nokia

Playyoo members Carlos “Naz” Nazareno and Joseph Cunanana, collectively known as Zen Graffiti Studios, have recently uploaded their game “iPhone Mania” to Playyoo. Taking its cue from the labyrinthine and, initially at least, hopelessly unsuccessful in-store iPhone activation process, iPhone Mania puts you in the role of an Apple Store clerk with a queue of irate customers and only a minute and a half until closing time.

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.

Afzainizam Zahari currently lives and works in Singapore as a teacher, his game Think Fast came in 8th place.

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.

This afternoon we installed a maintenance release to Playyoo, with the following principal changes:

New Features

• Playyoo staff members can now be identified by an orange “team” tag below their profile image.

Principal Bug Fixes

• Scores, ratings and comments from mobile now works also for non-Nokia phones

• What your friends are playing lists are now shown correctly

• Game stream configuration slider scale now corresponds to game ratings: for example, setting a slider to second position (after “none”) means “only games with rating 5″, setting to fourth position means “only games with rating 3 or higher”, etc

• Game default rating is set to 3

• Phone type detection greatly improved (although not 100%)

There will be a further update next week, then we’ll move on to the serious business of introducing some new stuff.

According to Nokia it is based on:
- Snack Size Content
- Geek Culture
- Generation C
- Localization

Seems as we are perfectly positioned. Ok, localization is missing but it’s on our roadmap. And, please tell us what languages you do prefer.

Nokia Nseries | Entertainment Study: “The study carried out by The Future Laboratory, interviewed trend-setting consumers from 17 countries about their digital behaviors and lifestyles signposting emerging entertainment trends.”

Well this is exactly what is fundamental to our platform. The Game Creator released in public beta in Friday is a relevant piece in that puzzle. At some point in that press release they call it the “feminization of technology”.

Nokia - PressRelease: “Up to a quarter of the entertainment consumed by people in five years time will have been created, edited and shared within their peer circle rather than coming out of traditional media groups. This phenomenon, dubbed ‘Circular Entertainment’, has been identified by Nokia as a result of a global study into the future of entertainment.”

With mobile casual games on a social platform Playyoo is well positioned to support these shifts in creativity and innovation. So why not try the Game Creator immediately and create a free mobile game.