Quick tip for Scrivener users

I'm writing my Master of Arts thesis at the moment. This involves a lot of copying and pasting (HA!) of bits of text from various sources. It also means that I have to deal with many different layouts and text formats.
In order not to have to change the style of everything I paste into a document manually, I use the "Paste and Match Style" shortcut, which is bound to the key combination "⌘+⌥+⇧+V" by default.

Often enough I find myself hitting "⌘+V" instead, ending up with text that's formatted differently than my document. As Scrivener doesn't offer a way to change the default behaviour, I simply set two keyboard shortcut overrides for Scrivener in the keyboard shortcuts section of the System Preferences:

  • "Paste and Match Style" is now bound to "⌘+V"
  • and the regular "Paste" is now bound to "⌘+⌃+V"

Of course, this works for almost all applications as well, but make sure to type the menu item name exactly as it appears in the application's menu.

‘Galaxy on Fire: Alliances‘ and the Free-To-Play model

Today Fishlabs linked to an interview with its CEO Michael Schade on Polygon. One of the topics was the question whether a developer can deliver a premium gaming experience with a Free-To-Play business model. Michael Schade seems to think so.

I think it's going to be a difficult task. Delivering a high quality game while at the same time trying recuperate the cost of development and marketing through a FTP model results in the creation of a thin red line.

On one side of this line players are going to enjoy the game but won't have much incentive to spend money. On the other side of the line players have no possibility to significantly advance in the game and enjoy it without spending money over and over again on In-App-Purchases (see the Real Racing 3 travesty of a game).
Apply this logic to an online multiplayer game and that line becomes even thinner than in offline games, because it means a player (or a group of players) with sufficient funds can potentially gain so much power that other players will lose interest.

Walking that thin red line is what Fishlabs has chosen to do.

That being said, I believe that in previous Galaxy on Fire titles they've made good use of IAPs, limiting them to things that make the experience nicer, help the player progress a little bit faster, or give her/him a little edge, but nothing that'll completely alter the difficulty and thus the over-all experience of the game.
Because of this I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt, but as we've seen with recent titles on the App Store, customers are increasingly sceptical of (high-profile) games that rely heavily on In-App-Purchases.

All that remains to be said is: "Viel Erfolg Fishlabs!"