Today we have showcased some websites that are a bit different from what we usually see. These websites are special for their design which is very creative and unique: they’re colorful, artistic, have a lot of interesting effects and non-standard elements as well as custom navigation. These sites are very different but they have one thing in common – they do stand out!
See All Unique Web Designs »
Free Magic Giveaway – Win Your Very Own Foldable Cardboard Buddy.
VectorStock Giveaway – Download 100′s of Amazing Vector Images, Illustrations, Icons, Logos and Clip Art.
A Great Combination of Free Online Tools for Web Designers.
Updated at 4:30pm PST for record $1 million amount.
Earlier this week, crowd-funding site Kickstarter set a new record when the Elevation iPhone Dock became the first project to close in on the $1 million dollar mark. But that milestone has officially been bested. In its first 24 hours, gaming studio Double Fine Adventure’s Kickstarter project has raised more than $1 million and it shows no signs of slowing down.
Double Fine’s Tim Schafer tweeted the above photo of the Double Fine team celebrating the $1 million mark.
As GamesBeat reported yesterday, Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert are legendary game-makers from the golden age of PC gaming, having created classic LucasArts adventures such as Maniac Mansion, Secret of Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, and Grim Fandando.
But in the era of Angry Birds, publishers weren’t willing to take a risk on a new project from the duo. As Schafer put it in the Kickstarter video, publishers would laugh in his face if he asked for the funds to do an old-school adventure game. But legions of fans are always asking for it, and offering to pay. So they turned to Kickstarter, hoping to raise $400,000 and offer fans a chance to watch the creative process, pitch in ideas, and even star as characters in the game.
Sketches of Double Fine’s new game
“There’s an unprecedented opportunity to show the public what game development of this caliber looks like from the inside,” Schafer said. “Not the sanitized commercials-posing-as-interviews that marketing teams only value for their ability to boost sales, but an honest, in-depth insight into a modern art form that will both entertain and educate gamers and non-gamers alike.”
The incredible response to the project is going to give Double Fine a lot more leeway in how it crafts the game. “Additional money means it can appear on more platforms, be translated into more languages, have more music and voice, and an original soundtrack for the documentary, and more!” the team wrote in an update after passing its goal by a wide margin.
The developers behind the iOS game Hungry Shark recently released some statistics showing just how powerful the freemium model (in which customers download an app or game for free, and then support it with in-app purchases) can be. While the game floundered as a paid app, it’s gotten much more popular after going free, and actually increased its revenue by five times over. Currently, says Future Games, the average in-app purchase is as high as $3.26, and that’s in addition to having a daily active user base of 250,000 people. Clearly, the freemium model, when combined with the right game and the right audience, works very well.
But what’s the other side of the equation look like? Mobile advertising firm Flurry also released a report recently, and said that almost overwhelmingly, the main items sold in a freemium game are a “consumable” — a boost or temporary ability that a customer can use up. That’s opposed to a “durable” item, like a new weapon that stays around, or a “personalization” item, like a name change. Flurry says that since consumable items can often directly affect the game, consumers are much more interested in spending money on them, sometimes in surprising amounts.
Now, I’d argue that beyond all of this data, it still depends on just what game and which items you’re talking about. If a game is terrible, it’s far from guaranteed to make any money no matter what model you’re using. And I know for a fact that some consumers will backlash against a consumable item that affects gameplay too much, like a double-damage token in a multiplayer game, or anything else that could be seen as cheating.
But for the right games, and for items used and sold in the right way, freemium can support an app and even a whole developer with significant amounts of revenue. Angry Birds has been cited before as a great example of how to implement freemium content, with its Mighty Eagle consumable item. And there are a number of other games out there that have figured all of this out, and have the monetary rewards to prove it.
Freemium items may make money for devs, but aren’t kept by consumers originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 17 Aug 2011 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Tapjoy chief executive Mihir Shah said in an interview that a single line of code could solve his company’s dispute with Apple over the use of certain kinds of promotions for mobile games.
That single line could stop incentivized app downloads from being counted toward Apple’s top rankings list, Shah said. So far, Apple hasn’t responded to Tapjoy.
Apple has communicated that it is concerned that incenting users to download apps, as Tapjoy has done as one of its major businesses, has led to a manipulation of the top rankings for mobile games on Apple’s App Store. So Apple banned the incentive ads a few weeks back.
Tapjoy and Apple have held talks on the ban during the past few weeks, but Apple’s hard-and-fast ban on “pay per install” incentive promotions remains in place. Apple reportedly felt that developers using Tapjoy and other incentives were unfairly gaming the system and hurting the quality of the game rankings.
But Tapjoy said such incentivized promotions are common and that their use has enabled game developers to create a predictable and stable business on a platform that has a lot of competition.
Shah met with Apple to try to convince the company to allow a limited amount of pay-per-install promotions, with a cap that prevented developers from buying their way into the top 25. But Apple disallowed that kind of compromise, according to Tapjoy. Then Shah proposed the single line of code change. Apple did not respond to that suggestion.
“We have a simple fix for this problem,” Shah said. “If this is all about the top charts, we can solve it with that line of code. I am hoping this is all a misunderstanding.”
As we reported yesterday, Tapjoy surveyed 496 iOS (iPhone, iPad etc.) developers that have used its mobile app distribution service. Almost half of those have reported an increase in user complaints about the inability to earn in-game currency by installing other apps. A quarter of the respondents said they are receiving “way too many” user complaints about the problem.
“It’s clear that the effects on developers and users have been pretty telling,” Shah said. “Early on, Apple was a huge proponent of innovative developers and it encouraged those developers to make big investments in its platform. Unless there is something we are missing, they now seem completely uninterested.”
The number of developers who saw their game usage decrease after the Apple policy change is eight times higher than the number who saw game usage increase. And the ratio was 15 to 1 for those who saw revenues decline versus those who saw a revenue increase. At least two-thirds of the companies surveyed said that 20 percent or more of their revenues came from the pay-per-install model. Many said that pay-per-install generated 60 percent or more of their revenue.
Last month, developers found out that Apple was rejecting their new pay-per-install apps and updated apps because of its concerns that the apps violated one of the App Store rules. In a pay-per-install app, a user is encouraged through an incentive to install another app. The developer of the app that gets installed shares revenue with the original app that steered the user to make the install, so it is a kind of advertising program. And it has been a lucrative one at that. The system allows developers to distribute their apps much more widely than they otherwise could.
But when Apple tweaked the way it calculates App Store rankings a couple of months ago, it also changed its stance on pay-per-install apps, for a largely unexplained reason. Developers have been directed to section 3.10 of the Apple developer program license agreement, which says, “Developers who attempt to manipulate or cheat the user reviews or chart ranking in the App Store with fake or paid reviews, or any other inappropriate methods, will be removed from the iOS Developer Program.” It may be that Apple views the campaigns as unfairly gaming the system, but the company has not been crystal clear in communications. Apple evidently doesn’t want its top App Store rankings to be manipulated. Some days into the changes, everyone seems to believe that Apple has users in mind as it enforces the 3.1 clause more stringently than it has in the past.
The good thing about incentivized apps is that they allows children and other people without credit cards to get new paid apps without having to charge the transaction to a credit card, Shah said.
“A significant number of users are upset about [the change],” Shah said.
Shah also said that the situation is similar to third parties trying to game Google’s search research. Rather than completely shut down the search engine optimization companies, Google makes its algorithms better so that the search results can’t be gamed as easily.
Tapjoy, Flurry, AdMob, W3i and Apple’s own iAds have generated considerable revenue (possibly hundreds of millions of dollars) through pay-per-install campaigns.
Over time, Apple may suffer from this change in policy as Tapjoy and other game developers embrace the Android platform, which doesn’t have the same restrictions that Apple has put in place.
“There is an enormous amount of shift in investment to Android,” Shah said. “What Google has done great is made their business predictable. Our Android business is doubling month over month.”
NEW YORK – A packed crowd of over 200 film fans filled the SVA Theater in New York City during the recent Tribeca Film Festival to watch LAPD Homicide Detectives Cole Phelps and partner Rusty Galloway track down “the red lipstick killer” in LA Noire.
But the action on the big screen, set during 1947 Los Angeles, wasn’t a movie. LA Noire is the latest video game from publisher Rockstar Games. And in contrast to many video games that have forever claimed to be “movie-like,” LA Noire really is movie-like (see video here), from its captivating story to its use of an outstanding new facial animation technology that brings video game characters to life, as if they were actors in a movie.
Rockstar, a division of Take-Two Interactive, is the maker of bestselling genre-defining titles like the modern-day crime drama Grand Theft Auto IV and the western Red Dead Redemption. And the red lipstick murder was an actual case involving the murder of nurse Jeanne French, which remains unsolved to this day.
In the game, players will find the culprit, although the names and persons involved in the real case were changed for the sake of interactive entertainment. A total of 20 cases are featured in the new crime game.
Over the past five years, Brendan McNamara and his Team Bondi development studio have been immersed in 1940s Hollywood. Considering the distance between Brisbane, Australia and Los Angeles is 7,178 miles, that’s quite an achievement. Rockstar Games built a studio in Culver City to house the new Motion Scan performance capture and facial capture equipment that was designed for this game.
What separates LA Noire, which ships for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 on May 17, from anything else on the market – besides its homage to film noir – is the technology that was created to allow a cast of 400 actors bring virtual characters to life in a believable way. McNamara was a pioneer in pushing motion capture performance in video games back on the PlayStation 2 with The Getaway games, when he ran Sony Computer Entertainment’s Team Soho studio in London. With the added processing power of today’s consoles, McNamara was able to get authentic performances from his cast of actors.
LA Noire is the first game to employ Motion Scan (although new Rockstar Games currently in development are also using the technology). This technology utilizes 32 HD cameras that are set up in a room to record the facial movements, voice, and acting of each actor. The technology allows the actors to emote freely, as they would in film or television work. All of that emotion, along with the lines of dialogue, appears in the game. The Motion Scan work is added to the performance capture work, which required each actor to work on crude multi-story sets with other actors to bring the 2,200 page-script to life. All of this data was used to construct accurate 3D versions of the actor as the character in the game.
“We captured the actors’ performances the same way that James Cameron did in Avatar, basically,” said Rob Nelson, art director for LA Noire at Rockstar Games. “We had quite a few actors realize when they got to this cavernous space that it’s real acting and they have to bring it. In a lot of ways, it’s like theater because sometimes we had to shoot long scenes.”
Up to 14 actors were able to work together on set to bring complex scenes to life using props and crude sets. The game company worked with “Mad Men” casting directors Carrie Audino and Laura Schiff to cast the game, which features 400 actors including Aaron Staton (“Mad Men”), Michael McGrady (“Southland”), Ned Vaughn (“The Event”), Adam Harrington (“Dexter”), and Alexa Alemanni (“Mad Men”).
McGrady, who plays LAPD Homicide Desk Detective Rusty Galloway in the new game, has done voice work on games like Activision’s Prototype in the past. He’s watched as video games have progressed from working in a recording booth to literally transforming an actor into a virtual character.
“With L.A. Noire, it’s a huge leap forward because they’re actually putting the actor’s face on the screen,” said McGrady. “Face recognition in fan bases has always been a vital component of any actor’s career success. Any chance you have to get in front of a camera, whether it be film, TV or a video game, is an opportunity for people to see you and get familiar with you. One of the major reasons why so many actors jumped on board this game is because we are featured characters in this game.”
McNamara said the actors worked in the Culver City studio over the course of a few months. Staton, who plays lead character Detective Cole Phelps, had the most grueling task. He spent 45 days doing performance capture work and then did 70 straight days of Motion Scan. The game focuses on his character’s journey from the patrolman’s beat to a detective who’s seen the underbelly of LA.
McNamara didn’t employ this new technology just for the sake of advancing virtual characters. A key gameplay component players will have to master is interrogating suspects and reading their faces. Every movement and nuance, from looking away to a sweaty brow, provides clues that the player needs to tell when to believe what’s being said. The emotions and facial ticks that the actors bring to life are crucial to successfully navigating the game world, which spans eight square miles of faithfully-recreated 1940s Los Angeles.
With LA Noire complete, McNamara is already looking to the future. Within a few years, he said actors will be able to wear costumes while they perform on sets for games. McGrady said that will help more actors feel comfortable performing in video games.
“If you took one logical step from this game, there’s no reason we couldn’t use this exact same process to make a game and a TV show from exactly the same material and the same performances,” said McNamara. “I think that’s pretty interesting.”
Given LA Noire packs two TV seasons worth of crime stories into one huge game, there’s plenty of material to go around.
Sketches of Double Fine’s new game
We’ll be exploring the most disruptive game technologies and business models at our third annual 
NEW YORK – A packed crowd of over 200 film fans filled the SVA Theater in New York City during the recent Tribeca Film Festival to watch LAPD Homicide Detectives Cole Phelps and partner Rusty Galloway track down “the red lipstick killer” in 
In the game, players will find the culprit, although the names and persons involved in the real case were changed for the sake of interactive entertainment. A total of 20 cases are featured in the new crime game.
LA Noire is the first game to employ Motion Scan (although new Rockstar Games currently in development are also using the technology). This technology utilizes 32 HD cameras that are set up in a room to record the facial movements, voice, and acting of each actor. The technology allows the actors to emote freely, as they would in film or television work. All of that emotion, along with the lines of dialogue, appears in the game. The Motion Scan work is added to the performance capture work, which required each actor to work on crude multi-story sets with other actors to bring the 2,200 page-script to life. All of this data was used to construct accurate 3D versions of the actor as the character in the game.