“My team won but I still ended up with a negative score!”

is something we’ve heard from several players. So in this post we’ll take a closer at how the point distribution works and also introduce a recent change to the point system, which will remove some of the constraints on the use of super pixels and thus make the game more fun!

The Pixel Distribution System:

After a nail-biting duel, the game ends and you see this screen:

Game Over Screen

So let’s go over what each field means and how we arrived at these values. Let me take my data which goes like this:

Jason Bosco

• Normal Pixels Invested: 325 (This is the number of pixels that I placed on the grid by pressing the Add button at the bottom of the screen in the game, or the X shortcut key)
• Super Pixels Invested: 210 (This is the total value of the all the super pixels that I used in this game)
• Normal Pixels Earned: 1970 (This is the number of normal pixels that I won as bonus in this game, more on how we got this value below)
• Super Pixels Earned: 450 (This is total value of all the super pixels that I picked up in this game – Those orange pixels that pop up on the screen randomly from time to time)
• Net Pixels (Gained in this case): 1885 (Normal + Super Pixels Earned) – (Normal + Super Pixels Invested)

Here’s how we calculate the third field above – normal pixels earned in a game. A lot of thought and empirical analysis has gone into the formula that we use to get this value:

Winning team:

Normal Pixels Earned = Pixel Bonus + Super Pixel Value Refunded

where

Pixel Bonus =

Normal Pixels Earned Formula

Let’s go over each of the terms in this formula:

• Base Pixels: The number Of Watermark pixels filled by the winning team. Every watermark has 500 pixels. However, the base pixels value includes only the number of pixels that the winning team placed on their watermark. The losing team’s pixels on the winner’s watermark do not count for Base Pixels.
• Scale: A fixed value of 4.
• Opponent Team Strength Value: Number of players on the losing team * 300. What this effectively means is that, if you play games with several people on the opponent team, you will get more number of pixels as bonus. For each player on the opponent team, an additional 300 pixels is added to the loot. Playing a 10 vs 10 game will fetch you more pixels than playing a 5 vs 5 game.
• Teams Difference Value: (Number of players on the losing team – Number of players on the winning team) * 50. This factor takes into account the number of players in your own team, relative to the number of players in the opponent team. Thus if you win against bigger teams, you will win more pixels as bonus. Also, if you were to win against a smaller team, to balance the difference in numbers, you will actually be losing pixels that you would have otherwise won! So winning a 2 vs 10 game will fetch you a truck load of pixels when compared to playing a 12 vs 2 game, if you’re on the winning team.
• Player Level: Based on which level you are, you will get additional pixels. So if you are on level 2 you will get 1.1 times more pixels and if you are on level 3 you will get 1.2 times more pixels. This gives you another incentive to move to higher levels, besides unlocking new super pixels.
• Participation Fraction:

Participation Fraction Formula

The above values are all calculated and then the bonus pixels that are obtained are divided among the winning team members according to their involvement in the game. While we understand that this is a difficult to quantize a player’s contribution to a game, we believe that calculating the number of pixel moves a player has made and the number of pixels the player has added on the grid, in relation to all the other players in the team, gives a good indication of the player’s contribution to the game. So if you expect to win a lot of pixels, move and add which is play well

And that’s how we arrive at the Pixel Bonus.

Now,

Super Pixel Value Refunded = 4/5th of the value of super pixels invested by the player in a game.

Now, for the winning team members, we also refund 4/5 th of the value of super pixels that they invest in a game. Earlier we had this refund fraction as 1/3rd. The result was that several people lost a lot of pixels, even when they win a game, unaware that they might end up losing more than they would win by over-using super pixels. But then, we all agree that super-pixels are fun, don’t we! Well, then why restrict their use! So now we refund 4/5th of the value of the super pixels each player uses in a game. Happy cloning, sniping, hammering, bombing, building… Now you can use super pixels without the fear of ending up with a negative score!

Losing team:

The losing team simply gets back the pixels it placed on its watermark. So

Pixels Earned by each player of the losing team = Number Of Watermark pixels filled by the losing team * Participation Fraction

Happy playing!

On reading that, I smiled to myself as, this has been our prime objective right from the start. We wanted Pixza to be simple and fun to play for beginners, while still having sufficient scope and depth for strategies for advanced players. This is also reflected in the kind of super pixels you unlock as you go up the levels in the game.

We want to start writing more about the strategical elements of Pixza, and the beauty of this is that with the emergence of new super pixels in future levels, these strategies will evolve and change to meet the needs of the new challenges.

Today, I wanted to kick start this series of posts with a very simple tip: guessing your opponents watermark early allows you to decide which areas of your own watermark to concentrate on. See the scaled-down copy of an actual game grid below:

Even though it’s pretty early in the game, you can see that for my team’s perspective, it’s fairly easy to guess the opponent’s watermark : X.

This is something you might want to avoid as a team – don’t give away your watermark so easily, and so early in the game! And as you can see, the no.1 NO-NO here is to begin filling your watermark by outlining it with pixels! So, why is this not such a good idea? One main reason is that in Pixza, a portion of your team’s watermark overlaps with your opponent’s. If you are able to see what watermark your opponent has, it becomes easy to see which area of your team’s watermark they have to fill – and you don’t need to focus on these parts and perhaps let them do that for you unknowingly!

Stay tuned for more strategical and behind-the-scenes post about Pixza on this blog. You should follow us on Twitter @pixzagame.

User interface tweaks

We have made loads of little tweaks to the user system, and the core game design. Pixza, being an original game means that sometimes people tend to be a little lost when trying to figure out what’s happening in a game. We have been working on subtle UI hints to the users, so that the game is a little more intuitive to play.

One major change is to the super pixels menu. Initially, we had large icons and each menu screen contained only four icons. This is fine for level 1 (in which you begin with four super pixels), but as you progress through the game, you gain more super pixels and eventually a lot of our beta testers found the super pixels menu incovenient (they have to manually click on the arrows to navigate to the next set of icons in the second screen and so on…). The speed of the game, and its competitiveness meant that this was significant time lost for the players during a game. So, we have now enlarged the size of super pixels menu, and have also made the icons smaller. The current screen will fit 21 super pixel icons, and it should be more than enough atleast till Level 10 players. In future, we will be bringing in the ability to arrange these icons in your order of preference.

Another major change to the core game design, is the introduction of Pointers. We have had the in-game chat screen for a long time, but everyone wanted a way to convey messages tied to a specific area of the game. Stuff like “Let’s form a wall here”, and “Move these pixels into the watermark”. Using the co-ordinates and chat screen was too cumbersome for this. We decided to introduce the concept of “Pointers” as an ad-hoc manner through the form of a super pixel, which can be purchased from the store. Due to its resounding success, we felt that it must be a core UI component, and have thus moved it into the game’s menu bar. We really encouage teams to use Pointers to communicate, as it definitely brings about order and strategic game play.

New levels, new super pixels

We now have upto Level 5 in Pixza. Some really exciting super pixels to unlock on Levels 4 and 5. We have also lowered the barriers for progressing up the levels. From our experience, discovering and using new super pixels is one of the most fun aspects of playing Pixza, and we want to build Pixza around this idea.

Stay tuned

With the core game stable, we are now turning our attention to other areas of the game. We plan to keep adding more feature and surprise elements. We also want to write on this blog more often, and offer you some insights on what happens behind the scenes! Currently we have our hands tied up with development and marketing work. We will shortly put together some development notes to share with you.

You should follow @pixzagame, if you haven’t already, that’s the easiest way you can keep up-to-date with all the stuff we’ll be cooking up!

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!

So ended our previous post on this blog. That seems like a long time isn’t it! And since then, you sure haven’t heard from us here on this blog (though, we have been posting development updates on Facebook and Twitter)! So, here is a much overdue update on what has been holding us up!

First, we want to share with you some actual information about the game. We know we have been irratingly, stubbornly, frustatingly reticent about revealing the details of the game! But, that’s only because we were actively working on it, and most of the things that we tried with respect to the game play was experimental and was bound to change.

Okay, so here is some actual juice!

So, with that out of the way, why is it taking us so long? The short answer to that question is: we had to make some changes to the core game architecture – which made us rewrite our codebase about 3-4 times in the past three months. The good news though, is that it’s finally stable and the rest of the work should not be taking too long! Of course, it also goes without saying that what we are trying to achieve here is not trivial – achieving synchronization in a game with some 15 players is no mean feat (atleast not within the constraints of the browser)! Hopefully it will all be worth the wait!

We leave you with an unfiltered screenshot from the game!

We thought we will use this first blog post to break the ice and formally introduce ourselves! Some of you know us personally, while quite a lot of you don’t, so this Jason and Kishore for you, from Chennai, India. We are about to finish our final year in Computer Science and Engineering. We also thought we could answer some of the (many) questions a lot of people are throwing at us on what Pixza is and isn’t!

Is it a scam?
No, this is not a scam, prank or vaporware. Although we really aren’t even going to show you a screenshot or a teaser to start off with (expect it soon though), Pixza is indeed real, just like you and us! It’s something that we’ve been been thinking, working, and dreaming about for quite some time, and definitely something we can’t wait to show, share and play with our fraternity!

What’s all the hype about?
We don’t believe in hype, and hate it as much as you do. Having said that, unlike many people who already are popular and still go on such hyping schemes, we are just starting out, and we really have to reach out for people before we can launch Pixza. It’s a social game, so it cannot launch in a ghost town! If you digg it, do help us spread the word. When it finally launches, you are going to be playing it with your friends (all the time, we hope!). So, you might as well let your friends know now and ask them to sign up for our limited beta launch list or join our fan page on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter. We’ll also keep you posted on all our latest developments.

What can we say about Pixza for now?
As we perceive it, Pixza will be an engaging multi player game. When launched, we believe it will be unique on several fronts – the game concept as well as the monstrous technology supporting it. Initially, when the idea of the game dawned upon us, (the complete story for another post), we were thrilled about the game’s concept – we used to talk endlessly about how the gameplay would be and at the end of each discussion “Infinite possibilities” would be the conclusion. All this before we wrote a single line of code! We had absolutely no clue what was in store for us, technologically. The technology we have used to build Pixza is a poorly documented beast – which took several hours of hacking and taming to get it working well across all major browsers! In short, we believe we have a unique game concept and some powerful technology backing it. The “really realtime” in our tag line really does mean something!

We believe the current breed of social games on facebook and on other social networking sites are quickly becoming one dimensional. And, quite a few of them are using spamming of your social stream as an excuse for viral growth. Pixza is going to be completely different and really real time. And, we will respect your privacy when it comes to broadcasting game related messages out to your friends.

What’s up with all these boxes on the page?
We’re giving you a hint about Pixza! And no, you won’t be chasing boxes around the screen in the actual game. Let’s just say, they’re a subtle hint.

When is the launch date?
If all goes well, we hope to roll out our first round of beta invites in the last week of December. We aren’t going to commit to a date, but we will keep you posted of any progress/delay right here on this blog. So be sure to bookmark this page and check back for updates. That’s all from us for now!

We’d love to hear from you! You can get in touch with us directly at contact aT pixza d0T c0M.