Month: October 2005

I’ve always admired Steve Zehngut’s business sense (and Gary Rosenzweig’s, for that matter) because they figured out how to make a living developing games, which is something I’ve never managed to do. So, of course, I went to Steve’s session on game development.

Steve’s program started off with a little glitch, as he tried to show the remixed trailer for The Shining as an example of a viral marketing tool. The vagaries of wireless connections at a conference….

Steve went through some of his history and that of Zeek Interactive (curiously, I used to work at a company called Zeeks.com). He talked about the major players in the online and shareware game distribution development industry, including Pop Cap, Skunk Studios, Mumbojumbo, Reflexive, and Freeverse. Estimates are that a company like Pop Cap spends well over $75,000 developing a showcase game.

A number of questions and comments centered around one of Steve’s statistics, that a prime purchasing market for shareware games is women 35+ in age. Speculation ensued over whether they were buying the games for themselves or whether they were buying them for their kids, whether you were writing games specifically for that audience, etc. Points were made that the most successful games in the category didn’t require you to spend a lot of time reading rules, that they had lots of unexpected goodies that popped up during the course of gameplay, and that they could be walked away from to attend to something else (a la solitaire) without affecting game play. Steve recommended Chuzzle and Zume from Pop Cap, both of which I downloaded before heading to the hotel where I’d have had to pay for wi-fi. There was a brief but firm lecture that Director was still a better environment for shareware games than Flash.

Steve encouraged everyone to go to Shockwave.com to play his years-old title Taco Joe, because he’s still getting checks through their advertising-supported model. At other venues, he said that a top game at a place like RealArcade might bring in $100,000 to $250,000 per month at its peak, of which the developer gets 25%. All hail capitalism!

Ze

Frank, the author of “How to Dance Properly” opened with a

riff on how a party invitation made him Inter-famous. He’s

funny, and moving quickly, so I’m just going to type notes

from here on out.

“Shut it down? People were finally paying attention to

me!”

“The Scribbler”: a drawing toy that

rewards crappy drawing. Mentioned Director!

“Atheist” and
“Buddhist” and
“Christian” games.

“Punctuation Substitution”

Stephen Elop, CEO had to follow. said that there were over

3,000 people in the Ballroom. Mentioned those in the

community who have maintained support for New Orleans, site

of last year’s conference.

Showed comments from people on Studio 8 and Cold Fusion

7.

Flash Player 8 gone from 0 to 100 million downloads in less

than a month, still around 5 million per day.

Mentioned partnerships with SAP, foreign mobile phone

vendors, Flashcast in Japan. 1,600 Breeze customers.

Snarked at Microsoft and their efforts to move into the

multimedia development market by displaying a blue screen of

death.

Got around to the Adobe merger about 35 minutes into

presentation and asked people to maintain trust and keep the

faith.

Kevin Lynch, Chef Software Architect, came on to talk about

the future of the web and plugged a Kevin Morale (sp?) essay

called “What is Web 2.0?” It encourages separation of UI and

data.

NOW: Studio 8, Flash Player 8, Flash Lite 1.1, Flex 1.5.

Feedback on Studio 8 has been good. 1.5 million trial

downloads of the studio so far. Kodak EasyShare camera has a

Flash Lite-based touchscreen interface.

Flex adopted by 400 customers so far. Guido Schroeder of SAP

brought onstage for some demonstrations.

Back to Kevin, he says that Player 8.5 has an entirely new

Virtual Machine, ActionScript 3 (with runtime error

checking, standard event model, inline XML, regular

expressions).

Flex Builder designed for developers to create rich internet

applications without a the Flex server. Sho Kuwamoto, one of

the leads on the Flex Builder team comes on stage to build

an app that queries Flikr for some photos and displays the

results. (An error crops up as he builds it. Dead air.

Second time it compiled but he doesn’t notice the app’s

loaded in the browser behind Flax Builder until someone from

the audience mentions it.) 9 minutes from start to finish,

even with the delay.

William Wechtenhiser of the Flex Enterprise team came to do

his own demo, extending the photo search to include chat.

Lynch announces partnership with Mercury Interactive for automated testing with Flex applications. Canned video from Chris Lockhead.

Battery getting low! Gotta go. Only a few minutes left.

[UPDATE]: The future got its licks in via an application mock-up presented by Macromedian Mike Sundermeyer, who was with a group I believe was called “Experience Potential.” His media center app was meant to simulate the nexus of an interconnected electronic homeverse, where all of your videos, games, and music are tied together, with reviews, recommendations, and purchasing capabilities in one groovy application (although I did notice that Spice World was in his collection, so I’d have to wonder just how groovy it really was). I didn’t see any books, though.

At the end, Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen came on and talked about how he really couldn’t tell us anything since the last few hurdles of the merger haven’t been cleared yet. He definitely implied that there would be some sort of event next year — we’ll see if that’s just wishful thinking on the part of those of us who are used to shelling out our hard-earned coin to meet our ever-shrinking pool of peers. Some quotes I wrote down for no particular reason:

• The merger should be final “sometime in the next few weeks
• Regarding the Universal Player discussed earlier in the session — from which Acrobat was noticably absent — “use your imagination.”
• The combination of Adobe and Macromedia will “revolutionize how people engage with life.”

Alan Levine, the long-time force behind the Director Web site, mentioned the other day that my 1996 book Shockwave! breathe new life into your web pages is still useful to him. He’s using it to prop up one side of the Apple XServe unit on which he runs the CogDogBlog site. He says another Shockwave book holds up the other side of the unit, but that it’s too much trouble to look to see what it is. At least I’m not the other author!

[UPDATE 13 October 2005 21:12] I was rushing out the door to a meeting before I posted this, and I should have mentioned the contributions of several people to the book:
Dave Yang, who provided a short game discussed in the book and has gone on to great things with Flash;
Eric Coker, who was but a wee lad when he put together the CD-ROM for the publisher (and who has an
eye for captions of sf/fantasy convention photos; and most of all
David Duddleston of Violet Arcana, who provided material for an entire chapter on audio.

I’ve been going to Macromedia conferences now for over 11 years, since the first one I attended in the fall of 1994. I spoke at the 1997 conference. I was a member of the press for several others: as a book author on Flash and Director, and as a technical editor for Macromedia User Journal and Director Online. I missed one: the 2002 conference in Orlando which took place just a couple of weeks after I broke the heck out of my ankle. I was gonna go, but the doctor said no. Considering that I ended up with blood clots in my lungs from that break, maybe it was best that happened close to a hospital rather than at 30,000 feet or at Disney World.

In 2001, the New York conference where Shockwave 3D was released gave me a last chance to see the city before terrorism and war were the watchwords for the day. Last year, the conference in New Orleans got me to that city for the first time, before life there changed irrevocably, as well.

If the merger between Macromedia and Adobe goes through this winter, I have to assume that next week’s MAX is going to be the last get-together of its type under the Macromedia label. I’m not particularly attached to the name, but it is something I’ve been intimately associated with as a customer, commentator (and even contractor) for more than a quarter of my life — which includes a rather long prelude to my entry into multimedia. If it’s subsumed into Adobe it won’t necessarily make a big change in what I do, but there’ll be a putting-the-wrong-date-on-the-checks feeling writ large about it until I subconsciously think “Adobe Flash” and “Adobe Director” (at least, I hope I’ll be thinking that!)

So I’m looking forward to seeing anyone who’s going to be there: the Macromedia folks I’ve corresponded with over the years; the people who’ve left Macromedia; the developers I only see at these conferences (hey, it’s the real reason I go at all); and anyone I might not have met before. I’m off to LA for a couple of days before the conference, see everyone in Anaheim!

If you haven’t already seen it, DOUG, INM, and Macromedia are putting together a Director Get-Together for anyone (not just MAX attendees) on Monday, October 17.