.: WEREMSOFT :.

When I was a child, a CD with some hackers fanzines comes to my hand: Minotauro Magazine and HBO (Hacked By Owls) Magazine. One of the tricks to break into other people systems was something called “social engineering”.

Basically, the thing goes like this: You study the habits and the background history of the person wich account you want to hack: What is the most significant thing in his life?

As an example, if the target is to steal the hotmail account of a middle aged woman, wich is single, and she has a pet, there are good chances that his password includes the name of her pet.

Early in the 90’s, the best way to do this is by calling directly to the person, faking a telephone survey or by search into his garbage(trashing) looking for clues about his personality.

Today, 20 years later, there is not necesary to fake a call or search in a garbage to get “social engineering” useful data. All this data is online: Blogs, facebook pages, twitter accounts, flickr accounts, linked-in accounts, etc.

Now, supose that you don’t want to hack a hotmail account. Supose that you want to make a game instead. Imagine a RPG that ask you for your public flickr, wordpress, twitter and facebook accounts(no paswords, just the name of the accounts). Then the game analyzes the public information in this accounts and then populates the game with a series of significant content.

Example: If in the “about me” section of your blog you say that you have two childrens, a boy and a girl, then the game gives you a mission when you must rescue Hansel and Gretel.

Think about it

In this post, I want to introduce you an scene of the movie “Ratatouille”(spoiler ahead!!). In this scene, Anton Ego(a very difficult food critic) tastes a special dish that evocate an emotive moment of his childhood.

This is the essence of the interactive media design: Evocate feelings and sensations.

Sadness, joy, laugh, hate, etc. Can(must!) be evocated by careful level design, unintuitive tutorials and all the well documented good practices to create interactive content.

In order to create successful games, we must have clear this principle and work towards to it.

Our games must be like a ratatouille and the expression in the face of the people that plays our games must be like the Anton Ego’s.

Enjoy the video!

Regards

Somebody said : “If You Want Something You Never Had You Have to do Something You Have Never Done”.

This phrase sounds weird to me, let’s take Roger Federer, by example. When he wins his first tournament, he was doing what he always does, playing tenis.

The same for Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan, Emanuel Ginobili, etc, etc. The point is, that, to achieve something you never had, maybe you must practice a lot.

The problem is the way you learn. Lets imagine you are trying to be a great basketball player. You shot to the ring, the ball hits on the left and goes out. Then you realize that you must shoot a little to the right. You try again, and fail. Because tha ball goes to much to the right. You shoot again and SUCCEED!.

Ok, whats the important here? You can adjust your shoot because you have inmediate feedback! Yes, so you can learn, because the way you shoot, the way you move your arm, your hand, your fingers, the muscles of your fingers is still fresh in your mind and you can correct it in order to achieve your goal.

Lets supose that you practice in a low gravity environment, and you have a glass wall that is much higher than the ring, between you and the ring. Now, you must shoot in a way that the ball fly over the wall before reach the ring. Now, the ball thakes too much to reach the ring and the feedback takes longer. Let’s say, over a minute.

Now, learn is harder, because the position of the your arm, your hand, fingers, muscles of your fingers and all the subtle things that you not aware of, are missing.

In the bigger companies, I witness that there is a burocratic structure to deal with projects. The problem is that when the project involves certain degree of innovation, the burocratic structure does what the glass wall to the basketball shooter: Ruins the learning. Then, the people involved in the project can’t learn, become frustrated and the product turns in a flat copy of something.

The solution can be implement a burocracy free environment for the learing for certain projects of the company, thats will lead to fresh, innovative products and a happier people.

Regards!

Several people thinks that the limitations are a great creativity booster. Use creativity to overcome limitations is a very common task this days.

But most people doesn’t see when the limitation helps the creativity and when it harms it.

The limitations in a project is good when:

a. Take some decisions for you(solve problems).
b. Don’t makes you do the same task several times.

If the limitation cause a lot of re-work harms the creativity and quality of the product.(IE, when using a tool that is still in development or when several people taking back and forth decisions over the project)

So, it’s good to keep this in mind when dealing with limitations.

Regards!

Most of flash/unity developers are familiarized with the term “sitelock”. That is, some code that prevents your game running in other sites besides yours or your sponsors.

When I programmed “Vox Populi, Vox Dei”, I forgot to put sitelock in the first versions, so the game was downloaded and hosted in several game portals around the world without my permission.

So, what I do (a little late), was implement sitelock in a way that the game stop working when hosted in other site besides Kongregate or Weremsoft.

What I realized, is that several media, like Kotaku, found my game through the sites that steal it! So, I said to my self, “this is not all bad, maybe this can be good”.

So, in one hand, I have several sites that steal my game, draining the attention of the public and limiting the money I make with my game(because the gross of the income comes from the ad share in Kongregate). But in the other hand, several media talk about my game thanks to it’s ubiquity.

What I say is that we must handle this phenomenom in a smart way. So I propose the following:

Instead of make a sitelock that stop the game from working or put a sign that says “THIS GAME WAS STOLEN BY EVIL FORCES! RUN FOR YOUR SOUL!!!”, we should allow the player to play the first level/screens of the game, and then put a text that says “Thanks for playing my game, to play free the full game, go to kongregate.com”, and a link.

In this way averybody wins, the people that stole games from kongregate get content for their site, and you get a traffic funnel for your game, that translates in more money for your pocket.