Welcome to the latest EA GameShow design update. We’ve been busy working on a lot of exciting technical features, which we hope everyone is enjoying. The new web-based version of GameShow just rolled out last week, and already we’ve gotten a lot of great feedback from the players who have been giving it a test run.

However, as some of you may have noticed, power-ups have been turned off in the game. Any power-ups you may have had in your bank have been cashed out and those tokens have been returned to you. So why are we turning off power-ups?

Power-ups are unbalanced. My initial design was to have users buy power-ups in order to win their room. The idea was that you wanted to win the room as cheaply as possible so that you would profit from winning, but not spend all your profits on power-ups. However, all the people who currently play, play to win the region or overall, not to win their rooms. Therefore, in order to be competitive everyone chooses the 6X Chicken power-ups, regardless of cost, because it will give you the most possible points. I want people to make decisions about what power-ups they use, and no one is forced by the design into making any interesting decisions right now.

Power-ups are confusing. Some users in our playtests didn’t even know what power-ups were. They got it once I explained the concept, but their initial experience was confusing. We are going to be getting a lot of new players in the coming weeks with our AOL announcement, and I don’t want them to be immediately discouraged because they don’t know what the hell a 6X Chicken is.

Some Power-ups aren’t working perfectly. A few people have reported that some power-ups simply weren’t working as advertised. The Chicken power-up in particular caused some bugs were users selected the right answer but the wrong answer appeared on the screen. We need to address that.

So, are power-ups gone for good? No. We’re going to be working on them in the coming weeks, and when we reintroduce them there will definitely be some changes. I can’t talk about those changes right now, because you’re never sure what will survive from the page to implementation. I can guarantee you that some old power-ups will be gone, and some new ones will show up. I can tell you that the goal will be to make power-ups force players to make more interesting decisions. If you’d like to share your thoughts, please swing by the EA GameShow forums or submit a comment below and let me know what you think. Until then, I’ll see you in the game.

First, sorry for the lack of regular updates. As many of you know, we’re working hard on getting the game on to new platforms. I realize the game itself hasn’t evolved much in the last few weeks, but we’re laying the foundation for a really amazing summer and fall, with a lot of big announcements coming.

This things I am focusing on from the design side include (but not limited to), balancing the power-ups, adjusting the difficulty, cleaning up some areas of the AI, and working on the look of the Pop Culture channel. We just had a playtest the other night here at EA Tiburon, and I’m really happy with how things turned out. We had more than two dozen people play the game and offer a ton of great feedback. We’re now digesting the feedback, and thinking about the changes we’re going to make.

April will continue to be another quiet month, with only the last avatar unlocked and few smaller updates, but trust me when I tell you we’ve got big plans. If you have any suggestions or thoughts about how to improve the game, don’t hesitate to start a thread on them, because I have an RSS feed for our forums, so I’m always plugged in. Thanks for reading and I’ll see you online in GameShow!

This Thursday we will be sending out the 1.3 update to GameShow. The primary addition to the 1.3 version is “Guest Mode”, which will let players get into the game without having to go through EA’s registration process. Of course, guests will not have persistent stats or the ability to earn tokens nor win sessions, but this will give them a taste of the game and hopefully encourage them to register for the full experience.

One small feature that I was hoping to get in sooner was the new addition to the wager screen. Now you will be able to tell whether this session has double point questions right at the wager screen without having to wonder. I’ve posted a screenshot to give you some idea. It’s in the upper right right underneath the total number of questions for that round.

There’s obviously a lot more I need to be doing to provide you guys with more feedback on the state of the game. You will see a LOT of changes happening to GameShow in the coming months. We’re going to be light on features for 1.3 and 1.4, but that is because we’ve got big plans for the future of GameShow. Plans that I hope you regular GS players will be a part of.

Now playing: Bully for the Xbox 360 (waiting for the patch from Rockstar), Poker Smash on Xbox Live Arcade, SSBB on Wii, and Scrabulous on Facebook.

Update: We’re putting in the new studio today and making the switchover tonight. Here’s a shot of Eric working hard on putting the screws to a keyboard for some reason.

Hey guys, sorry for the delay in updating the designer blog, but I was out at the GDC all last week. I’ll get to that first, but I wanted to update you on the 1.3 release of GameShow. First, 1.3 is more of a server update than a feature update for the game. We’ll be adding Guest Support (the ability to play without having to first create an EA ID), server-based settings (you won’t have to reset your settings every time we update the game), and few other smaller updates. That includes the addition to the wager screen that will indicate which questions are worth 2,000 points. I know we were planning on adding those last week, but we had some server issues that prevented that, so it’s getting rolled in to the 1.3 release, which will roll out next week.

Now on to the GDC. For those of you who don’t know, GDC is the annual Game Developer’s Conference held in San Francisco. It is a week-long conference that has everything from two-day tutorials, to 30 minute lectures, to pub crawls and award shows. This year I had a chance to attend an outstanding session given by Damien Schubert on how to write design docs. If you’re interested, you can check out the powerpoint presentation at his blog, zen of design. Other notable talks included Rob Pardo on Blizzard’s approach to multiplayer design; Jane McGonigal’s summary of academic research on games; Steve Fawkner on the making of Puzzle Quest; Steve Rogers in boss monster design; and plenty of other stuff that I can’t recall right now.

I also had lunch with the head of Capcom’s PR, and I’m truly excited about Street Fighter 4 now. Like almost every other fight fan, I got my start in fighting games with Street Fighter 2, specifically the Championship Edition. SF4 really is a return to those days of classic inputs and balance along with some fantastic animation, so I’m looking forward to that.

Now playing: No More Heroes (wii), Devil May Cry 4 (360), Poker Smash (360), Logan’s Shadow (PSP). Oh, and for my obligatory video highlight, click here for your very own trunk monkey.

1.2 version of GameShow is out the door, and despite a few bugs I’m pretty happy with the way it looks and plays. I had a great time getting a chance to finally communicate last night with some of our players. The chat system is not ideal, I’ll admit. I would prefer to have a system with a scrolling chat buffer so you could go back and see what people said in case you missed it. The problem is there really isn’t any room on the game screen to put that display. For now we’ve settled on something that is light but hopefully easy to use.

We will be making improvements to the chat system like everything else in the game as we evolve. If you have any suggestions, please hop in to the forums and share them with us. We’ve got a 1.2 thread going on so you can join the conversation.