Geewa Blog

Geewa is Looking for a Flash Developer

cedric.maloux.nospam@nospam.geewa.com (stepan.fiala) — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 11:50:00 +0100

To expand our Flash Platform team, we are now looking for an experienced Action Script developer.

We require:

experience in creating Flash applications / games
strong knowledge of Action Script 3.0
knowledge of Flash Builder and Flash Professional
understanding of OOP and basic design patterns
willingness to develop one’s skills
motivated approach to work

We prefer:

knowledge of Flex / AIR technologies
knowledge of AS physics or 3D engines (such as Box 2D or Away 3D)
knowledge of areas such as video- and audio-streaming or 3D
experience in web technologies (HTML, CSS a Ajax) and graphics tools
experience in development for mobile and devices

We offer:

exciting work on online community games for millions of users
work with new technologies
new experiences, professional growth
work in a fast developing perspective company
attractive salary
floating work hours
work in a young team with informal atmosphere

If you are interested in the above position, please send us your CV and portfolio / examples of your work to jobs@geewa.com.

Geewa Launches its Casual Gaming Platform on Facebook with 5,358 Games

cedric.maloux.nospam@nospam.geewa.com (cedric.maloux) — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 13:07:00 +0100

Today, Geewa is pleased to announce we have successfully ported our casual gaming platform onto Facebook.

Built using our tried and tested multiplayer technology, the Geewa platform allows Facebook users to enjoy Geewa’s original games as well as more than 5,300 single player games, many of them handpicked. All are searchable in real-time. From a user perspective, we are bringing to Facebook all the benefits of a fully integrated set of features like our Avatar editor, Avatar virtual items, hall of fame, weekly leagues, our virtual currency (G-Points) and our Pro Player subscription model. Users can search for the most played games, the best rated games or discover newly added games (we add on average one new game per day!). The availability of our Live Games platform on Facebook also means you need install only one app for access to all our games. Once a user has the Live Games app installed, they can search and discover all the available games and challenge their Facebook friends to a real-time synchronous match in the popular Pool live! or Word Soccer live! or many others.

Since our platform is connected to our central database of players, Facebook users will be able to compete against players from outside of Facebook. At peak, more than 20,000 people are currently connected to the platform which has been in production for one year at some of our existing partners’ websites.

Play full screen! One of the drawbacks of the Facebook page format is that it is not possible to play a game in full screen mode. Live Games makes this possible thanks to the integration of Facebook Connect to our platform. In one click, players can now easily move back and forth between the Facebook environment and our website to enjoy their favorite games in full screen splendour without losing their Facebook identity and network of friends.

Going forward we intend to optimize our technology for Facebook’s Newsfeed and fully open the platform’s API to allow other casual game developers to benefit from our virtual currency, multiplayer engine and the various underlying set of features the platform hosts.

At Geewa, we believe that the future of casual gaming will be characterized by social gaming companies luring users away from social networks into the open-web where they will have a greater granularity of control over the user's experience and the underlying technology. The recent launch of farmville.com is a testimony to this vision. To achieve this, companies will need to start investing in platforms into which their games can be slotted in order to benefit from cross-platform features. Such platforms also reduce the time-to-market necessary to launch new games since some functionnalities will already be available at the paltform level.

You can experience Geewa’s Live Games platform here: http://apps.facebook.com/live-games/

Troubles with opaque / transparent wmode

cedric.maloux.nospam@nospam.geewa.com (stepan.fiala) — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 12:35:00 +0100

Have you ever run your swf in other wmode than window? If so, you might have experienced the same troubles as we did in our Virtual elections Facebook application. All the problems arose from the seemingly unimportant decision – as we needed to pop up Facebook dialogs (such as Invite Friends or Publish to Wall) over the Flash movie, we decided to switch the swf’s wmode parameter to opaque. While testing the application, we then came across the following two (and pretty annoying) bugs:

Corrupted local characters in text inputs

This an old and well known bug. In the demo above, try to type a Czech word “žluťoučký” (you need a Czech keyboard for it). What you get (or at least what I get) is “~lueouký” in Firefox 3.5 / IE 8 and žlu´toučký” in Chrome 3 / Safari 4 / Opera 10 (I’m testing on Windows XP). There are several workarounds for this bug:

swfInputs displays an overlaying HTML input field above the Flash text field and passes the captured key strokes to the Flash movie via JavaScript.
JSTextReader is another JavaScript-based solution – the difference is that JavaScript is only used for listening to the keystroke events and transferring the correct chars into Flash (i.e. no overlaying HTML input filed is used).
Nicolas Cynober’s workaround is in my opinion the most decent one. It’s almost a pure ActionScript solution – the keystrokes are captured directly on the Flex TextInput / TextArea components through the TextEvent.TEXT_INPUT event. Using the event.preventDefault()method, the event handler “swallows” the corrupted characters and replaces them by the correct ones. Of course, for this solution to work, you have to provide it with a class that maps the wrong characters (or their codes) to the right ones. JavaScritpt is in this case only used to detect client’s browser.

For our purposes, the last mentioned approach was the most suitable, although not perfect (some characters may still be corrupted based on browser and platform). I had to create the Czech keyboard mapping and it was a tricky task because unlike other languages, the Czech keyboard does not work even in MSIE. So I’ve written two mapping classes: PTCzechKeyboard_MSIE_Firefox (supports MSIE + FIrefox) and PTCzechKeyboard (supports all other browsers). You can check the result here (feel free to use the source code attached to the demo):

Mouse wheel not working (Firefox / Chrome / Safari / Opera)

Maybe not that critical as the text inputs bug but still quite unpleasant, as it significantly reduces usability of Flash applications. In the opaque / transparent wmode movies, the MouseEvent.MOUSE_WHEEL event not dispatched (except for Internet Explorer). As the result, all the scroll bars can only be controlled by dragging the thumb or pressing the arrow buttons, which is not really comfortable. Although there is a workaround available for this bug too, in our Virtual elections project we decided to ignore this issue because of the budget constraints.

Let’s hope Adobe is going to address both bugs in the future Flash Player releases. In the days of hybrid AJAX – Flash applications, using opaque or transparent wmode becomes a necessity, so if you find the described bugs as serious as we do, please vote for them (FP-501 and FP-289) in the Adobe Bug System.

Geewa's Pool Live! Now the Most Popular Pool Game on Facebook

cedric.maloux.nospam@nospam.geewa.com (cedric.maloux) — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 11:22:00 +0100

There are time in the life of a company when you have to sit down, listen and react to unexpected events. It could be the shortage of cash, a partner canceling a long-term contract, an employee leaving, an unexpected order from the sales team or you could be experimenting tremendous growth on one of your distribution channel.

This last case is exactly what we have been noticing for the past months with our multiplayer games on Facebook. Last week, Geewa's Pool Live! game overtook Pool Practice, a singleplayer pool game, and as a result Geewa's Pool Live! is now the most played Pool game on Facebook. From the day we launched it and seeded it to our own friends, the number of players has not stopped growing. In combination with our other Live! games, Facebook has simply become in less than 6 months our 2nd biggest distribution channel.

We already knew that launching our multiplayer games on Facebook would help us reach a new audience but we did not expect such a fast growth (even though secretly hoping for it). For this reason, we have decided to react and put more focus on Social Networks. Our game are already available on Facebook, MySpace, iGoogle and we are currently finalizing our Open-Social implementation. Expect a lot of news from us in the coming months including the release of a new version of 8-Balls Pool. Our players have given us a lot of feedback on how to make Pool Live! even better and we are taking the best ideas and including them into the next version of the product.

See you at the Pool table ;-)

Wedding announcement.

cedric.maloux.nospam@nospam.geewa.com (eva.richterova) — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 15:56:00 +0100

Wow! We have just received the great news that two people who met on Geewa have just got married today at 2pm :o)

Congratulations from all of us at Geewa. Wishing the new couple all the best

New member of Geewa

cedric.maloux.nospam@nospam.geewa.com (eva.richterova) — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 16:17:00 +0100

Hello everybody,

my name is Eva and I am a new Community Manager here in Geewa. Cannot wait to work with all of you. Hope to manage everything ASAP to became a real help for our clients & customers.

Yours,

Ewa

Playing Flash Player 10 Movie in Flash Player 9

cedric.maloux.nospam@nospam.geewa.com (stepan.fiala) — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 10:51:00 +0100

When working on our avatar project, I recently faced a tricky problem: since we use some Flash Player 10 features (such as PixelBender filters), we had to target our swf to Flash Player 10. On the other hand, we still do not want to force our users to install Flash Player 10. The decision was obvious: to make our application backward compatible – wherever we use a FP10 feature, we would also provide a simplified FP9 workaround.

My first approach to handle this backward compatibility issue was quite straightforward. I simply created a method that tests if the movie runs in Flash Player 10:

public static function isFlashPlayer10(): Boolean

{

var regExp: RegExp = /( )(?P<fpVersion>\d*)(,)/;

var fpVersion: int = int(regExp.exec(Capabilities.version).fpVersion);

return fpVersion >= 10;

}

And then I assumed, that the following code would solve my problem:

if (Utils.isFlashPlayer10())

{

//fp10 implementation goes here …

var shader: Shader = new Shader(new BendShader());

}

else

{

//fp9 workaround goes here …

}

However, when I ran this movie in Flash Player 9, the player has thrown this exception:

VerifyError: Error #1014: Classflash.display::Shader could not be found.

After some research I’ve found the solution: if you don’t want your FP10 movie to crash in Flash Player 9, you have to put to all the FP10 functionality into a separate class, e.g. UtilsFp10(), so that no references to FP10 classes (such as Shader or ShaderFilter) occur anywhere else in your code. Referencing the UtilsFp10() class itself then causes no problems (although just for sure it’s wise to wrap the UtilsFp10() method calls into a try-catch block).

if (Utils.isFlashPlayer10())

{

//fp10 implementation goes here …

try

{

UtilsFp10.playPixelBenderEffect();

}

catch (err: Error) {};

}

else

{

//fp9 workaround goes here …

}

Geewa Is Hiring a Community Manager

cedric.maloux.nospam@nospam.geewa.com (cedric.maloux) — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 16:50:00 +0100

Are you passionate about online communities? Are you able to communicate in English and Czech both verbally and written? Are you an avid user of Facebook and Twitter? Do you like casual games? Then we want to hear from you.

Geewa’s community manager is the voice of Geewa externally and the voice of the users internally. He/She serves as a hub and must have the ability to:

•   Personally connect with our audience (humanize the company)
•   Provide feedback to IT and Management
•   Be the interface between users and IT
•   Represent the Geewa community during internal discussions
•   Animate external communities (Facebook, Twitter, etc…)
•   Manage crisis
•   Manage all publishing on all sites
•   Select and publish new games in Czech and English
•   Monitor Chat
•   Manage Administrators
•   Post news items on site and blog

Responsibilities include:

• Creatively and proactively assist customers.

o   Serve as the initial point of contact for inbound requests.
o   Identify and analyze issues, patterns and trends in customer requests & product performance.
o   Moderate discussions on Geewa’s site and on external communities
o   Transfer the information to the appropriate people so that they can respond accordingly.

•   bugs,
•   new ideas,
•   messaging effectiveness,
•   frequently asked questions.

o   Recommend new tools or services

•   Author blog posts on the company and user blogs.
•   Conduct online research among users (i.e. using tools such as SurveyMonkey.com)

o   Define enquiries
o   Manage the software/online questionaire
o   Collect and analyze data
o   Present results to the relevant team members

•   Manage external communities

o   Monitor
o   Post
o   Create new communities
o   Comment on external blogs

•   Ensure all new games are available
•   Establish metrics & report on a monthly basis including recommendations.
•   Proactively escalate issues, observations, opportunities, and insights to the executive team.
•   Communicate issues, opportunities and insights to the company at large.
•   Stay up to date on new social media tools, best practices and how other organizations and companies are using them, so that Geewa can continue to be an early adopter of these technologies.
•   Manage the premium subscribers program

o   Liaise with external partner for special offers

Please contact us in English at: jobs@geewa.com Subject: Online Community Manager

English Version of Word Soccer Has Landed on Facebook

cedric.maloux.nospam@nospam.geewa.com (cedric.maloux) — Mon, 25 May 2009 16:35:00 +0100

A few weeks after introducing 8-Ball Pool, Backgammon and Reversi to Facebook, we are happy to release today our most popular multiplayer game: Word Soccer.

If you like word games, this one is definitely for you. The goal is to create as many possible words as fast as possible and as a result score more goals than your opponent. This game is inspired from some classic word games and it became our most popular game here in the Czech Republic with almost 42,000 people playing the Czech version every day.

This game was originally designed 3 years ago for the World Cup in Germany and to our surprise very quickly became more popular with women (over 60% of players) something we did not expect considering the name of the game.

Click on the picture below to be redirected to the Facebook version of Word Soccer.

What If Casual Gaming Was The Solution to Improve Your Users Loyalty?

cedric.maloux.nospam@nospam.geewa.com (cedric.maloux) — Thu, 21 May 2009 14:50:00 +0100

Note: The blog post is sponsored by Geewa's shameless self promotion department (aka: me).

I was going through our Google Analytics data this morning and thought readers of this blog might be interested in a couple of information I found on user loyalty and recency. At Geewa, we like to say that our users love our games and come back often to play whenever they want to have a break from their boss or their demanding husband and kids.

Looking at the last 30 days, we can see below that Geewa's large selection of games (you can play more than 5,500 in total) means that the majority of our visitors come back more than 200 times per month. That's more than 7 times per day.

For us, this is a very important piece of information because like any other online business, we have to make sure we minimize our bounce rate. For our existing partners as well as our future one, it means that by having the Geewa games on their site, they have a new way to make sure their visitors come back to their site.

Another way to look at the same phenomenon is the visitors recency or when was the last time a visitor came to play a game. Not surprisingly, 76.66% of our users come back within 24h.

I don't have this kind of data for other categories of sites (read: I'm too lazy to research) but I guess there are other online services which can be as addictive (any Facebook addict wants to comment here?). These result are great because somehow it tells me that even if it is mandatory we keep on looking after our existing audience, if we focus on bringing new users the majority of them will stick and come back. Often!

Another piece of data which complements this is that the average time of game play on our platform is more than 90 minutes per visit. I remember talking to a VC a few weeks ago and he was telling me "you know Cedric, I saw your stats about the average play time and I doubted it but then I went to the site and ended up playing for more than one hour".

So if you are having problem with user retention, stickiness or user loyalty maybe it is time to investigate launching a casual gaming section (preferably with Geewa of course!).