Casual Connect

The regional social networks in Eastern Europe have grown explosively over the past 12-18 months, dramatically widening the playing field for micro-transaction monetized online games. Companies like Odnoklassniki, Vkontakte, and Nasza-Klasa have taken the distribution potential of the social graph and Facebook-like platform services to the Eastern European audience, and what was once the exclusive [...]

500,000,000 active users certainly puts Facebook in a league of it’s own in terms of social communities online.  But as huge as that audience is, it’s still not EVERYBODY.  Success on Facebook is an important centerpiece to game developers, but there are substantial revenue opportunities around the world in localized networks, as well as potential [...]

How do you attract people using acoustic speakers or headphones? How do you produce quality soundscapes for casual games in cooperation with an audio team? How do you estimate the quality of sound a developer received from an audio supplier? The answers to these questions and more will be revealed in Dmitry’s presentation. Delivered at [...]

Access to robust, relevant analytics about your game is fundamental to success in Social Games. Without this you will waste time and money, squander opportunities, and ultimately fail to find success. For most of us, this is clear. However – how does one GET access to such a system? What functionality should it contain? How [...]

As social games continue to evolve at mind-blowing speed, effective methods and tools must also advance in order to facilitate this rapid growth. This lecture will focus on developing 3D social games on the Alternativa3D engine, benefiting flash developers and project managers alike with discussions ranging from effective team building through the use Agile and [...]

Anyone who has tried to program a complex character’s behavior has faced the problem of consecutive actions realization. And what should be done if these actions last indefinitely? In this workshop, we will solve these problems and learn to program AI more effectively. Real-world examples will illustrate the development of a decision-making system for an [...]

Which trends will influence the casual games market in the near future? Social networking? Mobile gaming? New methods of monetization? The emergence of local markets and additional distribution channels? Something else? In his report, “Where are the trends taking us?”, Alawar Entertainment CEO Alexander Lyskovsky will discuss the changes the casual games industry will soon [...]

The largest demographics of casual games are women, while developers are mostly men. Developers are from Mars, while players are from Venus. The question is how they can developers know what women like and dislike? What kind of storyline would girls love to see and what stereotypes don’t work? Developers make mistakes. Nevosoft has researched [...]

Since 2006, Amazon Web Services have been providing on demand, pay-as-you-go infrastructure to businesses of all sizes. This talk will introduce the Cloud platform offered by Amazon, and discuss how companies can make use of Amazon’s massive scale and operational experience to build highly scalable games and move to market more quickly. With the help [...]

For a casual game to be successful, the developer must address the desires of the target group. Yet while huge international corporations pump large amounts of money into research, casual game developers simply rely on their knowledge of the market and their intuition. To improve this situation and to inform casual game developers of the [...]