Funny Serious Game

[sovka]

So, I got advice to play the game again and ZOMG!

Congratulations, a new child was born this year!

Now the design is getting somewhere. Another suggestion I have is to credit users for their ideas though.

[fred]

Credit the users - yes, we will do that - we have gotten loads of suggestions, some new and some that we had thought of ourselves and had to skip during production because of university deadlines and such - the forums at the site used to hold a lot of threads with these suggestions from people, but I'm having problems restoring them from the old site - although all threads are in an sql-file, new user ids and forum-ids at our new site make restoral a mess, so it'll have to be done manually when I have time for it. There will also be an updated official suggestion list so people don't keep suggesting the same things to us - we get a lot of those emails, and it would be hard to give everybody due credit this way. I think we will credit the best suggestions individually, and then maybe give collective credit to all the forum users because most of them contributed in some way.

I actually read a booklet by some design guru a while back who said it's always better to present a sort of unfinished concept first - it's the best way to get people involved and let them put their own ideas into the product. It will make people feel they are part of the project, and they will never forget that. And if you look at the amount of money game companies put into user testing and quality assurance, I think it makes sense for small  developers to take public criticism and ask for suggestions. Sure some people are annoying, and your vanity can take some serious blows - but it's a way of getting for free what companies pay for. I'm kinda enjoying it. I only wish I had more time at the moment...

[fred]

I finally finished a new and improved version of the 3rd World Farmer game!!

We were invited on national radio about the release, so about one million people heard about the game, and it's become fairly popular. The game is being used in economics, game design and geography classes in universities in us, canada and australia, so I'm quite happy. The new version is hosted at (www.arcadetown.com) as well as Danish Broadcasting Corporation game blog (www.dr.dk/spil).

Direct link to ArcadeTown version

This version has a lot of new features, and it addresses a lot of the ideas and critique we got on the earlier versions, including some from AGSers, I believe.

Check it out

[Mikko]

I didn't get to play any previous versions, but this one seemed quite easy on the contrary what I read first here in the forums.

Anyhow the idea behind the game is great, good work.

I had brief opportunity to play a german game called Ecopolicy few months ago. Unless you've already seen it I think you might want to check it out.