Category Archives: General

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.

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

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):

Play the Election 2012: Going Live With Play the News Election Edition

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We have had the amazing opportunity to partner with Rand McNally to launch, free to schools and educators, an election version of Play the News for the 2012 US Presidential Election.

You can go straight to the site here.

And view the Press Release here.

This was a great opportunity to do a lot of things we have wanted to do for a long time. Over the years we have conducted a lot of outreach to schools and foundations because we think Play the News could be great for the classroom. We have also heard from many of you educators out there requesting the opportunity to use it in you classes.  Here is our chance to find out if it is as great as we all hoped.  Sorry to the rest of you Play the News fans since this version is specifically set up for educators and students, but hopefully if this is successful enough (with your help) we can leverage it into partnerships and opportunities that will help us bring back the open to all broad news topics platform.

Inside you will find all kinds of extra teacher resources to help integrate this into your classroom or community including the opportunity to create your own game stories. Stay tuned as I hope to hold a couple webinars down the line to interested teachers on the game creation process.

ImpactGames Refresh

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The overhaul of the ImpactGames web-site was long over due.  My complete lack of blog posts over the last couple years has also been a source of shame for me.  So, I am happy to say that I am going to remedy both of those situations with the announcement of our new site as well as a rapid fire publishing of several blog posts highlighting some of the other projects we have been working on over the last couple years.  I realize this is not the proper way to maintain an active blog but it’s a start.  We look forward to hearing your thoughts on some of our new projects and ideas.

ImpactGames at DevLearn 2010

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DevLearn is right around the corner!  We’ve been busy working on a few items for the conference that allow you to play and learn.

First up, we’re proud to be sponsoring an instance of BackChatter, the fantastic twitter game created by Local No. 12 which premiered at the Games Developer Conference last year. BackChatter allows players to place “bets” on words that are used in tweets marked with the conference hashtag. It’s a super-fast, easy and slightly addictive way to engage in the conference. Plus we’ll be giving away prizes to each round winner as well as the finalists! The first place overall winner will receive a Premium Membership to The eLearning Guild!!!

DevLearn site: DevLearn10

BackChatter site: http://bc.impactgames.com/

Secondly, Kris Rockwell, ImpactGames CEO, will be presenting at the Serious Games Zone on Play the News and the idea of using gaming as a way to present news media and create a rich experience for users. As part of this, Kris will give a preview of the updated version of Play the News and show the game in action. Kris will also be speaking as part of the Mobile Learning Jam, covering a variety of topics from development to games on mobile devices.

As always, if you want to talk to us about ARG’s, mobile learning or Serious Games and how they can help your organization, just send an email to Alexi Morrissey at alexi.morrissey@impactgames.com or send him a tweet at @hybridlex and we’ll be happy to setup a time to talk to you.

We look forward to seeing you at DevLearn 2010.