We called upon some of the greatest mid-century American action serials to make a game that both harkens back to the adventures of yore and puts a new face on the idea of exploration, with an emphasis on the environmental impact of what reckless exploration means to the planet at large. 5% of our in-game revenues go to benefit Project Kaisei, a non-profit dedicated to cleaning up the real Pacific Trash Vortex.

Crazy Boat contains many gameplay innovations. The biggest: it uses Facebook profile data to give players in-game bonuses for their real-world skills and strengths. If you you post messages about the forest to your facebook wall, you might earn the Forest Ranger skill, and if you post about current events, you might score points as a Politician. In addition, in a first for Facebook games, players share their adventures with groups of up to four – and what happens to one affects all four.

IO9 calls Crazy Boat “The Best Sci-Fi Distraction on Facebook”

The New York Times Magazine calls Crazy Boat “Enormously Compelling”

Forbes calls Crazy Boat “Weird, witty and compelling: like Farmville if you could grow peyote”

I worked on the game with many talented people, including the consummate artist Joe Alterio, front-end guru David Kurtz, and crack iPhone developer Tom Brow.

Use your real-world facebook profile to earn skills for your in-game persona like “philosopher”, “spy”, “soldier”, “musician” or “politician.”

Play in groups of up to four per boat — your actions are critical to the success of the group.

Crazy Boat builds a rich narrative using the quality-based narrative system pioneered by Fail Better Games in Echo Bazaar.

Sign up for some of our games at http://undercoverstreetgames.com.

Check out our article in the SF Chronicle, Undercover Street Games: Assassins play among us

Path of the Monk is a three-player game of deception made in 48 hours for the Global Game Jam 2010. The Monk relies on chatting with two guiding spirits to make it through the maze, but one spirit is secretly hoping to get the monk killed.

Play the game at http://monk5.shrdwhtbrd.com.

Read a review at http://incrediblystrangegames.com/post/366416893/path-of-the-monk-global-game-jam-2010

Pretweeting

There’s a whole ecosystem of different words. The English top 100 words (“the”, “and”, “or”, etc.) are the blue chip stocks of the twittersphere. Some words, like “dinner”, “#followfriday”, and “sleep”, have very predictable cycles. But you’ll need to follow current events to really know when the best picks, topical words like “ipod” or “lakers”, will hit it big.

This game hit it big on twitter and had several international articles written about it.

@louroboros: i love this so much. #pretweeting
@bdougher I want to buy shares of ‘pretweeting’, it’s gonna be huge! #pretweeting

IndieGamesBlog Browser Game Pick: Pretweeting

Mashable: Pretweeting gets a prediction market

Technology Reviews: Pretweeting- Virtual Twitter Stock Market

OnlyGizmos: Pretweeting is the new trend

WATBlog: Enough of tweeting and retweeting: it’s time for pretweeting!

TechCrunch: Can You Predict Twitter Trends? Use Your Skills For Virtual Cash With Pretweeting

Whytech.fr: Spéculez sur la fréquence des mots avec Pretweeting pour Twitter

MyFox Tech Tips: Predicting Twitter

Turf is the follow-up to Old Campus Tree Risk, a strategy game set on a map of Yale campus that I ran in January 2007. We expanded to multiple campuses, greatly improved the graphics, and experimented with more real-time game designs. I worked on Turf from 2007 – 2008 with Andrew Fong, Hugo Van Vuuren, Matt O’Brien, and Lewis Zimmerman. We were funded by Y-Combinator and Harrison Metal.

The Yale Daily News: “Students hazard all in campus Risk game”

The Harvard Crimson: “Houses Compete in Bid For ‘Risk’ Supremacy”

Wall Street Journal: “Facebook Ignites Entrepreneurial Spirit at Harvard”

The game was mentioned by Bill Clinton (!) at his 2007 Harvard Class Day address.

Harvard Independent: “Winner Take All”

Stanford Daily: “StanfordTurf invades campus”