It's been just over six weeks since I released my first attempt at monetising a complete flash game, Pompetaire, out into the wild. This game just had a pre-loader ad attached (no attempts at finding sponsorship were made) and was uploaded to Kongregate (no ads), Newgrounds and added to Mochi's distribution list.

To date the game has earned a grand total of.... wait for it..... $2.37!
$0.85 of that comes from Kongregate from 666 plays (35% of a total revenue of $2.42) all of which were mostly from the first week, with the rest, $1.52, coming from MochiAds from just under five thousand ad impressions. Over a third of the mochi earnings came from a single site, onlinespiele24.org, which only picked up the game over three weeks after the game was first released.

Suffice to say the game never "gained traction", to borrow Metaplace's phrase, with reviews being decidedly average, hovering just above the 50% mark.

So all in all a failure!

But with every failure there are lessons to be learnt, some of which I had in mind when putting together my next game Trinhex.

This is a colour matching game based upon Raph Koster's original game Wheelwright


This time I decided to take the sponsorship/licensing route by using FlashGameLicense.com, which can provide the potential of a few thousand US dollars per game, assuming you can manage to entice a sponsor to put in a bid. So far the game has been available to potential sponsors for just over two weeks now with no solid offers, but it is still considered too early to say how it will do. It may take up to a month or two before the right sponsor comes along.

In the mean time I am working away on game number 3...

Okay, so it was a little bit over two weeks...

The game is now "finished" and has been sent out to fend for itself in the thunderdome that is the net. I hope it doesn't get too savagely beaten!

It is currently awaiting approval to be added to Mochis Partner Publisher list and is also up on Kongregate. The relative success of the game on Kongregate will depend mainly on the rating it gets from the community there, so feel free to sign up and give it a 5-star rating! And then get everyone you know to do the same. ;-)

I'm now over halfway through the second week of my self-imposed two week time limit for creating a flash game. I'm mainly in polishing mode now, making everything look pretty. Apart from the ads, which I have yet to put in, it is probably 90% there.

I've also decided on a name. Pompetaire! I guess I probably have to explain that...
Since the game is basically Spider Solitaire, I decided I'd call it something-taire; it was just a matter of figuring out what the something should be. As things in the game are mostly grouped into lots of five, I thought perhaps Pentaire or Quintaire. Although Pentaire doesn't exist, there is a Pentair, which is a water services equipment supplier, so that was a bit too close. Quintaire appears to be a surname (or sometimes a first name).

I ended up going a bit more obscure and decided to use the oscan word for five, which is pompe, so I end up with Pompetaire. As far as google is concerned this word simply doesn't exist. At all. This has the added benefit of allowing me to be able to track the spread of the game by searching for any mentions of the word used on the net (not that I have high hopes that it will spread far and wide).

So here we have the almost there version...

[edit]
Link to final version
[/edit]

I still have a few questions for myself on the gameplay - as to whether it is perhaps a bit too easy - so again I would greatly appreciate feedback from play experiences at various levels!

In this version the 'strict' and 'non-strict' rules are merged; where a 'strict' move, as indicated by the green placement guide, only costs one point per move, and a 'non-strict' move, as indicated by the red placement guide, costs 5 points per move. I am toying with the idea that I should only allow up to 5 non-strict moves per game, so it would be up to the player to decide when best to use those moves. All assuming the current version doesn't provide enough challenge.

Thanks for your help!