Category Archives: games

games, Singapore

Another fine productivity sink: Battle Stations

1 Comment

Battle Stations is a Facebook MMORPG that you add as an app. Developed by local start-up Tyler Projects, who also have a few other interesting games.

(I did try to sign up for Mobile Weapon once, but was turned off by the need for registration.)

Addicting. Get an airship, arm it, and blow stuff out of the sky 🙂 Oh, and explore too.

Back to dollars and cents. They’re currently earning most of their revenue from online ads, as expected:

Since October, Tyler Projects, the company he set up with two friends, has been raking in US$3,000 (S$4,300) a month from just one programme on Facebook.

The money is coming in from advertisers who have been placing movie trailers in the Battle Stations application that the trio created in two months.

The mini online strategy game allows users to build battleships, which they can use to fight others.

It has already attracted some 36,000 users – and it is these users who are helping to attract advertisers.

For every 1,000 pageviews, advertisers pay anything from US$5 to US$50.

(from an ST article, Dec 8 2007:

But if they had a micropayments system here they could get much, much more.

Why isn’t there one in Singapore?

Interestingly enough, their current art was outsourced to a company in China.

China, games, history, pens, random

Randomness #785D

Leave a comment
  • R.I.P. Gary Gygax. Found out from, of all places, How The World Works:

    In the deep structure of ancient Internet culture, where the same computer programmers who helped build the Net often spent their leisure time pretending to be online wizards and warlocks, there’s no underestimating the genetic influence of Dungeons & Dragons. Gygax’s legacy is built into the infrastructure. I hope he took pleasure in that as the years went by, and I hope Gygax always knew how much millions of gamers and fantasy-dwellers, whiling away their hours on online quests, owe to him and his co-author Dave Arneson.

    Order of the Stick has a charming tribute too.

    –

  • Zhou Enlai was born today, 5th March 1898. My impression of him was that of the model civil servant (not necessarily a compliment), managing to survive while Mao offed all his contemporaries. But what was he thinking on the inside? What kind of conscience did he have? I bought Gao Wenqian’s The Last Perfect Revolutionary with those questions and others in mind. Only managed to read a bit before being distracted by other books — should go back to it soon.

    • –

  • Jottings From The Granite Studio also informs us that 5th March was the start of the “Learn from Lei Feng” campaign too. Ah, a man for all (propaganda) seasons

    • –

  • When in London, why not visit the Stanley Kubrick Archive?

    • –

  • Turns out that the rumours of a new lime-green Lamy Safari are true. Here’s one for sale on eBay.
    • cartography, future, games, ideas, media, mobile, photography, virtual world

    Merging virtual and real with handphones

    1 Comment

    I once saw a HP ad where a boy, armed with a handheld console with a camera, runs around a city playing a game on the handheld. The locations in the game correspond to the boy’s current real-world location, but with obstacles and challenges. So an innocent looking alley in the real world turns into a deathtrap in the game world, with a virtual boulder coming down towards you (like in Raiders of the Lost Ark)

    I love the idea of blurring the lines between the real and the virtual, and I thought then: “why do you need a separate device? Almost everyone already carries a camera handphone these days.”

    Wish some Singaporeans followed up on this idea before the Scots did.

    “It’s about using a camera phone as a magic wand,” said Dr Mark Wright of the Division of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh who came up with the idea.

    At the heart of Spellbinder, as the project is known, is a database of all the places that participants have added data to. People query it by taking a snap of a location with their phone then using multimedia text messages to send it to Spellbinder.

    Dr Wright said powerful image-matching algorithms are used to analyse the image that can deal with snaps of the same place being taken under different lighting conditions or orientations.

    Once Spellbinder has worked out the location of an image it consults the database and sends back an image with the extras added to it. (read full article)

    (from Networked Performance)