Industry News

Playyoo member and Flash Lite game developer Dave Sapien has a very interesting game currently up for a Golden Joystick award at this years London games festival.

The game, Roul, is certainly unusual. It takes me waaaaaay back to a strange game / interactive thing called “ScruTiny in the Great Round“, which didn’t actually do anything as such, but was strangely addictive and fascinating.

I’m not expecting a Playyoo version in the near future - well not until at least Flash Lite 5 is released - but I’m not going to hold that against Dave.

As he says, he needs votes, your votes and as many as you can click!

As Mark Doherty mentions on his blog, nominations for the Adobe MAX Awards 2008 are now open.

I’m not trying to canvas for support or anything, but if you happened to want to nominate your favorite Adobe Flash Lite and Flex-powered mobile games community site, well, I wouldn’t stand in your way

Gamasutra posted an article discussing the role Flash Lite has played in empowering Tokyo based content provider Pikkle to create a casual gaming site attracting 40% of all male teenagers in Japan. According to Pikkle’s president David Collier, Flash Lite has been key in building the community because of its lower barriers to development and the ease of game downloads when compared to Java games.

Obviously the rest of the world has some ways to go to catch up to the penetration rates of Flash Lite enabled handsets but the number of handsets is steadily increasing.

A significant part of Playyoo is the ability for users to create their own customized versions of our games. While admittedly some efforts are more appealing than others we are excited by some of the feedback we’ve received from users. There is huge potential in the ability for users to generate the games they want and in coming months we hope to release enhancements to our own game creator that will help realize this potential.

Media Molecules and Sony Playstation 3 are also looking to tap into this desire for users to create their own games with the upcoming release of LittleBigPlanet. Sony are expecting the concept to be their biggest Blu-ray release of 2008.

Check out the LBP game creator demo at GDC 2007 below.

Adobe has announced the alignment of the company’s operations for personal computers (PCs), mobile handsets and consumer devices. In support of this strategy, the Mobile and Devices Business Unit (MDBU) is joining Adobe’s Experience and Technology group. This can only be a good thing for Flash Lite.

Meanwhile, in the continuing story of iPhone Flash (non)support the WSJ has reported on a conference call between investors and Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen in which Narayen said his company is finally working on a media player for Apple’s iPhone. Adobe has been working on Apple’s software developer tools since they were released last month. The tools will let Adobe build a Flash player for the iPhone, then distribute it through Apple’s iTunes online store.