One thought might be to look into some sort of graphical math program. Something where you could enter in a formula, run a couple thousand iterations of test data through it, graph the results, perform frequency analysis on it, that sort of stuff.

Yeah I've been thinking about this too. I think the best way is to do a crowd source scheme. Ie make it a meta game. A game to build a game.. hehe. The thing about social games is if you try to model it you'll always come up short (Economist have been trying to model human behavior for 100's of years and they still fall short). All models encode bias and blind spots which ultimately leads to miss opportunities..

People do social polling but that's really also just as leading. How you poll and who you poll will lead to the same bias and blind spots.. With the advent of the internet, crowd sourcing and modern software design, it might be possible to do realtime iterative product development shaped by user feedback. What would have been un-thinkable years ago, now is possible. Develop a product release in an early state have players/users play it and from their feedback iteratively change and polish it, in addition you can fund the development by selling access to the pre-releases or discounts on the final release (this is the model for Cortex Command and Mine-craft) . This crowd source funding model (like what KickStarter does) is probably the future of product development.. It's faster, safer and gets more capital to more developers and the returns on investment is less risky since the customer is involved in all stages of development.

-ddn

One thought might be to look into some sort of graphical math program. Something where you could enter in a formula, run a couple thousand iterations of test data through it, graph the results, perform frequency analysis on it, that sort of stuff.

Yes, we will be using Matlab to test some of our algorithms. I come from a biomedical background, and that's what we use..

Yeah I've been thinking about this too. I think the best way is to do a crowd source scheme. Ie make it a meta game. A game to build a game.. hehe. The thing about social games is if you try to model it you'll always come up short (Economist have been trying to model human behavior for 100's of years and they still fall short). All models encode bias and blind spots which ultimately leads to miss opportunities..

People do social polling but that's really also just as leading. How you poll and who you poll will lead to the same bias and blind spots.. With the advent of the internet, crowd sourcing and modern software design, it might be possible to do realtime iterative product development shaped by user feedback. What would have been un-thinkable years ago, now is possible. Develop a product release in an early state have players/users play it and from their feedback iteratively change and polish it, in addition you can fund the development by selling access to the pre-releases or discounts on the final release (this is the model for Cortex Command and Mine-craft) . This crowd source funding model (like what KickStarter does) is probably the future of product development.. It's faster, safer and gets more capital to more developers and the returns on investment is less risky since the customer is involved in all stages of development.

-ddn

I checked out Kick Starter. Looks like a great program. I will definitely take a closer look. This could also be a great way to build grass roots interest, and support. I have capital already, but this could allow us to get in some of our phase II features in for release. I like the idea of having the players involved from the very beginning. Thanks for the great feedback.

Best Regards,

Eric