was left on the table. I guess it is part of a great dramatic arc that you want to yell and scream at the main character.

There’s tons of fascinating stuff in here, especially if you’ve been a professional game designer. It’s amazing in this day and age of the willy-nilly aspect of just throwing things into a game without documentation or process or just taking six months off because you feel like it. Of course, it is also unreasonable in this day and age to actually expect to own anything you make AND get paid for it.

It is inspiring in a number of different ways. One, it makes me wish I’d kept a true personal journal during my EA and Gameloft days. Two, it reminds me that even the names in the industry face the same insecurities and setbacks.

Haven’t played everything, but there were some great games this year:

Skyrim

Portal 2

Sword and Sworcery EP

Triple Town

Bastion

The Oil Blue

SpellTower

Ahem, Fire & Dice…

(Edit: Darius reminded me of Murder Dog IV: Trial of the Murder Dog and that certainly belongs on the list)

So, right, last few months, amirite?

First, Fire and Dice is coming out with our epic 2.0 release with new interface, tutorials, helicopter mega-attack and all kinds of other improvements. If you are on Android, it’s live right now. We are always trying to improve it. We intend to support it for a while, so keep the improvement suggestions coming. If you are on iPhone, the app is crossing the Styx right now and I’ll devote a whole post to it when it hits. I love this game.

It’s an odd situation when you are a contractor designer because you want to “own” the project, but you aren’t in the office enough to make the hundreds of little design decisions. It’s simultaneously my responsibility and not mine.

We also have a non-traditional app coming out soon that is very social and I will require all you good folks to participate.

Oh, and I got married. So there’s that:

And I went to Project Horseshoe for the second time and hobnobbed with some amazing people. And gave a presentation about emotion:

The report is forthcoming on the official Horseshoe site. Seriously, if you have the means, you should be going to this conference.

Miscellany. I updated the Dominion picker script if you are into that. Every time I think about posting something, I get distracted by my two jobs or life and instead condense it down to 140 characters and put it up on Twitter. Hm. Maybe that’s for the best? Upcoming posts about new apps and IGDA most likely.

Education is boss and I dig what I do, but I’ve also missed actually making games. Luckily, there’s a neat little startup about fifteen miles down the road from me called Sky Parlor Studios that needed some help crafting a portfolio of mobile games. We are working on a number of things but the first to release is called Fire and Dice. It’s one of my favorite games I’ve designed in many years, so I do want to tell you a bit about it.

Fire and Dice has a number of inspirations, notably the board games Roll Through the Ages and Elder Sign where the player takes random resources and assign them in a Yahtzee meets Sim/RPG kind of way.

In Fire and Dice, you play as the fire chief of Sparksville, which is a town of sixteen blocks that seems to have trouble avoiding combusting. You roll your dice and choose to lock in water, movement, rescue or truck dice to drive around the town, put out the fires and rescue the citizens.

Small fires take five water to quench; large fires take ten. If two large fires are next to each other, they will spread. But having two trucks at a location will double your water efficiency (spend 5 instead of 10 to quench the large fires). Having three trucks at a location will triple it.

Rescuing a citizen and returning them to the fire station awards you a new die (up to seven), which is key to long-term survival.

Here’s my strategy, but I don’t have the score, so take it with a grain of salt: get to seven dice as soon as possible, then expand your truck fleet and make sure there are never two large fires next to each other. Easier said than done. Do you bunch your trucks together for the efficiency bonus or do you spread them out to cover a larger area? It’s a catchy game and I wouldn’t sell it so hard if I didn’t think it was a lot of fun.

The Ad-Supported Android version is on the marketplace now. The Paid Android ($2) as well. Paid iPhone, Free iPhone and iPad Universal apps are all forthcoming. There are more features and tweaks we are rushing to add, but we wanted to get this in front of folks as soon as possible.

We put a lot of love into the game, so we would appreciate if you purchased one of these for the mobile device of your choice and supported original indie development. We’ve got a bunch of good ideas in the pipeline and want to be able to afford to come out with something fun every month or so. Use the comments if you have questions or suggestions and I’ll get to them as soon as I can. I’ll keep this post updated with news and screenshots.