I have to admit, I’m not much of a blogger. I wish I was. I wish I was one of those that that would routinely jump onto wordpress to distribute my thoughts across the net, but I’m not. I constantly have “better things to do”. For all those out there that are (for some strange reason) interested in what I have to say on here, then I apologise for being a lazy git, and one of my new years resolutions, is to blog more often. But onto the purpose of this post.

Lets start out with some statements.

2010 has been the best financial game development year I’ve ever had.

One of my games has had over 60 million plays in a 12 month period.

Every game (but one) has been sponsored for more then $1000 (usually quite a bit more)

All in all I’m pretty pleased.

Christmas Crunch

The past year has been a pretty good one, mostly because of a little game called Christmas Crunch. This is a match 3 type game which a Christmas theme (surprise surprise) that I created in November 2008. At the time I created it, it was a last ditch attempt to be able to carry on working full time making Flash games. The year leading up to that point had been hard. I had made countless numbers of games, and even though most of them got sponsored (and I happen to think were actually pretty good), publically speaking they weren’t doing too well, which was obviously a dissapointment. I was working 24/7 just to pay bills and by time I had gotten to Novemeber 08 I had decided that the next game was make or break. Either it was going to be a big success and do financially well (so I was actually able to have a break inbetween game projects) or I was going to give up on the whole endevour and go and work a 9-5 Job in London doing Flash development/design work (which I was not looking forward to).

The reason that next game project was Christmas Crunch was a complete and total fluke. I was having a conversion via msn with a very nice and cool guy in the “biz”, and we were discussing game types…which ones do well, and which ones don’t. Up to that point I had the rather novel idea that I needed to innovate, that I need to create games that no one else had seen before (what can I say, I’m old school), but as the conversation unfolded it became very obvious to me that I was going about things the wrong way. There’s a reason certain games do very well online. It’s not luck that bloons for example was a huge hit, or DTD or countless others. These games through design, talent and hardwork hit upon a gameplay mechanic that works, and specifically it works with the types of people that play browswer games, i’e casual gamers. I really was trying to re-invent the wheel with each new game, and that was my problem, I was my own worst enemy in other words. So after seeing what games did well, I decided to do my own match 3 game, and seeing that it was November give it a Christmas theme. Christmas crunch was born.

The first version of it everyone hated. In my original version you could click and destroy a single Christmas ornament, you just wouldn’t get many points for it (infact I think I even set things up so that you would lose points), again I was trying to re-invent the wheel and was paying the price, so out went destroying single ornaments.

Up until that point apart from games that appeared on addictingames, the most views in a day I had had were probably around 20k, the first day Christmas crunch was online it had 70k plays and it’s never looked back ever since. At the time of writing it’s had just over 80 million plays, which is a number I have to look at a few times to believe. Since then I’ve thought about maybe doing a sequel, but everytime I think about that I realise there’s pretty much nothing you can do to that game, that won’t mess up the gameplay mechanic, it’s that finely honed. Everything from the grid size, to the colours used to the scoring system just “works”. My own mother plays it religeously and is always trying to think of ways to beat those other highscores!

Sponsorships

I’ve had 5 games sponsored this year. I spent the whole of last christmas learning AS3. It was bit of a rocky road, but finally I managed to understand it well enough to start making a as3 game, and the first one I did was War droids. It was sponsored by Arcadebomb.com and I was please with the deal I got. After that I felt like I wanted to have a go at a zombie game, and the result was Zombie War which was sponsored by minijuegos.com.

After seeing the success of the Epic war type games on Kongregate, I felt that I could add something to the genre and came up with the idea of combining the basic gameplay of Epic war and similar games (side on defense games) with box2D. I had never used box2d before and perhaps this wasn’t the wisest choices of projects, but I felt that it was something I wanted to have a crack at. About 2 months later Quest for Power was born, and was sponsored by Arcadebomb.com. I had really high hopes for this game, and dreamt about a million plays on kongregate and high ratings etc etc, alas it wasn’t too be. The players had problems with the control method (all mouse control) and the fact that you couldn’t see where your little boulder was landing. Two issues which I never saw as a problem, but again you must never lose sight of your target audience (which for us is casual one), even though I had no problem using the mouse to pull the catapult in the game backwards, and moving a little dial up and down, a lot of people did and that really had a impact on the success of this game. The box2d stuff worked well though, it was a bit of a bold move putting box2D into this kind of game (if I don’t say so myself) but I really liked the idea of everything in the game being a real physical object and even though the players didn’t take to the game overall, I was pretty pleased with the project.

I learned 2 things though from that project 1) Don’t try and do everything yourself and 2) get people other than YOURSELF to play test your games. Being pretty much a one man show, I do (or did) everything myself (ok apart from the music/sound fx). I came up with the ideas, I designed/created/animated the graphics, I did all the programming, I play tested the result, and then I tried to get it sponsored. The time for me to do all that for Quest for power was 2 months, which isn’t too bad, but to be honest in this day and age, to create high quality Flash games and not have it take ALL of your time, you really need to work with other people, and that’s exactly what I did for the sequel of QFP. Time mangement really is of supreme importance when you work for yourself and is someting frankly I suck at, getting better at that is another one of those new years resolutions. 

I found a great graphic artist and she set about working on the graphics for QFP2. I also completely re-designed the main gun in the game, changing it from a catapult to a cannon, and made it keyboard controlled. After some discussion it was decided that the screen also needed to zoom in and out (manually) to allow for a greater region of the game to be seen, and that would also fix the issue the players would have with not being able to see where things landed. About 5 weeks later QFP2 was born, I thought this time it would be it! Again, not so.

Up until now both games have done pretty well, but not the success I wanted them to be. Sometimes that’s how it goes, maybe putting box2d in was overcomplicating the gameplay, but it was something I’m glad I tried as now I can program box2D for future games, and what a great API it is.

If you have been counting, you will realise that so far I’ve mentioned 4 games that got sponsored, so what’s the 5th? Well the 5th is actually 2 games (well 3 but i’ll get to that) and it’s a little puzzle game I did called Connecto. I’ve seen pipe games before, and thought I would have a go at creating my own, little did I realise just how complicated the programming would be, mixing in recursive with all kinds of “if” statements, but I got it to work, combined it with some of my own simple (but effective) graphics and Connecto was born. I put it online and people seemed to like it, but complained about it only being keyboard control (those fickle players!) so I quickly put in mouse control and Connecto 2 was born. After a few weeks I was contacted by shockwave, who said they really liked Connecto 2 and they would like to license it. They did and I started work on a sequel (which would now be a sequel to a sequel..umm.triquel?) which they also sponsored. I was really pleased to see one of my games doing so well on Shockwave.

So that was the year sponsorship wise and I was pleased with all the deals I got. Mixed in with the above games I also did a tiny Flash contract game for a major brand, but Flash contract work is something I really don’t do a lot of anymore and is not something I miss, which brings me neatly onto the future.

2010 Game odyssesy

2009 has been a year where more things have gone right then wrong, so all in all a good year. I took some risks which didn’t pay off, but I’m glad I took them because I learned from the experience anyway. It taught me that oppotunities really can come from anywhere, and that if you truly believe in what you are doing, with a little bit of luck you will succeed. But what’s next? Next dear reader is Facebook.

Zynga….Playfish…..Farmxxxx and so on and so on, that’s all you read about. If ever there was a bubble, social games on facebook is one. Are the Facebook roadmap changes going to burst it? Maybe, but I doubt it. Even with the roadmap changes, Facebook still looks to me a pretty good way of virally spreading your work. One of the things I realised a few months ago, was that most of the views that one of my succesful games was getting were coming from facebook. This was a revelation to me, up until then I thought that most of the views were coming from via game websites etc. It really made me realise the power of Facebook, and the impact it’s had and having on the Flash game market. So I have 2 Facebook projects in the works. One I’m employing a company to develop for me while I provide them with the design, and the other I’m doing completely myself, not that I want to do it myself, but some conservative costs I’d had regarding a company doing “Facebook game development” were $13,000.00, which is a tad more then I can afford! So over the past few weeks I’ve been researching Facebook development (yeah I know I’m a little late to this party, but least I got here eventually) and trying to learn as much as I can before I get stuck into the development of the project .

Sp that’s 2 Facebook projects that are lined up, and I’m soon about to start work on a Flash game project, which will be my first attempt to do a “typical” top down DTD game. I’ve got 2 great graphic designers working on the visuals and I’m excited about how it’s all going to turn out. Hopefully that will be launched early Feb.

Looking at the future more generally, I think the impact that the iPhone and Facebook is having is going to change the Flash games industry in a dramatic way. Virtual goods are already becoming de-facto on Facebook as the main source of revenue, and that’s only going to continue and is now creeping into “standard” free to play Flash games. I can definately forsee a Flash games world in 2-3 years time, where you have very very simple games that are free (say 20% of the overall market) and every other game contains some kind of in-game payment system. Whether it be mochi-coins (great system guys) or social gold, virtual items are here to stay. It really is a whole new way of doing things, and regardless of your opinions on virtual goods in games…..thats exciting. Of course whether the majority of free to play Flash game websites can survive on that 20% of simple games is another question, my thought it probably not and we might see a shake up of Flash games websites over the coming year. How’s that going to impact sponsorship deals? I’m hoping the big games portals will be able to strike a balance with game developers, so we can all take advantage of the new oppotunities of the next few years. Some game developers might be able to go it alone, but the majority of Flash game dev’s are still going to need the big game portals to spread their games, so some kind of halfway house needs to be sought with regards to sponsorship Vs in-game payments, and visa versa, big game portals need quality games and even more so with Facebook becoming a casual game powerhouse.

Just want to finish by saying a big thanks to all the people that sponsored my games in 2009, I look forward to working with them and new partners, and to Mochi for making all this possible.

I’ve started to get my head into facebook development and over the past few weeks have accumulated a tonne of useful URL’s, so I thought maybe they might be useful for other aspiring facebook developers! Most of these are relevent to Flash/Facebook development in some fashion. I’ll be adding to this list over the coming weeks, if you have any suggestions let me know in the comments.

Facebooks development: The basics

Facebook development: Get Started

Facebook development: FAQ

Facebook development tools

Choosing between an FBML or IFrame Application

How To Build A Facebook Application

Developing a Facebook Application for absolute beginners – step 5 (contains links to other parts, and not specific to Flash)

Facebook Application Basics

AS3 Facebook API

Adobes Facebook development portal

Google Code Facebook Actionscript API central hub

Build your first Facebook application with the AS3 Facebook API (video)

Creating a Flash Facebook application with the Facebook Actionscript API

Creating a Flash Facebook application with the Facebook Actionscript API – part 2

Using the brand new Facebook ActionScript 3.0 library

Facebook API version 2 Project Setup Walkthrough

Facebook/Flash development

Facebook Flash app development

Facebook Roadmap changes (these are relevent to the Oct-Jan 2009/2010 changes)

December Facebook platform roadmap update: Planning for the next 3 months

Facebook App Developers Face New Obstacles

Facebook changes put end users above app developers

Facebook roadmap could be bumpy for app developers (Useful list of articles about the changes)

Facebook Business

5 things All page and brand managers should know about Facebooks recent updates

Facebook scripts you can buy (Not used this site myself)

An interesting new type of games portal launched today, www.biggerplay.com . It has a nice selection of games, but the thing that makes it stand out is it gives players who register on the site the chance of winning some money just by being on the site. They have this novel “token” system where the player can claim tokens, and whoever has the most at the end of the month (subject to terms and conditions) can win the prize money. Nice to see a games portal giving something back to players who are loyal to the site! check it out.

ok, well maybe not “on”, but there definately seems to be a lot of missunderstanding and irritation between the 2 groups recently (mostly due to micro-transactions).

Something occured to me the other day while thinking about this, and I think the issues between most devs and publishers is this.

Most game devs see game development as 80% art 20% business.

Most publishers see game development as 80% business 20% art.

(with “art” meaning, doing it for more then just financial reasons).

I think therein lies the problems. Obviously this is not true of ALL game developers or ALL publishers (especially as a lot of game developers also have their own portal), but in general I think the point stands up.

I think both sides can learn from the other. Game developers to continue to develope HAVE to look upon what they do as a business. This is something which took me a little while to learn. It’s fun to try out unique and original ideas, but (unless you get lucky) they won’t pay the bills. As a game developer you need to pay close attention at the market and see what games do well and which don’t.

Likewise I think some publishers can look upon the whole endevour as a money making exercise only. I think this alienates the game developers, and doesn’t make for a particularly good games portal for the players. There is only so many “dress up”, “match 3″, “Casino” games the internet can handle, and I think the best portals are ones that try to push the quality threshold. This although is also dependent upon their particular already established audience.

All in all, we all want the same things. When new tech comes along we need to find ways to embrace it TOGETHER, and find solutions which mutually benefit us all.