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.

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.

Well all the work is finally over with, the game is sponsored and it’s live out “there”. I’m really pleased with the result. What am I talking about? QFP, or “Quest for power” the longest project I’ve worked on so far. It’s got 14 levels each with cool graphics, 7 bad kings/queens to defeat, different soldiers to use, potions and the list goes on.

This is apart from the fact that you can build stuff such as walls and towers, from wood or stone!

Game can be played here

Here’s some juicey screen grabs..

 

10/03/2008

First day of development. Pleased with my scroll code on “MagnaBall”, I thought that would be perfect for my Cannon man game, so today I spent my time porting that code over. I’ve created a very flexible standard game structure for any games I work on, so switching from working on one game to another is no problem. All my games from now on will use this basic structure, the only snag might be when I switch to AS3, but I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. Anyway, I grabbed some graphics I had and placed them into a background, combined them with some cannon firing code I had, and eureka I had me a cannon firing an object over my background landscape only problem is the scrolling wasn’t working properly. The problem basically came down to how I was detecting at what point the code moves the actual object in the air (cannon man) to when he’s reached the middle of screen and the scroll kicks in and he remains static. Going to bed thinking about that bug, and some possible solutions.

11/03/2008

Woke up, straight on the computer to try my solution and it worked! So now I have a very rough turret/cannon thing firing carrots! Ok so not what it should be doing but it works. Now I’ve got that working it’s onto making some “you lose a life” msgs appear on the screen, and the “have another go” code.

17/03/2008

Finally managed to get back to working on this. Spent most of my time putting in new graphics, including the cannon, better background graphics, character graphics and a splash screen. Didn’t have much time to work on the actual gameplay though, that’s for tomorrow.

18/03/2008

Today is finish everything off day! Or at least get as close to it as possible. Things on the agenda are, put in the gameplay rules. What I mean by that is, right now it’s more a demo then a game, you can fire off the character, and he flies off and lands sometime later but there’s no real “game” there. Also you have 3 lives, and then nothing happens! So I have to put in what happens after you have lost your 3 lives. I’m also thinking about perhaps ditching the lives, and making it so that you can try as many times as you wish with an easy and quick way to re-start.

4pm and I’ve got a lot done. You now can have 3 attempts of getting a good distance, and then it goes back to the splash screen. The instructions/control screens are in. I’ve sorted out the mess that was the bottom panel, and it now displays your best distance, current distance, attempts, music on/off and a quit button, oh and I managed to finally get down on paper (well the stage in Flash) a design for the logo of FlashGameMaker that has been knocking around my head for a month or 2. Put the first sound FX in! A cannon firing sound. Also I put in different types of messages for how well (or not) you did.

19/03/2008

Showed it to some people and the response was not what I was hoping for. One of them flat out didn’t like it and the other was luke warm towards it. This though was a good thing! Sometimes when working alone on a game it’s easy to miss things. A fresh set of eyes is often good to spot gameplay problems. So with there comments in my mind I changed a few things.

20/03/2008

Put in roll animation for when cannon man gets close to ground he rolls into a ball, I put this in to fit in with his new “bouncyness” that allows him to travel further. Bouncyness is something I noticed that all these kinds of games have, and are not as I first designed this game where you fire of something or someone and then they stop the first time they come down and make contact with the ground. Put in shadow effect. Took out old background clips, and replaced that all with some code that places the clips. This is so I can have much longer levels, and that I can place some other background tiles in there as well to vary the background more. Instead of having a 2 click system where you click once to set the cannon angle and then again to set the power I’m thinking maybe I’ll bring that down to just 1 click which will be for setting the angle and just make that faster and more erratic. Also quick restart needs to go in.

22/03/2008

Quick restart put in, along with more erratic movement of cannon to make things more difficult. Rest of the time was spent putting in new background graphics, and tweaking things. It’s nice to be at the end of the project and I’m looking forward to putting it on the FGL website.

23/03/2008

After a day or 2 of last minute bug hunting and correcting graphical glitches it’s finally online at FlashGameLicense.com ! within an hour I had a private msg asking about an exclusive license. However I would prefer non-exclusive deals so let’s see what happens from here onwards!

24/03/2008

Negotiations still going on in regards to the offer mentioned in the last diary entry, but only 6 portals have looked at it on FGL so far so I’ve emailed about 20 major portals directly. I’m going to give it at least another 3 days before I commit to anything. Also working against me is that it’s Easter weekend, so a lot of people are off somewhere. I’m also still wondering about putting mochiAd’s and the MochiAd’s leaderboard in, so far everyone’s told me that would be ok so I’ll probably put all that in before long. One of the emails got back to me saying they were not interested but liked the graphics. I saw on FGL that a few others looked at it, but so far no emails, and no offers.

25/03/2008

The guy who was first interested has made a very low offer of $300 for an exclusive deal, which I promptly rejected, lets hope better offers are on the way!

26/03/2008 - 29/03/2008

Over the last few days I have been waiting to see if any more sponsors came forward but unfortunately they didn’t. There was a chance of the guy who offered $300 would take it for more, but that didn’t pan out. So after all that I thought to hell with this I’m going to put it on new grounds and see what happens. So I did! Currently it’s been on new grounds for about 2 hours and its rating at about 3.41 which I’m very please with. I decided to email a few (5) other games portals on the back of its initial success on NG to see if any would be interested now they can see that people actually like the game!

30/03/2008

Only 1 or 2 of the portals I emailed got back to me. I just checked the stats on NG and it has a rating of 3.46 and has 1294 views, it also had a mention on the front page! (See screen shot) By just squeezing into 10^th place for the top 10 games for Sunday. Sponsorship didn’t work out for this game and I’m not sure why. In total I must have emailed about 30 portals, most of them about 6 days ago, also it’s been on FGL for about a week. About 10 portals looked at it on there, with basically no interest and yet here it is on the front page of NG, so obviously an opportunity was missed by games portals. I still haven’t put it on Kongregate or anywhere yet but that’s the next step.

I’ve been scratching my head as to why games portals were not interested. Perhaps I didn’t give it enough time (it’s been about a week), although 1 did get back to me and was not interested. Perhaps it’s because the gameplay is too basic? But nearly everyone who gave it a review on NG (17 so far) seemed to really like it (also made some good suggestions for a sequel), and everyone accepts that the graphics are really good, so why no portal interest? I think it has a lot to do with what kind of games are sought after right now. Since I put Cannon Man on FGL I’ve seen a number of games which I regard as well, crap but yet had a sponsorship deal (because of a big ad on the front of them), and 9 out of 10 of these games are simple physics based games, without “fancy” graphics or animation.

List of lessons learned.

1) It’s harder then it looks, and I still have a lot to learn about monetizing Flash games.

2) Great graphics and animation are not needed.

3) Don’t expect immediate results from portals.

4) Physics based games are “in” right now. I think portals are looking for the next big physics based game.

5) Listen to the people playing your game! They make good suggestions.

Whats next? 

1) Physics based games! Ha, I’ve actually been working on about 500 different physics based games over the last 2 weeks and have 10% demo versions done of them. I’m pushing forward on 1 or 2 of them right now and hope to have them done real soon (along with a new diary).

2) Should I create webpage’s just for the games themselves rather then just relying upon it being hosted by other people?

3) Keep pushing Cannon Man into other portals.

4) At what point do I switch to AS3