This week’s release is a pretty exciting one.  For quite a while now we’ve been discussing how exactly to implement user-defined application achievements as well as our own Sharendipity achievements.  Well we’ve settled on a plan and we’re happy to announce a new Achievements feature available to all application creators.

Achievements are a way to establish goals for playing a game or using an application.  Sometimes they’re difficult accomplishments, such as reaching a new high score, and sometimes they’re just for fun.  Either way, it gives application creators a new way to engage their users and allows your friends to see what you’ve been up to in Sharendipity .

One example of a Sharendipity achievement is the Application Creator, which you can earn by publishing your own application in Sharendipity.  As shown below, when these achievements are earned your Facebook friends will be notified through their news feeds (if you are using a Facebook account):

There are additional Sharendipity achievements for both creators and players, such as reaching a certain number of plays for one of your creations, or ranking first place in a published game.

You can create your own achievements through a new option in the Director menu under the Application heading.  The Achievements Manager dialog will display all achievements that have been defined for an application, allowing you to create new achievements and edit existing ones.

To highlight how some of the achievements might be used, I’ve also published a new game called Block Boxer.  This is the view that I see as the creator of the achievements:

The game itself is pretty challenging but a lot of the fun is in trying to unlock all of the achievements.  Here are a few more games that have new achievements :

Scramble, a sliding-puzzle game that uses the Flickr interestingness feed.

Dodge, a game where you have to avoid the enemies by moving your mouse.

For more information and discussion about the Achievements feature, check out the Wiki page.

Creating and playing Michael Arrington games is all the rage on twitter these days with the release of PopFly’s Game Creator. Folks love to add Mike’s mug shot to their games. So we decided that we should join in the fun.

With our release of a new personalization feature, we’ve made it dead simple to incorporate your own pictures and sounds into games and share them with others.

If you aren’t ready to embark on the creation of a brand new viral hit, you can start with an existing game and personalize the artwork to your liking. Every application can be personalized by pressing the personalize it button below every running applet. If you’d like to dig into the logic, add or subtract contact, use the edit it button to whip up something even more authentic.

Providing our contribution to the Arrington game genre… Fly through space and shoot down giant Arrington asteroids with Arringroids.

This is a personalized version of TJ’s Asteroids game, and incorporates high scores, friend challenges, and a discussion board. You get all of this with every game you create or personalize - without the need to program!

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 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 have been rolling out new features and stability improvements nearly every week. We are especially excited about last week’s release because we have incorporated additional viral channels within Facebook.

Users can now challenge their friends to a game contest from within Sharendipity using Facebook notifications. This provides an exciting new level of social engagement for game-related applications currently published on the platform.

Furthermore, from a creators perspective, they now get this tight social integration for free with every Sharendipity application they create and deploy on our platform. No programming is required on their behalf to take advantage of this powerful element of Facebook. Simply add the high score action to your game, and the friend challenge framework will appear on your asset page. Very fun stuff!

More is on the way! Come check out some of the creations that have been published thus far, and challenge a friend today!

I spent the end of last week enjoying the Games, Learning, and Society Conference in Madison, WI. Educators, researchers and a smattering of corporate folks came together to discuss how games are being used to enhance one’s learning experience.

The most compelling content for me were the case studies where IT staffs and game developers discussed their experiences building games for specific educational purposes (as opposed to the faction that builds games of their own design - without the direction of a particular teacher or course). Two of these stories are right here in our backyard - Filament Games and the ENGAGE project in UW-Madison’s DoIT team.

Dan White and Dan Norton of Filament Games made a couple of great points about building games in this space. First, they highlighted the fact that it’s more important to provide problem spaces for students to explore than it is to present raw content. The text books do the latter just fine. Second, a successful project needs to find efficient and effective means to link the designers with the subject matter experts (teachers). Without that, the output misses the mark just like it does in other software domains.

If there was any doubt about whether or not there was an appetite for new games in education, the ENGAGE team squashed it. They seemed to be overwhelmed with projects. The UW-Madison campus is filled with professors eager to add new learning tools to their courses. What they seemed to lack were tools, however. They went after each new project with a clean piece of paper and long development cycles.

Although I would never describe us as an educational software provider, we’ve always felt that our platform offered terrific opportunities for learning. After attending GLS, I’m very optimistic that this learning community can take advantage of the blend of interactive and creative elements in the platform. Not only has it proven to be a fun vehicle for building applications, but we are beginning to see that one of the most powerful aspects of the platform is the ease at which new ideas can be prototyped. Either through the re-use of components already available in the community or simply by taking advantage of the interactive nature of the environment. Try, fail. Try, fail. Try, succeed! It’s beginning to feel as if the act of application development is in itself a game!

Some of my takeaways from GLS…

• everyone needs tools that help bring the subject matter experts closer to the game/content designers
• everyone needs tools to quickly prototype ideas
• there is a void of tools that let the students become part of the lesson creation (one exception to this would be the MMOG environments like Second Life)
• unlike a lot of art-driven game design, the computer CAN be used in the design if it is interactive

One of the nice things about the blogosphere is the ability to quickly and easily get perspectives from others that participated in the same events. For more analysis from the GLS natives look here…

• Mark Chen’s Blog
• David Warlick’s Blog
• Jenny Levine’s verbose notes

You can also check out the talks yourself on Sonic Foundry’s Media Site (this year’s content has yet to be posted)