Today I presented with Doug, at the Velocity Project Exhibition. Yes, I do presentations for fun.
The presentation was on the project called ColorTheNet, which we’ve worked on throughout the term.
Cograts to http://unsynced.com, saymore, and http://giftah.com for winning prizes.

Presenting in front of an audience isn’t easy. I’ve always been shy, but in the past few years I’ve been able to overcome it for the most part. There are days when I go back into a shy state. There is this common misconseption that shy people should be feared, they seem like they’re always planning something.

But what is being shy really? Being shy is caring. Caring about the way you look, the way you stand, the way you act, the things you say. But though you care, you care in the least selfish way imagineable. You care because of the people around you. Don’t get me wrong, it doesn’t mean that people who are confident, don’t care. It’s just that they do so within a bigger picture. While a shy person does so in a fragmented way. Takes tiny steps with each action. Strategically plans every move, every conversation, to not offend, not insult. For a shy person being confident, takes practice, but with time, I belive that shyness can be overcome.

What makes a game a seller or just plain popular? Some games such as Sock and Awe become popular overnight. Finding something viral, can turn any seemingly stupid idea into a goldmine. On the other hand there are games which reach the top for what they are worth. With 2,231,434 plays ‘Bloons Tower Defense 3’, is the 3rd most popular game on Kongregate.com, the Youtube of web-based casual games. Bloons was created by NinjaKiwi.

Genre Background

Bloons is a tower defense game. The tower defense game genre originated in the 90s in an arcade game called Rampart. That idea re-appeared 8 years later in a user created map for Starcraft, then Age of Empires II, and Warcraft III whereby the gameplay was adopted to fit new design tools.

Gameplay

The concept of Bloons Tower Defense is just as simple as the classic Tower Defense games. To make it adoptable to the casual gamer, you can choose from 3 difficulties; Easy, Medium and Hard. There’s also an in-game tutorial to aid a beginner through the basics of the game. The main aim of any TD game is to make sure that none of the enemies (in this case balloons) get through to the other side. Balloons come in waves, and one wave is considered one level. More sophisticated enemies appear and the bounty earned to kill those increases as the next stage begins. In Bloons, you choose to trigger the next stage. Before you trigger the next stage you are encouraged to improve your defences and build new types of defences. For replay-ability, you can select new maps to play on and unlock some new ones as well.

Graphics

Although the graphics are simplistic, they are very appealing. The success with Bloons, and other 2D arcade games shows, that you don’t need to utilize 3d visuals to gain someone’s attention. As Leonardo da Vinci said “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” As you can see from the image below, both the interface and graphics are simplistic in nature:

In the end the main thing that a game needs to have, to be entertaining, is be easy, but not too easy. That’s why most casual games have a difficulty throttle. It needs to be easy to learn, and that’s why there’s a build in tutorial which goes through the basics as you play the game. A game which includes some of these elements, may end up the next popular game.