ChefVille 'Another Name for Sauce' Quests: Everything you need to know

Along with the "Pans on Fire" Flambe Station quests in ChefVille, daring chefs can also complete the new Worcestershire Sauce Station and its quests: Another Name for Sauce. Like the Pans on Fire quests, these are timed, and they'll only be available for nine days. We're here with a look at these quests to get you started, so let's go!

Tongue-Tied Place and Build the Worcestershire Sauce StationTend Friends' Flour Crates 6 TimesCraft Worcestershire Sauce 4 Times
The Worcestershire Sauce Station can be placed via this quest window and unwrapped with three energy. You'll need to collect five Sauce Bottles and six Fermenting Barrels in order to finish it off. The Sauce Bottles are earned via a general request posted on your news feed, while the Barrels come from individual requests sent directly to your neighbors. When you finish this Station, you can create Worcestershire Sauce using three Cloves, two Onions, and two Salt. The Sauce takes two minutes to create.

Once you run out of Cloves, you can earn more by planting Clove Trees in your restaurant. They each cost 200 coins and can be harvested instantly. Each tree can be harvested once every 10 minutes, and each tree has four harvests available in total before disappearing. You can also earn Cloves at random by tending trees in your friends' restaurants. When you finish this first quest, you'll receive two Sirloin Beef, 10 XP, and three Mushrooms.

Kitchen Helper Cook Vegetable Skewer Flambe 4 TimesHarvest 8 TomatoesAsk for 3 Secret Worcestershire Sauce Recipes
The Tomatoes can be harvested once every two minutes, while the Secret Worcestershire Sauce Recipes are earned by sending out individual requests to some of your ChefVille neighbors. Finally, you'll need to cook the Vegetable Skewer Flambe dishes over on the Flambe Station, so make sure to check out our guide to building that particular appliance if you still need to catch up.

We'll update this space as we learn more about the Another Name for Sauce quests, so stick with us!

Play ChefVille on Zynga.com now >

More ChefVille Coverage

What do you think of this Worcestershire Sauce Station? Do you think you'll be able to complete these quests before they expire? Sound off in the comments!

View the original article here

FarmVille 2 Vanilla Heirloom Recipes: Everything you need to know

You might already be satisfied with the amount of crafting recipes available in FarmVille 2's Crafting Kitchen. But Zynga always releases more. In fact, the developer has released a brand new "Heirloom Recipe" feature to the Crafting Kitchen that will see new recipes released for a very limited time to encourage players to come back for more.

The first set of Heirloom Recipes revolves around the Vanilla plant, which has been re-released in their honor. The Vanilla is planted for 80 coins per square and harvested after four hours. If you never reached the Blue Ribbon level of mastery for this plant, you've got two days to do so, as your progress from before is still intact here, letting you pick up right where you left off. As for the three recipes, you can now use that Vanilla to eventually craft Vanilla Butterscotch Bundt cakes.

The first recipe in this trio is Vanilla Cream, which is prepared using five Vanilla and four Milk. You'll receive eight XP each time you create a batch of Vanilla Cream, and a single batch is sold for 1,230 coins.The second recipe is Vanilla Butterscotch Filling, which is created with one Vanilla Cream and three Butterscotch candies. The Butterscotch is earned through individual requests to your neighbors. Once you've collected enough to make Vanilla Butterscotch Filling, you'll receive 12 XP for each one you create, which are worth 2,050 coins each.Finally, The Vanilla Butterscotch Bundt recipe is created using one Vanilla Butterscotch Filling and one Batter. The Batter is created using Wheat, Flour, and Eggs. Crafting a Vanilla Butterscotch Bundt gives you 25 XP, and you can sell each one for 4,260 coins. Remember though, these recipes will only be available for two more days, so make sure to craft as many of these bundt cakes as you can to make the most coins possible within that time frame.
Play FarmVille 2 on Zynga.com >

What do you think of this new Heirloom Recipes feature? Which other crops would you like to see re-released in the game? Let us know in the comments!

View the original article here

EA gives Scrabble an overhaul on Android

With so many Android devices available on the market, it's not uncommon for games to run differently on different devices. In an attempt to make Scrabble a more streamlined experience for all kinds of Android gamers, Electronic Arts has overhauled the game, creating a version that can now support over 50 additional Android devices, including tablets like the Google Nexus 7 and Google Nexus 10.

What's more, the game has been specifically optimized for these new tablets, allowing for gameplay in both portrait or landscape mode, depending on your personal preference.

In addition to this technical upgrade, Scrabble now comes with a "Super Chat" feature, allowing friends and strangers to gossip from right within the app using emoticons. Of course, the rest of the game remains relatively unchanged, giving you the same cross-platform play across iOS and Facebook as you work to create the best word possible with your limited letter tiles.

This update may not seem like a huge one, but it's great to see EA supporting an "older" mobile game, bringing it to new audiences that may not have had the chance to play it before. Stick with us for more EA news, as we'll make sure to let you know if the developer / publisher updates any additional apps in a similar manner.

Download Scrabble on Android >

Have you tried Scrabble on any of these newly supported phones and tablets? How do you think the Super Chat mode handles? Sound off in the comments!

View the original article here

Facebook updates iOS app with free calls in the U.S., Canada

Facebook today released version 5.5 of its iOS app, which now allows users in the U.S. and Canada to call friends for free directly from the app.

Facebook users have been able to make free calls via the social network’s Messenger app for iOS since January, but today that functionality has been added to its more widely used main app. From a Facebook message, users can tap the “i” icon in the top right corner and select “free call.” This will only work if both users are in the U.S. or Canada and have the latest version of Facebook or Facebook Messenger installed on their iOS device.

Other changes in version 5.5 include more prominent buttons to Like, comment on and share posts in the News Feed. The design for the buttons is the same one that Facebook uses on its mobile site. In addition, the Share button to repost stories from the News Feed is now available in all languages.

We also noticed that the icon in the corner of posts that gives users options to hide or mark a post as spam has been changed from three vertical dots to an upside down caret.

View the original article here

Meaningful grinding

A recent tweet and Winter Wolves forum post about grinding got me thinking how to deal with this issue.

Grinding can be relatively boring experience. For example, in an RPG a player character cannot complete a quest because there’s too tough enemy in the end. Therefore the character goes and kills some orcs to get experience points to level up so that he can beat the quest boss enemy.

Grinding here is simply a boring act of clicking without real threat of losing anything. Why is this introduced in the first place? If the purpose of grinding is to make player “wait”, then there’s little meaningful play there.

I’m not trying to fully describe what grinding is or how it should be dealt with, but the basic idea can be that you need to do some boring, repetative action in order to progress in the game.

So, what are alternatives for grinding?

No grinding?
One obvious is: no grinding. This cuts down the playing time, and at least gets rid of the boring parts. But this isn’t necessarily the optimal way since it requires tons of work, and some players actually like some aspects of grinding.

Meaningful quests
One very obvious way to masquerade grinding is to introduce quests. While everybody and their mom can notice that killing spawning rats in a forest is grinding, adding some variety to this in form of quests can bring some meaning into things. Instead of killing a rat you first talk with an old man who has a rat problem, you go to his barn, kill rats, collect rat tails and then come back and gain experience. This too can be grinding, but having few more different actions (talk, walk, kill, collect) add variety into the system, and becomes slightly less boring.

For a time being.

Long-term penalty for grinding
Instead of viewing grinding as “something you need to do to beat the next enemy” we could introduce long-term thinking in how much grinding you do. Usually player can choose to grind so much that there’s no challenge in beating the major boss: for example you might have designed that in the end of Map 2, there’s a Level 2 enemy which should be attacked by Level 2 hero. Hero might have decided to kill spawning wolves so much that he is now level 7 hero, and can easily beat level 2 boss. So, your challenge has become something that has absolutely no challenge (first rat killing, then easy end boss kill).

To prevent this: introduce some long-term negative penalty for grinding. For example, in some games there might be attribute “age”. If player spends 60 years in the forests beating rats, in order to beat the next boss… he might suffer penalties for Dexterity or something. Maybe his skills are getting better, but his core attributes receive penalties (thus he might have perfected his mastery of the sword, but since his endurance is very low he can hit just once). This “age” attribute can be a really harsh penalty, so milder versions most likely are more suitable for most games.

Another thing might be that since time passes, there are certain quests he cannot take. Perhaps there has been a possibility to defend a city from attacking pirates, but since the player character spend 3 years in the forest collecting mushrooms, the pirates conquered the city. There’s no “defend the city” quest (that would reward the player with plenty of experience points, karma and equipment) available any more.

Here player has had a choice between “low-risk, low reward mushroom grinding” and “high-risk, high-reward pirate attack quest”. That can be a meaningful choice as-is. Player must take his pick, he cannot choose both ways.

Or perhaps character receives a curse point every month (I dunno why, maybe he just is cursed) and the more curse points he receives during the game, the worse overall score he’ll receive at the end of the game.

Or perhaps the curse points affect: each curse point increases the likelyhood of random bad encounter during travels. This way, player may decide to grind to gain experience, but receives curse points that affect traveling. Therefore, player cannot grind too much or his long-term progress gets worse.

Or maybe player character is an elf who can live 500 years, and grinding really does increase his age — thus eventually killing the player if he grinds way too much…

Whatever the situation, one way to think of grinding is that “grinding gives you short term help (for example: helps completing the current quest) but introduces long term penalty or hindres progress somehow. This way player might need to think how much grinding he does: he must balance short-term gain vs long-term pain.

And the other way to think of it: allow player to grind (low-risk, low-reward) but also allow him to choose high-risk, high-reward path.

Even more meaningful quests
Adding an another layer of meaning in the previous actions help make things bit more interesting. Naturally this means you have to do some work to get the engine going, and it’s probably a hidious thing to test… but here’s the general idea: doing certain actions change state of the world.

For example, if the player character goes around killing rats throughout the city, eeventually he’ll piss of the “hunter killing guild”, which is the official jobbing place for rat killers. No outsiders are allowed to kill their rats. This means that when your player kills rats, this event triggers negative and positive reputation. Let’s explore this situation bit more.

For example, there could be several entities in the city, some of them listed below:
- rat killer guild
- inn keeper guild
- old man
- miners
- prince
- villagers
- thieves

Then there can be several resources in the town (here’s a few examples):
- rat population
- gold mine
- food situation

Each of these entities could have relationship. For example, “rat killer guild” could be happy when “rat population” is high. “Prince” doesn’t give rat’s arse, if you may, about the rat population, but he cares about “food situation”. Inn keeper guild doesn’t care about “rat population”, and they actually want “food situation” to be poor (so that they can get monopoly over limited resource). Villagers hate rats. Prince wants to keep good relationships with the rat killer guild but also with the inn keeper guild. And somewhat good relationship with the villagers to ensure there’s no riots.

Now, some examples that might occur if the player character was to go really deep into killing rats. Naturally, getting rat population lower might actually be an impossible thing… but let’s assume there’s a town with a really low rat population, and somehow the main character manages to use alchemy to come up with a poison to kill almost all the remaining rats.

What would follow:
- rat killer guild would be pissed off: they have just lost their jobs to an outsider
- inn keeper guild doesn’t care since rat population doesn’t concern them (unless the hero decides to start a rat burger business too)
- old man specifically cares about rats in his barn, but he might also generally like the idea that there’s fewer rats in the city, thus he might thank the player
- miners don’t care, so nothing happens there
- villagers hate rats, so they like the new situation
- prince notices that rat killer guild is pissed off, which might mean prince gets bit pissed off too, but not too much since villagers are happier now

What else might follow?

Rat killer guild members might try kill the player character (this can be simply by spawning random rat killers somewhere near the player character, who have think that player character is “enemy”). Of course if there happens to be “friendly” villagers nearby, those might join to defend the hero.

As you can see, by introducing just a few elements in the game economy, we’ve seen a huge difference in what “rat killing” has become. By introducing generic elements, we can see emerging behavior from different groups, and player needs to choose sides.

And these are just numbers.

See how it’s almost automatic that you think “rat killer guild” is “bad folks” and “villagers” are the “good folks”. (I’m taking a wild guess here that you sort of mentally labeled them one way or another).

And they are just numbers. I could have listed them as groups A, B and C and doing thing X creates negative relationship with group A but positive relationship with group B. But since we labeled them “villagers”, “prince” etc. we assume differently. There’s now, in a way, some meaningfullness in the system itself. Player might choose to do things game designers didn’t anticipate (maybe he pisses off multiple sides, maybe he manages somehow to get villagers and rat killers hostile towards themselves. Maybe villagers manage to kill rat hunters, and then rat population grows too high, pissing of villagers who then go attack prince for not doing anything.

And at that point our lone hero has left the town…

But what about balancing?
Now that’s a tricky subject I purposely left out. In this blog post I thought only about how to add meaningfulness to grinding.

As for the balancing all this, that’s probably beyond this blog post.

Sure, by introducing new elements, you also have to think about the game balance, but one thing is certain: even if you go with “rat killing, no side effects” method… that too has balancing issues. No matter which route you take, there’s always balancing issues.

Here I tried to look at things that might turn grinding into something bit more interesting.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 25th, 2013 at 9:18 am and is filed under Game Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

View the original article here

FarmVille 2 Gothic Revival Items: Everything you need to know

While you might be busy working on collecting Valentines in the FarmVille 2 Valentine's Day event, keep in mind that the game's store continues to be updated. This includes the launch of a new set of Gothic Revival items that were just launched in the store to start the week off right. We're here with a complete look at these new items, which includes a variety of buildings that you can purchase to really make your farm pop. Let's get started!

Crops

Black Pansy Costs: 40 coinsHarvest Time: 2 HoursCan be turned into: 5 Animal FeedCan be sold for: 57 coinsXP Earned: 3
Trees

Ash Tree - 12 Farm Bucks
Beautyberry Tree - 12 Farm Bucks

Animals

Black Shire Horse - 47 Farm Bucks
Baby Black Shire Horse - 30 Farm Bucks
Chocolate LaMancha Goat - 42 Farm Bucks
Baby Chocolate LaMancha Goat - 29 Farm Bucks

Decorations

"Ochre" Carpenter House Wing - 40 Farm Bucks
"Umber" Carpenter House Wing - 400,000 coins
Gothic Revival Iron Fence - 3 Farm Bucks
"Cocoa" Carpenter House - 47 Farm Bucks
"Cocoa" Carpenter House Turret - 28 Farm Bucks
"Cocoa" Carpenter House Wing - 42 Farm Bucks
"Ochre" Carpenter House - 45 Farm Bucks
"Ochre" Carpenter House Turret - 26 Farm Bucks
"Plum" Carpenter House - 43 Farm Bucks
"Plum" Carpenter House Turret - 24 Farm Bucks
"Plum" Carpenter House Wing - 38 Farm Bucks"Roan" Carpenter House - 45 Farm Bucks
"Roan" Carpenter House Turret - 26 Farm Bucks
"Roan" Carpenter House Wing - 40 Farm Bucks
"Slate" Carpenter House - 41 Farm Bucks
"Slate" Carpenter House Turret - 22 Farm Bucks
"Slate" Carpenter House Wing - 36 Farm Bucks"Umber" Carpenter House - 450,000 coins
"Umber" Carpenter House Turret - 260,000 coins
Gary McDoober Scarecrow - 11 Farm Bucks
Gothic Revival Planter - 8 Farm Bucks
Gothic Revival Rocker - 8,500 coins
Kelly McDoober Scarecrow - 11 Farm Bucks If you're looking to create a larger building on your farm, remember that you can purchase these multiple building pieces, like the Houses, Turrets, and Wings, and then place them near each other to create one larger building through illusion. If that's something you're interested in, make sure you purchase these items sooner, rather than later, as they'll only be available for 20 days.

Play FarmVille 2 on Zynga.com now >

More FarmVille 2 Coverage

What do you think of these many Gothic Revival items? Will you purchase any of these large building pieces for your farm? Which color of the home pieces do you like best? Sound off in the comments!

View the original article here

Zynga’s earnings report for Q4 2012 shows $311 M in revenue, $48.5 M loss

Today, Zynga reported it made $311,165 in revenue, with $261,269 million in bookings for Q4 2012. In terms of revenue, that’s flat year-over-year while bookings were down by 15 percent year-over-year (but up 2 percent from Q3 2012).

Zynga’s earnings report shows it had a net income loss of ($48,561) million; up from Q4 2011's loss of ($435 million) (though the company could really go up from there), which was due to a $510 million stock-based compensation charge tied to its IPO in December 2011. As a result, Zynga’s Q4 2012 was decidedly up from the ($52.7 million) loss in Q3 2012.

Leading up to today, analysts have been split with their predictions for how Zynga’s earnings would go. The ongoing success of FarmVille 2 (which was recently dethroned as the No. 1 game in terms of daily active users but still reigns supreme in with monthly active users) and the CoasterVille’s recent surges in traffic are certainly feathers in the company’s cap, but things like Zynga shutting down a number of underperforming titles and the disappearance of high-profile sequel CityVille 2 from the charts (the performance likely recreating a sense of deja vú for anyone who watched The Ville flounder) were considered warning flags.

Outside factors fueled some analysts’ wary outlooks. EA’s lackluster earnings report last week, which eschewed any mention of social titles in favor of mobile development, has been taken by some as a sign of the continuing decline of social games. Additionally, Facebook revealed on Friday that Zynga’s impact on the social network’s revenue was continuing to shrink.

As has been the case in past quarters, Zynga still has a lot of cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities on hand. That’s down from the $1.92 billion it had in Q4 2012, but the company also doesn’t have any short term or long term debt, according to Bloomberg. Cash flow from operations in Q4 2012 was ($114.3), or $119.4 million excluding the purchase of the company’s headquarters in San Francisco.

Zynga’s partner publishing program has begun picking up steam, but its effects still haven’t really started to make much of an impact on the company’s bottom line. Although some of the early partners have games now playable on Zynga.com’s platform and/or Facebook, Zynga hasn’t turned on the full effect of its cross-promotion power to benefit these titles (many of which seek to tap into the lucrative core gamer market).

Following last quarter’s lowered 2012 guidance, the company was able to meet its projected estimated bookings between $1 to $1.1 billion (this amount was already $500 million less than original projections for the year). The company’s total net revenue for 2012 was $1.28 billion, while bookings managed to reach$1.15 billion.

Over the past quarter, Zynga had three major releases to help FarmVille 2 bring home the bacon: CityVille 2, CoasterVille and Bubble Safari Ocean. It didn’t take long for CityVille 2's traffic to nosedive (it only appeared on our Top 25 Facebook games lists before it completely disappeared from them), but CoasterVille and Bubble Safari Ocean are still sitting fairly high up on the list of top-performing Facebook apps. CoasterVille currently holds the No. 2 spot among facebook apps in the 10 million MAU tier and the No. 11 placing in the 1 million DAU tier. Bubble Safari Ocean also sits in the 10 Million MAU tier with the No. 24 spot and the 1 million DAU tier at No. 61.

We’ll continue to update this story as we further examine the company’s earnings report and listen to the earnings call, set to begin shortly.

Developing.

View the original article here