1) Figure out what your fundamental gameplay dynamic is going to be as early as possible. IE, what is it the fundamental unit of play that the user is actually going to be doing (including the physical button/key presses)?
2) Define and integrate your social model and your monetization model.
3) Express your concept in wireframes.
4) Determine the minimum viable level of product you will need for launch.
5) Determine the size of your post-launch including your development window, goals, and top priorities.
6) Execute on development.
7) Launch.
8) Begin to execute on your post-launch goals. These will change based on metrics and user requests.

Completing some later steps will often send you back to step one. Don’t be afraid to loop.

If you haven’t checked them out, go take a look.

“Through the VolleeX engine, we can take full PC games, MMOs or even virtual worlds and stream them to any 3G enabled handsets, “says Vollee’s head of business development, Julian Corbertt in an interview with Pocket Gamer. “This means that you can now access games or full persistent online worlds right from your mobile handset. It’s a real step forward for mobile games as you can now have meaningful connected experiences on your handset.”

But maybe they’re just aiming too high. Streaming games will never really deliver core game experiences to the degree that twitch players are going to find acceptable, at least not until we fix the speed of light. Still the idea of doing it with something like WOW makes infinite sense, and allows you to deliver relatively high end graphical experiences to relatively low-end platforms.

Applications on Facebook are already becoming more server driven, so why not pull the whole thing over and deliver rich, immersive experiences one click at a a time to audience that will be perfectly happy with lag and a low frame rate?

The animation industry was taken by surprise when Hanna Barbera starting delivering cartoons for television using less than a quarter of the frame-rate of features. Could history be about to repeat itself?

Every time a new market opens up the first games to appear are built on traditional, time-tested play patterns. From the DS to the iPhone, from XBLA to browser games, it’s always rock-solid gameplay that shows up first, with the fancy stuff pulling up in a later bus. And it’s been true since the beginning of the medium. It wasn’t the gorgeous graphics that made pong a household name.

Sure, basic expectations have grown in the last thirty years. These days players expect a lot more from even the most basic games than just a sprinkling of pixels and some bloops and bleeps. But it’s not zero-sum either. In the wrong hands, or used in the wrong way, adding more graphical effects may just serve to confuse your audience, or make a game that has less mainstream appeal. More isn’t always better, and the audience for social games isn’t one that will necessarily appreciate a hardcore experience.

My latest piece is on the bright future for Social Games.  I’m currently working on something a little less optimistic.

Here’s the excerpt to whet your appetite:

I’m actually beginning to wonder if the future for social platform gaming may turn out to be so rosy that our dogs and cats will indeed be a target market for social entertainment in the next few years.

There have been a few concrete events in the last couple of weeks that have given me a reason to have some genuine optimism. First is Facebook Connect, which strikes me as proof positive that Facebook is, for the present at least, genuinely committed to supporting application developers in a (mostly) open manner that will everyone to continue to make a decent profit for the (foreseeable) future. (There’s that conservative side speaking again.) Allowing everyone to win may seem like an obvious strategy, but the history of games is one where the person providing you with the platform is also one of your biggest competitors. Sony, Nintendo, Sega, and even Microsoft, all had divisions making “first party” games that were trying to eat as much of the market as possible even while they were charging everyone else for the privilege of publishing on their platform. Even the Wii, last year’s great mainstream hope of the living room, is utterly dominated by titles made by Nintendo.

Raph Koster is a designer who’s blog posts are always worth reading. His thoughts on the future of single-player were a big inspiration on my decision to focus on Social Games.

He’s just dropped a big post on ways to make virtual spaces more social, and there’s plenty of good stuff in there to mull over, not the least of which is that the ability to have an in-game way to reflect on your experiences (virtual and otherwise) is a key part of the socialization process. He points out that you need to actively incentivize players in order to get them to engage in activities that create social opportunities. There’s a subtle difference between that and just giving them straight rewards for being social, and I think it’s an important one.

In a much more limited environment like a Facebook game, that means giving the user the opportunity and the ability to share elements of their current Status with other players. The main problem right now is that the only way you can share that information is by putting it up on your wall and sharing it with everybody. That dilutes the impact, since most of your friends probably don’t care what you’re doing in Mob Wars, and your Mob Wars friends are much less likely to notice what happened to you and be able to comment on it in any significant way. Why not have Mob Wars update me about how my other friends in the game are doing and also give me the ability to comment?

Communication about status is a key social activity. In the end it’s the primary thing you do on Facebook, so it’s ironic that it isn’t being well exploited by the current generation of Social Platform Games that appear on it. Part of that is, of course, that those elements of social sharing can often be the ones that are the most easily exploited, so they tend to get locked out by the Terms of Service.

"For the vast majority of players, even those who regularly play and enjoy violent games, violence was not a plus," study lead author Andrew Przybylski, a Rochester graduate student, said in a news release issued by the university.

The plus isn’t for the player, necessarily. But what violence does do is communicate clearly.

"Kill or be killed" is a primal and simple way to explain to a Player their relationship between themselves and the other objects in the world. And their first goal will be to find out just how the game intends to let them do that.

It’s certainly not the only way, nor is it going to be popular with a lot of demographics, but everyone gets it, whether they like it or not. Violence avoids the need to try and create a context for why I might you might want to match three of a similar object together.  Gore shows you that you’ve done the right thing, because if something is exploding into a shower of blood, then you probably did what you were supposed to do.

The research, consisting of two online surveys and four experimental studies, found that overcoming hurdles, getting a feeling of accomplishment and having multiple choices for strategy and action appealed the most to seasoned video gamers and novices alike.

There are reasons to not use violence and gore as your basic toolset, but the above quote confuses cause and effect. Games use violence because it communicates accomplishment and helps you overcome hurdles, not because it feels good to be violent.

As games become more socialized violence will probably become a tool favored more by cooperative games (us vs. them) than head to head play (you vs. me).  After all, it’s far more socially acceptable to shoot a computer generated monster than your best friend.

Flash has come a long way over the last decade, and the games are getting better all the time, even if they’re not quite up to application quality in terms of stability and power. So it’s easy to forget that there are inherent technical and practical limitations that come from running a game inside an browser application designed to work across multiple operating systems and desktops.

In some ways those limitations are good thing. And interestingly, it’s also something they share with their big brothers on core platforms like the Xbox and the Wii. It changes how they need to be structured, because in both cases you never know when the user is going to decide to suddenly shut off the application.

Traditional games are primarily focused on the experience of play. It’s the old "gameplay is everything" model, and while that’s still important, the equation has changed a bit. What a social player is most concerned about is status. After all, telling other people about how you’re doing is what Facebook does best, whether it’s what you’re watching, reading, thinking, or playing. In the end your "wall" is a billboard that gives you a chance to let other people know what you’re up to. It wasn’t all that long ago that only Presidents and movie stars got the kind of attention we’re all getting now.

And if you look at the early social platform successes, you can see that while the gameplay isn’t all that compelling your status is clearly something they all have in common. X-Wars games like Mob Wars are constantly telling you where you’re at, what you need, and what’s next. Scrabulous was also a strong a status game. It constantly let players know when it was their turn, and immediately gave them a "lay of the land" when they saw the game board. For users of these applications "where am I at?" can be almost as important as "what’s next?"

With players coming to your games looking for five minutes of fun you need a place for them to start and end that experience, and a strong status screen is always going to be the place to call home.