Zoetermeer is a city (pop. 119,000) near The Hague and Rotterdam. On the city council website are Zoetermeer-themed computer games. One is a sort of SimZoetermeer, like SimCity except that the city grows according to the history of Zoetermeer from 1960 (when the town had only 6,000 people) to today. The other is Castle Zoetermeer. I haven't tried that one yet.
I think that all city council websites should have video games.
My company currently makes games for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux.
The first 2 have a good business case. Lots of people run Mac OS X and Windows, and buy games to play. (Thank you to all the customers who keep us small developers alive.)
Linux doesn't have as good a business case for us. Not very many people buy the Linux versions of our games. But, I foresee Linux continuing to grow in leaps and bounds on the desktop. And our codebase is in Java, so it isn't that much extra work to make Linux versions.
Going Mobile The mobile OS wars are warming up fast. In the past we've gotten some scattered requests for PocketPC or Palm versions, but it hasn't seemed worthwhile. Apparently there was good money to be made selling Palm apps in the past, but greedy distributors (hearsay says Handango) and a decaying platform have destroyed it.
J2ME and BREW cellphone apps are making money, but only for a few big companies (at least in North America). The carriers have been very greedy distributors, and locked down their platform tightly.
Apple's iPhone is fresh mobile platform coming on strong. They've publicized their app distribution rate as taking a 30% cut. That's a lot better then most desktop games distributors (Yahoo Games typically takes 70%). Apple has been tremendously successful at iterating the iPod from version1 to perfection. They're following the same process with the iPhone, building a mobile platform from the ground up. I think the iPhone will be one of the long term mobile platform winners.
Google Android is the other mobile platform I'm keeping an eye on. Open-source and available for carriers to build on. Apps are written in the Java language, but using G's own VM and libraries. (A nice end-run around SUN, straight to Java developers.) It hasn't launched on any real phones yet, but I think it has huge potential. The first Android phones are supposed to be available "soon."
You already have a computer in your pocket (your cellphone). The big question for software developers is: what platform is your next one going to run?
Vidfest is the Vancouver International Digital Festival, happening May 21-24, 2008. It's got a keynote from Chris Anderson of Wired, a day of "creative exchange" conference sessions, a day of "International Partnering Forum" one-on-one meetings, and the PopVox Digital Media Awards.
Lux Delux is in the running for the best casual game award. Please show your support and vote for the entry (you have to register an account for the Vote button to show up).
Launch Party 4 is also happening on the 21st, celebrating the local startup scene. And the Vancouver Game Summit runs concurrently on May 21-22, mostly focused on console business.
Techcouver is being used more as a nickname for Vancouver. Cool beans.
Tektek.org's Dream Avatar is an awesome avatar creation game that has been sweeping the Lux Forums like wildfire. Lots of cool stuff to choose from and output is a PNG on a transparent background. Sweetness.
Their HTML output code is missing some "s in it unfortunately, and won't work in a comment here without being fixed.
I do not play many games but here are two flash games I read about recently at MetaFilter and am now pretty much in love with:
Cursor 10 is a truly original, beautiful and downright exciting game - quick-witted, challenging, and ingenious. All you need to know: YOU HAVE 10 CURSORS. WORK TOGETHER. (not much replay value though.)
Shuffle is like curling or pool or shuffleboard, but with no walls, no nonsense, just balls and shootin' and your heart in yr mouth. Devilishly simple.
