Nonoba’s Weblog

Multiplayer Snake has actually been on Nonoba for a while, but seems to be a hidden treasure since not that many people have played the game. I love it and think it is a lot of fun!

The game is a perfect example of how new players can join in at anytime, and even though you can die pretty fast, you are back into the game really fast as well.

The graphics are nice and clean without any extravagant details that take focus away from the actual game.

I also think it is great with the way the scoreboard comes up after each game and the big letters saying whether you won or lost. There is also a great feature with being able to skip a round if you don’t hit space to join in when it starts.

I think that a lot of the features in this game are great and many developers could learn from this simple but cool game if they want to make their own multiplayer game.

Good job ptgames!

We just wanted to post a little reminder to all you developers out there on the interwebs. As you might know, we have a few different competitions for Flash game developers, including our big Multiplayer kick-off competition where the winner receives $15,000.

• The most played game during each week wins $500.
• The most played game during each month, that uses one of our APIs, wins $2,500.
• The best multiplayer game created using our Multiplayer API wins $15,000.

More info on the contest can be found at: http://www.nonoba.com/developers/contests

More info on our APIs can be found at: http://www.nonoba.com/developers

The deadline for entering into the big Multiplayer kick-off competition is on November 1st 2008, so the quicker you develeop and upload a multiplayer game, the bigger the chance is that it will get a lot of plays and attention, which increases your chances of winning!

You can find some good tips on creating multiplayer games here on this blog at: http://blog.nonoba.com/2008/10/14/tips-for-designing-multiplayer-games/

If you have any questions, please contact us, and we will try to help you as fast as possible.

Good luck!

While browsing the net the other day we found this cool webpage where you can create your own word mashup, based on a series of words. Here is an example:

Go to wordle.net to make your own.

A presentation by Nick Fortugno was made on developing games. He explained how the difference between hardcore games and casual games is on the simplicity vs. complexity of the game. Differentiating on how difficult they are to learn.

A casual game must therefore have a simple set of mechanisms to attract the gamer, a set of mechanisms that are:  Easy to learn, but takes a lifetime to master.

But the casual gamer wants to be challenge and the games need to vary to keep the gamer’s attention, which is why the use of terrain will be of great use. Below is a few slides from the presentation, where an hardcore game is being used as an example.

It is the final day of the conference. It is easy to see that everyone is done with being at the conference; several of the stands are closing down, and many have already left. Maybe the big party the night before is also keeping some from coming in, not us, we want to make the must of the trip, and we still have some meetings to take care of.

We met up with Chris from FlashGameLicens, a few different payment providers, and a company that can make animations for our pre-loaders.

It has been a great conference, but we are also pretty tired from handing out business cards, which we are getting some good response from, due to our small description of ourselves: “Casual gaming community & kickass developer tools.”

Chris and Oliver are heading down to San Francisco to have a bunch of meetings.

I will try to make some more post on the different presentations, so stay tuned.

The day is far from over, but the formal part with presentations and walking around to booths are over, now the fun part starts – socializing! We are going to dinner at Buenos Aries Grill with Ira (onemorelevel), Charles and Pooj (I’mlikewithyou), and Carol with some colleagues from Mochi.
After having huge Argentine Steaks we are joining the rest of the conference folks at RealGames’ party. We will hopefully take some pictures and upload them tomorrow.

During an intermission Oliver and I played some catch, and Alan Berner from the Seattle Times came by. He thought it was interesting that we did something physical to relax and not just played a casual game! I guess we are not that addicted and hardcore gamers like the women over 35 years in one of the panels today, whom used 2-3 hours every morning playing games. Mr. Berner took some pictures of us, and asked a few questions, so hopefully it will end up being a little bit of free advertisement. I will post a link to the article about the conference tomorrow.

 The flight went perfect and we arrived at our hotel at 7PM. We dropped our bags off and drown downtown to The Triple Door where Mochi Media was having a party. It was a nice party, thanks Mochi,  we got our badges, a couple of drinks, and met a few people, we talked to Ira from onemorelevel.com and Pooj & Charles from I’minlikewithyou.

We went home not too late, after being up for about 25 hours we were kind of tired.

With 300,000 plays for a week, Nonoba Uno has set the target for the future weekly competitions. It is by far the largest amount of plays a game has received during a week, since the competition started in the first week of June.
From all of Nonoba, well done Mystery, and thank you for naming it Nonoba Uno, that was not a request from us.

Now the question is – can any game beat Nonoba Uno for the monthly price?? We will see. Good luck to you all, and remember to give a couple of +4 and +2 to Chris if you are playing against him.

Yes I know, that was a cheesy headline, but it is cool how many plays Nonoba Uno has. Someone out there must have been missing someone to play cards with.

Nonoba Uno suddenly accelerated and blasted past Bombators, whom was leading big in amount of plays. Nonoba Uno has at the moment 408,387 plays for the month of July, and we are only half way into July with more games being uploaded everyday. Nonoba Uno does look like a monthly winner, but you never know, a lot of games have been uploaded lately. This included Youdagames, who have uploaded 8 of their games; all of which are very professional including the card game – Governor of Poker.

Anyway, we will see how it goes, good luck to you all in the competition, now I am gonna go play some Uno – The multiplayer game Uno of course :-)

Take care.

We now have more than 100,000 users. Welcome to all the new ones, we hope you will enjoy your time here at Nonoba. The next goal is 500,000 users, so keep inviting your friends and challenge them for a battle in a multiplayer game.

I was looking at the traffic report for Nonoba this morning, and taught it would be fun to know from which countries most of the users are coming from. So here are the top 10 countries:
1.    United States
2.    Norway
3.    Spain
4.    China
5.    United Kingdom
6.    Russia
7.    Sweden
8.    Israel
9.    Germany
10.    Mexico

We have visitors from 6 out of the worlds 7 continents; we are missing Antarctic and it is most likely not the best connection they have down there to challenge the rest of us in Nonoba Racer or any of the other multiplayer games.

As part of starting a blog, we have all agreed that those of us who will post here regularly should introduce ourselves. So therefore, hi, I’m Chris, and I’m one of the co-founders of Nonoba.

Besides being part of the so called management I do a lot of the Flash work on Nonoba and love making games myself.

I guess thats about it.

Trappit have been s solid leader in the monthly competition of June, but it looks as though multiplayer games are a big hit, at least for Connect4, which now only is 1000 plays behind leader Trappit.

More numbers, we have currently 49,438 users, and with close to a thousand sign ups per day, we should reach 50,000 users today!