Online Game

Timewasting on the FarmVille online flash game from FaceBook and a fresh look at Office Live

By The Illustrator  |  2009/12/07 20:07 Posted in Illustration, Online Game, Review, SEO etc  |  Comments (0)

I’m still playing with FarmVille.

FarmVille is a flash based game you can play from a link in Facebook.

The stupid game is quite addictive, and I find myself spending quite long periods of time just staring at the thing of beauty that is my farm. I’m quite desperate for more money, and I’m also finding myself making stupid short term decisions to get more cash, just like a real farmer. Here in the picture I have just taken part of the animals grazing meadow over to plant strawberries, because they grow quickly and I can have the money in only a couple of hours. Most other crops take days to grow, and I want to make some progress now.

The gentle pastel coloured art work is a big factor in coming back to FarmVille over and over again and I hope it will actually be an influence on my own art practice, as proper artists call it, over the coming months that I will undoubtedly spend playing this terribly addictive game.

I’ve also been doing a lot of work on my Spiralcat.co.uk website. Spiralcat was always very much a mixed bag and I never thought I would be particularly going back to this site after starting my new Starbright site dedicated to illustration and art. The site is provided as part of Microsoft’s Office Live suite of products and although it is free, it has to be created online using their own site creation software. The last time I had used this software there were just too many bugs in it and too many compromises that had to be made in the design of the website. Microsoft sent me an email recently pleading with me to give it another go however and so I stopped by to see what had changed.

And to be honest not much has changed, it is still an unresponsive and tricky interface, but just enough had been improved for me to now decide that it is worth taking it seriously. For instance I now have control over the colour scheme of my site rather than having to chose from about seven pregenerated schemes, as was the situation before.

So I’m busy sorting out the navigation bar, changing the colour scheme and adding a favicon. It’ll be looking like a real website soon, that someone might charge money for, and that’s a good thing because from the end of next year that’s exactly what Microsoft intend to start doing.

So here is Spiralcat with all the art, good writing and entertainment it was always famous for, at least to the twelve daily visitors it has been attracting.

Facebook | Brett Fitzpatrick

By The Illustrator  |  2009/10/26 15:20 Posted in 3D, Animation, Cute character, Online Game, Review  |  Comments (0)

Facebook, grrr, I didn't think I'd see that again.I’m back on facebook, not particularly because I love facebook (I hate facebook, because millions of people are creating great content and then posting it on someone else’s website), but because of that new game FarmVille. Farmville is a playing experience that has infected the brains of all my normally grown-up and business like friends and turned them into computer game addicted kids.

If you haven’t played it yet – don’t worry you will, you will, it won’t be long before you get an invite because part of the action of the game is persuading friends to join so that you can enjoy greater farm-related riches – if you haven’t played it, it’s like that Tamagotchi key-ring game of the 90s, but a bit more complicated and with better graphics.

And FarmVille has some of the addictive qualities of Tamagotchi too, where according to Wikipedia,

“Some parents also express concern because the device constantly calls the user to it with penalties for ignoring its signal, including death, starvation, and sickness, effectively keeping the device in the child’s consciousness at all times and interfering with other, potentially constructive, activities.”

If you ignore your farm crops can die, and you can lose FarmVille money. I’ve already experienced apparently sane adult people breaking off conversation over dinner to say, “I really must milk my goat.” Before running out the door leaving their meal half eaten.

It’s a mind bending plague of a game, but it does have great graphics, and it’s fun to play, and my crop of wheat is almost ready to be harvested.

I only wish I’d thought of it first.