jvrossb

It's pretty obvious if you are not paying attention to your surroundings while using Glass, your eyes shift up (you have to to see the screen) and it's clear you've zoned out.

"what is the user looking at on their screen, are they present, or distracted? Are they here and paying attention? Are they publishing this online right now? Or later?" is a made up problem. The other issues brought up may be entirely valid, but this one isn't.

The correct answer doesn't exist. There's a methodology you can follow to find an answer for every product, and it will vary case-by-case and sometimes over the lifetime over the product. Your gut reaction will be right many times but wrong sometimes as well. It's entirely possible to run the numbers and figure out what the right decision is right now for this game.

Adding email registration can be a mistake in situations when users who would have signed up through Facebook now sign up through email instead. Depending on what % of your growth is driven by virality vs organic discovery and how viral your fb users vs email users are (could be a 10X difference or more) you can be better off losing say 50% of players but having the remaining 50% sign in through Facebook than having 80% sign in through email and 20% through Facebook. It really depends on your numbers.

Neat - any plans for iOS? BTW nobody I've challenged has responded, would be awesome if with your admin superpowers you started a 'random' game with me. I'm Jeremy Rossmann, fb username jvross.

Depending on your demographic of players this may be a mistake. HN will complain a lot about Facebook login but take words with friends as an example - you can play the tutorial without logging in and then it's FB login to play for real. Period. Why? Because a major driver of growth for them is Facebook. They've optimized their flow so that the average player invites other players, they used OpenGraph to post a lot when players take in-game actions, basically Facebook allows them to grow their userbase by having each user spread the game to more users.

The fact that so many games have Facebook only login is a sign that when done right, with a demographic of players that accept it (almost all, the SF Bay Area is way more anti facebook-login and sharing than most of the rest of the world), the players you lose by having only Facebook login are made up for by the viral spreading you get from Facebook users.

The caveat of course being that you have to design, from the ground up, for the game to spread through Facebook. If you don't, it's not worth it. But if you don't, you need some other strategy to make the game spread, and there are very very few unfortunately.

On the not showing up after refresh, 2 more quick notes. First, after I've completed setup games in my game list still show up as action:setup. It should say something like waiting for opponent. Second, when I select a game where I have completed setup, even though the game confirms I am waiting on my opponent I can't see any of my ships. So a refresh AND exiting+reentering a game wipe my view of my ships.

birthday seems unnecessary, but otherwise remember that the HN crowd will complain about FB login far more than the general population would.

It's always better to do an interactive tutorial the first time someone plays. You can count on very very few people ever voluntarily clicking a help section and reading what lies within and on similarly few people actually reading any amount of text you show the first time they play presented more than a couple sentences at a time.

Waddya know. Me too.

They'll be more once I actually get a game going!

Where are you folks located? Interesting time to post :)

You should let players save starting configurations so games can get going faster once a matchup is made. I'm now waiting for my buddy to set up. Alternatively don't start looking for players to match me with until I have finished set up. Either way I really really want to start playing and I really really don't want to wait for the other player to get ready.

EDIT: Aaaand when I refresh the page it seems like everything is gone.

EDIT 2: There should be a way to return to my list of games from the game screen.

EDIT 3: I notice there is a way - you click the top bar - but it should explicit, you have the space to include a back button on the side anyway. I also am unclear on how to remove the position of a ship I've already placed, and the error messages need to be polished a little. "You have placed too many lage_ship ships" isn't super user friendly.

No doubt, I was (perhaps incorrectly) assuming that the parent him/herself was assuming that afghanistan was an arab country in the middle east. The finer details (that Afghanistan has no majority ethnicity, that many arabs came to fight the soviets during the soviet-afghan war, that by some definitions afghanistan is a middle-eastern nation) are not lost on me, but given the seemingly sweepingly ignorant nature of the post I was replying to I was going for a more high level rebuttal.

Oh where to start... Afghanistan is hardly in the middle east and there are hardly any Arabs in Afghanistan. You may or may not be right about peace in the middle east being a cruel joke, but if you happen to be right it'll be for all the wrong reasons...

Seconded.

What happens when they look the same as sunglasses or normal glasses? Fashion sense won't be as much of an issue.

Where did you emigrate to?

Is it possible to craft a course that assumed that students would collaborate/copy from each other and the internet while completing any take home assignment (so homework and projects but not in-class tests), allow for it explicitly, and still teach as much as the existing courses would have if students didn't collaborate/copy?

Are you sure it's the same public? You're making it sound like the same people who were once for it swung against it.

Cross-promo is actually one of the draws of publishing with us. We already have a larger network than most indie devs will be able to build (10 games and counting) and they all cross-promote each other. When you publish with us you get exposure in every single other game we've published.

Agreed on the art - iStock art isn't going to cut it. We just tweaked the terms to accomodate folks like you - we're going to keep track of our actual art costs and deduct that instead of a fixed $1000. So if you provided all the art there will be no deduction.

We just tweaked the terms slightly - we're going to keep track of our actual art costs (which tend to come in at $1000 but may be lower especially if you game has a bunch of art) and deduct that. So if the art cost say $750, we take the first $750 Apple deposits into our bank account and then 30% after that. Once the rev-share kicks in on every 99c spent on the game Apple takes 29c, we take 20c, and you get 50c.

If a game is paid, we will switch it to free for a day or two during which the installs will be driven. This is a common promotional tactic (see freeappaday.com and others).

If the game is free then we'll just drive the installs when the developer wants us to. We won't require the game have IAPs at the time we start promoting the game (though of course we'd prefer it).

Gotcha.

I feel like you may be right for the wrong reasons. "Any software that is desirable on its own will be sought out on its own." is the prelude to many a failed software project. People say the same thing about films, games, apps, etc... and it's almost universally untrue.

If you are right, it's not because no good software aught to be promoted and thus this (and by extension of your logic most any type of promotion) can't be legit, but rather that there doesn't exist a non-scummy way of conducting this particular type of promotion. Is that true?

Your interpretation of the rules is correct. You do have to publish through us to count as an entry. On the rev share split: if a user spends $99c on your app, Apple takes 29c, we take 20c (70% post-Apple), and you are left with 50c which is just over half.

Our publishing contract is very developer friendly - we don't take ownership of any of your IP. So, you could publish your game with us (and we'd probably end up touching up some art here and there) and if you didn't like what we were doing with it, you could publish a version yourself. If we aren't worth it, you're not tied to us. If we are we hope to publish a bunch of your games :) Very low risk in giving us a try if you already have a game on the way.

We buy ads in a trackable way and run them until we can prove to you that we were responsible for driving N thousand people to download your app.

Sujay is a good friend and top knotch guy. Developer Auction is lucky to have him.

Cool! If you want to chat about it shoot me an email at jeremy@makegameswith.us. Also happy to hop on the phone or Skype if you want to bounce ideas off someone or if you have any further questions you want to ask about what we do.

We don't take any ownership of your IP. If you strip out our characters, art, music, sdk, you can do whatever you want with what's left. If you stick with us we want it to be because we're doing a good job as a publisher, not because we've taken ownership of all your IP.

Yep. iOS only at the moment.