Profusion Dev Team

So for the speech we wanted to have a few things integrated. Namely music. So I have been busy all week trying to get the music integrated into the game to where we wanted it. It wasn’t easy at all. First we had to loop the sound to a point where we wanted. Our two tracks we have selected are around 1 minute long and each is about 400kb. That, in my opinion is a bit too much, but I figure its a demo, might as well keep it.

Anyways, the next problem was that Flash HATES mp3s. It seems to have terrible support for them. I was getting an error where the sound just stopped after playing a little bit and I finally figured that out. After two days… It wasn’t the code library I was using (skyboy’s SoundManager), but it was Flash itself. Flash has a hard time encoding certain mp3′s into the .swf. The one type of mp3 bitrate setting I used wasn’t good enough for it.

So what I had to do was change the bitrate from variable (always fails) to constant. This solved my problem. I was disappointed that it couldn’t have been in the Adobe Livedocs. Or at least in an easier spot if it is there. I sure didn’t see it. So now we got the sound integrated just fine. Now along with looking great it sounds great.

In addition, we have made the decision to cut production time by dropping the planned ideas for Saved Games. Its good in a way because then we don’t have to worry about it, but its bad that we are starting to think that players may not return.

What is Publicity?

Publicity is “the deliberate attempt to manage the public’s perception of a subject.” (Wikipedia.org). It is also the “deliberate attempt to manage the public’s perception of a subject.” (Reference.com) Since they seem to have the exact same information, that leads to the conclusion that they are either completely agreed on the same definition or someone just copied. But hey, lets be nice and assume they are right.

What does Publicity do for you?

It gets you attention. It gets you views. It gets you imprinted in the brains of dozens to thousands of people. Is that good? Well, if you want to make money then for sure its good. Taking a look at Kongregate.com, you can easily establish a great base for publicity. User profiles that you can almost completely customize, friends, fans, forums, etc. Its the right place to start making this happening. And when you do get Publicity, Kongregate.com has the user base that is active and loyal, and something you can work with easily. Not to mention that by making a base here for it, you can get a pretty steady flow of cash coming in.

Publicity and Contacts

Something that is very useful, as proven by our experience is contacts! You’ve got to know some fellow developers that can get some publicity for you. David knows RobotJAM. What did that do for us? So far its just given us an awesome source of encouragement in the beginning and helped the project get rolling. Using FlashGameLicense.com and their chat, I’ve come to know some more active developers such as xDragonx10, Benologist, Rocketman, LongAnimals, robchester, and more. They can give you an unlimited amount of knowledge on how to succeed in getting publicity, since they have the experience and have done it themselves.

Publicity and Blogs

Another great experiment of ours was this blog. I’ve seen tons of other developers have blogs and so we decided to get one too. Its really helped, since we’ve gotten over 1,000 views so far. I’m betting that has established a few, regular fans of ours. Its still better than none. With our blog, we can post useful information and attract more attention to interested views, or newer people.

Something else that has come to my attention is that a simple blog like ours, posting on the progress of games is not nearly as effective and as attracting as something with useful knowledge, like the info post. When I saw xDragonx’s Blog, it really struck me as the true way to make a blog that people will actually want to visit and learn from. Its surely gotten attention faster than ours.

Publicity and Users

This is where you really need to pay attention. This is the factor that might make you or break you. If you have made plenty of games and never interacted with users, then all you’ve got is a user fan base of people who can’t wait for your next game or just simply think you are a great developer.

Why not extend that? If you interact with your fan base then you can actually become more than just a good developer. You can become friends with your fans and that is the key that leads to loyalty. As mentioned earlier, Kongregate is a great way to do it.

Don’t believe me? Lets take a look at the developers of GemCraft. WOW! They made a great game. But who are they? I don’t know. I’ve never heard of them much, despite the mention of them with the game, and only then when their fans have looked at the developer name, or when other developers talk about them. Luckily in this case they have the powerful force of an extremely good game to make up for the lack of contact. Now what if they had made friends with their fan base. I’m sure that they would have had tons more publicity than they do now.

Publicity and Money

Yes, we all know that more views is more money. That extra publicity IS going to make that difference. Want some proof that its really going to make the difference? Spend the next 45 minutes watching this conference. You can see how the publicity, made by their PR company and by Apple has made him tons more than he could have ever done by himself. However, in this example, he didn’t need to contact anyone or do anything to get Apple’s attention besides making a great game. But he did spend money on his PR company and it really made the difference.

Cheers,

UnknownGuardian

Cheers, Brayden.

xDragonx, the developer of a whole ton of games, like Cell Warefare, Penguin Massacre, Medieval Rampage and more, has just got his blog. On it, he has posted almost a complete breakdown of where he got is money. He has earned over $45,000 in a single year just from making flash games. While I know this isn’t very common to be doing such a thing, its great to see what he did right and attempt to emulate it.

You can visit his blog here: http://kaitol.com/ All of his posts are great reads.

Cheers,

UnknownGuardian

So what do we need to look at? A few things. We need to check out returning visitors and the amount of time they spent on the game.

Returning visitors have a colored dot (so far just blue and red) next to their name. The amount of time each sponsor spent on the game is boxed in red, and the longest time is boxed in blue.

Now lets look at times in more detail. Starting with the longest one, this is a time you HAVE to ignore. If you see any time greater than maybe 10 minutes, then it usually can be disregarded. Why? Because on FGL, sponsors like to open games in tabs, so they can load multiple at a time. So what I did was eliminate any time under 10 seconds and any time over 5 minutes. There is no way that any of those times actually spent that much time on the game.

From the selected times that look about right, I want to check for those that spend maybe more than 30 seconds on the game. That signals to me that they have actually started the game, and because Achromatic is a very short casual game, possibly have finished the game, since the player determines when the game ends.

The next more important is how many returning sponsors you get. Well, the blue dotted sponsor can be eliminated since his second play was less 10 seconds. If they are interested, I can safely assume, for Achromatic, that they would spend longer than 10 seconds. With the other sponsor, its seems like it was an accidental click too, because 15 seconds really isn’t enough time to get the game going if they were interested.

So what does this all mean? Wait! I have to wait another month of two before I get bids or decided to sell it extremely cheaply.

Cheers,

UnknownGuardian

When mastering any discipline, you’re bound to run into the Plateau Effect from time to time. For awhile, your mastery increases steadily through training or studying, but then you begin to experience diminishing returns. The slope of mastery versus time evens out, until you reach the plateau point, when it seems like further investment just doesn’t have much effect. For example, if you’re weight training, you might reach a stage where you can’t seem to increase the amount of weight on the bar. It’s like your muscles have decided all on their own that this is it, this is as strong as they’ll grow. Or if you’re trying to lose weight, your weight might decrease for awhile and then get “stuck”.

Well, if we take that same premise and apply it to our game development , you get a game that you’re working on and you are constantly finding that it reached a place where it’s not moving in any direction. And that is very frustrating, why?  because you’re working on something that doesn’t return anything, and I’m not talking about profit, just the feeling that you released a crappy game that everyone is tearing apart in the comments section is better than not having a game at all, heck, I even envy this guy, at least his game is out in the wild.

I made a very nice and simple graphic to illustrate my overall feeling about making a game in the past 5 months:

As you can see I’m between  “meh” and “I don’t give a fu**” and THAT is the plateau effect.

Note to self: For future games just do what the working and successful game development groups do 99% of the time = Games based on bullet-proof game mechanics and genres

Here is what you have to do:

trace("[ClassName] Action: Extra Message");

Simple right? So here is how often you should use it, and an example of what it shows for Spin the World.

[Capturing traces with FDB]
[IntroComic] Added:  instance1.IntroComic_comic0
[MainMenu] Left on Stage: [object Main]
[MainMenu] Left on Stage: [object IntroComic]
[MainMenu] Left on Stage: [object MainMenu]
[MainMenu] Left on Stage: null
[MainMenuBackground] Added:  instance13.MainMenuBackground_background2
[RightMenu] Added:  instance19.RightMenu_background3
[LeftMenu] Added:  instance24.LeftMenu_background4
[TopMenu] Added:  instance27.TopMenu_background5
[BottomMenu] Added:  instance30.BottomMenu_background6
[BackMenu] Added:  instance39.BackMenu_background7
[SliderBar] Added:  instance50.SliderBar_Slider9
[SliderBar] Added:  instance55.SliderBar_Slider12
[LoadButton] Added:  instance74.instance75.PlayButton_Play17
[LoadButton] Added:  instance78.instance79.LoadButton_Load18
[PlayButton] Clicked
[MainMenu] Left on Stage: [object Main]
[MainMenu] Left on Stage: [object MainMenu]
[MainMenu] Left on Stage: null
[MainMenu] Left on Stage: [object View3D]
[ControlState] Added:  [object ControlState]
[PlayState] Added:  [object PlayState]
[EarthCube] Added:  [object EarthCube]
[PlayState] Implement Mystery Upgrade Now!
[SliderBar] Added:  instance1058.SliderBar_Slider482
[SliderBar] Added:  instance1063.SliderBar_Slider485
[QualityButton] Quality change to Low
{SliderBar] instance1066 was clicked
[SliderBar] Change to 14
{SliderBar] instance1061 was clicked
[SliderBar] Change to 90
[QualityButton] Quality change to High
[QualityButton] Quality change to Medium
[QualityButton] Quality change to Low
[OptionMenu] Redirect to Main Menu
[BottomMenu] Navigate to http://www.kdugames.wordpress.com

What is nice about it is that you can see exactly where things are happening and what is going on through out your trace output.

For example, near the middle, I can see “[PlayButton] Clicked”, which I know exactly where the click method is now, and when it was clicked.

Also, if you see those statements with “Left on Stage”, those were called after I started up or destroyed the menu. It happened to save my life by noticing a “null” child, which is theoretically impossible, which I spend a day researching. It happened to be a bitmap that had somehow been added to the display list in an odd way.

Cheers,

UnknownGuardian

What have we done these past days?

Completely comment out practically half the entire game play engine.

Why?

We have thought of a more interactive and captivating game play.

Why did you comment out not permanently delete?

We think for the future! If we deleted all our code, then reusing our code might be a bit difficult.

How has it changed?

Well just to touch up slightly, you can now only rotate in 1 direction.

Why one? That defeats the whole purpose of the game?!?!?!

No, we left the other direction open to a possible sequel where we can make the other direction be of some use. In addition, we have also made it so that your population grows faster when you spin the world rather than die off as the G-Force increases.

What does this mean?

It means you have a choice! You can either spend time taking aim at the incoming swarm of enemies or you can increase your population to prevent the hits from the enemies from killing you and possibly increasing your morale ‘chunks’ you get from destroying enemies.

And the real part: How is this better?

The original version, said simply, was basically a you sit there and control left or right to shoot enemies. See any player captivation? I don’t… Thanks to jonathan’s comment (post below this one), this seems to be a bit more addicting as well as challenging, though we have yet to try it out.

Cheers,

UnknownGuardian