Happy New Year!

Today, the Internet is at risk of being shut down. Many of the leading tech companies such as google, are protesting the online act SOPA which would allow the government to control the information on the Internet. The goal is to reduce piracy, or that's what we are told. Being producers of media, this sounds great, but the actual threat is much different. I won't go into details here, but if you want to read more, check out google.com and click the censorship banner. [caption id="attachment_1465" align="alignnone" width="650" caption="Wikipedia is the first company we've seen that has completely shut down their service today."][/caption] Fun Fact: While Moyo remains neutral to the initiative to keep our roots in Swedish tradition, SOPA in Swedish means Rubbish.

We would like to take the opportunity to thank everyone that we've met and had the pleasure of working with during 2011. It's been a great year and we look forward to a fresh start with plenty of action in 2012! The Moyo Team!

We've been very busy at the studio most of 2011 even though there has not been many new game releases. The reason is that we've been working hard on our very first social game for mobile devices. We've been very quiet about the development as well due to a top secret agreement, but today, we are extremely pleased to publicly announce for the first time... Globlin development started in March 2011 and after assembling a fantastic team of extremely creative and talented people, between 8 and 10 of us have been working full time on the game to date. Globlin, a concept developed from start to finish by Moyo is an original fairy tale about a little creature, their life, challenges with happiness, evolution and the evil Mechanimal. Your job as a player is to revive the spices, build your own galaxy and protect it from the Mechanimal who is out to destroy your planets. Globlin is a resource management and collecting game with quite a twist. A brand new 2D User Experience is a breath of fresh air in the convolution of Isometric social game clones. We are also taking art, animation, and story to the next level. Globlin delivers a message with great educational content that will teach children and (hopefully adults) the power of relations, teamwork and to act responsibly towards nature, resources and surroundings. As all Moyo Studios games, Globlin is a casual, social game with well balanced edutainment (or Playful Learning as we call it) and opportunity for players of all ages to enjoy and be challenged for hours and hours. Globlin will be released on the iOS platform initially, but our goal is to allow all android users to enjoy this wonderful piece of art.

Moyo Studios just had the honor to enter into a partnership with New York based Rock Out Apps (ROA), a startup focusing on casual mobile games production and publishing. The Moyo team were of course very pleased to have earned the trust to develop ROA's flagship title Slippery Seal. Slippery's story is quite unique and interesting. Having been a major attraction at many aquariums for years, Slippery has decided to try and make it back to his home in the north. On his journey, slippery will not only encounter a variety of characters that live both in water and on land, but also travel through many well known locations such as San Francisco and Vancouver. Being a master at acrobatics, Slippery can travel swiftly in both water and on land by sliding on the slopes. "One of the main reasons we chose to partner with ROA was because they had an interesting and well planned approach. Players will have a variety of strategies to complete the game depending on personal preference and experience. In addition, Slippery offers educative elements about life under water as well as many interesting travel destinations. Being able to provide elearning or mlearning in a playful manner to such a wide audience is really important and should be utilized more frequently by publishers. I should note that the educational aspects of Slippery will not at all interfere with the user experience but rather enhance it. This is and important aspect for all our titles." Rasmus Hansson Slippery Seal is a great casual game for all ages and  experience levels. We promise you that there is a challenge for anyone who will want to master the next casual game release from Moyo Studios and Rock Out Apps. Slippery Seal is currently in Alpha stage and will be released for iOS on iTunes in January.

[caption id="attachment_1413" align="alignleft" width="299" caption="Game Developer Conference 2012"][/caption] It's almost that time of year... GDC 2012 is around the corner and of course you'll see Moyo Studios there. We will be networking, enjoying, sharing, learning, playing, pitching, teaching, hiring, inspiring, speaking, relaxing, eating, drinking, educating, partying, writing, demoing, designing, developing, thinking, growing, and beginning an awesome relationships with you! So whatever floats your boat, get in touch and schedule an appointment with the top mobile game developer in town!

Many people come to us and ask for help executing their ideas. If you are like us, you probably have a bunch of really creative and innovative mobile game ideas that you want to bring to life but have no outlets for execution. I thought i'd help you out by letting you know about two really good Websites that you should look into that can help you realize your ideas, including funding. BestAppIdeas.com They connect people with great ideas with people who has the funds to make the best iPhone or Android idea a reality. KickStarter.com Kickstarter is a new way to fund creative projects. They believe that: • A good idea, communicated well, can spread fast and wide. • A large group of people can be a tremendous source of money and encouragement. Kickstarter is powered by a unique all-or-nothing funding method where projects must be fully-funded or no money changes hands. That's it, check them out and let me know if they were able to help you! Now, if you need someone to develop a top quality mobile game from your idea, you know who to contact ;) Best of luck to everyone out there with great ideas!

A very interesting team showed up in our studio a few days ago to discuss game development around some really good licenses. It seemed that everyone really liked each other and had an understanding of the nature of mobile game development. Today we got the unfortunate news that this team decided to build their own production house in China. They called it "the assembly" where the team of programmers would receive the game design, specification and assets, nicely packaged in a box for production... I wondered - "What is going to come back in that package, how long is it going to take, how many people will be discouraged and affected in a negative way?" I felt so bad that I decided to help out by giving you some advice when pursuing a development partner. Here are 6 of the most important things you should be considering. Don not underestimate the challenge of modern game development production. Finding the right partners are key to our success. 1. Make sure your purpose is communicated and understood by your partner Why do you need to develop a game? Do you have a message you need to get across? Do you want to create community and bring people together? Do you simply want to build a really cool world where people can be happy? 2. Know your market If you know your purpose it becomes easier to know your audience. Once you target your audience, make sure that you can exceed their needs and expectations with the content you are giving them. 3. Know your vision Make sure that your vision is in perfect alignment with the scope of your product. If you do not have the skills of a modern game designer, and I emphasize on this, don't even try to create a perfect scope of work. You will have to work with someone who is an expert. 4. Know your partner The right partner will have the perfect team for you. They have been doing this for a long time. They have a proven track record, a lean structure, and all the tools and technology you need to maximize the investment and delivering a full, quality product. 5. Know the process Game development is rapidly changing. Teams, scope, high risk and old models of software engineering are being phased out and replaced with lean, fast, user focused development with fresh, simple, new, purposeful ideas for an incredibly large and hungry market. 6. Know your product As development is changing, so is the life of your product. Your game becomes a living organism with a community that will evolve until it dies. Your partner must understand this, know how to nurture the organism, and grow its community in order to maximize its life span. If you need help choosing your partner, please contact us because we would be very happy to see you succeed!

Warning: This story is very opinionated and based on my own personal experiences... There are two very special companies out there today... Apple has made digital equipment friendly enough, even for old-school people to enjoy. For us in the industry, it's just a very comfortable tool to use on a daily basis with very little distraction and interruption from regular workflow. Apple with their fantastic Hardware, Operating System, and absolutely amazing customer service is a given. Google on the other hand are doing extraordinary things when it comes to connecting people through online software. Their infrastructure, technology and tools are making it feel like you're sitting right next to each other when you're actually over 10,000 miles away. These companies are furiously battling for the throne.... Apple with their iOS devices and Google with their Android devices... What if we were to combine these two great companies and get rid of the waste!? That would mean, we would take the Chrome browser and all Google's amazing tools would be accessible from Apples extraordinary hardware. We wouldn't need anything else. Let us focus on building extraordinary software with HTML5 for one browser and let us get rid of all the waste. That would be way too easy for us!? We want things to be a little more complicated than that, right? We have to fight over what actually makes sense and what doesn't. Let them handle it and we'll get to enjoy the outcome? Peace!

Thank you everyone for making our first Play! event such a success. It was great to meet everyone, share experiences and discuss business opportunities. We hope that you had a good time and will spread the word so that the next mixer will be even better.

Yesterday and today, I am attending the International Game Developer Association's annual leadership conference, hosted at the Sheraton, LAX, Los Angeles, CA. The focus of the event is obviously how to build and nurture great teams. It's my first time here so my expectations are high and I am very much looking forward to hearing the leaders of today share their experiences. Day 1. Thursday Morning The Thursday event was good and I met a few really great people. Here are the highlights that I would like to share with everyone. - LootDrop John and Brenda from the startup, Lootdrop started out, talking in metaphors, comparing car mechanics to game development. The best tip we got from them was: CHECK YOUR REFERENCES. And this doesn't mean referrals. How many times have we not been through this? Things happen fast and we need to hire fast. It's easy to listen to a person sell themselves but the truth is usually very far from the talk. Their recommendation was to look at MobyGames.com and compare the resume roles with actual facts. Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn are obviously also amazing tools for understanding personal behavior. - The Amazing Society These guys founded their company based on addressing the co-founders weaknesses before getting to work. This is a very good approach because we all know that relationships need hard work and maintenance. In order to imprint their message into the corporate culture, they invented a management model called FightClub. To make a long story short, there are a few rules of FightClub, and the most important one is. Always talk about fightclub Everyone in the company can "call" fightclub on anyone. When you call fightclub, it basically means that the other person should prepare for fight or flight (not that drastically, but just prepare the person that there is something that needs to be discussed). The idea is to deal with issues immediately to understand where frustration is coming from. Finding the root cause, and  hopefully deal with it before it turns into passive agression. The rest of their presentation were focused on honesty. Honesty to yourself, to your team, publishers, and most critically, your audience. This is of course easier said than done, but we learned a lot from The Amazing Society! That's all the time I have for now but I'll be back later with additional thoughts.