If someone had told me that they could make an addicting game out of progress bars, I wouldn’t have believed them. That is… Until I ran into “Starfleet Commander” on Facebook.

Blow Away the Opposition in Starfleet Commander

In Starfleet Commander, you enter the universe on a small outpost in a large galaxy.  You have a small amount of Ore, Crystal and Hydrogen to build up a massive space empire and armada.  Unlike games like Mafia Wars or Castle Age, everything in Starfleet Commander happens in real-time.  Building your first levels of Ore Mines and Power Stations takes only minutes.  In later levels, it takes hours, and sometimes days to build things.  So for a lot of the time, you will be seeing a bunch of progress bars across your screen.

Is it done yet?

Yet, this is what makes the game incredibly compelling.  After a few levels of being immune in “newbie” status, you are thrown into a pretty cutthroat world.  Once you are out of newbie status, anyone can attack you and steal your resources, and harvest the remains of your fleet from orbit.

I started the game with a friend of mine who was unlucky enough to live close to an incredibly aggressive player named “Caesar.”  That player plundered most of his resources from neighbors who happened to be weaker than him.  This sparked a massive arms race which also led to an alliance formed by many players disgruntled with becoming a feeding ground.

So, these progress bars become everything – how fast your fleets can move, do raids against other players, or how fast it takes to research technologies or construct buildings that are necessary for you to climb the tech tree.  And for some strange reason, organizing fleets, transporting goods among colonies, and arranging the flow of traffic becomes incredibly compelling.

Maybe I should work for Air Traffic Control

Now, the monetization of this game is fairly light compared to the Zynga games of Mafia Wars and Farmville because you can really only buy technologies or buildings with in-game credits. So there is a limited number of places a person could “buy” their way to the top. And I have to admit, I have been tempted more than once to swipe my credit card or to take these surveys or offer deals on in their store to get ahead in the game.

However, recent news has been showing that these games are full of scam-ridden surveys and offers.

To be fair to Blue Frog Gaming who created Starfleet Commander, they aren’t part of this massive class action lawsuit against Zynga. But if anyone is considering putting money into these games, be really careful. I personally would give money directly to the companies for credits because their games are just that much fun.

And to be honest, Starfleet Commander did contribute to my insomnia.

If anyone tries Starfleet Commander out and wants an alliance to join, look up my alliance – “Fading Suns“.

Who says you have to make a 3D game to be considered AAA?  With top notch companies barely scratching a living, even with a million copies sold and barely breaking even, other companies are innovating and producing incredible new titles in 2D.

The first is the infamous indie game “Castle Crashers”:

The second is the company that breathed new life into the 2D genre with their breathtaking game “Odin Sphere”.  Here is their latest title “Muramasa” coming out for the Wii:

And lastly, is a company that is has owned the fighting game genre with “Guilty Gear”.  But since their publisher owns the rights to their groundbreaking fighting game and forced the game to become a 3D RTS, they have broken out and gone indie for their new IP, “BlazBlue” and have rocked the socks out of Street Fighter 4 and King of Fighters 12:

Long Live 2D!

This could have been an incredibly different story

After watching a lot of the special features and extras in the Pixar DVDs, I have a strange feeling that Pixar uses something akin to “Agile Development” methodology in their storytelling.

In the “Incredibles” deleted scenes, the villain, “Syndrome”, actually makes an appearance at the start of the movie while Violet is just a little baby.  He invades the home of Mr. and Mrs. Incredible while they are still a young couple. This scene was supposed to be the prelude to the story introducing the characters and their super powers.  It included a fully animated storyboard with sounds and voices. The dialog of Syndrome breaking into the home and capturing the family even included a mention that there was a prohibition on “supers” marrying and having children.

The final movie did not include any of this. In fact, if this was the original scene for the movie, it would have radically altered the entire story, plot trajectory, theme and mood to the narrative. This wasn’t a “deleted scene” so much as it was a complete rewrite of the entire story.  In fact, in some of the “Behind the Scenes” dialog, Syndrome was not even considered the main antagonist of the plot.  He was supposed to just be a random villain that allows the characters to display their super powers.

What Pixar appears to do is that they storyboard, voice and create the entire movie more than once and get audience feedback. This allows the storytellers the ability to refine the story ideas over and over again – scrapping bad ones, changing scene orders, and completely rewriting the story if need be. It is the “Agile Development” method of software taken to film – quick iterations, and lots of opportunities for feedback loops.

Linguini was voiced by Lou Ramano, Art and Production Design

In fact, that is how the voices for Linguini and Emile were discovered for “Ratatouille” – they were Pixar staff who did the voice work for these storyboard sessions and fit the characters so well, they kept them for the final production.

Keep in mind, this is merely conjecture from viewing a lot of “Behind the Scenes” features on the DVDs and on the Internet for the latest Pixar movies. But at the same time, I cannot help but think that a massive amount of research was done to perfect the movies that Pixar produces.

Both “Ratatouille” and “Up” stunned me in their storytelling craft. But if you attempt to describe to someone what these two stories are about, they would be incredulous to believe that someone could actually tell a good story from such a ridiculous plot premise.

It is almost as if someone at Pixar is taking bets that using their storytelling method, they can tell a good story from anything that you can throw at them: from a mouse who wants to learn how to cook in France, to an old man who strings his house up on helium balloons and wants to fly to South America.

With so much story refinement done up-front with tons of research done on audience reaction, I think that it would be nigh impossible for Pixar to make a bad movie. At worse, you won’t get a Pixar movie next year because they are still iterating the kinks out of the current story they are developing, but you will never get a bad one.

"Up" was probably created by a random plot generator