How many people can you squeeze into one small room?

We’ve been meaning to start a developer’s diary but have been so busy doing ‘developery things’ we hadn’t found the time.  That all changes here and now as we lift the lid on all of the totally interesting and crazy amazingness that happens here at Soshi Towers.

OK, enough of the #forcedexcitement – we’re getting quite a few followers these days and we thought it would be interesting (for at least three of you guys) if we shared some insight into the trials and tribulations involved in getting a start-up games studio up and running……so here goes!

GAME PROGRESS: Our MusicFestivals Game (play it now at facebook.com/musicfestivalsgame folks!) continues to be refined. We’ve got a gaggle of new features and some major (player feedback-driven) changes in development/testing right now and we will be releasing these over the next few weeks. We’ve been very encouraged by the response we’ve had to date even though the game has been in a pretty early stage.  I for one will be eagerly watching the analytics screens once these new changes get pushed to our production servers to see if the engagement and retention numbers increase as we believe that they will.

VIRUS BADNESS: This week was made a little interesting by a wee bit of virus infection ‘fun’ that took us the best part of a day to resolve. Cliff ‘the only iPad’ Dennett remained productive whilst the dozen of us PC users disembarked down to the pub for an extended lunch…ahem…team meeting. When you are feeling the pressure to get urgent improvements into your live game, losing a whole day of productiveness is more than a little frustrating. Lesson learned – good anti-virus and security practices are not a secondary priority!

GAME HACKS: I and Adam Russell, our Game Designer & Head of Especially Appalling Puns, spent much of Wednesday attending the very excellent ‘Meet The Games Press’ event that the fab people at BSPA (Birmingham Science Park Aston, our very nice landlord) organised. We got to hear from and chat with a bunch of gaming hacks (their description not mine!) including Will Freeman (Develop editor), Alex Wiltshire (EDGE), Keith Stuart (The Guardian’s games journalist) and Matt Martin (gamesindustry.biz editor). Some truly useful and interesting advice was gleaned from the guys that was particularly targeted at start-ups and smaller games studios. BSPA are regularly organising similar events here in Birmingham – follow @launchconf / #launchconf for info.

We also hope to be announcing some new commercial partnerships soon including some major artist involvement.

Stay tunes and don’t eat too much chocolate over Easter J

Kevin (@kevcorti)

Follow us at @soshigames & on Facebook

Tutorials in games are often left until the end of development, and are written by someone who has spent months if not years with the game and knows it inside out. Because of this, the tutorial designer can only assume what aspects of the game a new player will understand and what they will need explaining.

The tutorial for Music Festivals was written a month or so before we entered our closed Beta and since then we have added many new features that haven’t been explained anywhere. We have added some in-game missions for a few bits of UI stuff but we get a lot of comments from players who have gone through the tutorial and still don’t understand things.

With this in mind, we have wanted to re-design the tutorial for a long time but have made the implementation of new features and bug fixes a higher priority than the new tutorial (after all, even if the current tutorial isn’t great, it still works to a point).

Graham McAllister, founder of Player Research suggests having someone who hasn’t worked on the game write the tutorial (listen to the relevant Eurogamer.net podcast here).

We’ve decided to take Graham’s advice and are now giving Music Festivals players the opportunity to redesign our tutorial. If you’re interested in taking part in this experiment, what we’d like is for you to play the game (available here) and as you’re working through the tutorial jot down some notes as to what you think works well, what isn’t explained and anything else that you can think of.

If you could then think about ways to improve the tutorial we’d really love to hear your ideas. Perhaps storyboard out your new design or list the steps with bullet points, whatever feels best for you! Of course, the more information you can provide the better we’ll be able to replicate it in the game.

Once your design is finished pleased e-mail it to adam.russell@soshigames.com with the subject: Tutorial Design. We’ll then begin the process of reviewing it and if we like it we’ll work on implementing it in the game! If you like we’ll also add you to the game credits.

If you have any questions you can e-mail me at the address above or send me a tweet at @AdamSRussell

Adam Russell

Lead Designer at Soshi Games

SoshiGames is, first and foremost, a computer games publisher. We focus on social games; online, browser-based games that reside alongside social networks (such as Facebook) and which allow a broad demographic of users to play with or against each other. These players are typically not what would traditionally be termed ‘hardcore gamers’, indeed most would probably not self-identify as being ‘gamers’ at all.

SoshiGames is currently developing it’s first major game; a sim that is heavily themed around music festivals.

The game is in closed (invite-only) preview mode until late November but you can register your interest to preview it at the following URL:

http://signup.musicfestivalsgame.com

The game blends elements of many well-known games such as Farmville, The Sims and Rollercoaster Tycoon but does so in a light-touch, non-geeky manner that makes it accessible to a broad range of players from ages 8 to 80, both male and female. Players get to create, grow and manage their own virtual music festivals complete with stages, a wide range of business and decorative items and, of course, lots of toilets.

The goal of the game is to create the most well-attended festival possible and to do that players need to earn both coins and karma. To earn these, players build virtual stages upon which they are able to ‘book’ real world artists and bands (either through a text search or via various pre-provided tags such as ‘popular’). Each stage has a genre such as, for example, ‘rock’, ‘country’ or ‘J-pop’ and it’s graphical treatment is strongly themed around that genre. A rock stage on which the player selects Black Sabbath, Metallica and Guns & Roses will earn that player a bunch of virtual coins. As the music tracks played are randomised, this will drive discovery of established act’s back-catalogue.

Players also need to earn karma if they are to grow their festival. Karma is earned primarily by booking unsigned or emerging acts and artists. The more that you book (and listen to) unsigned acts, the more karma you accumulate and the more things you can do and build in your festival. This is how the game fosters music discovery for unsigned and emerging acts.

As well as being a compelling consumer entertainment experience we are also very focussed on solving the problems associated with music discovery and that is why we seek to partner with bands and artists.

The model is quite simple; bands use their social media presence to raise the profile of the game and in return the game delivers airtime, track sales, new fans and, in some cases, a share of virtual goods revenues.

For unsigned/emerging acts; whereas a band might drive tens, hundreds or maybe thousands of new players to the game (by promoting it on Facebook or Twitter for example), their music will then potentially be featured to millions or players.

For established acts; we are entering into direct agreements to create custom-designed stages and other in-game items that are themed around these acts. These items will more often than not involve some for of premium paid-for) benefit to the player and this revenue will be shared with the acts in return for their promotion of the game to their fan base.

We don’t license music in a traditional synching manner. Instead, when players ‘book’ bands (established and emerging/unsigned) they then get to listen to a random stream of 30/60 second preview clips from these artist’s songs. This creates kind of time-lapsed effect which is appropriate considering it is a ‘god’ game where you create and manage your own virtual festival.

Alongside the in-game radio (which shows artist’s name and song title) is a ‘BUY’ button. If the player likes this song, they click this and a new window opens with that song pre-selected – ready to be purchased- through our partner, 7digital.com

We are building what we call the gamification of music track sales and we are confident that the click through rates to purchase will exceed that from static ecommerce sites.

Presently for a band/artist to be featured in the game they must have their music available on 7digital.com from where we access over 15million tracks. In time we will be adding additional aggregation services particularly with a focus on those that can supply emerging, unsigned and niche/global acts.

Signed acts need do nothing for to be included in the game as chances are their music is already accessible via the game. Their fans who play the game will search for them, other players will come across them via features such as ‘popular’ or ‘suggested’ listings.

With unsigned acts we are adopting a 2-phase process:

Phase 1: those that happen to be on 7digital.com already (there are many) can potentially be listed as ‘featured acts’ in the dedicated unsigned stages that we have in the game. Initially our team are selecting a small number of these to ensure a broad variety of genres to suit all tastes. Typically we look for acts with something of a social media following (100+ fans on Facebook etc).

Phase 2: We then plan to work with partners, such as Sonic Bids, who aggregate unsigned/emerging acts’ music. In order for those bands to be featured in game, their music needs to be available to us via that service/platform. In addition, we also plan to host tracks ourselves for some artists.

To get involved

[1] Signed/established acts (e.g. with label/management representation)

Please email us directly at info@soshigames.com and one of our commercial team will get in contact.

[2] Unsigned/emerging acts

For phase 1 – if your music is on 7digital.com – please tell us who you are and point us to some of your tracks as well as to show us that you have some evidence of a social fan base. Technically your music is then already available in the game however it is unlikely that most players will seek it out as you/your band is by definition ‘unknown’. If we decide it fits with our criteria we will select you/your band to be one of up to 50 featured acts on a dedicated virtual unsigned stage for a period of time. This will drive awareness of you and your music.

Please email the information (above) to music@soshigames.com

Please note, whilst we will endeavour to acknowledge every email, we are not an A&R service and lack the resource required to provide in-depth follow-up with each and every submission and cannot in any way guarantee your inclusion as a featured artist or band within the game.

In addition we may also be featuring truly unsigned acts on a fan page with the opportunity for fans to vote for them to be featured in the game.

We will announce our plans for phase 2 within a few months once the necessary infrastructure has been built and commercial partnerships put in place.

...where the rock stars live

SoshiGames is a social music games developer based in Birmingham and we’re looking for rock stars….literally!

We’re a young start-up that is working on a novel social music game for Facebook, other social networks/devices. We have a novel approach to building a player base and are aiming to help unsigned & emerging bands/artists get discovered. We’ve been building our game – themed around music festivals – with an ultra-tiny development budget (but loads of enthusiasm!) but with the imminent influx of seed funding are now looking to add some experienced talent to our existing team.

We’re looking for:

You will have strong exposure to ActionScript, PhP, SQL, HTML/CSS, JavaScript with a particular focus on browser-based gaming and client-server application architectures. A strong passion for videogames is essential and an awareness of social gaming and cloud computing would be particularly desirable. You will have strong software engineering skills (OOP, design patterns etc) with a demonstrable portfolio of commercial projects, willing to help define our products and comfortable in a fast-paced start-up environment. You will have experience of working with the Facebook API as well as the specifics of synchronous and asynchronous game feature creation. You will ideally have a good first degree in Computer Science, Mathematics or Physics (or similar) and exposure to Agile/Scrum project management and continuous integration approaches.

• Illustrators/animators (Flash)

You will have strong, natural artistic ability and able to demonstrate a mastery of digital painting, drawing and graphic creation skills using Photoshop, Illustrator and/or similar packages. You will be comfortable creating top class animations and game-ready assets using Adobe Flash. You will be able to work from concepts to create slick, visually gorgeous game-ready assets and know how to balance the need for quality versus the need to get things done on time. You will also ideally have some experience with 3D asset creation, character creation, UI asset creation and multimedia/video production.

More information

Our goal is to be a global social game developer of note with a particular focus around music and related themes and content. Our focus is on partnering with a large number of really cool people and organisations within the music industry to create interesting in-game features/content and as an effective ways to drive people to our games.

If players see 'Cyril' then something has gone wrong....join SoshiGames and help us to keep Cyril in his cage!

The unique game design approach we have taken enables the discovery of emerging artists as well as the back-catalogue of established acts and we’re partnering with organisations in the music industry to build upon this. We’re talking to festival promoters, major and indie labels, top DJs, major artists/bands and the music media.

Apply to get access to the preview release of MusicFestivals at: http://signup.musicfestivalsgame.com

See the FB application page at http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=157742920933005

On the technical side we’re a 100% cloud based organisation. Our game application servers/databases etc are all hosted on EC2/S3, we use a cloud-hosted code repository and automated build system (Jenkins). We use a traditional LAMP stack along with a highly-scalable noSQL database, Memcache, the Yii PhP framework and have built our own custom libraries upon the opensource Pushbutton flash game engine (as used by Zynga).
To contact us:

• Please email your CV and a cover letter explaining what role you are looking to perform and why along with your salary expectations to careers@soshigames.com
• We will confirm receipt of your email and, if we want to follow up, we will contact you directly thereafter.
• Please no phone calls
• Applicants must hold British nationality or have a valid EU work permit
• Applicants must be willing to work from our Birmingham offices
• NO AGENCIES (we hate being rude on the phone!)

The Soshi team are still working very hard ahead of the release of Music Festivals – our Facebook game where players can build and manage their own music festival. We’re also in the process of recruiting fifty unsigned acts to place in the game on launch (if interested, just get in contact with us – all we require is that your music is on 7Digital).

We aim for the game to be a music discovery vehicle as well as a unique and fun game!

The music social game scene is certainly maturing, particularly when you see established artists delving into the world of social gaming for the marketing efforts. The most famous example would have to be Lady Gaga and “Gagaville” – when Zynga added a Lady Gaga-inspired neighbouring farm and offered Lady Gaga-inspired virtual goods to players. Tapping into that massive userbase on Farmville, Lady Gaga was able to give exclusive previews of her new album Born This Way to players. Lady Gaga fans are happy, getting access to new tracks; Zynga are happy, offering the benefits of such as massive partnership to its customers; and Gaga and her people are happy with the unique exposure through Farmville.

“I want to celebrate and share ‘Born This Way’ with my little monsters in a special way that’s never been done before.” (Lady Gaga says)

We’ve seen the death of one of the biggest music game franchises – Guitar Hero – earlier this year. Manufacturing costs and low sales led to the decline of the popular franchise but we believe the online social networking environment is one into which music gaming can move, for low costs and vast potential audiences.

Music festivals are a huge industry at the moment, with festivals more popular than ever and new ones popping up every summer. We hope these large communities of audiences and music fans will take to Music Festivals to satisfy themselves while they are waiting on their next music festival, or reminiscing about their last.

Keep your eye on our blog, Facebook and Twitter for the latest news about Music Festivals!

The Vaccines crowdsource next music video

This week, UK band The Vaccines announced they would crowdsource their latest video by taking fans’ Instagram photos and combining them into a montage video for their next single. The band have asked fans to tag their music festival photos with #vaccinesvideo, and have a dedicated website for the project also. What a great way to include your fans in your music!

Alan updates us online about his six-week road trip

Alan of wherethemoodtakesme.com has just completed a six week tour of Ireland using only the bus company Bus Eireann to get from A to B to C and so on. 
As part of the trip, he’s taken in a couple of festivals including Sea Sessions – a surf and music festival in Donegal – and Clonmel Junction – a street theatre and music festival in Tipperary. Alan has been documenting his trip on Twitter and Facebook, running little competitions as he goes along. We think having some “real-world” competitions like this (above) is a great idea; blending social media and the festival experience into one. Who doesn’t love great big group photos while at a festival? Even better when you could win some iTunes vouchers out of it!

Greg takes in 26 festivals in one month

We’ve already written a post about Greg Parmley who is traveling across Europe on his motorbike, taking in festivals in countries and documenting his travels on Twitter and Facebook also.

What are we missing?

With those in mind, what could be next for music festivals and social media than the opportunity to build your own music festival on Facebook. It’s going to be a unique way for bands to get exposure, for brands to start integrating into social games and for music fans to discover new music according to their taste in a much more exciting way. We can’t wait! Let us know in the comments if you have any other examples of music festivals and social media colliding successfully.

Planning on attending all the major European festivals, like Glastonbury and Hard Rock Calling this past weekend, and Rock Werchter and With Full Force on the continent, Greg is going to need to cover up to 400 miles a day to keep on schedule. He’s due back in the UK on July 21st, finishing off his month-long trip at High Voltage Festival in London on the 23rd.

Here’s his itinerary:

via The Telegraph

June 24 – Glastonbury – Pilton – UK

June 24 – Hard Rock Calling – London – UK

June 25 – Graspop Metal Meeting – Dessel – Belgium

June 26 – Rock a Field – Roeser – Luxembourg

June 28 – Pennenzakkenrock – Mol – Belgium

June 30 – Rock Werchter – Werchter – Belgium

July 1 – Summerjam – Fuehlinger See – Germany

July 2 – Rheinkultur – Bonn – Germany

July 3 – With Full Force – Leipzig – Germany

July 4 – Rock for People – Hradec Kralove – Czech Republic

July 5 – Malta – Poznan – Poland

July 7 – Bazant Pohoda – Trencin – Slovakia

July 8 – Heineken Balaton Sound – Zamardi – Hungary

July 9 – EXIT Festival – Novi Sad – Serbia

July 11 – Metalcamp – Tolmin – Solvenia

July 12 – The Garden Festival – Petrcane – Croatia

July 14 – Umbria Jazz – Perugia – Italy

July 15 – Moon and Stars – Locarno – Switzerland

July 16 – Montreux Jazz – Montreux – Switzerland

July 17 – Gurtenfestival – Gurten – Switzerland

July 18 – Live at Sunset – Zurich – Switzerland

July 19 – Paleo Festival Nyon – Nyon – Switzerland

July 21 – Secret Garden Party – Huntingdon – UK

July 22 – Redfest – Redhill – UK

July 23 – I’ll Be Your Mirror – London – UK

July 23 – High Voltage Festival – London – UK

Good luck Greg! We’ll be following Greg’s travels on Facebook (RideToLive2011)

We wonder whether Greg would be willing to relive his adventure on our new game Music Festivals when it comes out this summer? He will have plenty of inspiration anyway