Articles by David

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We’re pleased to announce the release of version 1.0.09 of Playyoo. There are some significant changes here, but they’re mostly under the surface. We’ve made some fixes, and some enhancements, to the algorithm driving the Game Stream, which is Playyoo’s way of getting games to you. The biggest change is that the “sushi belt model” is now working. After you play a game from your main Game Stream channel on your phone (the default view), it is removed. You can find it afterwards in the “Recently Played” channel, and if you really like it, you can add to your “Favourites” channel. The idea here is that every time you access Playyoo on your phone, you’ll be presented with a new game to try.

You may notice a few other changes. For example, if you have ticked “Auto-accept pick of the day” in your Game Stream settings, unless you’ve played it before, then the current pick of the day will show up at the top of your game stream.

The Game Stream viewer navigation has also been changed, as shown below:

You can reset your Game Stream to recommended defaults by using the settings illustrated here.

We’ve got some good stuff in the pipeline, and we’re aiming to address a lot of the issues raised during the survey we carried out a while back. We’re always pleased to hear feedback, positive or negative (although we like positive even more!).

We’ve been a bit quiet recently on where we’re going with Playyoo, so here’s quick update.

Although on the face of it Playyoo has many similarities with other user generated content sites, we need to do quite a lot of heavy lifting behind the scenes to make sure we deliver correctly configured games to each phone model we support. Web developers get frustrated having to deal with browser incompatibilities across a handful of browser / operating system combinations, but mobile software developers have to deal with literally hundreds of devices on many, many networks. This was one of the initial challenges we set out to solve with Playyoo, and we’ve spent a lot of time on it.

For the first version, we had a lot of support from an external partner, who I can’t name for various reasons, but who I’d like to express our thanks to! However, now we’re on our own, with a relatively small in-house software development team working on enhancements and new features.

The first thing we’re tackling is to greatly improve the game selection process, which powers the Game Stream, to give users more control over it, and to provide better results out of the box. We’ve got a whole stack of other things lined up, many taking into account user feedback from the last few months.

You should see some changes starting to appear in the next few weeks or so, as we get back up to speed with development and releases.

We always appreciate and listen to feedback, good or bad, either here, by email, or on the forum. We’re pretty excited about the directions we’re going in with Playyoo, and I hope you will be too!

Playyoo has a wide mix of games available, all created by its members. Some of these games have a very wide appeal. Some only make sense to a few people. And some are maybe a first attempt at using the game creator, and a bit repetitive. Playyoo uses the gamestream to deliver games to you that you should like. Frankly, this still needs some work - and it is being worked on. As we get more and more members, it gets trickier to handle. In the next major update to Playyoo, we hope to introduce some extensive improvements in this area.

In the meantime, here’s a little trick you can use, discovered by Ivan, one of our senior techies:

On the web site, click on “configure your game stream” (the link is in the bottom right of the game stream strip), and set all the sliders in “adjust your category mix” to the second level, as seen here:

The result should be that your gamestream is mainly populated with “custom” games, with a sprinkling of the highest rated Game Creator games.

Of course, you can click on the “Games” link in the green menu bar to see the full set of games currently available in Playyoo - and if you find a game which you think deserves more attention, then add t to your favourites, play it on your phone and give it a high rating.

The Playyoo launch contest will soon be over, but it doesn’t end there.

We want to make Playyoo a place where skilled Flash Lite developers - and that means all of you - can show off their talents, attract an audience and build up a great portfolio of games.

After the contest ends, we will be promoting the leading games and game developers, covering at least the top 20, not just the prize winners. We will be featuring the games on Playyoo, we will run interviews with developers on this blog and elsewhere, we will be showcasing their games to commercial partners, and we will be pushing them in general to the Adobe Flash Lite community. The Flash Lite community has got Playyoo off to a great start. Now we can start helping you in return.

We believe that Flash Lite has a big future, and while we hope that Playyoo will play a key part in that, coming from the user generated content side, we also believe there are great opportunities for individuals and small companies to develop a career in this market.

We have big plans ahead for making Playyoo an attractive resource for both hobbyist and professional Flash Lite developers, and we also hope to be able to make introductions to content purchasers.

We would love to hear from you about what you would like to see from Playyoo. Let us know through the developer forum, or contact us directly at support@playyoo.com

There is still one week to go for entries in the contest, and things are heating up. Samir, who is also behind Mobile Wish, offering an innovative Flash Lite greetings application, and who has dominated so far, has made a very generous offer to relinquish all prizes except his top one.

A look at the leaderboard shows that a late entry, The Empty Space, from loomand, is demonstrating that it’s not over ’til it’s over.

So keep them coming!