Art by Zee

Casual Connect, the world’s largest conference focusing on mass market games, returns to Seattle’s Benaroya Hall July 19 – 21 offering current and aspiring industry insiders the opportunity to network and share game innovations and trends.

Always a cutting-edge event, this year’s Casual Connect includes speakers like:

• LeVar Burton, Actor and Educator
• Paul Thelen, Founder, Chairman and CSO, Big Fish Games
• Peter Vesterbacka, The Mighty Eagle, Rovio
• Gareth Davis, Platform Manager, Facebook
• Jens Begemann, CEO, wooga
• Dave Roberts, CEO, PopCap Games
• Charles Yim, Strategic Partner Development, Google
• Andrew Sheppard, CPO, Kabam
• Raph Koster, VP Creative Design, Playdom
• Heiko Hubertz, Founder & Co-CEO, Bigpoint
• George Donovan, CEO, Gogii Games
• Thomas Chung, VP, GM, The Playforge
• Jesse Redniss, SVP, NBCU
• Vivian Lee, Director of Strategic Partnerships, EA Interactive
• Jennifer Lu, Director of Business Development, TinyCo
• Shainiel Deo, CEO, Halfbrick
• Sean Ryan, Director, Games, Facebook
• Arjun Sethi, CEO, Lolapps
• Aki Jarvinen, Creative Director, Ph.D., Digital Chocolate
• Dan Chao, Lead Designer, Funzio
• Robert Tercek, President, General Creativity
• Seth Ladd, Developer Advocate, Google
• Demetri Detsaridis, GM, Zynga New York
• Tim Chang, Principal, Norwest Venture Partners
• Game Audio Alliance

and lectures on such topics as:

• Beyond Play: Gaming in the Connected Age
• What It Takes to Create and Manage Entertainment
• Winning in Social Mobile: What it is and the future of Social Mobile games
• How to Make Your IP Work for You
• Challenging Social Success Conventions: There’s more than one way to build successful social games
• Online Game Security: Foiling the hackers
• Casual Games: The cross-platform king!
• Making money on Mobile Games

The full list of content can be found online at the Casual Connect site.

Casual Connect is organized by the Casual Games Association.

Last weekend I gave up sleep in order to play Classic Adventures: The Great Gatsby from Seattle’s own I-play from start to finish. While I’m no fan of the classic American novel that inspired the game, I always enjoy a good hidden object game, particularly if it has some clever twist, so I decided to play for a few minutes to see what it was like. I was hooked from the start.

Classic Adventures: The Great Gatsby begins with moving scenery in which some objects are hidden. You don’t have to find these to proceed, but locating them gives you bonus points and if you don’t find them all, you have the option to go back and start over. You then enter the world of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s imagination in a game that follows the novel’s plot including narration and dialogue taken directly from the source material – a neat bonus for fans or anyone curious about the work. You play at Nick, neighbor to Gatsby and cousin to Daisy, in a series of beautifully rendered hidden object scenes, each laid out as a chapter in the book. In addition to the list of items you must find to complete the scene, there are bonus items you can find. A book is hidden in each scene; finding it gives you points to decorate your library, which appears between game scenes. It’s not necessary to complete the library, but it’s a fun added bonus. Additionally, words are hidden in each scene – finding all the letters gives your hint meter a turbo boost that speeds up its refills. All the words are relevant in some way to the scene in which they’re found and as an added bonus, if you can’t find all the letters you can still take a stab at guessing the word. Some are easy to guess, some quite challenging.

Some scenes require the player to complete a simple puzzle and some scenes are made more challenging by motion – at points in the story where the characters are driving to and from the city, you search for items as you move past them in your car. The object searches can be quite challenging, but not impossibly so. There were some scenes where I made quite liberal use of the hint button, but none of the scenes would have been unsolvable without it. As you progress in the game, you earn a series of trophies for display in your library; player who like to share their game achievements with their friends also have an option to do so via Facebook Connect.

Admirers of The Great Gatsby, the novel, will be pleased at how well Classic Adventures: The Great Gatsby adapts the book’s story; if you’ve never read the book, you might just be inspired to by playing the game.

Keeping with the reading theme, I-play is offering a promotion that allows casual game fans a chance to help out local literacy group Page Ahead, an organization that provides new books and reading activities to empower at risk children by giving them the gift of reading. Page Ahead’s programs include a book distribution program that gives children books of their own to read and a family involvement program which encourages and enables parents to help their children succeed in reading.

In celebration of Classic Adventures: The Great Gatsby and I-play’s other literary-inspired games, from now until August 31, the I-play Summer Reading Program will donate $1 for each sale of a game based on books. Besides Gatsby titles include Vision in White, based on Nora Roberts’ Bride Quartet series, titles based on the Women’s Murder Club series by James Patterson, and games inspired by Agatha Christie’s classic mysteries.

To learn more and to purchase games, visit I-play’s site.

Corbomite Games today announce the development of a new commerce strategy game “Star Shipping Inc.” The game is expected to be available in September 2010 for iPhone, iPad, PC and Mac.

In Star shipping Inc. you take the role of the captain of of a cargo ship traveling between star systems to trade goods and commodities in strive to become the richest star ship captain in the galaxy.

Travel to new and exciting planets, encounter multiple type of enemies like space pirates, monsters and others, fly solo or protect your cargo by hiring defense drones. Receive groundbreaking and exciting news at the end of each turn that dramatically effect the next turn’s outcome. A dozen of random events that can occur during travel will make you think twice before take chances and increases the fun experience with a high replay value..

“I’ve wanted to do an iPhone game ever since I first laid my hands on this wonderful device” said Oded Sharon, CEO of Corbomite Games “and especially now with the iPad and the new iPhone 4, it seems like a much more exciting time for independent game developers to reach out to new audiences which we haven’t had access to only a couple of few years ago. Now, we are able to produce high quality products, featuring high production values with stunning graphics and original musical soundtrack that are available in the palm of your hand”

Star shipping features high resolution beautiful space backdrops, planets, aliens, nebulae, space ships, items, and characters. The game includes an in game store where you can buy upgrades to your ship in order to increase performance and get a higher score. For example, you can buy upgrades to get more speed, strength, or resilience. The game also features a bank where you can keep your savings and where you can loan cash in times of need.

Star shipping and will have both a standard version and an HD version available for iPhone and iPad.

The game will also include unique features for each platform, for example, a use of the iPhone’s accelerometer.

For more information on Star Shipping, please visit:

http://starshipping.corbomitegames.com

Women and chocolate – yeah, it’s a cliche, but it’s a cliche that does seem to have some merit – we’re not all crazy about it, but how many women do you know that don’t like it at all? I’m guessing the number’s pretty low.

So it Playfirst who announced today their first foray into social gaming with Chocolatier®: Sweet Society on Facebook.

It’s a strategy that makes sense; a Playfirst-sponsored survey by Frank N. Magid Associates called “Magid Media Futures 2010 Social Media and Consumers” found that 38 percent of all regular social network users 18 years and older regularly play social network games, and 58% of these players are women.

Chocolatier: Sweet Society brings three major innovations to the series: destination gameplay with both a shoppe and a factory to manage, “lickable art” , and social elements. Players go behind the scenes as factory machines create an assortment of delectable confection and unlock the Baumeister’s secret family recipes. Players also decorate and manage their shoppe and invite their friends to help them build a chocolate empire.

“Our goal with Chocolatier: Sweet Society was to take a franchise millions of players love and bring it to Facebook in a way that is authentic and compelling to both the brand and the social platform,” said Mari Baker, CEO of PlayFirst. “In limited release, we’ve already reached over a quarter million players and we’re confident this game will please the sweet tooth of Facebook gamers everywhere.”

Casual Connect, the annual Seattle gathering of the casual games industry, returns to Benaroya Hall July 20 – 22.

In addition to the excellent exhibition halls, this year’s event includes lectures from Jeremy Lewis of Big Fish Games, Mari Baker of PlayFirst, John Pleasants of Playdom and more; this year’s presentations include “The Not-so-Casual Journey to Mainstream Entertainment”, “Browser and Tech Smackdown”, “Building Communities, Not Just Hits”, “Why Friends Matter: Designing Social Emotion”, and more.

Casual Connect is a mandatory for people already in the industry; if you’re interested in joining that industry, you should be there, too.

Just when I thought I was going to have some free time, Club Funkitron sends me a note to let me know that Last Day of Work has released Virtual Villagers 4: The Tree of Life.

I’ve been playing Virtual Villagers since the very first release. The popular time-management game tells the story of the people of Isola, a mysterious island that looks an awful lot like paradise. In the first edition, survivors of a volcanic eruption take to the sea before being swept to the island where they must learn to create fire, feed, clothe and house themselves and grow their village both in size and population, solving complex puzzles that allow them to master a variety of skills. The second release, The Lost Children continues the story with two villagers investigating a mysterious cave and discovering the lost children of the title. Chapter 3, The Secret City adds new challenges and a historical twist.

The Tree of Life continues the saga with the island chief directing a tribe of explorers to discover the source of Isola’s diminishing life. The explorers discover the island’s hidden eastern shore where they must find a way to restore the Tree of Life.

Game play for Virtual Villagers is simple and yet challenging. Basic tasks are easy to do but to solve the complex puzzles that allow the player to progress, the player must carefully manage village resources and properly develop each villager’s skill set. Some challenges require mastering more than one skill and while some puzzles can be done in any order, others require progressive puzzle solving.

Graphics have greatly improved since the first Virtual Villagers but they’re still pretty simple. Some changes for this edition of the game include a new select screen which allows the player to custom select a tribe, a new user interface, and real-time weather and in-game events.

Virtual Villagers is available on most popular platforms or directly from the Virtual Villagers website for both Windows and Mac.

Seattle based technology firm Spoon specialize in technology that lets games run instantly from the web without installations. Today they announced the immediate availability of the online IGC and IGF Sandboxes.

The IGC, or Indie Game Challenge, is an annual competition for aspiring game developers to showcase their skills, pitch their games to top publishers and win cash. This year’s winners, Cogs by Lazy 8 Studios in the professional division, and Gear by Team 3 in the non-professional category, each won $100,000 grand prizes.

The Independent Games Festival is an annual event that allows indie game developers to meet, show off their games, learn from and network with their peers and compete for cash prizes. This year’s IGF kicks off March 13 in San Francisco.

Spoon allows users to access these hot new games with a single web click.

“Spoon is pleased to support the independent game development community by offering online versions of the IGC and IGF game competition finalists”, said Spoon CEO Kenji Obata. “These sites demonstrate how Spoon can bring the benefits of instant, single-click launch to full DirectX- and OpenGL-based download titles.”

The IGC and IGF Sandboxes are available free of charge on the web at http://spoon.net/igf and http://spoon.net/igc, respectively.

Rather work on your own games than play someone else’s? Spoon offers a free Spoon Studio tool which allows developers to quickly adapt existing apps for deployment on Spoon.net and Spoon Server. Spoon Server allows enterprises and publishers to host apps on internal servers, manage users and licensing, and view detailed usage analytics. The Spoon.net online app portal, powered by Spoon Server, offers free hosting of hundreds of virtual apps on the web.

Dear Zynga:

You don’t need me to tell you how successful Farmville is. After all, you already know that it’s the most successful application on Facebook with over 82 million users and over 22 million fans. Farmville users represent more than a fifth of all Facebook users and (at least per The Guardian) one percent of the (real) world’s population. That’s huge.

So huge, in fact, that it can be hard to put a human face on it. Let me help by giving you one: my sixty-something year old mother is a woman who previously left all of her computing to her assistant until she retired, at which point she used her old, slow computer (on dial-up, no less) primarily to look up airfares. Until she discovered online casual gaming, at which point she promptly bought a shiny new computer with all the bells and whistles, signed up for Facebook and started adding apps.

She now calls me on a regular basis to remind me to harvest my crops.