The Lucky Donut

If you weren’t following and constantly refreshing the previous post, and weren’t following Lightwood Games on Facebook or Twitter, you might have missed the stunning news: We won two awards at GameHack!

GameHack organisers promise that there’ll be videos of the presentations online soon, but like us – they’re exhausted!

Coding for 24 hours straight is something I’m not sure I’ve ever done before, even as a reckless student.  The all-night sessions I remember from university were more to do with making sure essays got delivered on time.  Not being able to sleep, even if you were finished in the early hours, because you had to be awake at 8am when a computer lab with a printer opened to get a hard copy in time for the 9am deadline, and then be in bed by 9.30.

This was a whole different beast.  Once the time was up, you had to make a presentation to a room full of peers and industry leaders.  Sleep deprivation probably helps with this.  I think if my head had been fully aware of what was going on, I would have run a mile.

We went with an idea for a game, but also with an idea with how it would have to be presented to get noticed.  That’s why we spent so much time making the screen layouts flexible and on displaying a scrolling message.  The demo had to show immediately what we’d done that was different.

Three devices running the same software could be anything, and in fact once you get into the gameplay there’s not really anything to show that the devices are communicating, nor that they are aware that they’re laid out in a particular configuration.  Sending a message scrolling across the entire array does exactly that, and that’s what got people to notice.

Katherine quickly realised that having a large scrolling message on our table was turning heads, so she cunningly kept timing it so that people walking past would see this

It’s hard to describe just how thrilled I am without sounding all big-headed.  That will probably happen anyway, so it’s just as well I kept this to a personal blog, rather than an official company statement.

Other people agree that we’re awesome.

What really makes me buzz about creating games is seeing people play them.  Knowing that people I’ve never met before are having fun using something I helped create is an enormous sense of achievement.

It’s why I waste so much time every day looking at stats pages, counting the number of games played, watching download trends in countries that don’t make much difference in the global scheme of things.  That’s why I’ll probably spend the Arduino credit prize on constructing a stock-ticker style LED sign that constantly shows who is playing our games

It’s also why all our games are free to play.  If you don’t generally pay for games, we’re not going to convince you to pay for one of ours.  But I’d rather see people enjoying our games than someone else’s.  And hopefully, for you people who appreciate just how much they’re getting for their $1.99, we’ve included enough to tempt you into upgrading.

I can’t overstate how good winning at GameHack was, but the real highlight was having so many people come up to us and wanting to play the game.  Then saying “wow!”.  People who were there themselves to make games.  People who make “proper” games, in teams of more than two, using technologies that I have no idea about.  And creative people who can like draw and stuff.

I’m truly flattered.

So what next?  We clearly need to develop this game further.  It felt like there would be an angry mob on the doorstep if we didn’t.  But it needs some serious thought.

We can’t charge for the app.  The point is that everyone who wants to play needs a copy, so you can quickly get lots of devices connected.  If everyone had to pay even a dollar to do that, it won’t work.  But we can’t put advertising in there.  A banner advert in the middle of a grid will spoil the effect, and there’s no way it will get noticed anyway.  With four people around a table playing together, one isn’t likely to go “hey, what’s that tiny zoo thing all about” and yoink back their own device to tap an advert.

But we’ll definitely do something.  Watch this space!

There’s a little more room here to write updates than Facebook and Twitter, so I’ll link here from those places so we can give you a bit more detail about what’s going on today.

We’re at the GameHack event at Pinewood Studios, London.  The challenge is to make a complete game in 24 hours, and it’s meant to start any second!

We’ve already sat through some Facebook propaganda and some extremely short talks by the companies that are actually sponsoring the event with prizes.  Facebook didn’t need to give us anything, except the comfort of their presence.

Katherine and I came with an idea already in mind, which has been something on the back burner for some time – but we actually never got started.  It’s based on a concept that Paul, our designer, came to us with.

Call it “lights out” or “bubble pop” or “whack-a-mole” – it’s that’s sort of concept.  Things appear on screen and you have to tap them.  Not very innovative when we say it like that, but there’s an interesting twist.

We’re going to make this game run on lots of devices.  In harmony!  If you’ve got an iPad and your friend’s got one too, put them next to each other and double the play area.  If you’ve got an iPhone and an iPad, put them together and make an oddly-shaped play area.  Got a whole bunch of friends?  We want you to be able to spread all those devices across a table and make one massive touch-screen game.

That’s about the extent of the game design that we have so far.  Updates to follow

## 11:57am

While a whole bunch of musicians and artists are still looking for teams and the larger teams are arguing over which source control system is going to work best, we’re off.

The first thing we have to do is work out how to divide up the screens on various devices.  The edges of the screens on two iPhones placed end-to-end just about line up with the screen on an iPad.  So how many lights (or whatever game elements we decide to use) will be on screen on each device?  60×60 pixels fits quite nicely on an iPhone.  However the two devices have slightly different pixel densities, so the same pixel size is going to be physically larger on an iPad than an iPhone.

This needs some trial-and-error, so Katherine is bashing out a simple little app to place buttons on a screen to see how they line up.

In this kind of arrangement…

## 12.27

Through the magic of green and blue squares, I think we have an answer.

On the iPhone, 80×80 fits perfectly on the 480×320 screen.  Through trial and error and using my pink plastic ruler, we worked out that 68×68 on iPad is roughly the same size, and this fits 15 squares along the long size, leaving 4px spare (padded by 2 top and bottom) and 11 across the shorter side, leaving 20px square (10px either side).

One of the things we want to be able to do using the game board is scroll messages in the style of an LED sign.  A 6×4 grid is probably too small for this so it won’t look great on iPhone alone, but going much smaller makes the iPad grid look insane.  Enlarging from the original thought of 60×60 has reduced the number of slots on iPad from 300 to 165, which is still plenty to make a manic game even with just one device!   And it’s better for fat fingers too.  How to communicate with players when only one iPhone is in the arrangement will be a challenge!

## 1.04pm

Lunchtime, and Facebook freebies!  A mousemat that’s not even in Facebook colours (apparently people still do use these!) and a sticker that is – as long as you put it on something blue.

## 2.41pm

A prototype!

## 3.06pm

While Katherine is beavering away with something resembling a game board, I’ve been trying to find a character set that will fit our size constraints.  Given 7×5 or even 6×5 this is pretty easy.  Making it only 4 wide presents problems with letters like M and W.  I found help on the internet with a variable-width character set that fits into 6 pixels high and where most of the characters are 4 or less wide.

That means that wide letters can’t appear on screen in full, but a scrolling message should still be readable.  Well, I’m not sure how much more than that we can do anyway – and besides the point is to have 2 or more devices talking together to make a nice big visible area.

Here’s how it looks made out of Xs, and that should be the hard part done.  For now

## 5.13pm

111111001000001000111111000000111111101001101001100001000000111111000001000001000001000000111111000001000001000001000000011110100001100001011110000000000000000000000000000000000000111110000001000010000001111110000000011110100001100001011110000000111111100100100110011001000000111111000001000001000001000000111111100001100001011110000000111101000000

It says “HELLO WORLD!”.  And I promise this is important

## 6.48pm

Bluetooth is causing headaches.  We’re terribly shocked by this, but it’s still frustrating.

Also, piggy geeks ate all the pizza before I could even get close.  They plonked down a huge pile of (what I would consider to be) personal-sized pizza boxes and then tried to tell the frenzied masses they needed to share.  Didn’t happen.

## 7.14pm

The backup pizza arrives.  First in line, naturally.

## 8.12pm

The Bluetooth problem, amazingly, was that the devices were telling each other their names, and some of those names had an apostrophe in.  For example “Chris’s iPad”.  Stripping that out and communication is looking much better.  At this point, it’s not exciting to look at, but we do almost have an array of devices that share one game grid!

So, while Katherine’s been busy making that work, I’ve been making a ripple pattern to test it with.  In theory, this effect will extend onto as many screens as there are connected.  Exciting stuff!

## 9.47pm

So, as promised, the same pattern on THREE SCREENS!

## 11.33pm

I made plasma!  We might be calling it Plasma Fest!

## 1.42am

I’m quite tired. But I made more plasma, and something that resembles gameplay! When you tap one blob, another lights up. Except for one time in this video when the same one lit up again in a different colour. Oh well… Also I realised why the intensity of the yellow and blue is greater than the purple, which I think is nice and gassy whereas the others are a bit dense. But it requires more concentration than I have right now to regenerate the animation frames, so that won’t happen for a while at least! For my own later reference: #9020B0

## 2.31am

Bedtime, for a few hours at least. It’s going to be called Plasmafest and we just connected 3 iPads and 3 iPhones and everything worked as expected. We have a to-do list for the morning. Everything has to be ready by 11.30am so it won’t be much sleep, but hopefully enough that I can actually drive back afterwards!

## 6.33am

Back in Pinewood after basically no sleep, but a change of scenery and a change of clothes. Better than nothing I suppose. Katherine stayed up coding anyway, and now it’s super awesome, only missing that elusive gameplay. Messages between the devices are lag-free, and two iPhones can connect alongside the long edge of an iPad!

And there’s still 5 hours to go!

## 8.10am

We played a game! Two people, competitively, over two different iPads. With just one more pair of hands I’d be able to make a video of this.

## 9.30am

Bah, not enough free t-shirts to go round

## 9.39am

Just some polishing left to do. The game is mostly styled up, talking among many devices and running games for up to 3 players. In this video, you have to imagine that two of us are fighting to put out our own colour. However, I had to hold the camera, so I left Katherine to it!

## 10.20am

With basically nobody talking to us for the past 23 hours, we finally have something that looks interesting, pretty and fun on the table in front of us, and it’s turning heads.

Three lads staggering by with sleeping bags just declared it “wicked”, and gave me chance to explain what it’s about ahead of the presentation that’s coming up shortly. Katherine just got challenged to a game by the other girl in the room, who said it was “awesome”. One of the judges came to have a look and said “wow” a few times, which can’t be a bad sign. A security dude stopped by too, but he wanted it to be “more like Draw Something”. Oh well.

Personally, I think it’s the impact of having a scrolling LED-style sign moving across a number of devices that’s getting it noticed. It does look pretty cool doing the set pieces – scrolling “Ready” at the start of the game and doing a left-to-right wipe at the end of a game. The gameplay is fun – because two players get tangled up while they’re playing – but spectators can’t actually see much when it’s just a frenzy of hands trying to put lights out.

I think we can do no more. The app achieves everything we set out to do. There’s a few ways to crash it that we already know (one of which I decided to demonstrate to the judge dude, but I won’t do it again in the proper demo!) but there’s plenty of ways to show it off. I’m not really sure how much we’ll be able to show in the demo as it seems to be an overhead projector that would fit one or two devices, but not the array we’re intending. Let’s wander over there now and see what we can do

## 11.30am

It’s all over bar the shouting.

And OMG suddenly we’re popular! We’d taken to trying to entice people to play the game as they walk past because the demo we’ll get to give on screen can’t possibly be as effective. The projector just barely fits two iPads side-by-side. The demo will probably be 3 iPhones and then an iPad and 2 iPhones.

So we have a setup on our table with 3 iPads and 2 iPhones together. Lots of people asked what it was about. Someone walked over and simply said “can I touch it?”. Well, obviously. We got filmed by the official Game Hack cameraman, where I apparently garbled too quickly and – naturally – because the devices had been sitting for a few minutes, Bluetooth was exceptionally slow to connect. Another judge had a personal demo and appeared to like it, also saying that he’d love to use the sprawling device concept to set up a large play area for war games.

The judge from Marmalade had a look but clearly it wasn’t what he was looking for. Can we throw an Android device in there? Nope, because Apple’s Bluetooth implementation won’t talk to it. Amazingly, we had actually considered this, but it’s just not possible.

We’re getting a lot of passing trade without even trying! The consensus seems to be that it’s simple, fun and looks awesome

## 12.15

“Everyone’s talking about your game. Can we see it?”

## 12.24pm

Presentations are about to begin!

## 2.23pm

That was a lot of presentations Captain Obvious was a highlight, and I wanted to see more of the one with the cardboard monsters. Our first demo with 3 iPhones worked perfectly, but we could only connect one iPhone and one iPad for the second. Still, virtually everyone had something not quite work right. And at least we have a finished game

## 3.08pm

Win win! Twice!

“Best Use of Mobile” AND “Most Innovative Idea”. You’ll probably hear more, but we need to get on the road

You cannot be an app developer if you are not a gambler. I just can’t see how someone without a tolerance to risk could handle it.

Right now we’ve just had a great month – our best ever. March wasn’t so spectacular you’ll read about us in the news, but from where I’m standing it’s pretty amazing.

We hit number 2 overall in Singapore. Who cares about Singapore? I thought I didn’t until I saw what a difference this made. On the peak day, that accounted for an extra 9,000 downloads.

We also went top ten in Malta, Anguilla, Barbados and a few other countries I had to look up where they were. They were all insignificant.

But Singapore, apparently, has enough of an iPhone-owning population to matter.

The Singaporians don’t buy in-app purchases, by the way. Conversion on in-app sales is extremely low compared to other countries. It even makes us Brits look generous! But I imagine that has as much to do with the prevalence of payment options as it does with their desire to buy virtual items. Does Apple offer an iTunes gift card in Singapore? How happy are they taking card payments from Asian nations?

However, something about this turned great and rankings climbed up a little everywhere else too. What I used to consider our core income – in-app purchases from the USA – increased accordingly.

But it also had a mighty effect on advertising revenue.

Originally I thought we only put ads in our games to be annoying and to encourage users to pay $1.99 to turn them off.

Now I love advertising. Now that we have a number of networks on board, and can mediate them effectively (and at least one of them is happy to show banners to Singapore!) it is a whole different picture from when I just threw in an AdMob banner and hoped for the best. In March, combined advertising revenue eclipsed straight app revenue by about 300%!

And I know we’re still leaving money on the table. Our projections are for around 24 million banner ads and 2 million insterstitials in April. While we are filling most of the banner space – albeit still it at pathetic rates in some cases – the insterstitials are only used for cross promotion and the odd affiliate program.

At present we are working to replace our own pop up ads with network banners from a number of companies that promise sky high eCPM rates. Sure, that space is more valuable than a banner but the quoted rates look ridiculous. I guess we will see who can live up to their promises.

So back to the gamble I mentioned earlier. There are a number of organizations that you just have to put blind faith in to make money from apps. You have no negotiating power, and – other than having no choice – what reason do you have to trust them?

Right now, I am looking at the reporting for one particular ad network that paid particularly well for our success in Singapore during March. If they’re true to their word, we’ll be paid at the end of May.

We’ve only just started using this particular network. We have no past trading history together. They’re an overseas organization that I have no direct means of contact with. Their helpdesk team have already proved to be selectively responsive to emails. We are assuming all the risk and they are setting out all the terms.

“No matter how much you make, we’ll pay you in 2-3 months”

The figures so far look great, but it just so happens that – as a happy victim of our success – the amount they now owe us is already more than the credit limit I would have agreed with any new trade partner.

You’re probably curious where my level of tolerance stretches to: I get a bit woozy when I see a total hit four digits (in any currency) but once the amount I am owed by anyone is more than what I pay myself for a month’s salary, I start to bob myself.

As a contractor, this has always been manageable in the past. You can structure deals with stage payments, stop work when accounts get behind and so on. You do have the ability to operate within a comfort zone, and to build up working relationships with new clients and partners at a pace that suits both parties.

Now it’s an uncomfortable choice: stop showing their ads (and leave space unfilled, or sub-optimally filled) until they prove they pay on time, or keep clocking up the balance and hope for the best.

With online companies, I’m twice shy. I’ve already been bitten by Google. As large, faceless, unapproachable organisations go, they’re clearly top of the pack. And somehow proud of it.

Seriously, how can anyone ever be comfortable doing business with an email filter that tells you to jog on and use the support forums instead? Yes, speculating with other users. That’s what you need.

About two years ago I had my AdSense account closed for an inadvertent breach and I still consider the £1,500 they didn’t pay up as stolen. You think they actually gave it back to the advertisers I’d allegedly wronged?

Was all of that sum earned by illicit means? No. I made a mistake with the integration on one site and fixed it within a couple of days, but that gave them the right to keep about 45 days revenue – and not just from that site, but from every site that I was showing their ads on!

Just in case you expected different, Google’s “appeals” procedure is an email autoresponder. It says “No”.

So since AdMob was bought out by the big “not evil” I’ve been trying to eliminate them. Hmm, that sounds a bit like wishful thinking. I should clarify: eliminate them from our ad rotation wherever possible.

It would be foolish just to turn that ad network off. Instead they sit at the bottom of the pile, showing shitty looking grey-on-black text banners to anyone that Apple and everyone else deem unworthy of seeing a rich media ad experience. It still accounts for anywhere between $10 and $30 per day.

Back when I participated in poker forums, there were often discussions of how you should boycott X Poker or take all your money out of Y Poker because they weren’t going to let you use a four colour deck, or someone once rivered a flush against an angry dude.

There was always at least one response that simply said: “Get over it, and play where the fish are”.  I believe this to be wise advice.

I hate that I’m making money for Google, but until they actually decide to stuff me over again, I’d rather have my share than throw it away. While the sun is shining on us, I’m in “make hay” mode, and that means I am going to work hard to find every edge I can.

And besides, I’ve still been screwed over by more poker players that I thought I knew than by online companies I clearly don’t.  I’ll take any written terms over a “gentleman’s agreement”, thank you very much.

It’s an interesting question. Is there such a thing as an ex-poker player?

I don’t think it ever leaves your system. Just like you can never be an ex-alcoholic. Or like that band on X-Factor a couple of years ago that claimed to be “ex strippers“. I didn’t buy it. Once you take your clothes off for money, you’re a stripper, right?

I haven’t played online poker in quite some time. It wasn’t necessarily conscious decision to quit, but just the way things came together.

At the end of 2009, the site I was playing at the most was about to restructure its frequent player program to take away many of the benefits I’d come to rely on to make it worth playing. I was way past the recreational stage and if I couldn’t produce numbers to show that I was making money, I wasn’t going to play.

Unfortunately, I relied on what was effectively 60% rakeback from this particular iPoker skin in order to show satisfactory results. I’d show a small loss at the tables but cash out a few hundred dollars in net profit every month thanks to the perks. Since then I played odd tournaments on Poker Stars, but never got myself back into the right frame of mind to take it seriously. Playing online poker to make money takes commitment and discipline and this was at a time when I was getting busier than ever in my work.

I was long past the delusion that I could “go pro” with poker and use it as a primary source of income. I still enjoyed playing – by which I mostly mean that I enjoyed the satisfaction of knowing I was getting out more money than I put in – but it was either a way to pass an evening or to fill some spare clock cycles on a quiet work day. Although I never consciously made this decision, it was essentially a choice between finding a new poker site where I might expect to eek out $10-15 per hour for my spare time, or filling my time with low-paying contract work – undercutting everyone to build a portfolio.

You want a complete mobile app for $50? Ask me 2 years ago.

You want to know if that gamble paid off? Ask me at the end of the year.

I have played live poker exactly once since I last went to Las Vegas. That’s not particularly unusual. Combine a decent tournament with the chance to visit somewhere new – like, err, Stockton – and I might be interested. Otherwise, I steer clear. But I am looking forward to playing again on my next trip to Vegas – even through by then O’Shea’s will be gone, and I’m still mourning the passing of the Sahara.

However, I do think there are parts of the poker mindset that stick with you day-to-day, no matter how out of practice you are.

Is something good value? Am I the sucker here? I think he thinks such-and-such, but what does he think I’m thinking? How can I exploit that?

Meh. Poker player. Passive aggressive sociopath. Who can tell the difference?

Of course I find myself yelling “string bet!” and sighing “don’t splash the pot” at the TV almost every time I watch anything that has a poker scene.

And I do keep seeing parallels between what I was trying to achieve with my poker play and what I’m trying to achieve now in business. Of course it’s a gamble. If I didn’t think I had the best of it, I wouldn’t be doing it. And I absolutely want to maximise my edge wherever I can.

Assuming I’m able to articulate them, that is most likely what I will be writing about here.

So, yes, I still consider myself to be a poker player. I just don’t play cards much any more.

It took some time to click the “Add New Post” button, but the blogging voices in my head are strong and apparently there’s things I want to write about in order to try to quieten them. I’m not sure this is the right outlet, but it’s what I’ve got.

So then. This all fell apart two summers ago. I suspected the end was in sight as I just didn’t have time to keep writing as regularly as I wanted to, but I thought I’d least get to the end of one last trip report. Once I broke my arm, it pretty much ruled out me having anything interesting to write about.

In fact I just went back and checked what photos I had taken after the accident.  Basically nothing.  A shot of some floor tiles at The Orleans (they have little silhouettes of their jazz alligators on them, which is pretty cool) and a video of a slot club promotion that I couldn’t even be bothered to watch the whole way through.  I wondered whether it might have been possible to reconstruct at least some of what happened in the last 21 days of that trip – but it seems not.

So, much as I hate having left things hanging that way, and I always detested “sorry it’s been so long since I blogged” posts, let’s move on.

In the past 20 months:  Claire and I broke up.  Katherine and I got engaged.  I’ve not played any online poker.  Just haven’t felt like it.  I took Katherine to Las Vegas and she seemed to enjoy it enough to want to go back again this year.  T-44.  She wrote her own trip report, so I didn’t have to I transformed my company from being software developers for hire (who dabble with mobile apps) into a games studio (that does a bit of contracting on the side).  I expect this is what I’ll be writing about more than anything these days.  Oh, and I discovered that I do like sushi after all.  Now there’s almost nothing I won’t eat.

So what next?  I don’t know.  I have ideas in my head that I have to write down.  They’re quite likely garbage.  You might see some of them.  I just needed to post something here first to mark the passing of time, and to see whether anyone was actually still reading.  Not that it matters.  I just thought that if anyone is still hanging on, you deserved a little update.  You got a very little one.  Enjoy.