Un-conferencing

Facebook pictures from the Israeli games unconference we had last month.

http://www.facebook.com/photo_search.php?oid=49055263011&view=all

It was the first un-conference we went to and it was great. The freestyle atmosphere seemed to allow much more interaction between everyone there. It also made the lectures become discussions, which is awesome for people who attend a lot of conventions and conferences and keep hearing the same basic level lectures. These lecturers often address a fairly low common denominator in terms of industry knowledge. The unconference somehow shortens the distance between the podium and the seats so that even the most structured presentations quickly make way for an open peer to peer discussion.

This unconference was great thanks to Yossi Vardi, Guy Ben-Dov and Oded Sharon who put it all together. And there you have another advantage of an unconference: Guy and Oded didn’t look half dead at the end of the day the way they usually do when organizing such an event.

Lynx

Intel and adobe’s chip for TV’s will allow running flash

http://www.casualgaming.biz/news/27870/Flash-will-become-casual-platform-of-choice-says-Boonty-boss

Cafe.com and Boonty CEO predicts Flash will become the main platform for casual games. And those are not the only good news he has for us –  there are also some great numbers in this Casual Games Forum keynote

http://sacramento.bizjournals.com/sacramento/stories/2009/01/05/daily3.html?ana=yfcpc

New Sandhill website needs some more work

We’re still in the middle of construction works here.

Forums and rating system are not functional yet, highscore tables do not work properly in Ring Pass Not and Gluttony 2, we are not yet compatible with many browsers, accessing other people’s profiles is nearly impossible and a few other glitches and bugs are still making the website meet the requirements of WIP. 

We also plan some more graphic improvements to the UI and general look & feel.  

Oren, our website manager, promises the basic fixes and improvements will be up and running in a week or two.

Ring Pass Not and Taming The Dragon series

We’re a few weeks away from finishing the work on Ring Pass Not 2, so it’s time to explain how that whole “Taming the Dragon” issue works.

Ring Pass Not is the first episode in the Taming the Dragon series. It’s about building the magical ring that protects the sorcerer from a dragon, allowing her to draw near without getting hurt. We released Ring Pass Not 1 a year and a half ago. Wanting to learn what people think about it we put it on Kongregate and waited to see what the reception was. It took a few days and it was all over the place. And by ‘place’ I mean the planet. It made a huge U turn only to come back and knock on our back door in the big Israeli portals Ynet and Walla. In Ynet it was one of the most played games in 2007.  It’s still the highest ranked in its category. We got lots of compliments and lots of complaints. People wanted us to add a save option, to improve the tutorials, to make it less luck based and to fix some nasty bugs (imagine that…).  

So we started working on Ring Pass Not 2 – a premium version of the same game. It took us a while. A long while. Actually it still does. We’re about to finish a Beta and then we’ll send it to a few publishers that already showed interest. In the mean time we were prototyping some new ideas for the next two episodes. You can check out Stella here on our site. Stella is about establishing the mental link with the dragon, which is basically another spell the sorcerer casts. It has different mechanics but we kept some basic principals we want the games in the series to have: 

1. General game play: fitting tiles into a somewhat round shape. You complete your task by filling all the slots of the shape.
2. Rainy days principal: you use the first few levels to accumulate power ups that will help you endure the harder levels coming after (more on rainy days in future posts).
3. The story line: spells cast by a sorcerer taming a dragon.

So we’re waiting for your opinions of Stella. Please let us know what you thought in a comment or on the forums.

Why the new website

The old website was our visiting card when most of the games were developed for our business customers.

The new Sandhill Games website is for players.

It was built to accommodate a community of people interested in playing our games, sharing their thoughts about them, competing for the highest scores and learning more about us, about our games, and about stuff we’re working on at the moment.

We have all kinds of ideas about making this website fit the needs and expectations of online gamers. We want to use a “houses” system where every game or game mechanic that our players like is going to get a house – a place where we keep developing content for a growing community of fans of that specific game.

And we want to work with other developers and entrepreneurs on new content ideas. We already have a few of those in development. Friends and partners who came with a raw idea and ended up sitting here in the studio with us for hours on end devising evil plans to rule the world of online gaming.

Blog post one

Hello everyone.

We’ve been around for a while now and probably should have done this a long time ago, but a new website is a good place to start.

So without further ado, let the blogging begin!

 

Ofir.