There were two keynotes for the Casual Games Summit this year, one yesterday from PlayFirst, and one today from Microsoft Casual Games. To my surprise, it was actually Chris Early from Microsoft who expressed more of a core understanding of the future of casual games.

Before Chris’s talk, I was a bit dismayed at the content in the Casual Games Summit. There’s a lot of recapping about what casual games are: who the target demographic is; what the target platforms are; etc. If you’re here at GDC, chances are you already know this.

Chris realizes that casual games need to continue to innovate. The one statement that summed it up best was that we need to continue to look at casual games as “brand new,” a territory whose horizon is always evolving. Specifically, he understands that innovation in casual games is happening through social networks and the activities involved therein.

Among the specific topics Chris has noticed in casual game innovation are asynchronous play, the ability to play with your friends, mini-games as multiple winning opportunities, data persistence, and pyramiding through the social graph. He knows that the portals need to embrace change, and he’s got the right idea. As an indication, yesterday’s talk on Social Gaming was in front of a crowd that can’t even be described as standing-room only:

To his credit, I’ll also mention that John Welch from PlayFirst had a few key points. One: the minority is still happy with the $20 price model and that we require new business models. Two: casual games are still dominated by clones.

What does this all mean? My hope is that it shows that there will be additional support from those who recognize these facts, enabling the true innovators to get their ideas to market faster, providing new business models for developers to capitalize on their creations. You can see this in the explosion of companies such as SGN, Zynga, and of course, Sharendipity.

It’s worth adding that innovation can come from anywhere – including you - so come innovate using Sharendipity and distribute your creations to your friends!

Lots of interesting thoughts from the opening sessions in the Independent Games Summit. The first session I attended was about the Potential of Indie Games:

Kellee Santiago, the maker of Flow, had some really great thoughts about intrinsic rewards systems in games. She was talking about rewarding the player through the gameplay itself as opposed to extrinsic rewards such as points and achievements. This type of gameplay promotes a different kind of behavior in the player and really treats them as a partaker in the experience rather than simply a consumer. As examples, this can be done by promoting the player’s actions and the skills they develop through in-game feedback, such as the way the character grows in Flow.

The maker of Everyday Shooter, Jon Mak, also had a great demo that showed off the importance of graphics as part of the gaming experience in opposition to the growing mantra of Gameplay over Graphics. The demo was based on what he called “Input/Output Theory” and allowing the player to feel like they truly own the output of the game. He does this by linking every input from the user to the visual output. Even with very abstract gameplay, this lets the user associate the actions they perform with the result of the game, making them feel more a part of the game.

Pekko Koskinen finished up the session talking about Games as systems of behavior. He states that game design can be thought of as an art of fictional behavior, providing a lens through which the user sees a particular experience. Unlike so many other forms of expression, games are not reliant on the media through which they’re presented. Once you know the rules of a game, you can even play it in your head!

We’re excited to see what else the conference has to offer and will continue to post our experiences!

The Game Developer’s Conference is getting started! You can follow our activities this week on Twitter @sharendipity.

More to follow…

The Sharendipity crew is heading to San Francisco for the Game Developer’s Conference during the week of February 18th. We’re looking forward to another great event.

Please let us know if you’ll be there and would like to get together. We’d love to share stories and show off some of the exciting things we’ve been up to.

We recently issued a new release of the Sharendipity platform that was aimed at improving launch performance. One of the issues that we addressed was the scripting engine that allows advanced users to extend the core functionality of the platform.

You might think that the underlying scripting engine is only important to the authors of shared assets in Sharendipity. The reality is that the wrong scripting engine can provide a very negative impression of application performance to any user.

Originally we used the Jython project to provide scripting using the Python language. The functionality was great. It was even fast. Despite this, there were a few big problems.

Jython is large. The download size for Jython alone was nearly 1.2MB. The result of this is that the user’s first experience when launching our applet takes significantly longer, directly affecting the percentage of users that are willing to sit through the download.

This wasn’t the biggest problem though. Our number one issue was the initialization time. On many users’ machines this was commonly around 10-15 seconds. When a user launches an application in Sharendipity, it may require the use of scripts before doing anything else. We needed the application to launch and run immediately and this just wasn’t possible with Jython.

Our most recent release changed our underlying scripting engine to use the Rhino JavaScript implementation. Rhino fixes every single issue that we had with Jython.

The Rhino developers understand the importance of a small footprint. Rhino provides a very easy way to reduce the download size to as small as 204KB, or about 20% of the size of Jython. There is no initialization time for the Rhino engine either, so there is no pause when loading an application in Sharendpity.

The smaller download and lack of initialization are a huge win for us already. There’s also something else that developers might not think about when choosing a scripting engine, and that’s portability.

We’re still in Alpha mode, so we have enough flexibility to change our scripting implementation. JavaScript (or ECMAScript), is the only scripting language that was really an option when creating a Rich Internet Application. This is what ActionScript, Flash’s language, is based on, and Silverlight supports it as well (in some respect, at least). Furthermore, just about every web developer in the world knows it.

We’re trying to strike a balance between the demands of our power users and the ability for our casual users to launch existing content very quickly. We’d love to hear your feedback on walking this tight line!