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

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If nothing else, ironically iPhone Mania is a pretty good test for the usability of phone keypads!

I’ll let Naz explain some of his thinking and frustrations about the iPhone:

It seems that everything that Steve Jobs touches turns to gold these days. With his Midas touch and the legions of loyal fans from the cult of Steve, the iPhone 3G has been selling faster than pancakes.

Despite the lack of basic features such as copying and pasting, Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS), and video recording, people have still been flocking to the iPhone in droves.

What’s also curious is that despite the iPhone’s miniscule 10million units per year sales as compared to Nokia’s sales of 1.34million units per day, tech news and developer buzz has never been so high. This becomes even more strange considering that Apple has been actively making it hard for developers to create apps for the iPhone by becoming such a finicky gatekeeper.

Still, the big question on everyone’s mind is:

Why doesn’t the iPhone support Flash?

Please allow Adobe to put Flash on the iPhone, Steve! You know that everyone wants it, and allowing it on the iPhone certainly won’t hurt sales.

Browsing Flash websites aside, how can people play such wonderful Flash games as these on the iPhone if the iPhone doesn’t support Flash? Give us our games, Steve!

Flash on the iPhone 3G: we want it, and we want it now!

We’re certainly neither anti-iPhone nor anti-Apple here at Playyoo, although personally I find the iPhone 3G too big to be a practical mobile phone. But certainly I share Naz’s disappointment that such an attractive piece of hardware is effectively crippled by an unimaginative and over-restrictive application policy. It certainly is the case that an unrestricted platform is potentially at risk from misbehaving or malevolent 3rd party applications, and I would also agree that it is necessary to be extra vigilant in the mobile world. But come on - how many reports are there of, say, Nokia S60 phones, being bricked by bad applications ? And for that matter, how often does the “inherent security” of Mac OS X get rammed down our throats ?

It is difficult to see that the iPhone Application Store policy is about anything other than money really. And over-pricing always has been Steve Jobs’ Achilles heel.

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We are pleased to announce that from today Playyoo is also available in Italian. You can select your preferred language by clicking on the flags in the web and mobile sites.

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You can read a nice roundup by Corsin Camichel, and even see how we coped with the challenge of describing Playyoo to a large audience in 20 seconds.

Our thanks to the organisers for a great evening!

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The idea is to try to kick start a market between Flash Lite developers and game buyers. At some point in the fairly near future, we expect 3rd parties to be entering the picture, but to get started, we’re sponsoring games ourselves. The basic idea is that every week, we set a theme, and invite proposals to build a game which responds to it. Once the game is delivered, Playyoo pays a fee to the developer.

[UPDATE: A Clarification: please note, Playyoo is not buying these games. They remain the property of the developer. Playyoo is 100% about user generated content.]

In the first week, the theme was the Euro 2008 soccer championship, and the winning proposal came from Mariam Dholkawala, with Headers Euro 2008. If your team didn’t win, Mariam’s game gives you the chance to rewrite history!

For week 2 (and week 3), we set a more oblique challenge, “global warming”. The first game on that theme was the very creative “Drought” created by Dave Sapien, where you need to help the fish escape the evaporating ponds.

Week 3’s game is in production, and we’re looking forward to it!

This sequence will continue throughout the summer, and maybe longer. Other initiatives are also in the pipeline.

The fact that mobile games like these can be built from scratch and put online in less than 1 week says a lot about the talents of our developers, but also about the power of Flash Lite.

The Playyoo Developer Program has it’s own private area in the Playyoo forums, for members to exchange ideas, discuss concepts, and for us to post requests for games.

If you want to show the world what you can do with Flash Lite, and perhaps start making some money from your talents, why not sign up ?

To qualify for the PDP, Playyoo members need to:

• upload at least 2 custom games (not Game Creator)
• have at least one game favourited by at least 10 members
• have accrued at least 20 verified downloads
• be approved by the Playyoo PDP manager

To remain a member

• maintain at least 2 games at all times
• upload at least 1 game per year
• agree to and keep to the terms and conditions of the PDP

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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!).

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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!

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Games on Deck have published an article on Playyoo titled “User Generated Games Are The Next Big Thing” in which they discuss the rise of casual games and user generated content “The next logical stage is the democratization of game design-where just as anyone can play games, anyone can now create games.”

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“U.K.-based Web site Playyoo.com is a social network where user-generated content demonstrates the beauty of simplicity. Developers and gamers alike can upload and download games from anywhere in the world for free. Players control a stick figure in “Sketch Mini” as he tests his courage and dodges wrecking balls. The game runs on devices supporting Flash Lite, notably including recent Nokia and SonyEricsson phones, plus some LG, Samsung and Motorola handsets.”

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The Game

About Izam

Izam has a strong desire to boldly go where no man has gone before (except maybe the depths of a volcano). He is a dreamer/artist/inspirer/performer/animator/game creator/mac user and an overall charming person. Before he became the fountain of knowledge to adolescents, he was busy creating animations for television programmes, web development and mobile games for PDA. All of which were done using Flash. More information about the man and his strange escapades can be gleaned from his blog

The Interview

WordRap

Tell us a little about yourself.
I am Afzainizam Zahari and I am from Singapore. I am currently teaching Science, Biology and Multimedia to secondary school students. I majored in Biology and did a minor in Multimedia in National University of Singapore. I have been involved in multimedia development since 1999 when I was first introduced to Macromedia Director. I learnt about Flash and immediately I fell in love with it.

How did you become a Flash Lite developer?
Back in 2000 I knew Flash was the way to go for rapid multimedia development for offline content as well as for the web. Flash 5 was released in 2001 and I never looked back. In 2002 I started to create mobile applications and games for the pocket pc platform. I enjoyed the experience tremendously.In 2004 when Flash Lite was introduced I got really interested in the possibility of having flash games on the Nokia series 60 platform. I decided to create a simple boxing game for the Nokia 3650. I was forced to re-learn Flash 4.0 Actionscript syntax. Flash 4.0 has quite a number of limitations but then Flash Lite 2 was released a year later. It was quite a relief because I can make use of Actionscript 1.0 and up. However the phones back then in 2005 was mostly able to support up to Flash Lite 1.1. So it was still quite a challenge for me.

You are interested in casual games, tell us why?
I am a strong supporter of casual games. Personally I find that I have very little time to sit down to play a full game on the video game console. Casual games that make me smile and tickle my brain cells work for me. I find it a rewarding challenge to be able to figure out the likes and dislikes of casual players and create a game that will interest them. These are the people that have very limited time to play, but once you catch their attention, you’ve got a winner.

Tell us how you came up with idea for this game.
The idea of Think Fast came from a personal situation in a chocolatier. My friend and I were calculating the prices of the various chocolates on the shelves. I challenged her to find out who is faster at calculating mentally. I lost.She’s a Mathematics teacher by the way. So..Anyway, that immediately gave me the inspiration to create such a game with cute and colorful characters trying to get chocolates from the Lollipop tree. It was a joy to create the game right down from drawing to scripting.

What other games do you like on Playyoo?
Playyoo attracted an amazing number of polished and well developed games. I was blown away by some of them. I really like Bog Frog. It was the kind of game I find it hard to put down until I solved the puzzle for each level. I also like Sketch Mini. It has that really cool animation which simply made me smile. It is a joy to play.

What are you currently working on?
I am currently working on a game called Journey Man. This game was conceptualized when I was 10 years old with 2 of my childhood friends. We never got around to creating the game because we went our separate ways ever since we went on to secondary school. I guess its about time I close that chapter of my childhood by creating the game that we have always wanted to create back then.

What do you think Playyoo can offer to you as a developer?
As a developer I really hope that Playyoo can be a platform for me to showcase the games I create to a large audience easily. And from there, maybe obtain a certain amount of revenue from players who really appreciate the games that I created.

Do have an advice for other game creators how to win a contest like this one?
You have to create an original game that captures people’s attention (in a good way). A great idea for a simple game, with simple user interface that people can simply jump in and play straight away. People don’t really like to be bogged down with too many instructions or having to learn so much just to play a simple game. Keep it really simple. User experience is very important.

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