Pixza

We soft-launched Pixza a few weeks ago without any fan-fare. Pixza, being a multi-player social game, we needed a lot of people to test and what better way than having our end-users play and give us feedback. And so it happened, one evening when we thought we were done with a fully playable version of Pixza, we quietly opened the gates and let friends and family know of the soft-launch. Within a couple of weeks we had around three hundred players on Pixza just by word-of-mouth.

While developing Pixza, we concentrated more on the technology aspect, that is, getting the game up and working and less on the dynamic factors like how pixels are to be distributed, how to price the super pixels, how to calculate user participation levels, etc. We thought since they were just parameters we could tune them any time. A month into the launch, that’s what we’ve been doing. We had friends play games and we would join a couple of them. Every game was a learning experience. We would have people suggest features and we ourselves would find the need for some. Major bugs which could only be reproduced with several players playing were fixed. Improvements were made to the user experience and the interface with Facebook. Documentation was reviewed and we’ve started putting together a wiki. Beta testers, thank you so much for all your input!

And as we were fixing bugs and playing games, several people found themselves addicted to Pixza and that includes us! We would have tons of things to fix in Pixza, and we would instead find ourselves playing game after game. The instinct to capture those orange hidden super pixels is something unexplainable! And you should appreciate us for resisting the urge to give ourselves infinite pixels!

So what differentiates Pixza from the social games out there already? Pixza is a realtime social game, which means that you and your friends play the same game simultaneously and all actions are reflected almost immediately on all game screen screens. And when we say social, we mean realtime interaction with your friends as you play the game. There are strategies to be planned, roles to be assigned, walls to be built and decoys to be set not in the isolation of your ville, but in the dynamism of the gameboard, alive with pixels flying around caused by others playing the game. From a technology point of view, unlike most multiplayer browser-based games, Pixza does NOT use any third-party browser plugins like Adobe Flash Player. It was quite a breakthrough to enable Pixza to run purely on browser-based techniques.

We can’t say enough. But to emphasize, we HATE spam. While some games rely on spamming your Facebook stream with posts to ensure virality, Pixza does not and will never publish posts to your Facebook stream without your explicit confirmation. Facebook provides developers an option to ask you for extended permissions so that we can auto-publish to users’ streams without requiring permission for individual posts. But we do not use this mode at all. Instead once you win a game, we simply give you the option to choose whether to post your victory to your wall or not. You can choose to skip this at will. So if you find a Pixza post anywhere on Facebook, it was put up there because the owner of the post wanted to put it up there and not because we forced it upon the user.

We are currently in the process of enhancing our in-game activity stream. We are also getting a nice little trailer video done for our home page. And once we’re done with them, we will be opening the flood gates and going full swing into publicity. Stay tuned!