The 2009 Christmas party has come and gone, though sadly our hangovers haven’t!
This year the Mind Candies jetted off to London Bridge for a party with an 80s retro theme to indulge in plenty of responsible drinking, tasteful dancing and subdued singing.
Here are a few snaps from the evening for your enjoyment.
The season of giving is now in full swing so we’ve embraced it at Moshi Monsters with the launch of ‘Gift Island’. Here you can send some very cute gifts and messages to your friends to say anything from ‘Congratulations’ to ‘Look After Your Monster!’.
Gift Island is a huge new feature on the site which has taken lots of development so the great response from the players in the first week is something that everyone at Mind Candy is really proud of!
To help celebrate the launch we wanted to bring Gift Island to life for all of the folks at Moshi HQ, so last week the office was filled with purple gift boxes. The boxes were filled with Moshi goodies including our new products from Zazzle and some amazing poppet cupcakes (sadly not made by any of us, but by the lovely Catherine at buycake.co.uk).
After this, and a few glasses of bubbly, a fun evening was had by all at Gilgamesh in Camden where the whole team had a chance to celebrate our latest Moshi achievement. Now it’s time for us to get working on the next one!
So here I am, the last of my 12 weeks as a Flash programming intern at Mind Candy. I’d like to think I’ve brought a lot to the company. I programmed the Underground Disco for Moshi Monsters which went live recently, as well as a few small things that will hopefully pop up in the future, but aside from that I’ve tried my best to take an active role in meetings and discussions, possibly to the frustration of my more experienced (but very patient!) colleages.
My main reason for coming here was to learn, to become more experienced in doing what I do in a working environment and as part of a team. I’m happy to say that I learnt a lot more than I expected to! I’m programming in a much more professional way, in a much more complicated but rewarding development environment (FDT in Eclipse). I’ve previously been quite uncomfortable having other people work with my code but here I was introduced to the joys of using an SVN repository which has been pretty painless and very useful for recovering old work. I’ve taken part in pair-programming too which was surprisingly productive and again something I’ve never been exposed to before.
I’ve been involved in all stages of a product cycle, from the wide-eyed aspiration of the initial design meetings to the gut-wrenching final moments before release. Working with designers, artists, animators, testers, and coders of various disciplines really highlights the importance of communication between disciplines, and that going that extra mile, or even inch, to make things easier for other people helps a lot in bringing a whole product together.
In two weeks I’ll be heading back to do the final year of my degree, where I will immediatly get myself an SVN repository set up and write better code than ever before; and hopefully will keep in touch with some of the great people that I’ve worked with. :)
Playing games on your own is fun, playing against a friend in two player mode is even better, but the most fun of all is had when you can connect with hundreds, thousands or even millions of other players from around the world. Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOs) have grown into a major sector of the $40B games industry over the last decade and produced a number of hits, most notably World of Warcraft.
The first wave of MMOs were focused on fantasy themes but there’s a new category of online game that has been quietly gaining momentum over the past couple of years. Social games are a relatively new phenomenon that don’t usually don’t require any annoying download, detailed instructions, or even money to play (at least for their non-premium elements). They focus on content that’s more appealing to mainstream consumers than Sword and Sorcery themes: sports, racing, fashion, dancing, virtual pets and so on. The social aspects of the games are as important to the users as the actual gameplay.
Many of these games are played within Facebook (Mafia Wars, Farmville, Pet Society) but many live outside where the developers have created their own social networks and vibrant communities from scratch (Moshi Monsters, Kart Rider, Stardoll, Dark Orbit, Puzzle Pirates)
These games are not only racking up new players at extraordinary rates, they are also monetising their audiences incredibly effectively. Many of the games are highly profitable and are one of the few sectors that seem to be prospering in the current recession.
As Vic Keegan in the Guardian put it last week, Facebook and Twitter are making all the noise, online games and virtual worlds are making all the money.
At dinner parties I’ve been to recently, people still laugh at the notion of consumers spending real cash on digital items such as food for their virtual pet, or birthday cakes for their friends (this might be a sign that I’m going to the wrong sort of dinner parties). The truth, as anyone in the online gaming business knows, is that people are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on these items and will continue to do so in greatly increasing numbers over the next few years.
What’s frustrating to me is the lack of attention this booming sector seems to be getting from mainstream media. Europe is home to several of the pioneers of the Social Gaming space (Playfish, Bigpoint, Gameforge, Jolt, Mind Candy etc) yet despite tremendous growth, revenues and profits, the sector seems to have been all but ignored. The impact of the internet on Music, Film and TV has been picked apart by the mainstream press in micro detail, yet Games seem to get scant attention.
I want to do something about this. Fortunately Andy Moseby, and the forward thinking team at Kemp Little, were thinking along the same lines so we’ve decided to put an event on. We’re inviting several of the leading lights from the Online Gaming world to speak about their games to an audience of journalists, investors, execs from big media, gaming entrepreneurs, and other folks interested in learning more about this exciting space. There will also be plenty of time for questioning the panel, networking, and drinks
We’re calling the event GAMES GONE WILD! and it’ll be taking place in London on the evening of Wednesday September 9th.
We’d love to invite everyone, but due to venue constraints we’ve had to make the event invite only. If you’re keen to come along then you can apply on the Kemp Little site
Hopefully see you there