Tell Us What You Think #PeaceMakerGame and More!

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If you found us and are playing PeaceMaker we want to hear from you and want your help to spread the word about the game. Here are a few ways that we would love for you to tell us what you think. We have also recently had some requests from people wanting to write about us that would love to speak to some of you. If you are willing to share your story please use the contact option to let us know and we will pass along your information.

Review the Game
Due to the nature of the content and our sensitivity to the experience we didn’t include the pop-up that asks you to rate the game while you are playing it. This definitely doesn’t mean we don’t want you to do so. If you have played the game and have an opinion good or bad don’t hesitate to do so in the different app stores.

Tweet About Us Or To Us
We would love to hear your thoughts and experiences #peacemakergame and hope we can get it trending enough to give people a sense of the experience people are having with the game. Tweet us directly at @impactgamespgh. We were a little late to jumping on twitter handles related to our company and game so it seems a bit obscure but that is us and we will respond as best we can.

Join Us On Facebook
We have a couple of different presences on Facebook. You can check out our ImpactGames page our PeaceMaker page or join our I Wanna Be A PeaceMaker group!

Contact Form
Using our contact form is a sure fire way to get us. Need to send us more information than makes sense in any of those channels we are always reachable through this blog or our contact form and happy to do so.

Educators We Want To Hear From You!

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Many years ago I collected information about teachers using PeaceMaker and began the process of building an educator community that included a forum and resources for lesson plans associated with the game. Unfortunately that forum has long since been overrun by spammers and my information is definitely outdated. I would love to try to kick start this effort again and if you are an educator using PeaceMaker we would love to hear from you.

We have recently been contact by someone at UNESCO MGIEP who is trying to compile best practices around education and games and would love your help. He is very interested in hearing how you use PeaceMaker in the classroom at all levels. Hopefully we can also pull specific best practices around using PeaceMaker from his work as well. I will update this post soon with a link to a survey that he will be providing but in your contact please let me know if you would be willing to be introduced.

We are also starting to try to get the news about our newest release out there through press and reviews. We have been asked by some interested parties if we could put them in touch with our users to interview for their stories. If you would be willing to speak to them we would greatly appreciate it and again if you would be willing to have your contact shared please include that in your contact.

Finally we would just love to hear how you are using the game. If none of the above appeals to you we would still love to hear from you and have you let us know where you are using the game, what context and what format. As much or little information as you are willing to share would be great. I will try in the near future to make it even easier on you by creating a survey and attaching it here.

Please contact us using our contact form and sending to general inquiries or whatever box tickles your fancy here.

PeaceMaker Mobile is Live!

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Dear All,

I am excited to say we have released the mobile version of PeaceMaker. We hope this will help broaden the availability and exposure of the game to new and exciting areas and audiences.

I want to thank our dedicated team for their great work on this project. A big thank you to all of our Beta testers. I also want to thank the people who have continued to support us and use/play our game over all of these years. Your vocal disappointment when our old version stopped working kept the pressure on for us to get this development completed.

We are also excited to offer the game through the desktop AppStore for MacOS and soon through other avenues to insure access for PC users. While the new design was primarily with mobile devices in mind we think it translates well to desktop (and makes the game available to those without mobile access). We do plan to further optimize the desktop build as we move forward.

Please continue to let us know about issues you may find and ideas for improving the game. We hope this is going to open up new avenues for us to continue to develop the platform, new titles, and new languages.

More to come soon.

Sincerely,

Eric

PS. If you do not see the game in the app stores one reason may be that we were forced to give it a 17+ rating. I will write more about that later but we hope this does not limit your access.

PeaceMaker Mobile Beta Approaching Release – Mobile Testers Needed

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We are very close to submitting for release. Different platforms may come online at different points depending on review and approval process. Currently we are making a push on the mobile version for Android and iOS with a desktop version to follow.

We are looking for people willing to beta test different platforms so please contact us through the contact form if you are interested. We are especially interested in fluent Hebrew and Arabic testers to validate our new menus and that the localized files transferred correctly into the new builds.

Look for more news in the upcoming week(s). I want to put a date to it but as with any release every time we think we nailed it a tester points out a usability issue or finds a bug. Our open issues currently number in the handful so the optimist in me is counting down the days to release.

Once we launch we will be discontinuing the old version of the game. For now if you are desperate to play and are willing to work with the technical problems associated with our old build it can still be downloaded from the About page as the classic version of Peacemaker.

Sincerely,

Eric

PeaceMaker Mobile and More…

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Asi Burak’s recent interviews have renewed interest in PeaceMaker and prompted a bunch of inquiries into whether the game is being updated or if there is a mobile version currently available or in the works. The simple answer is yes. Broadening our impact through wider distribution as well as updating the engine to be more stable on new computer environments is something we have always viewed as important and we have been working on a port for some time now.

We have undertaken the process of rebuilding the game using the Unity Game Engine to make it available on a range of platforms. Updating the game to the new engine will also move us forward on two other longer term goals we have had:

Through the new engine we will be better able to update the content of the game itself. We are not sure at this time if version 1.0 will be updated with new content or just be a port of the current version of the game to mobile, but it will make it a lot easier to do so in the near future.

The new engine is also the first step towards our other goal of creating a more strategy game publishing platform or “PeaceMaker Platform” (name TBD) that will allow others to build their own versions of PeaceMaker on whatever scenarios are important to them.

At this time we have not set an actual launch date for the mobile version but we are in a very early beta and things are moving along fairly smoothly so please check back for more details or keep an eye out in the app stores.

Asi Burak Reflects on Designing PeaceMaker Amid Current Events

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Asi Burak was asked to write an article for Kotaku reflecting on his role in designing Peacemaker given current events. I will just link over to it for you so you can read directly his words.

Kotaku Article

I also thought I would link to a post by Tim Sweeney a long time ago regarding our design assumptions related to the game as it seems relevant to the article.

Design Assumptions

PeaceMaker Free to Everyone!

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Dear All,

Thank you all for your support over the years. We are pleased to announce that we are finally making PeaceMaker free to the public. Our newest build doesn’t require any serial number activation and can be freely downloaded from the site. We hope this will allow the game to find an even larger audience in schools, community centers, and the general public.

If you have any technical issues with the game please refer to this post first to look for answers to the issues you may be facing:

Having Technical Issues? Read this first!

Enjoy and check back for news on future projects related to PeaceMaker. We currently have a mobile version of the game under development which will also address technical issues related to this version. This new development is also getting us moving down a path that will make a PeaceMaker toolkit available that will allow anyone to try their hand at making a version of PeaceMaker for other conflicts and social issues.

Sincerely,

Eric

Play The Election: Overview

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The live site is no longer being hosted by Rand McNally so I thought I would post a slideshare showcasing the project since we are very proud of our efforts and the outcome.

First let me thank the fine folks over at Rand McNally for giving us this amazing opportunity. It had been since our partnership with the University of Missouri Journalism School that we had the opportunity to have an active community and it is always exciting to see people engaging with our platform.

It is always difficult to stand out in the sea of election education materials that pop up around a Presidential Election but we think our project did just that. Have a look:

We still strongly believe in the platform and hope that there are more great partnerships and life left in Play the News and its future iterations. Watch out for new things to come.

PeaceMaker Free to Beta Testers!

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** Update December 2nd 2015 – This version is no longer supported on newer OS. you can still find this version to download but we have no and are not working on a version that will resolve the issue that arose with Quicktime and Java. If you are trying to access the game and we have not yet released the new version you can use our contact form to reach out to be a beta tester of the newer version.

We have been working on and off to try to create a DRM (activation code) free version of PeaceMaker for some time now.  In the process of doing this we are attempting to update some of our media players and other know issues that have resulted over the years.  We have been giving this version out to select individuals for testing purposes and have had some success with only very rare technical issues.

Our hope has been to get this version stable enough to update our store and implement a pay what you want system.  The funds people decide to give would go to other extensions to this product that we have been slowly chipping away at such as a mobile version and a publishing platform.  With our activation server currently having technical issues we decided the time was right time to make this new version available to anyone who would like to play the game.

We hope that those choosing to download our new beta version would at least let us know of any technical issues by contacting us at our support email (support[@]impactgames.com). All we will request from you would be your system specs and a log file that we will steer you to.  We would ask for this in order to make the game more stable for everyone and expedite our final transition to a free to all model.

Without further ado the links (** Links removed from this post to insure understanding of discontinued support):

Contagious – The Pitch Pt. 3 – Real World Actions and More

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If you haven’t read or viewed the previous pitch posts you may want to go back and view them or this will make no sense to you… So our pitch grew and grew, and other people who had sent in ideas or platforms were merged into our pitch idea, and as such the overall campaign got even more interesting.

One group that designs and runs location-based marketing campaigns had a platform that they had pitched. As a result we were asked to design how we could make use of location services in our game. We came up with the following integration that we thought would be really cool rolled out into different cities around the globe. The pretty simple and straightforward approach was just to translate resource gathering and activities into the real world locations they exist. In short legitimately educating people as to where their fall-out shelters were, where to get vaccinated, closest hospitals etc. Again, I will let slideshare show you what I am talking about:

Another group, unfortunately I don’t’ have visuals to help explain, was a group that is very successful at creating viral video campaigns. There were several options going around. One option was to create a narrative backstory of the initial mutation through videos of someone who was one of the first infected patients and is quarantined. The idea being to figure out the source of the outbreak while interacting with the patient and other viewers – virus hunting. This piece could have also had some gaming components to find clues etc to unlock next chapter.

In the end the whole campaign could have worked something like this – teaser viral video campaign builds the narrative to the point of an outbreak, this is timed to occur with a major event at a baseball game, that then launches the FaceBook game, that then builds to the movie release (with red carpet game or even renditions at major theater openings), at which point the game then plays out till eradication, with location based gameplay spawned at different major cities on a weekly basis.

Alas it is a shame it was not realized. Live to pitch another day. As I said more on the business part of the deal later as well as where the different parts are now and how they may still live on (with help from you?)