Brain Seeds 2.0

Although Brain Seeds has only been live for a month we've already come up with a bunch of new changes for Brain Seeds 2.0 to make the game more accessible and more enticing to the normal gamer.

We basically took a beating in terms of gamer retention so we know we're doing something wrong. It's bad when you have 46 people play the game in the first week and no one comes back to play the game again.

So here's the list of improvements we want to make to the game more palatable to the general public.

1. Practice Mode and Competitive Mode are being removed and replaced with Prize Mode
2. Prize Mode will consist of 15 randomly selected questions - This will shift the game play to be a more frantic scavenger hunt for the correct answer by following the answer links.
3. The player with the highest score at the end of the week will win $15 for themselves - We believe this is important in attracting a larger audience, one that probably wouldn't play the game otherwise.
4. If we don't have any sponsored gifts to give out for the Community Prize, players will be able to donate $15 to a charity of their choice.
5. All players will be able to take the Prize Game once for free, but all subsequent games played require the player to submit a question.
6. During gameplay the player's score is shown along side the scores of the top 7 scores for that week.
7. On the score screen we'll tell the player their score and ranking among all the games played so far - i.e You are ranked 9th out of 230
8. All question submissions will allow the player to immediately play Prize Mode again. However any "bad" question submission will disqualify the player for the entire week.
9. Questions submitted must fit into one of our preselected categories - By controlling which question categories we offer, we can control what type of questions get submitted which allows us to subtly guide the game direction and content.

Brain Seeds has finally launched!

After a couple years of development and a team that grew from 1 to 8, I'm incredibly proud to say that Brain Seeds has finally launched.

Here's the official blurbed I've been sending around.

Our videogame nonprofit Gamers of Action recently launched Brain Seeds, a community based online trivia game that has all of its questions supplied by players themselves.

Brain Seeds is a community-content-driven weekly quiz that allows players to educate others about issues that they are passionate about.

Since all the questions in the weekly quizzes are supplied by fellow players, Brain Seeds plants "seeds" of information in the hopes that those seeds will grow to (1) motivate quiz-takers to learn more about a particular topic and (2) help players develop an interest in creating positive social change.

To play Brain Seeds and get more information, check out

http://www.gamersofaction.org/wordpress/brain-seeds

If you know anyone who might be interested in playing, please forward on this message because we really want to make Brain Seeds a real community driven game.

Thanks,

Tim

Founded in 2008, Gamers of Actions is a Los Angeles-based non-profit game development group dedicated to creating and finding gaming opportunities that can bring about positive social change.

Brain Seeds Website – www.gamersofaction.org/BrainSeeds.html

Gamers of Action Website – www.gamersofaction.org

For more information, please contact us at info@gamersofaction.org

Ninjacational - Bad ass name for our future game company!

Just soak in all the corny goodness of Ninjacational - Ninja + Educational.  Basically a name for the type of games we want to make.  Both fun and deceptively educational.  Maybe the tagline could be "Did I just learn something?" or "You just got Ninjacaded!"

Brain Seeds just launched on Kickstarter.com

BIG NEWS!

We just launched our Brain Seeds project Kickstarter.com and now we have to start asking for donations and backers.

If you would like to support use with Brain Seeds you can donate through Kickstarter at

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/964679488/brain-seeds-seed-learn-win

We're shooting to raise $1000 by February 20th and I'm confident we can do it.

Brain Seeds Screen Shots

Here's some Brain Seeds screen shots to feast your eyes on

Brain Seeds is alive and kicking (at least in alpha-ish form)

Quite a while since I've posted, but quite a bit happened this past half a year.

Here's a short recap of the awesome-ness that is Gamers of Action and Brain Seeds

1) Started the project using Flash and created an ugly artless prototype that functioned.

2) Hired two awesome art/animation interns that worked with Kat, David, Sophia and I to get the game all arted up and looking good. They did an amazing job over the 2.5 month summer internship.

3) David made some cool music for the game and is still working on some more cool stuff so we can add more variety.

4) Integrated all the art/animation/music into the game and added more functionality that users usually take for granted like emailing lost passwords, emailing prize notifications, tool tips and dynamic sponsor information loading.

5) The game is now ready to be tested on a much larger scale so I can find out how our web server turned game server actually holds up. I'm hoping we don't loss too many PHP requests because if we do I might have to migrate everything over to a dedicated game server which is going to be quite costly.

Now after all that technical hype you can now check out the alpha-ish version of the game at

http://www.gamersofaction.org/Games/BrainSeeds/BrainSeeds.html

If you're reading this post and would be like to be part of the beta test please let me know at tim@gamersofaction.org or join our Gamers of Action facebook group.

Shit like this makes me really sad

Reading this article about how Obama and his administration are now backing out of releasing the latest batch of Abu Ghraib and other US detainee prisons torture photos, makes me really sad.  To think that our country has sunk to such disgusting and evil acts in OUR name.  Those photos really need to be released so the truth has a chance to come out and the perpetrators are brought to justice, both those who commited the torture and those who ordered them.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/5395830/Abu-Ghraib-abuse-photos-show-rape.html

As a gamer developer, my first instinct would be to make a game (not even sure that's the right word to use anymore) about this, but I'm not sure the general public would be ready for something like that which is extremely sad.  

Games are not being used to their full potential as a medium for education and critical thinking and honest reflection.  In my mind, if you can write a book about it or make a movie about it, there is no reason a game could not be made about it.