February 2008

So we are now at the conclusion of our first major contest on Playyoo! Between the launch of the preview site last October, and the cut off date of 15 Feb, 356 user games had been created and uploaded by Playyoo members from all over the world, making this easily the largest collection of free Flash Lite games online. There are some really fantastic games within Playyoo, and some of them perhaps have had less attention than they deserve. Other great games were uploaded too late to build enough popularity to win.We’d very much like to thank all who expressed their passion and trust by becoming a member of our community and contributed games. You’ve all played a key part in getting our vision for a mobile casual games community off the ground.We would particularly like to thank Samir Dash for his generous gesture in declining multiple prizes, thus allowing us to extend prizes to the top 12.

About the results
The results are based only on community activity. From various measures, we derive a “game popularity index”. The algorithm for this has been enhanced over time to improve the fairness and balance. Clearly, game quality is a big factor in winning, but so is engagement with the community, and finding ways to promote games. The game popularity index will be also used in forthcoming new and improved game selection features.

The Winners are:

1. Match the Blocks a game by Samir won $10,000
2. The Empty Space a game by Loomand won $7,000
3. Panic Mechanic a game by marc won $3,000
4. qTile a game by ptm won $1,500
5. Ludo Cells a game by Samir (Samir generously declined his prize for this game)
6. Mr. Shooti a game by Roozbeh won $1,000
7. Think Fast a game by izam won $500
8. Bog Frog a game by Ekleptica won $500
9. Fill Board a game by Samir (Samir generously declined his prize for this game)
10. SokoLite a game by ptm won $500
11. Orang Bunian a game by Faisal Arbain won $500
12. Sketch Mini a game by santoki won $500
13. Sushi Mushi Mania a game by marc
14. Mondo Under a game by bitacora13
15. The Bee Game a game by lfons
16. UFO Catcher: Barnyard Abduction a game by Naz
17. Sea Combat a game by Mariam Dholkawala
18. Trop Tris a game by CreativeSource
19. Mr. Cease Fire a game by HungamaMobile
20. Shark-Thrasher a game by digitallamb

For further info please go to the contest page.

Portraying the Winners and other high quality game creators
During the next days we will profile to the community the fine people that created the winning games. Short podcasts or transcripts will be made available on Playyoo blog.

And it’s not quite over yet!
Further prizes will be awarded under the banner of the 2007 Flash Lite game contest. A panel of judges including representatives from Adobe’s Flash Lite team is currently evaluating entries. Results will be announced soon.We hope that everybody has enjoyed participating in this contest as much as we did running it. Remember, these are just the first steps. We want to make Playyoo a key resource for Flash Lite developers for many reasons, and we hope you will all help and support us in reaching this goal.Keep your games coming!

Playyoo is all about playing on mobile phones. You can only rate a game when you play it on your phone. You can also add comments directly from the phone, although comments can also be made through the web site. We’re aware that at the moment how to do this may not be entirely obvious, so this short video shows you how it’s done (note: it’s not exactly Hollywood quality!).

By the way, we assign a default rating of “3″ to new games. So a game rated 3 is average, 1 is poor, and 5 is excellent. You can change you rating of a game at any time: we only retain your latest rating.

As you might know our contest will end in roughly a week. I was curious and had a look on the leaderboard and I took a snapshot to figure out if anything is going to change within the next days.Here is the intermediate result:

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Thanks again to Samir for your generosity. That move from Samir explains the strange annotations on the snapshot.

We recently introduced a new feature, the “short ID”, which is accessible through the Your Account link.

The point of this feature is to make it easier to login to Playyoo on your mobile phone. Now, rather than having to painfully enter your email address, you can choose a user ID of minimum 4 characters. Note that this has nothing to do with your nickname, and remains private.
The best way to use the short ID is to choose a sequence of letters which can be entered with single taps on your phone keyboard. For example, ADGJ, which is entered by typing 2-3-4-5 (somebody has already grabbed this one, unfortunately. I wanted it!).

Other strategies might be to choose a pattern, or to map to a number. For example, my birthday is 28 Feb (so, still time to buy presents), so I could try AT02.Other easy to remember numbers could be the first 4 of your spouse’s phone number, or your ZIP code.
Let us know how this works out for you, and if you have any suggestions.

Of course, you can also use this short ID to login on the web. And by the way, we’ve also added a third way to identify yourself: just use the mobile phone number you registered with.

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