It's been a while since I've finished and published a game, a bad habit to get in to, so I decided I should make something before I completely forget how it is all done. In order to give myself a relatively close deadline I am making a christmas game (to get a christmas themed game sponsored you need to ideally have it done by at least early November.)

I'm dusting off an old redesign of Blockdown I had been tinkering with early in the year, keeping just and main matching mechanism but losing the block locking (so it can't really be considered 'Blockdown' anymore). One of the main problems I found with Blockdown was that when you made the 2x2 match the replacement block spawned directly in place rather than there being any cascading. This had been a concious decision at the time for... some reason, but it ultimately led to the game being far too static and so not so interesting.

Now I have altered it so that when you make a match the pieces from above cascade down into the empty spaces, and then the empty spaces left over from the dropping pieces are filled in from the sides. The new spawning pieces then come in from the sides.

Also, I've slightly changed the matching so that not only are the 2x2-on-the-corners base match pieces removed, but also any adjacent pieces of the same type that are touching (and in turn any matching pieces adjacent to those pieces). This should make the board more dynamic and hopefully more enjoyable.

The timer now takes the form of falling snow that builds up in columns on top of the grid. When pieces fall due to a match, they take the snow above with them. If any of the snow piles reaches the top of the screen, that's game over. This is kind of like the Ice Storm mode in Bejeweled 3, but I swear I had this idea before I had seen that! Really!

I am also doing all the art for this myself (I had been determined that whatever my next game was I'd get somebody else - somebody competent! - to do the art).







I think it is turning out okay for the most part; I particularly like my santa! I am drawing the outlines of everything in AutoCAD of all things (use what you've got and what you know!) and then bringing them over to PSP.








In other news, prior to all of this I had been working on a custom game engine, focusing mainly on Line of Sight and Fog of War. Maaaybe something will eventually come of it...

So it's been a while since I posted anything about Trinhex and Blockdown, the two flash games I made last year, so it is probably time for an update on how they have performed.

So when I had last posted about Trinhex, back in June, it had just been released after about four months of being available for sponsorship. The game didn't appear to attract much of any interest from sponsors on Flash Game License in the time it was up there; although it did get its fair share of views, it didn't get any bids. This could be as much a reflection on the genre than the game, with colour-matching games not being on the top of many people wish lists. The sponsor I did get was via posting the game over on mochi.

That Primary license went for $400. This was initially for an ad-free release, but a short while afterwards I was allowed to release it with ads. To date the ad revenue from mochi on Trinhex is $22.56, form 51k ad impressions (but of course I'm not likely to see the mochi money for a looong time, as they only pay out once you reach a minimum of $100 with them, and my current total to date is only $35.94, with a recent average of $0.03/day from only double figure impressions. It will take a few new games for them to ever pay out).

The game also sold one site-lock Secondary license, which went for $120.

It also went up on Mindjolt in November, which required adding in their new advertisement system. This put the game up on a number of social networking sites, but the only one of any interest is of course Facebook. So far that has generated over $445, of which $387 was paid out. Mindjolt also only pay out in minimum $100 intervals, so I'll need to make another $42 before I get paid again (and I am averaging about $0.12 to $0.20 a day recently).
Most of this success was from the game being on the main Mindjolt app page, but they also eventually released it as a standalone app on Facebook. This was apparently supposed to have generated a good bit of new traffic, as other games have done very well with it, but I haven't noticed any difference. So again I am unlikely to see the rest of that money unless I submit a new game, or a flood of new traffic miraculously comes in.

It terms of views and plays, Trinhex has totalled 607k views and 707k plays. Of those 388k and 484k, respectively, were from Mindjolt. There is a slight discrepancy in those numbers as Mindjolts own metrics show 532k gameplays, which is a 9% difference from those shown by Playtomic, but a bit a difference is to be expected as Playtomic is an external service and you can't be guaranteed a connection. Incidentally, Mindjolt also show 431k ad impressions, which makes for an eCPM of $1.03, not bad at all!


The last (and first) time I talked about Blockdown it was still available for sponsorship on FGL. Since the game is similar to Trinhex in many respects it suffered the same fate, if not worse (this will be a bit of a theme), on that site. It was up on FGL for longer, received fewer views and did not end up with any serious bids and ultimately went without a Primary sponsorship deal. In the end I got tired of waiting and decided to release the game myself with ads to try and earn at least something.

But that wasn't entirely the reason I decided stop waiting and release. I had an offer from Mindjolt for a site-lock version of the game. This was a deal for $400! But in order to take that the game had to be released. I waited a small amount of time to see if there were any last minute bids, using the Last-Call feature on FGL to get some last minute attention, but none appeared.

This deal meant that Mindjolt would get all ad revenue from the game, whereas if you go via the normal submission system there is a 50/50 split between Mindjolt and developer. This means they would be getting about $2 eCPM and so they needed at least 200k impressions to break even. While I don't have access to the same internal gameplay/impression metrics that I do for Trinhex, I do have Playtomic to tell me that Blockdown has done at least 342k views and 326k plays on Mindjolt alone. So they at the very least have made their money back.

The interesting thing to note about those numbers, which are also reflected in the total numbers, is that the number of plays is less than the number of views. This is a bit odd and indicates that something isn't quite right.
The total numbers are 454k views and 395k plays; meaning that in the non-mindjolt numbers there is a wider disparity.

There were certainly people for who their Flash player wasn't up to date enough and so they could never have played the game in the first place, but still would have registered a view. But that only amounted to about two thousand views.

It could be that people did play but quit very early and so the 'play' never registered (I would have to check the specifics of the version of the API I was using at the time to see if that was a possibility). The 'bounce' rate, how many people quit within the first 30 seconds of a game, was higher for Blockdown, at 22.4%, compared to Trinhex at 14.5%.

It may be that people took one look at the main screen and decided not to play at all.

Or... there was a bug, which prevented people playing at all. It would be unfortunate if it was this.

Blockdown went up on Mindjolt exactly one week before Trinhex, but as you can see did not do as well. It also has a lower overall average play time at 5:30, compared to 12:30 for Trinhex. I attribute this to the fact that as a continuous game (as opposed to Trinhexs 5 matches per level) the game board was too static.

I had made a conscious decision to not have cascading pieces after a match, ala Bejewled, instead just respawning pieces where the old pieces were matched. Another limiting aspect I feel was that you only ever matched four pieces. This ended up making the game too... well, boring.

I have these rectified in a prototype for a different game that uses the same basic matching concept, which I think is much more interesting. Whether or not that will ever see the light of day is if I can decided on a graphical theme that will work.

As far as non-Mindjolt money goes, for ad revenue from the 'primary' release it has earned a whopping $9.35, from all of 35k impressions. So even with a better paying ad system than mochi, 'self sponsoring' a colour matching puzzle game just isn't worth it unless you have your own games portal to pimp, or you have a nice site-lock deal ready to take!

The game also won $100 dollars from FGLs mobile Flash for Android competition. It was really more of a 'taking part' prize than a real 'prize'.


So... all in all the two games have totalled approximately $1,510, of which I've been paid $1,407. After commissions, transaction fees, and various exchange rates at different times that comes to €945 into my bank account.

I think I can be reasonably happy with that and with over 1.1 millions combined gameplays for the two games. But of course there is much room for improvement, and I hopefully those improvement will be made!

Last month I attended the first of what is hoped to be a series of monthly indie game developer events in Dublin called Indie Games Space, organised by gamedevelopers.ie and held in Film Base in Temple Bar. It is a chance for independent developers to get together, show off their work, listen to a talk and work on a monthly design challenge (and get free t-shirts from the guys at havok! Thanks!).

Last month, Paul Conway showed and talked about the development process of his great Dragon Age addon Craggy Island.
For the challenge you could work in groups or solo (and being the unsocial hermit that I am, I went solo, naturally) to design and implement a game based on two themes. For this first challenge the themes were disease pandemic and failure. An extra 'unofficial' condition was then tagged on... "no zombies"! Blatant discrimination!

Seeing as how there are already pandemic games dealing with the global scale, I started thinking on a more local scale, but still involving infection vectors in populations (yeah, so not really pandemic at all).
I had originally been thinking of having a virus trying to spread throughout a group, but being combated by a genetic 'cure' that was also spreading through the population. I was going along the lines of having single gene recessive/dominant phenotype resistance to the virus, so that there could be simple varying degrees of protection. This ended up getting a bit too complicated, including the need for a reproducing population and that would have just gotten messy, in more ways than one. It was also becoming more of a simulation and less of a game.

So I ended up slightly reworking it so that it became VvV... Virus verses Virus. It is a two-player game where each player has to create a virus that infects and kills the fewest amount of people. The virus with the lowest score wins (the failure theme).

So I made it...



Ah... yeah, zombies.
I only used them as I was going to use the isometric engine I had been making last year (and promptly ignored) and the only avatar spritesheets I had to hand were Brookes Metaplace zombies, so I decided to use them. Otherwise it would have had to be squirrels!

Players change a simple set of sliders to alter the attributes of the viruses, which effect how they spread and survive.

• Range: is simply how close another zombie has to be before it possibly be infected by a contagious zombie.
  
• Incubation: determines how soon a zombie becomes contagious after being infected (the smaller the bar the sooner)
  
• Infectiousness: is how aggressively a virus will try to infect
  
• Lethality: is how easily the virus will kill (this also plays a role with incubation time)
  
• Durability: is how well the virus can survive in the host zombie

Making one attribute less effective made others more effective.

Each zombie gets both a random generic health and immunity values to help fight off the viruses, so there are differences from one zombie to the next on how they will cope.

Another degree of randomness is the fact that zombies are constantly wandering around the map.


Your initially infected zombie could walk into a corner and never spread its virus before it manages to get rid of it itself.
The game starts by randomly infecting one zombie for each virus. I probably should have allowed players to examine the initial state of the map and then select their preferred zombie to infect.

Each infection scores one point, each death three. Each game takes a couple of minutes, although sometimes it can drag on when those damn brain eaters refuse to just die; the game ends when their are either no zombies left 'alive' or there are no current infections. Otherwise you can just end it prematurely.




So there it is. It's not at all balanced and there are probably some show-stopping bugs in there somewhere, but it works for the most part for me. Any feedback would be welcome. Comment below!



I should probably get back to working on something that might make some money now. Speaking of which, I must post about how Trinhex and Blockdown have done since my last post.

Trinhex is finally out in the wild!

My thanks to Lisandro from 7lay.net for being willing to sponsor the game, and for being so patient during the whole bidding process, which I allowed go for... a while :).

Starting into its fifth day of being published the game has racked up almost 20k plays so far on about 130 sites. On Newgrounds it managed to get a rating of 3.43/5 with about 1,400 plays before falling into the black hole of obscurity. On Kongregate it scored about 2.8 after 965 plays to date, with the last few hundred plays thanks to a post from Raph.

Game 'number 3', that I had been prototyping at the time of the last post and that is now known as Blockdown (FGL link), has been completed for a while and is waiting to see if it can pick up a potential sponsor. We seem to be in a bit of an early summer lull for the flash sponsorship market, so it may have to wait a while longer. Although my games appear to be in a constant lull in terms of attracting sponsor interest. :)


In the meantime, I've been slowly working away on an isometric engine for a possible Tower Defense-esque game...