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How to make Angry Birds – part 1. Hello and welcome back to my blog! This time I’m going to try something new. There are many tutorials for various techniques and tricks on the web, but what you don’t often see is one that takes you through the development of a game, step by step from start to finish. This is what I’m going to attempt here. I hope that it will provide some missing insight into the components that actually make up a working game and how to go about developing them. I’m going to assume the reader is familiar with the basics of game development and I’m going to concentrate on the art and programming. At the end of this tutorial you will be able create a demo similar to this: Angry Birds So, the game I’m going to be making is to be based on the extremely popular Angry Birds by Rovio, a AAA title which cost some $140k USD to make.

Angry Birds Obviously, since its just me making this I will have to take a few short-cuts and will be concentrating on the core part of the game. Cloning Analysis Graphics Code Camera Physics. How to hire a programmer to make your ideas happen. Do you have an idea for a website, online business, or application, but need a programmer to turn that idea into reality? Many of my friends have been in the same position, so here's my best advice, below.

But first, a quick request: If you are a programmer, please leave a reply below with YOUR best advice. Feel free to include your URL and email for anyone to contact you. I know my advice is not complete, (and you may totally disagree!) , so any further advice is appreciated. 1. Reduce your big idea to “Version 1.0”. First read my short “Version Infinity” article. Dream the big dream of everything your site/service/company might be some day, and write it all down. But then think of the bare minimum that would make you happy, and people would find useful. Call this Version 1.0. A programmer is much more likely to say, “I can do that!” Your goal here is just to get Version 1.0 built. 2. Again, remember: only describe Version 1.0. Leave off all details that the programmer doesn't need to know. Re-inventing finance: an emerging (digital) reformation by Sean Park on Prezi.

Startups: How to Communicate Traction... by Brendan Baker. How to start a Daily Deals Business (Part 1) // Matchbook. SaaS Metrics - A Guide to Measuring and Improving What Matters. This blog post looks at the high level goals of a SaaS business and drills down layer by layer to expose the key metrics that will help drive success. Metrics for metric’s sake are not very useful. Instead the goal is to provide a detailed look at what management must focus on to drive a successful SaaS business. For each metric, we will also look at what is actionable. There is an updated (re-written) version of this post available here: SaaS Metrics 2.0. Before going any further, I would like to thank the management team at HubSpot, and Gail Goodman of Constant Contact, who sits on the HubSpot board. Let’s start by looking at the high level goals, and then drill down from there: Key SaaS Goals Profitability: needs no further explanation.

Two Key Guidelines for SaaS startups The above guidelines are not hard and fast rules. In the next sections, we will drill down on the high level SaaS Goals to get to the components that drive each of these. Three ways to look at Profitability Other Metrics. Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund. Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund Paul Graham July 2008 When we read Y Combinator applications there are always ideas we're hoping to see.

In the past we've never said publicly what they are. If we say we're looking for x, we'll get applications proposing x, certainly. But then it actually becomes harder to judge them: is this group proposing x because they were already thinking about it, or because they know that's what we want to hear? We don't like to sit on these ideas, though, because we really want people to work on them. Please don't feel that if you want to apply to Y Combinator, you have to work on one of these types of ideas. 1. The answer may be far afield. 2. 3. News will morph significantly in the more competitive environment of the web. 4. 5. One way to start is to make things for smaller companies, because they can't afford the overpriced stuff made for big ones. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

What we have now is basically print and TV advertising translated to the web. 13. 14. Web 3.0 (from social to big data).  Are you... | Josh Birkholz. Josh Birkholz Redefining fundraising for the 21st Century. Posting on analytics, technology, visualizations, fundraising, and other unrelated things I find interesting like Doctor Who, sci fi wierdness, crazy new ideas, and interesting people. Author of Fundraising Analytics Principal at Bentz Whaley Flessner Founder of the analytics group donorcast Acting Debut Top Chef Donorcast Fan Favorite Data Hoarders Video inShare Featured Posts Predicting who your major donors will be.Video of Yours Truly. Recent Tweets @ Prospect Development Reporting article by Bond Lammey and Josh Birkholz - 5 Techniques to COAST through... 5, 2014 2:54 am@clm2134 sorry, I was in international waters all week and cutoff from twitter. Posts I Like Tonight’s reading material #harleyquinn #dccomics #thenew52 Half-Life Headcrab Hat now available at ThinkGeek!

Web 3.0 (from social to big data). Using data to improve real life experiences. Single A Theme :: Version 1.3.3 :: By Storyware.

Virality in Startups

Motivating Virality in Facebook Games. Motivating Virality in Facebook Games [Editor's note: Brenda Brathwaite is a game designer with over 20 years of experience and credits on classic titles like Jagged Alliance and the Wizardry series. She is currently creative director at social game developer LOLapps, and a regular Inside Social Games contributor.] Getting players to post to the viral channel is a challenge every game designer faces when he or she is making Facebook games. It’s known that players are most likely to post when they’ve just started a game, but what motivates returning players? Four things: It helps me. There is a particular item or objective that is core to the progression of my game with which I need your help. Does this mean we should only include virals which fit the above themes?

In fact, there is a whole class of player for whom “playing the feeds” has become a pleasant meta-game to the game it supports. Ultimately, your only defense against subpar virals is playing your own game. Sponsored Post. Top 5 Elements for Virality of Social Games | Demystifying Digital Commerce. For today’s social game developer, virality is key to driving user growth and lowering customer acquisition costs. Here’s a look at five elements that boost the virality of social games: 1. Publishing updates about the game through users Every game developer should allow users to publish their top scores or milestones on their news feeds and Twitter streams. By doing so, their games will be promoted to all of their users’ friends and likely attract new players. For example, Zynga’s Texas Hold‘Em Poker lets its players announce to all of their friends when they get Three of a Kind, a Flush or another great hand. 2. Embedding social interaction into the game Game developers can boost virality by promoting direct user interaction—which transforms the gaming experience into a chance for players to spend time with (and recruit) their real-life friends. 3. 4. 5.

Facebook App Virality: Not Dead Yet But Dying Slowly. At the Social Gaming Summit in San Francisco today, the overall consensus among many speakers and attendees was that viral growth on Facebook isn’t dead yet, but it is definitely dying slowly. Kavin Stewart of LOLapps articulated the state of development on Facebook effectively when he suggested that with the ongoing changes on the Platform, it’s necessary to “keep your chin up”, as developers have historically figured out a way to continue growing. The term “viral growth” essentially means the art and science of free user acquisition. Top application developers have essentially become “viral growth scientists”, focused on two things: optimizing viral channels and finding platforms that provide those channels. As any developer in this space knows, Facebook is no longer the viral platform that it once was.

The changes made by Facebook have slowly squeezed many developers into an awkward business position. 5 crucial stages in designing your viral loop | Andrew Chen (@andrewchen) Designing a viral loop has multiple stagesViral loops have been featured in mainstream media and there’s even a book coming out on it – but the step-by-step design of creating a new loop remains obscure, and for good reason. I’ve come to believe that creating viral loops is akin to building a software project – at best, it still comes down to a great team, a strong understanding of the tools available, and relentless iteration. There’s no recipe at the heart of it which guarantees a viral process every time, the same way that you can’t guarantee that any software project will result in market success.

There are no silver bullets in viral marketingIn fact, the core of virality ensures that there will never be a dominant “recipe.” If everyone knows how to build a viral loop around social network invites, then everyone will do it, resulting in consumers will become desensitized, which finally leads to lower response rates. How does this viral loop fit into your core product? BIG TRENDS YOU BETTER KNOW ABOUT: Free Advice From Expensive Consultants. 4c - Four Cups - The Need for Speed. Your scarcest resource as a lean startup is undoubtably time. There's never enough of it. Sure, you could raise more, but that won't help you against your competitor who seems to have found his market fit while you were charming an investor.

No matter what, somehow you're always in the second half, 10 minutes left on the clock, the score still 0:0 and the competition has the ball. I'm constantly reminded of this in my nightly "shit, where did the day go? " freak-out moment. Over the last year I have become obsessed with speed and efficiency of every aspect of product development: Continuous deployment, build environments, and other basic processes on day one will make your team more efficient everyday and help you execute harder, better, faster on day two -- see this post on the Raddd process I implemented at Pipewise.

Another big driver for speed is making sure to have the right tools and technologies for job at hand. Ruby on Rails MongoDB and NoSQL Sass, CoffeeScript, and OOCSS Final Note. 20 Innovative Startups. Ben Milne founded Dwolla Company: Dwolla Founders: Ben Milne Location: Des Moines, Iowa Funding: $1 million from The Veridian Group and The Members Group in Iowa. Raising another round now. Why it's innovative: At a glance, Dwolla doesn't sound different than its much bigger competitors Square and PayPal -- but it is.

PayPal and Square both use credit cards for transactions. Because it doesn't use credit cards, there aren't high transaction fees. Fun Friday: Startup Creation Stories. A Conversation with Peter Thiel. Francis Fukuyama: I’d like to begin by asking you about a point you made about there being certain liberal and conservative blind spots about America. What did you mean by that? Peter Thiel: On the surface, one of the debates we have is that people on the Left, especially the Occupy Wall Street movement, focus on income and wealth inequality issues—the 99 percent versus the 1 percent. It’s evident that both forms of inequality have escalated at a very high rate.

Probably from 1973 to today, they have gone up faster than they did in the 19th century. The rapid rise in inequality has been an issue that the Right has not been willing to engage. It tends either to say it’s not true or that it doesn’t matter. That’s a very strange blind spot. In the history of the modern world, inequality has only been ended through communist revolution, war or deflationary economic collapse. Francis Fukuyama: And it will require countless environmental permits, litigation, and so on. Peter Thiel: Yes. Racism And Meritocracy. Editor’s note: Guest contributor Eric Ries is the author of The Lean Startup.

Follow him @ericries. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you can’t have missed the recent dust-up over race and Silicon Valley. Like almost every discussion of diversity and meritocracy in this town, it turned ugly fast. One side says: “All I see is white men. Therefore, people like Michael Arrington must be racist.” The other responds, “Silicon Valley is a colorblind meritocracy. If there were qualified women or minority candidates, we’d welcome them.” I’d like to say a few words about this, but I want to do so under special ground rules. I want to make an argument, step by step, that I hope will convince you to care about this issue, but that doesn’t presuppose that you already agree that diversity is important. So the rules are: No political correctness. So – no hippies, no whiners, no name-calling, and no BS. What accounts for the decidedly non-diverse results in places like Silicon Valley?

How Three Germans Are Cloning the Web. A purple rooster sculpture made from recycled grape Fanta bottle labels. Clocks designed to hang in corners. Bauhaus posters from the 1920s. Hand-painted vintage typewriters. These are some of the carefully curated objects for sale on Fab.com, the fast-growing flash-deal site for designer goods.

Launched out of a loft in New York City’s Garment District last June, Fab had sales of $20 million in its first six months and is on track to earn $100 million in 2012. “We owe our success to keeping it real, authenticity, being close to designers,” says Jason Goldberg, Fab’s chief executive officer. That, and “offering people objects and design products they wouldn’t find elsewhere. Six months after Fab launched, it was knocked off. Fab vs. Bamarang is the creation of Oliver, Marc, and Alexander Samwer, a trio of German brothers who have a wildly successful business model: Find a promising Internet business, in the U.S., and clone it internationally.

An image boost couldn’t hurt. How I built 7books in under 4 weeks | 7books blog. Update: This post is slightly out of date now since V2 of 7books is now live. See the "making of" post for V2 here: Let me tell you a story. It's a story of my very first coding project, called 7books. Are you sitting comfortably? Why I built 7books I've had plenty of ideas in my time. I quickly scribbled in my moleskine this diagram: As you can see, originally I was planning on calling the site 10books and I was planning on using some Ajax magic.

Still, as I sat on the train thinking through the idea I started to become very attached to it. It's based on one of my passions (I love books a lot)I didn't think it would be too difficult to buildIf I wanted to use the service then it was a sure bet others would too Underneath my diagram I jotted down what I thought the three main USPs would be: Now, given it's still early days I've not yet got all 3 of these USPs nailed but that's the vision. Me, 4 weeks ago Four weeks ago I couldn't code. What I've achieved Phew. Angry Birds, Farmville and Other Hyperaddictive ‘Stupid Games’ Notes Essays—Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup—Stanford, Spring 2012. Springwise | New business ideas, trends and innovation.