You Can Now Cook in Pet Society

Seems like cooking is a big draw for Facebook gamers. We have Restaurant City, Cafe World, and now even the Pet Society has a cooking function. Pet Society now provides each pet with a toaster / microwave oven device that allows the pet to cook!

Cooking seems pretty simple, much like other functions (planting, stickers...etc), and the instructions are provided when you click on the microwave device.

Initially the number of recipes is limited, and the pet will have to cook more in order to level up and get new options. There is not much profit to be made from cooking though, since each dish will only provide a few coins more. The dish that takes one day to cook, i.e. King Burger, will give about 40 coins profit.

There is no need to 'buy' ingredients, because the ingredients will be provided automatically when you purchase the dish. The dishes take about 10 minutes to 1 day to cook. Once there is something cooking, there will be an alert to inform you about the time remaining.

Just click when the dish is done, and the dish will go straight into the storage. There are quite a number of dishes to learn but the pet has to level up the cooking skill before the recipes are available. Recipes include Snowman Sundae, Gingerbread house, Choc Fudge cake...etc.

You will get the congratulations note about the cooked dish, and yes you will also get the congratulations note when you level up the cooking skill for the pet. Well, give it a try and see if there is any other cooking functions for higher levels.

It is snowing in Restaurant City!

It is snowing in Restaurant City! Now that it is December, everyone is in X'mas mood, and Playfish has introduced four festive related dishes (one for each category) into the game.

New dishes is an old concept, but I was pleasantly surprise at the snow covered trees. Yes they also added an outdoor option for more diners. Based on the letter from Playfish, there is supposedly a Food King, but I am not sure how to identify him. There were forum posting that the Food King is a purple character who is likely to be dining at the outdoor space.

You will need the Food King in order to get some of the materials needed for the festive seasons, e.g. raisins. Guess I will need to build an outdoor dining area (5,000 coins) in order to get these special ingredients then.

Snake in Restaurant City!

Yes there is a snake in Restaurant City! Well, not exactly those snakes that bite, but the game 'Snake'.

It is somewhat surprising actually to see an 'arcade game' within the game itself. We've always seen games within games, but I didn't expect to see it within a Facebook game like Restaurant City.

The Snake game can be activated if you have an arcade game machine within Restaurant City. The control is pretty simple, i.e. movement of the snake with the 4 arrow keys. to eat up ingredients that looked like actual ingredients in RC. There is a score function at the end of the game. I couldn't see if other 'functional items' giving this additional feature. Now that Playfish has introduced Snake, wonder what else would they add? Tetris? Bejewelled?

Electronic Arts bought Playfish!

Yupz Electronic Arts has bought Playfish, and from this CNA article it is at a hefty price tag (in my opinion).

for 275 million dollars in cash and 25 million dollars in equity retention arrangements for employees.

In addition, EA said it will pay up to 100 million dollars if the privately held Playfish reaches certain performance milestones through December 31, 2011.

Yeah that is a max of US$400 millions!

I must admit that Playfish has been a very innovative games developer, who has been able to track what consumers want and provides new features to the games. For example it has added features to prompt players to visit others in Restaurant City (in addition to other features).

Oh well, after Playfish, who next to be considered for buyout? Zynga? Zynga has also been rolling out new games that parallel many of other similar successful models (e.g. Cafe World). So yes I think it is time some of the bigger games company start to look at the new developers for some measures of consolidation in the industry.

Planting Seeds in Restaurant City - and get new ingredients!

Restaurant City has offered the 'Plant a seed' option for quite some time. The 9 plots of land located at the upper right corner of the restaurant are available for seeds planting when the player reaches various level. For example, the last 3 plot of land at the bottom right of the farm, where the plots look filled with stones and weed, are unlocked when I reach level 28, 30, and 32.

Why would any player want to plant a seed for 2,000 coins? Well, when ever seeds are planted, 48 hours later the player would get a new ingredient! This saves a lot of time and effort to hunt and exchange ingredients with friends. More importantly it allows for players to get more ingredients. So that simply means that if a player has all 9 plots available, he would get 9 more ingredients every 2 days, or 4.5 ingredients more per day. Attractive isn't it?

There is a trick though, and that is the players need to constantly water the plots of land. Each time a player click on the plot of land, 3 hours worth of water is added. A total of 9 hours of stored water is the upper limit. If the plot of land runs dry, the plant will not grow. :) Mouse over the land to get the info about the time left to harvest the plants.

When time is up, the plant will appear shiny, and a player can click on it to harvest the plant. As the plant grows, the icon changes a little. Below is a picture of the saffron ingredient. The icon in the little black box (to the right) shows the growing plant.

There are many ingredients that a player can obtained from plants. Well I guess it is only natural that meat products can't be obtained this way, but I've found the following list of plant ingredients: coffee, tea, saffron, sugar, garlic, oregano, basil, vanila, bay leaf, coriander, and wasabi so far. I've heard of people with the ginger plant, but I've not managed to grow one so far since the plant grew is random.

picture of garlic plant above

picture of sugar cane (i.e. sugar ingredient) above

picture of vanila plant above

I wonder if Restaurant City will offer a animal farming option soon? Now the meat ingredients are much harder to obtain...

Afternote: Restaurant City had just added an instruction (pic below) to teach players how to plant seeds.

Games Convention Asia 2009 - Convention @ Suntec

This year's GCA 2009 convention seemed smaller somehow. Perhaps it was due to the economic crisis and that the recently there were a number of other related trade shows / events (e.g. Toys Comics Games Convention, and also COMEX).

The good thing about GCA 2009 was that I get to see many other smaller local studios! I was hoping to catch the developer of Straw Hat Samurai, but I guess he wasn't around the area when I visited. I saw other booths by Tyler and also NexGen Studios. Seems like they are doing well, and that is good news to show the promise and potential of the local budding games studios.

A major attraction of GCA this year is the display of the Into the Pixel art prints. The prints were selected as part of a competition, and these pieces were the winners this year. For 3 years running, the Into The Pixel competition serve as an event to celebrate the artistic elements of the games development, and it is indeed different to see the art pieces as prints rather than on screen graphics. Ok I am a bit more biased towards Guild Wars but that game does have good graphics!

This year there were a number of business and trade related initiatives and a whole area was devoted to be the business centre for deals discussions. Not sure if there will be any announcement of the the total deals value later. I think we need more incentives, and more publicity of the events regionally to attract deal makers to come here.

In the exhibition halls we see the usual consoles, cars racing ...etc. Perhaps we have seen too many of such set ups that it is getting a bit dull. It is fun to see folks tryong out games but we see that too often at the various events.

Yeah we have other type of booths selling games related items too. Quite fun to wear military style dressed up persons walkign around. I wonder how they feel wearing these costumes that should be quite different from the SAF number 4 uniform that we are all familiar with.

The highlight is of course the competition. The One Asia Cup rounds will be completed (for Singapore leg) by this weekend, and then we have finalists from four countries (Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, and Singapore) competiting. Good Luck to those who are competing!

There was this large booth area hosting Dragonica online game, and I understand there was a x2 experience points event going on as well. Dragonica is fun and yes it is important to have more games event to retain the interest of gamers, especially when there are so many other online games available.

Afternote: Thanks to a guest reader who correctly pointed out that there is the large gaming area by Cherry Credits.

I do like to see more variety of games offered at such conventions and viola, we have the Playware Studios, demonstrating the educational games. These video walls content, including the displayed game items could be controlled via remote controllers by the side of the booth. So I guess these tools will be useful for teachers at schools (i.e. for educational purpose).

Yupz Playware also has other games, e.g. the Magic Lanterns, that we see here.

Overall the Convention is interesting, but I guess the CosPlay events and tournaments will attract more people this weekend rather than gaming booths. :)

See also:
- GCA2009 D.I.C.E Asia Summit @ Suntec

GCA 2009 - D.I.C.E. Asia Summit @ Suntec

It was a wonderful experience attending the first D.I.C.E. (Design Innovate Communicate Entertain) Asia Summit where I could have the first hand experience learning and interacting with so many renowned persons from the gaming industry.

The Summit started with the opening remarks (and announcement of Singapore Game Box @ E2Max) from the Acting Minister of MICA, and the official speech could be found at MICA website. There were many speeches, presentations, announcements...etc and I would just highlight those of interest to me.

The discussion by Mr Eundo Chae, General Director of Wizet Studio was interesting simply because it was all about MapleStory! Yeah, that was one of the online games where I spent a large amount of time, and where I met many online friends, a few of whom I still maintain contact till today. So it was very interesting to hear that MapleStory didn't start out as an online game durign the conceptual stage. Mr Eundo Chae shared that it was actually meant to be a graphical chat tool complete with avatar and costumes!

Wizet then realised that it was pretty easy to let the avatars moved around in 2D, and that they had difficulty developing the entire database of avatars and costumes at one shot. Thus Wizet had the brillant idea of developing MapleStory into a 2D side scroll game instead. Of course, the chatting function, the bright casual feel, and avatar customisation remained as core points of the game.

Mr Eundo Chae then shared that MapleStory became successful (currently about 87 million players around the world, wow!) because of the continuous development, the intriduction of relevant game content and events, and the effort to prevent server hacks ...etc. The localisation effort for MapleStory was remarkable, where new towns and related quests were customised according to the country for the specific groups of users. The MapleStory of today is no longer just limited to the game, since there were many other game related products, e.g. stationery, comics, anime and even TCG cards.

Another interesting discussion was by Mr Yasuhide Kobayashi, Senior VP of SCE Worldwide Studios. The discussion was interesting because of the focus on localisation. Localisation has always been a very important part of games introduction into any market. Games is a part of culture, and without understanding the culturally aspects of the target audience, it will be very difficult to penetrate the market successfully.

Mr Kobayashi shared many stories from the Sony studios, and how the Japan and US offices discussed about their games development strategy and designs.

The discussion was lively because of the many examples used, where as part of the audience we were asked about our preferences for the various designs. He ramarked that Japanese market prefered a softer image in terms of games packaging, where the US market prefered a stronger character focus. Examples of Hot Shots Golfs and ICO were used. Of course, the claps (indicator of preference) would be very confusing to Mr Kobayashi, simply because the audience came from various parts of the world. Thus there would be no way he could discern what was this D.I.C.E audience's preferences.

It was also interesting to know that Sony actually spent 1 year in designing the characters for their games. The decision makers had to decide on the looks of the game characters for Rogue Galaxy that took various iterations. Of course, that is important because any die hard fans of a game title will not want the character designs to change drastically at the next release.

The first day of the D.I.C.E. Asia Summit ended with a roundtable discussion. The topics were interasting, but I find the pce slow, simply because translators were needed for the various speakers. The makeup of the panelists reflected the global nature of the game industry, as can be seen in the picture below.

The second day of D.I.C.E Asia Summit attracted a lot more students and developers. I believed it is simply because the topcis of the second day would be closer to the hearts of many individuals. Unfortunately my camera battery died during the second day and I had taken only a few pictures.

The sharing by Lisa Hanson of Niko Partners about the China's Games Industry Outlook was informational. It is simply remarkable how the market size of China has grown. The 60 million online gamers base of China offered huge business opportunities. Of course, I didn't know that consoles were generally banned, and that many online games developers need to partner with Chinese local firms in order to provide services in the market. I guess billion dollars games industry, with predominanatly item based subscriptions will continue to be attractive to the game developers. I also learned new info, that ShangHai is the nexus of the telecom networks, and thus became the ideal location to host games servers.

Not all sessions were serious discussions of informational stuff. I attended the enlightening session by Christopher Natsuume of Boomzap entertainment, that was very very entertaining and yet provided insights into how the casual games market functions. Christopher's use of many examples helped to drive home the points of his presentation. Seriously I didn't know that there were so many different releases of Diner Dash, or that there were so many different versions of 'match three' puzzle or 'Mtstery Files' spot the items games.

These two days of the D.I.C.E Asia Summit were worth spending my annual leave for, and if there are opportunities again next year I am sure I will attend again. Judging from the audiences I am sure many will return again next year. However, I would think that topics offered during the second day will be more attractive than the general announcements or broadbased discussions done during the first day. I guess the organisers will have sufficient feedback to re-adjust their focus of the event, i.e. whether it is a trade show, discussion forum, or just consumer focused event. The pictures of GCA 2009, and the Magma Studios announcement will be shared in the blog separately.

See also:
- Games Convention Asia 2009 - Convention @ Suntec