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Sneeze's Blog

9th Mar 2010 - 20:40	Backgrounds, sounds and other misc fixes
So, Divide and Conquer lingers on. It's not far off but there's always more things I think I should do... I've implemented background processing for the backgrounds. Which is handy, since I can draw backgrounds and then reject the bad ones without affecting game speed. It'll draw a lower quality background if there aren't any available, but hopefully few people will be playing with something so old that this matters! I've also decided, via a quick survey on livejournal, that music is not desirable in this sort of game, and given all the sound is just going to be beeps and other small things, that's a bit pointless too. So I'm going for the silent treatment. This makes things a bit easier. So we're left with nuts and bolts to be tightened. The only difficult thing left is the tutorial/instructions screens.
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4th Mar 2010 - 18:00	An interlude
In a bit of an interlude between writing Divide and Conquer, I decided to have a go at writing games for mobile phones. I've thrown together a quick mobile site, mobile.cathelius.co.uk (you can use m.cathelius.co.uk if you want to save typing), and added a simple little avoider game I wrote last night. Feel free to tell me if there's anything that doesn't work. The site isn't pretty or really very useful, but I wanted to get something that works before something that is particularly pretty and I've never written a site for a mobile before!
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1st Mar 2010 - 17:39	General stuff
I've had one of those weeks where things go slowly, and a weekend that was fairly busy one way or another. Divide and Conquer is mainly done though - I have a few gameplay issues that need to be fixed, and still have music/sound and instructions to do, but its looking pretty good. I'm feeling a bit under the weather today (mostly alcohol related) but hopefully tomorrow I'll make some good progress towards finishing it all off. Its about time I did a decent game...
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22nd Feb 2010 - 22:49	More progress
I suppose I've not really made all that much progress over the last few days, but Divide and Conquer is pretty much done, at least from an engine standpoint. I do need to sort out a few graphical issues - there's no feedback when you're drawing lines, and nowhere for score, plus areas disappear rather than fading away or something similar. I've added in a random background generator that draws julia fractals, which looks quite nice really and gives a bit more of a professional feel to the program. The balls all bounce around as they should do and they no longer seem to escape the shapes they're bouncing in. Lines all cross at the correct points. Balls hitting lines that are being drawn cause the line to fail to be drawn. All in all, I've got a new game, I just need to polish it. The gameplay issues left to sort out are scoring, lives and game balance. The other issues are feedback (drawing, life loss and area capture), status display, pause, main menu, sound, music, instructions, story and icon. The other thing of note is that Qilox is particularly popular at the moment. It's up to about 180k-190k impressions per day, and I'm getting about $40-$50 per day in total. This is actually quite scary, since it's very hard to know if this is going to fall off later. I also worry that the scores on mindjolt are very dominated by cheaters at the moment, and perhaps that'll put off people from playing.
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16th Feb 2010 - 07:55	New game
So, I've had an idea for extending Qilox a little and making something a bit more unique (although not very unique, if you can have degrees of uniqueness). Unfortunately, it appears that my original engine for Qilox is hopelessly inadequate for the job. The problem is that Qilox works entirely on bitmaps. It draws on them, uses the flood fill function to check areas captured etc etc. State of the game is held entirely on a bitmap. This is perfectly fine... for a game where the lines are only vertical or horizontal, and where the enemies only travel in diagonals. Divide and Conquer has a system allowing lines that are not vertical or horizontal. This means that firstly they need antialiasing or they look awful, and secondly that bouncing an enemy off a line becomes nontrivial, especially if I potentially lose the information about the start and end of line when I draw it. Ultimately, bitmaps are not adquate for this job. Hence I need an entirely new engine. Various Real Life (tm) issues have cropped up (to do with house hunting, mainly) which have made it a bit harder to get on with stuff since last thursday, but I've made some progress in basing a game around vector graphics. What I need to do today is remember how to check if a line crosses another line, work out where they cross, then do a bit of reflection if they do cross. Once that's done, putting the game together shouldn't be -too- hard... I hope! As an aside, I've been practising my drawing a little more lately. I've been trying to work out how to get Sheep to do a few more interesting things, as well as working on my real life drawing. Much of it is pretty rubbish, but I think my cartoon sketching is getting a little more confident at the very least!
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11th Feb 2010 - 14:47	Next!
Right, SJ4K is done. It's not -finished-, but the only thing remaining is to sort out the music and preloader and do some testing. These things can wait until the music is sorted; I'm tempted to see if I can use some Trudy Rebel in this one, because it's the artist's band, and because some of it would probably fit. So waiting on a reply to that :) So we're left with the next project. In a fit of sleeplessness a couple of days ago, I put together an idea for a sort of sequel to Qilox. Not actually a sequel, but a game on the same lines; this time mouse based, and possibly a little faster paced. It shouldn't be too hard to do. I think it'll be called Divide and Conquer, but that may change. I'll give more details when I've actually written it...
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9th Feb 2010 - 14:57	Spot The Difference
Typically, I feel quite ill today. Mostly just a bad cold, but it might well be related to lack of decent sleep. My differences, however, make steady progress - I've not done all of them yet, but I'm most of the way there. It's actually harder than I expected, since while there's a lot of detail, its all in line drawings effectively. There's also the issue that a number of the panels don't really have much in them other than the two main characters talking, and I don't really like to do more than one change in a single dialog box. I'm getting better at adding in shading and other objects in the same style though... I've also got around to writing privacy policies for all of my websites. This is long overdue! I don't think it'll matter too much, but it cover a few issues that may arise, notably that Google require a privacy policy for sites with their adverts on, and I don't really want to lose the £150 a month for something as simple as that.
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8th Feb 2010 - 19:34	Back to the grindstone
Well, it's back to work really. I've done a card game in the last week, plus sorted out all the scanning for Busy Slacker and done a bit of work posting games to my sites. Not a massively productive week, I suppose, but I've got my usual sleeping issues at the moment, so it's hard to pick a good time to get on with things. That and I'm in a Dwarf Fortress mood, which does get distracting. Anyway. My project for the next couple of days is to get on with a Spot the Difference game for SJ4K. This should be slightly more coherent than the Blue Lighter Cult one, since the second and third pages of the comic make a decent story and I can fit all the panels into a window. I've got about half of the images done now, so I just need to do the rest, sort out the music and work out a title screen, backing screen and end game screen. This shouldn't take more than two more days, so should be in testing by the end of wednesday. Which leaves thursday and friday to think about doing either Pentrix plus or an improved API for rosamund's bower. Probably the former - not too much work to do there any more, whereas the API needs me to work out how to use Flex or FlashDevelop.
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4th Feb 2010 - 14:09	New contests
So, mochi have a new 'big' contest, as opposed to the smaller ones I've been entering lately. It does look interesting, due to the fact it's for a management game, which I've been meaning to write. Unfortunately, I think I disagree with the rules of the contest on a fundamental level and will not enter. The prize of the contest is -not- the money. The prize is actually a sponsorship, requiring you to produce versions of the game with their preloader etc. This is not acceptable. Ultimately, they're saying that I should fail to get any money for my game through sponsorship so I can enter it into a competition where I -might- get sponsorship. Its completely the wrong way around. If I commission art from someone, for example, I don't say "OK, I want you 50 people to produce something, and I'll pay the best one", because that means that I'm not paying 49 people for their work. Only the desparate would work for nothing, knowing that they may never get any money. There's a whole website about this: No!Spec, although it's mostly from an graphic desgin perspective. So I will not enter. If I thought I was really good, I'd write a better management game and specifically -not- enter it into the competition, and hope it's better than the rest. And unfortunately, I wish that more people would take this line. But due to the semi-amateur nature of flash games, I think a lot of people will be taken in. (as an aside, of course, I don't actually try for sponsorship anyway. But that does miss the point!)
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3rd Feb 2010 - 06:42	Review of 2009
I said early last month I wanted to write a review of 2009. Here it is! The money Firstly, I may as well start with the money - from 1 Jan to 31 Dec 2009 (this doesn't include computer repairs). Outgoings: £931.16 The outgoings include ongoing server costs, which amount to about £550 (including domains), and a new laptop at £330 and a printer at £40. The server costs, obviously, will occur every year. I hope the laptop costs won't, but there'll always be incidental costs. I've also spent some money on art materials and books, although that's not much. Income: £4020.49 This is almost entirely from adverts: either Google AdSense, MochiAds or Kongregate. Roughly £3000 of this is Mochi, Kongregate is about £650 and Google about £350. The Kongregate includes about £250 in prize money, the rest is revenue share. So. Last year I made a profit of about £3000. My total costs are about £7000, including both living and business expenses. This isn't all that great, but actually doesn't tell the whole picture. For example, in last three months of 2009, I recieved more than £1100 from Mochi; in the first three months I recieved just £70. AdSense is more damning: £240 from the last three months, and £0 from the first three. Of the three incomes, only Kongregate is falling currently. All in all, these are very positive figures. I am pretty certain now that, bar a catastrophe, this year will be see me earn more than enough to live on from the games alone. What went wrong I'll think about what went wrong first. It's very simple what went wrong: The games. If I look back on the year, there have been two successful games and two moderate successes. The successful games are Qilox and Colourshift, both of which I wrote in 2008. The moderate successes are Blue Lighter Cult, which while not a huge income, didn't take me a massive amount of time and achieved it's goals, and Stonewall, which again I wrote in 2008. So of all the games I produced last year, the only real success is Blue Lighter Cult. The other major games - Mobster, Rhymetime and Spaceman: Prelude - really didn't do well. Even 52 card pickup, which I wrote entirely as a joke, has done better than some of these. I didn't even publicly release Mobster. When I look at it all, though, I started a lot of projects that went nowhere last year, and spent too much time on ones that weren't going anywhere. I've had a go at tower defence games, world conquest games and match 3 games, but not produced any results, and I've not made the best of my shooter engine or thought how to improve my CCG. I spent ages on Rhymetime, which I could have known was too quirky to do well (I do like the game, though, and I'm quite proud of it). Whereas the few card games I did last year are chugging along nicely, and Blue Lighter Cult is a useful engine which I really need to get on with using for another couple of games for Busy Slacker. So what I need to improve here is my motivation and work ethic, as well as my approach. I need to have a complete game in mind rather than an engine, and I need to not waste time when I know something isn't going to be great - get it out of the door, and get on with the next thing. All easier said than done, but it's good to think about. The other minor disappointment, that is related to my failure to produce another decent game, is that Red Tower Games is not particularly successful. It needs a constant stream of visitors, and that needs new games that are on the big websites. Currently, it makes less than 50p a day, and it takes me at least a couple of hours a week to run. I've scaled down the time a bit on that though! What went right I'll not mention Qilox and Colourshift, since they're mainly 2008 work. There is one -big- success this year: Rosamund's Bower. Rosamund's Bower is currently making me about £4 a day. It's not much, but this is for, ultimately, no work at all. It also massively increases the value of my card games as I produce them - even if they're not massively successful individually, as a whole they make the website work. The API on RB is another good feature - people really do come back to my site. And while there's not much communication between people at the moment (the forum is pretty dead) there is a lot of competition for the highest scores on some games. Rosamund's Bower is worth my putting time into to improve or advertise; people use the site. It currently has about 3000 visitors a day. It also pays for my server costs! It also reinforces some work I did last year: the card game engine. That has consistently made it easy for me to write new games. I currently have 29 patience games, and almost all of them have hundreds of plays a day; in total usually more than Colourshift. Each (past the first) has taken me less than three hours to write - I have more of a problem finding and learning a new game to write than actually writing it! Even Red Tower Games, although not really earning its keep at the moment, hasn't done too badly, and it does give me a good outlet for my unsponsored games. I've not mentioned Busy Slacker yet. I think that is something that has gone right, really. Although neither I nor ST make any money from it, I'm not really losing money from it either and, while it's only making a few cents a day, it takes time and internet presence to build up a comic. And a few more spot the difference games! If it all works out, it might make a bit of cash. If it doesn't, then it's definitely been fun. The final thing that went right was that I have vastly improved my programming and game design skills. In particular, in the last year I have finally used proper graphics in games, notably Rhymetime and Spaceman: Prelude. I know I'm not the worlds best artist, but I think I also know now that I can draw and I can make things look prettier. The overall polish level of my games currently is much higher than it was at the start of last year. Conclusions and Next Steps There are two obvious conclusions here. Firstly: Rosamund's Bower is a good thing and needs to be encouraged. I have some advertising options that are probably worthwhile. I need to continue to find and write patience games, and perhaps consider some more flowery patience games that are more appealing to a mainstream audience. I need to fix the API and think about adding features to the site. I can't spend too long on it, but a few hours a week will pay dividends. The second obvious thing is that I need to sort out my games. Last year was a disappointment; I didn't produce them properly. There simply was not enough direction, not enough actual releases and not enough single minded production of games (other than card games). So far this year I have produced one game already - it might not be a great game, but it's out there, complete, and I can work on another one. Who knows when I write my next Qilox? But I'll never get another one if I don't release things. One thing I have learnt last year, but not touched upon, is distribution of my games. Several of my older games have benefitted greatly this year by submission to new sites, Qilox on mindjolt being a case in point. I need to make sure that I don't just leave games by the wayside, even if I think they're not that great. They need to be out there, and you never know what might happen. So, there it is. One review of a year, and some thoughts for this year. With a bit of luck, next january (or february, knowing me), I'll have some much higher numbers to quote! One final thing: A big thank you to all of you who've played my games, given me feedback and used my sites. It's nice to know people enjoy what I do!
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