http://www.philsteinmeyer.com Phil Steinmeyer's rumblings on the game biz, programming, and life Wed, 26 Sep 2007 14:43:40 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Perhaps this is an ominous sign for the industry - someone has recently released a book entitled Creating Casual Games for Profit & Fun. (Amazon link). This is the first I've heard of any books specifically aimed at our little corner of the games industry. I haven't read the ... http://www.philsteinmeyer.com/147/casual-games-book/ Very simple game here. See if you can beat 27.314 seconds... http://www.philsteinmeyer.com/145/fun-physics-game/ I took some time the week before last to play around with Flash some more. Specifically, I ported one of the mini-games from Banana Bay to Flash, to be played in a browser. You can try the result here: Banana Bay - Mini Game While it's ... http://www.philsteinmeyer.com/143/a-flash-mini-game/ A pretty lengthy, and solid, article on the casual games biz, here. Some interesting excerpts: The sequel to one of PopCap's popular word puzzles, "Bookworm Adventures," is expected to be the most expensive title produced for the casual game genre. PopCap, which has offices in San Francisco, Seattle and Ireland, spent $700,000 ... http://www.philsteinmeyer.com/142/casual-games-biz-article/ There's been a lot of industry speculation that Sony is losing a lot of money with each PS/3 sold. This article claims the the total cost of the main unit alone, EXCLUDING controllers, cables, packaging and any profit margin for the retailers (i.e. Wal-Mart's gotta make money to sell these things), ... http://www.philsteinmeyer.com/141/is-sony-losing-their-shirt-on-each-ps3/ For a bit over a year, I've been addicted to the online version of Ticket To Ride (from Days of Wonder), which was originally a popular railroad board game, but has a free online version as well. While you can play the web version for free, you get certain additional ... http://www.philsteinmeyer.com/140/ticket-to-ride-updated/ Well, I guess I was wrong a couple weeks ago in thinking Vista was not that close to going gold. It's been announced on the Vista Blog (link via Slashdot) that Vista has been released to manufacturing - aka gone gold. Congrats to the Vista team. http://www.philsteinmeyer.com/139/windows-vista-goes-gold/ There's a new Banana Bay beta build up (try saying that 5 times fast). If you've played previous betas, you can grab it from the same location, with the same login. For this beta, I'm not adding any new beta testers, but I should have another version later next week ... http://www.philsteinmeyer.com/138/new-beta-build/ You can download for free the first release candidate for Windows Vista. I did so last night to try to see if Banana Bay would work alright under Vista. Some observations: It took a long time to download - it's about 2.5 GB, and took about 2 hours or so for me to ... http://www.philsteinmeyer.com/137/windows-vista-rc-1/ In my last post I mentioned an interesting serious game in beta. It's now been released. Ayiti - The Cost of Life is a game where you try to shepherd your poor family in Haiti through the many problems they face. A light graphical touch softens a ... http://www.philsteinmeyer.com/136/ayiti-the-cost-of-life/