sjsivak
Joined 17 years ago
Karma
265
Submissions
75
Member since
Feb 26
I am a game designer/programmer in Cambridge, MA.
View on Hacker NewsRecent submissions
Comment · 1 year ago
Looks awesome
Comment · 13 years ago
Here is the demo we showed at PAX Prime back in August:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rj4aa9dhKdo
Comment · 13 years ago
The most important part of this post is the github repository: http://github.com/proletariatgames/HUGS
"This library includes Haxe externs for Unity and .NET frameworks, generated via the cslibgen utility. It also includes the HUGSWrapper "using" class, which includes various things to work around Haxe/C# translation issues, as well as make working with Unity easier."
Comment · 13 years ago
The organic install part of this calculation seems pretty suspect. In order to get the organic lift mentioned in the article the app would need to be pretty highly ranked _and_ likely sustain that rank for a while before getting 65%-100% the additional installs.
Whenever running a burst campaign it is important to follow it up with sustained installs afterwards to try and maintain the rank for as long as possible to attempt to get some of the organic lift mentioned. It does not simply happen instantly.
Comment · 13 years ago
This is so incredibly wrong in so many ways. Many developers were seduced into social games because people loved them and it seemed like a new frontier and a new market with shorter development cycles and interesting challenges. It is easy to have great hindsight but a few years ago the game industry looked very different. Zynga has had a few games be reviewed quite well, but nobody ever seems to remember them.[1][2]
As a former Zynga employee that came in through acquisition, I find it repulsive that people assume we are all responsible for the poor decisions of a few at the top. Most of us worked our asses off to try to make something awesome, but ended up having to compromise in the worst possible ways to satisfy the top brass or poorly understood metrics.
[1] http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/31/zynga-channels-settlers-of-... [2] http://kotaku.com/5836588/adventure-world-is-zyngas-take-on-...
Comment · 13 years ago
From the headline you would think this is about talent being drained away from VCs, but it is just an interview with Danielle Morrill about her Zombie VC post.
Comment · 14 years ago
I recently ran into an issue with D&B misspelling our company name. This was a massive hassle and I made over 6 phone calls to them and they kept on saying there was one more thing that had to be updated and it would be another 7-14 days. Each time I only found out that the update was not complete because I would call Apple to figure out why the iTunes Connect account was locked.
I finally got fed up and sent this tweet: https://twitter.com/sjsivak/status/276826269377765376. They called me the next morning and fixed it that day.