We have received a lot of positive feedback on Platogo's layout and design in the past. However, our change of direction (from an online gaming portal to a service provider for game developers) also required to rethink the layout of our website. As a result, we decided to do a step-by-step revision of our design in order to better meet the needs of game developers.

You may have noticed that our startpage has already changed some weeks ago. Today, we launched the redesign of the Developer and Edit Game Area. The new Developer Center contains a bunch of entertaining texts on Platogo's new features and benefits. It's definitely worth reading! Concerning the Edit Game Dialog, we managed to replace the rather complicated, tabbed overlay by a clearly arranged page including all the information needed. Just log in and try it out!

In the next few weeks, we will continue with the redesign of the remaining pages. Please be patient with us, as we are still a small team with a busy schedule.
By the way - one thing that will definitely remain, are our lovely Platogo mascots!

Any feedback on our new layout and content is highly appreciated, we would be happy to hear from you!

It's a great time to be a player and developer at Platogo!
We've listened to you and we are now bringing more games to Platogo by putting more effort on providing tools for game developers.

If you are a game developer, read on because we have excellent news for you.
You can now enhance your flash games with social features and bring them to Facebook easily using our wrapper.

You can even customize the look and feel by uploading your own graphics. Check out one of our latest games like Veggie Snake or Whac A Pal on Facebook to see what you can do!

We also have a brand new and shiny start page that will give you an idea of where we are going. Even more improvements are on the way like more social networks (Oops! I didn't say that).

We would love to hear your ideas, questions and challenges (and praise, of course). With your help we can do much better! Our feedback page is just one click away.

Get all this benefits now by joining the Platogo Community. It's FREE and easy.

Hi! My name is Nuno Marques and I'm the new member of the Platogo family (second from the right). I'm going to talk a bit about myself and how I got here in Vienna. I'm originally from Portugal, of a small city, north of Lisbon, called Leiria.


Everything started when I got my first PC at age 11. My passion for computers was already big by then (my friends had Spectrums that I played with) but this led me to play around and have more fun whenever I wanted.

Years later, I went to Uni and there I first learned how to programme. My first language was Pascal. I was very happy whilst doing the Introduction to programming course and even solved all the problems in the course book.

Fast forward to 2004, when I was doing my masters, I was invited to assist in the course of Distributed Systems in my University. It was a great experience! Helping students and teaching them was something I really enjoyed.

I've decided, after that, that I wanted to move to the commercial world, rather than staying at the academic. My master thesis was the crucial decider.

I, then, joined a company called Link Consulting in Lisbon where I and a couple of workmates did a portal (Intranet) with 12 applications for a City Hall. At that time, most of the tools and frameworks were new to me, it was my first contact with the jee stack in the wild and with JUnit. It was when I started reading, massively, about software engineering and construction. I've now read about 250 books about it.

In 2006, a friend of mine challenged me to go with him to work in London. I accepted! Leaving behind a stable job, I bought my ticket to England without any interviews or job prospects. Five days before my trip, a recruiter found my CV online and called me up to see if I was interested in going for an interview at an IT company in the Insurance/Reinsurance market. That company was RI3K. Fortunately, I got the job and joined RI3K three weeks after Jakob (Platogo's CEO), we end up not coding a lot together but we had a lot of good discussions.

Jakob left London to start Platogo with Florian and I stood working for RI3K another year. In RI3K, I integrated Brit Insurance with our platform and partly integrated Catlin. I, also, left a mail templating infrastructure.

I, then, moved to Inspired where I led a team of 5 for a year and introduced a lot of controversial practices (for the company) like pair programming, test driven design, tools for customer acceptance testing like fitnesse and pushed for the highest possible quality without compromises. We created a bingo server which had around 50k LOC, a test coverage of 89% with a ratio around 2:1 between test and production code.

After that I worked for a bit more than 2 months on a highly accessed website, The Daily Mail, which gave me some insights and confirmations about how to build a website that scales up to hundreds of millions of page views per month.

In the mean time, Jakob had been really busy travelling and promoting Platogo and had no time to code. The need for a new experienced developer was growing and last December, he offered me a job at Platogo. After some deliberation I found that there were a lot of advantages to moving to Vienna and joining in. It's a great project and I'm very happy to join this small but very exciting company.

I'm very passionate towards technology and the whole making process of software. I joined the Software Craftsmanship movement in 2008, had been an active member, went to all conferences and met some of the best developers.

I like to try out new and different languages, pair programme with friends on my spare time and read software related books, blogs and papers.

I'm currently learning German!

Upon many requests from developers and gamers we decided to loosen the publish restrictions for games on Platogo. Previously, games had to have a level-editor which excluded a good deal of great games that wouldn't fit into the scheme of level-creation.

Now we accept ALL games (that are family-friendly and have a high score integration). Tataa!
The first games making use of this are already online. Check out the unique & very refreshing coign of vantage by our friends at bobblebrook and the very addicting L.A.2 by well-known indie developer Kenta Cho.

Stay tuned! There's more great stuff that we'll announce soon. (maybe around the GDC *hint*)

Two weeks ago, on October 8th, I seized the opportunity (made possible through Seedcamp) to visit ThoughtWorks in London and talk about Platogo with two of their user experience experts. Over the course of the four hour session, we looked at the aspects and processes of our website in order to determine its strengths and weaknesses.

The overall conclusion was that we're on the right path and that we do a lot of things right. But, of course, when you look a little closer, there's always room for improvement. The most important issue we found was that our website doesn't properly sell our USP (i.e. that users can create levels in every Platogo game and also connect with their friends): it's not yet clear enough that Platogo is about users creating levels for users.

We'll therefore be taking prompt action in these areas: we'll soon be adding a dedicated 'Create' page that contains all relevant information and guides, and we're also working on ways to make creating levels much more accessible.

Another important issue is to enhance the feeling that users are really playing with their friends, which is the key to getting the viral loop going. We're therefore improving our 'Community' page, working on a closer integration with Facebook, and looking into integration with other social networks.

In addition to feedback on the website, I got suggestions for improving our 'Join' and 'Sign In' processes, and lots of other details that will help us improve our conversion rates. I also got many useful tips and tricks for usability testing, as well as tools that we might use.

All in all, the session at ThoughtWorks was extremely valuable and well worth the journey to London.

Yes, it's been a great launch. We'd like to thank everyone who has
taken the time to check out Platogo and to write about us. Here are
just a few media picks. It's fantastic to be a start-up!

"It's a fascinating endeavour, and there seems to be a real
emphasis on quality rather than quantity - the UGC stuff is also nicely
implemented in the games I've played. Have a look and see what you
think though – it could be a more creative way of blowing your lunch
hour than playing Desktop Defense for the millionth time..."
Keith Stuart, The Guardian

"Platogo has launched a casual game web site where gamers can
create their own levels in games and share them with friends so they
can play the levels together."
Dean Takahashi, Venturebeat

"The wonderful Gregory Weir has already got in on the action with
his game Exploit, and Platogo users have been creating tons of levels
for it. Any flash devs out there might want to check it out!"
Michael Rose, Indie Games

"Platogo is a casual games portal that at first blush resembles
many others. What makes it very different lies under the portal's
virtual hood: all of its games except one are designed by portal users,
rather than by Platogo itself."
Virtual Goods News

"To be honest, the platform looks pretty awesome. P2P online games creation platform where users create their own levels. Very much about challenging others to play your levels, so potentially addictive."
Mike Butcher, TechCrunch Europe

The wait's finally over! After a successful pre-launch test run, we've thrown off the covers, polished up all our games and features, and now invite the whole wide world to come and play together online at Platogo.com.

Want top quality family-friendly casual games? We've got them.

Want to build your own levels? Easy as ABC.

Want to share your thoughts and creations with the world? Got that covered too.

So don't delay - register, play, create and connect! The more active you are on Platogo, the more chance you'll have of winning a great prize in our weekly Rising Star Contest.

You're also a talented game developer? Then check out our Dev Center to find out just how easy Platogo makes it to (hopefully) become rich and famous. Publish your game and watch the Platogo community play it, rate it and expand it.

With Platogo, there's no such thing as "Game Over".

Dusk 'til dawn, yeah we know: planet Platogo is at your service - but bigger, better and brighter than ever before! Play and share games, check out our other wicked features, and build your own levels.

Our pre-launch Invitation Codes are spreading like wildfire, and gamers and developers the world over are already logging in (thank you!)

We're so excited, and we just can't hide it. But then again, the new Platogo is so good, why would we want to? If you can't wait until our upcoming official launch, scan the Net for our Invitation Codes or try your luck on our waiting list.

After we watched Terminator Salvation the only salvation was to get out of the cinema and do something to forget what we saw before. So what to do at 11 pm in Vienna? Luckily Andi Gessl, a friend of ours, had his camera and a couple of lights with him. We climbed into the nearest playground, switched on the lights, used long exposure and got this nice photos. Thanks again to Andi for this awesome experience!

You can find all his experiments on his flickr page: http://www.flickr.com/photos/gessman

We like Platogo. Our friends and family like Platogo. And since you're reading this, we assume that you like Platogo - or are at least interested in Platogo.

And now we know that a lot more people like Platogo! Florian and I had the chance to show off our little baby (we're still talking about Platogo) at the Seedcamp in Berlin. We came well prepared: with a wicked presentation (finished during the flight to Berlin), a slick outfit, a healthy dose of confidence and a few extra candles in case it got cold in the camp late at night.

Armed with all that we hit the stage, posed in true rockstar fashion and pulled it off. We won.Very cool feeling to realise that lots of our peers get the idea behind Platogo.

So what does this mean for us? To live up to our rockstar reputation we partied a little bit, until muffled shouts from nearby tents emerged. "We love you too, but please shut up now!" On a larger scale, for Platogo and the great team behind it, this means that we can provide for our baby (we're still talking about Platogo) to ensure a healthy childhood until it's ready to be shown off on the global stage. More details to come.

For now: great times!