TYLER Projects | the blog

We’ll be using a lot more 3D effects for the “full” version.

Here’s an example of one of the different environments that will be available in the December release. Shown here is the Maelstorm (yes, it’s actually animated) environment which can actually be invoked by the player in the form of a rare level 80 skill. The ship’s booster flare is also a 3D particle effect.

I should probably state that there’s no way we can complete everything we listed for the full version by December.

We’re going to release a ton of new stuff for the “full” version before Christmas but it’s still not going to be 100% completed.

Here’s a quick preview of some stuff that’s going to be in the completed version of Battle Stations:

Class Progression:
Players will be able to advance to better job classes from the basic 5 jobs. For example: players on the commander track will start as the Soldier; advance to Officer; then to Commander.

Advanced classes get more stat points and special abilities they can use in combat. Here’s the artwork for the female soldier and officer.

Class abilities:
There will be different abilities for different classes. Here are some examples (no prizes for guessing which are the respective classes they belong to):

Preemptive Strike – you fire first during defense
Black Barrage – all weapons fire for 1 more round
Augment – repair in combat + boost to SPD, HP, ATK
Gold Cannon – deal damage proportional to your gold
Maneuver – adjust speed to stay at maximum range

The special abilities cannot be used every battle because they will require strategy points (SP) to activate. More details after my exams end…

Things got interesting earlier this week when it was reported that Microsoft was considering a stake in a 5% stake in Facebook for between $300 million to $500 million. Following the news, Microsoft Corporation (MSFT) shares rose to from below $29 to almost $30 mid-week before closing the week at $29.46 representing a gain of about 2.3%. More importantly, it got people really aware of the Facebook “phenomenon”.

I was listening to the 93.8 live DJs discussing Facebook on air and I thought: Wow! Now EVERYONE (even those who aren’t part of the usual social network demographic) is talking about Facebook!

Since we officially launched Singapore’s first Facebook MMOG (Massive Multiplayer Online Game), MW:BattleStations! about 3 weeks ago, we’ve been contracted by 2 other companies to create Facebook apps for them. We actually had to turn down 2 more requests because our order book was already full.

While we were working on BattleStations!, I was tracking the user growth of Warbook (another Facebook MMO) when it still had no more than 1200 users. The day after I joined, it grew by 1500+ users; 2000+ the day after that and 2500+ the day after. Beyond that, I didn’t bother counting and spent more time working on our own app. With those kinds of growth figures, it’s no surprise that developers are churning out hundreds of new applications everyday hoping to enjoy the same success.

However, economic theory dictates that something this good can’t last forever and there are signs that it might already be too late to reap the same exponential growth that the first movers did.

Take our app for example:

MW: BattleStations! is growing at the rate of about 300~400 installs per day (~4000 in total). Active user growth is about 100~150 a day (active users = ~50% of total installs). The growth is certainly accelerating, but it’s not exponential. The inertia is definitely noticeable and a sign of increasing saturation in the Facebook app space.

I can think of 2 reasons for this:

1) If you think about it, there’s a limited amount of real estate on a user’s profile that they are willing to use for apps. The apps that manage to get onto users’ profiles earlier tend to stay there. Facebook users have also started to get sick of the torrent of invites they get all the time and now tend to ignore new invites.

2) Facebook has been trying to prevent “spam” marketing by apps and they’ve changed a few things as a result:
- Apps are now rated according to the % of active users they have instead of just installs (total users with the app).
- FB API has changed to prevent apps from spamming users with invites. Earlier apps could allow users to send invites to all their friends and even reward users just for sending out invites. Not anymore, the new system restricts you to 15 invites and the developers don’t have anyway to track the invites and new users.

Newer apps are going find it very hard to get any traction even if they are better than existing apps. The way I see it, if you want to launch an app now you have to either:

a) make an app that’s very viral and is really going to make users want to add it to their profile
b) you spend alot of money either buying ad banner space from Facebook or advertising on apps with a larger user base.

I think the Facebook Platform still has some ways to go before it hits a mature stage of development. While most of the early apps were created by individuals, I expect to see more companies with bigger budgets really going all out to push higher quality apps which will mean better quality and variety for Facebook users.

For the application owners who are already on Facebook and have managed to secure a stable user base; that user base will become more valuable as time goes by and the barriers to entry start propping up…

…which is why we’ll launching 2 more apps very, very soon.

I finally managed to find the time to review the screen renders for Pocket Cafe after my mid-term exam today. Pocket Cafe looks awesome! The sprites are an awesome interpretation of Lilian’s anime character drawings.

I was just thinking to myself, hey, we should make Pocket Cafe into an MMO just like Mobile Weapon: Battle Stations! If we do that, Pocket Cafe will become the world’s first restaurant MMOG!

Here are the new character avatar images for the engineers, male explorer and female pirate. Kudos to our artist, Shaoyang, rushing them out so quickly! We’re one step closer to make Battle Stations the best MMOG on Facebook!

We’ll have these characters (as well as the 2 commanders) added into the game this weekend so you’ll get to see the correct characters for your display avatar. Traders will have to wait a while longer but don’t worry about it, we’ll get them done ASAP!

We haven’t released any games for quite a while. That’s because we were secretly working on this: Mobile Weapon: BattleStations! You can play the game now! just follow this link http://apps.facebook.com/battlestations/

It’s our first MMO and we’re pretty excited about it because we’ll be launching it first inside Facebook and then later on mobileweapon.net. We’ve just finished an overtime, over the weekend session to get the game finished so we can launch it this week!

We’ve been doing ALPHA testing since 2 weeks ago and I must say that the game is really fun even though it’s now just into BETA. Here are some screen shots of the game:

Explore the world!
We’ve made sure there’s plenty to do in MW:BS. If fighting all the time isn’t your kind of thing, you can go exploring or trading to make some gold and maybe find rare items. We’ve added more than 50+ ships, weapons and upgrades. There are plenty of secret items to be found as well.

Ship to Ship Combat!
Remember the characters in MW1 boarded and airship and flew to the Imperial City? In MW:BS you are the captain of your own airship. Airships are a big part of Sios and we decided it be fun if you get to fly your own and try to become the most powerful battleship in Sios!

It’s not MAWs but finally MW players will be able to engage in PvP combat!

Make sure you add the game to your Facebook account ASAP!

Here’s the new concept sketch for your main character in MW. Well actually it’s not that new since it’s the concept sketch DZ did for MW:Multiplayer even before MW1. I just modified it a little to get a different style.

Please click on the image to see a larger version. Comments?

Oh yeah, “*pinkymermaid” has started working with Malc and I on Pocket Cafe. So expect to see a number of blog posts on development updates this new game series from TYLER.