hObbE's blog

As it seems the as far as I know nameless dog from Nintendo Duck Hunt has been spotted in my home town of Kalmar, Sweden. All according to local newspaper Barometern. I'll make sure to check this out myself asap

I guess nerdiness lives and prospers even in the heat of summer

Some of you might wonder what I've been up to lately. Besides having a sprint on the site adding support for Twitter login I've been busy starting a research project at the university where I have my daytime job. The general idea is to take some of the experiences (10+ years) from game development and make further experiments to expand, enhance and validate & verify my findings in a scientific way. The result of this process will be a thesis and I'll become a Ph.D.

And without further adue I present my "hyper thesis", a.k.a. vision

Enhancing Quality of Software Architecture in Computer Games

The driving requirement of software architecture in computer games has since long been performance. However, focusing on performance alone often leads to problems in other areas; the software cannot be maintained or changed in an agile way and it becomes hard for developers to react to market changes or advances in hardware. Testing is hard or even impossible in many cases and reuse of code and design is minimal.

Modern approaches to software architecture in computer games, e.g. a modification of the model view controller (MVC) pattern, bear other qualities like changeability, maintainability, testability, and reusability without sacrificing performance. This is shown for a number of game types ranging from casual games to multi-player action titles. A standardized software architecture throughout many projects also enhances programmer productivity and project scalability.

Feel free to comment

Oh man I've had two very busy weeks in my "real" life. So busy I've hardly had the time to check the website and little less post anything new.

Things do look brighter now and I hope to get busy developing soon! I've got an update for T.W.T.P.B. in the pipe and also Project L needs some love

I've been one of the lucky few to get into the XBox 360 Blur multiplayer beta and I really like the game so far. Kind of a mix between Mario Kart and Burnout. These games being two of my favorite racing titles Blur is spot on!

Anyway I just got three extra keys so grab em' while they are hot and register at www.blurgame.com/beta

3PHH-MT9A-T2Z4-UAVK
FYHW-VKWD-WLGP-CHW7
RACG-VNKR-7F63-RZLQ

Enjoy!

I love the people over at Kokoromi and their annual Gamma contests and what they are doing for independent game development. This year they even got an invitation to show the Gamma IV winners at GDC! A great opportunity for many aspiring game developers. One problem though, such a display costs money and they need about $1600 for this to happen.

I have decided to help them by letting all revenue generated from sales of T.W.T.P.B. during February go directly to support their plea. Also I've got two game codes for some casual games that I will give to some lucky winners in a Twitter contest*.

You can help to!

• Support Kokoromi by Donating some $ and get some fabulous schwag
• Buy T.W.T.P.B. and all revenue will be Donated at the end of February
• Spread the word on Twitter and possibly win a game*

* The Twitter contest works like this

1. Tweet this message "RT @SpellOfPlay: Help Kokoromi Send #gamma4 To San Francisco and Win a Game! http://bit.ly/dmWiYZ"
2. Your entry will be collected in this post as soon as I see it in my timeline.
3. Wait... I will draw two winners at the end of February and send them their codes.

Oh... a new year has come and it's time for a view back on the year past from a Spell of Play perspective.

2009 was a social year for me. TWTPB launched late 2008 and much of my energy went into marketing and getting the word out there about twtpb, hUb and Spell of Play in general. This was also the time when I discovered twitter and I quickly took it to my heart... probably a bit too much There is even a way for you to connect your spell of play profile and twitter profile, via our twitter app Game Twtr

Via twitter we got a bunch of followers and visitors to our website, I tried doing twitter contests, blogging contests, appeared on some pod-casts and also a web show featured the spell of play homepage. We then decided to host a small game development gathering called SoPCon in Gothenburg. We also managed to end up on a list of Swedens hottest small game developers resulting in some local radio and tv-interviews. Things where looking good!

However, as it seems reality catches up sooner or later and I've felt quite uninspired, burnt out, call it what you want after summer. The end result was that I did not manage to pull through the latter half of 2009 and the result is that the number of visitors to the site is at an all time low Not much is happening and I've not been able to do much about it.

I also have not been able to get a real start on any new game projects this year. I'm torn between continuing working on TWTPB (I have some ideas for an expansion), Project L and some new ideas I have been experimenting with lately.

So what is my vision for 2010? What I would like to happen is to get the online community working and have some proper integration with our games. I want the homepage to feel more alive and kicking than ever! I would also like to at least start a new game project. I also have a number of improvements to the hUb backend that I would like to get on.

What will definitely happen is that we'll push our games to appear on Gamers Gate and also a port of TWTPB to XNA -> XBox is more or less done. So I hope we'll get accepted by Microsoft.

I will try to play more games 2010

I hope your 2009 was good and that 2010 will be even better for you!

So while things are progressing a bit slow at the moment I see the light at the end of the tunnel and I hope I'll get back on managing the site and developing some games in the near future! I've massed some creativity and feel really inspired to work on Project L again!

In the mean while I'm writing something about casual games and more specifically the genre hidden object games. This genre is the absolutely most popular casual genre at the moment. The latest being the hidden object game; Big City Adventure: New York City

To be honest I though that this would just be a fad in the casual games market, but as it seems the top casual games are mostly hidden object games! While the gameplay in the game are dead simple, basically click on a certain set of objects on a cluttered scene (with some variations on this) production values of the games are top-notch. The theme of the games also seem to lean towards the mystery/horror genre many of them having quite gruesome stories in them. A bit like an Agatha Christie novel.

As it seems this is a winning combo in the casual games market; keep the gameplay dead simple, add top quality graphics, music, user interface and a mystery story. Just check this list of the best hidden object games out.

So have you played a hidden object game at all? Why not? What did you think?