I also created an animation of the five drawings called “Five From Five” as an interesting way to present how all the drawings relate to each other:

You can click on the thumbnails to enlarge them.

Here are the starting lines	“Yellow Dog” – Oct 10th, 2011
“Southwest” – Oct 11th, 2011	“Horncordion” – Oct 12th, 2011
“Hold On Tight” – Oct 13th, 2011	“Just Keep Swimming” – Oct 14th, 2011
“Fall” – Oct 15th, 2011	“Eggplant” – Oct 16th, 2011

For Saturday and Sunday I decided that five days of using the same lines was enough and just drew whatever I wanted. I’m trying to experiment a bit more with light and color as demonstrated in “Eggplant” above and I’m pretty happy with how it came out. I’ve spent so many years mainly drawing in black and white pen or pencil that I’m really excited to finally be pushing my color skills and learning.

Not sure what this week holds for the daily drawings. It was really nice to have some constraints or guidelines so I may have to think of something to provide a bit of structure. We’ll see!

Now I do use a Wacom tablet and I normally do all of my drawing in Photoshop because for whatever reason I’ve never really enjoyed drawing in Flash. I felt I spent most of my time fighting with it in fact. Well it turns out a lot of the problem was just some basic misunderstandings of the brush tool along with also learning some nice simple coloring, shading, and highlighting tricks using a few basic layers.

I corresponded a bit with Marcus over G+ to ask him some further questions about things I saw in his tutorials but then it was time to put my learning into action!

Below are the results of my first week. Six drawings in total since I started on Tuesday. I figure I’ll post the montage once a week on Sunday with the week’s drawings. I do post the daily drawings over on Twitter and G+ though.

You can click on the thumbnails to enlarge them.

“Banjo Farmer” – Oct 4th, 2011	“Loquacious Mime” – Oct 5th, 2011
“Focused Frog” – Oct 6th, 2011	“Red Robot” – Oct 7th, 2011
“The Loneliest Puppeteer” – Oct 8th, 2011	“Tree Beast” – Oct 9th, 2011

Some of these drawings just came from my subconscious when I sat down with my coffee in the morning and tried to imagine something to draw. A few of them though came from friends when I asked on Facebook for some random character prompts to do some improv. My friends suggested both “Loquacious Mime” and “The Loneliest Puppeteer” and I’m pretty happy with how they came out.  The other interesting fact is that “Banjo Farmer” came from a creativity exercise that Marcus posted about where you draw a random squiggly line and attempt to build a face out of it.

There was another creativity exercise Marcus posted a few days ago where you draw five squiggly lines and attempt to build an entire composition using them. I think as a challenge this week I will be using the same squiggly lines all week long but drawing a different drawing from the same lines each day. I’m excited about this challenge and we’ll see how it turns out!

This game is my most ambitious so far containing 40 levels arranged into 4 different difficulty groups.  This is also the first level design I’ve done for a game as most of my previous games have been more on the procedural or arcade side of things where game variables just sort of change over time to introduce new enemies or difficulties but there aren’t distinct levels. The gameplay combines aspects of puzzles, agility, and time trials.

I wanted to post some composite before/after screenshots I made of the new graphics overhaul:

Level 2-5

Level 2-8

Level 3-6

Level 4-3

I’m now getting into the “last 10%” stage of this game. There are still many miscellaneous tasks for me to complete like sound effects, music soundtrack, social features, menu features, further testing and polish.  It is getting close though to the point where I’ll be able to present it to sponsors. Always an exciting stage for a game to be at. I can clearly see the light at the end of the tunnel on this game and I can’t wait for the day when I can let the players in!

AVOIDAL placed 14th out of the 172 game entries submitted to the the competition.

Ludum Dare is a solo game making event where participants have 48 hours to create an entire game with all content from scratch after the theme is announced. This time the theme was “Enemies As Weapons.”

I wrote up a detailed post mortem about my experience creating AVOIDAL and created a timelapse video of the entire process.

This was my most successful Ludum Dare yet and I am happy to continue to meet my goals when I participate as I try to raise my personal bar for success with each event I enter. I wanted to get a top 10% finish again and I was able to get top 8% so my goal was met.

I’ve been able to predict pretty well how my games will place each time which I think is a good exercise in trying to be self-aware about your game and the potential audience for it. This can matter when you are trying to make a Flash game that you want to stand a chance of being enjoyed by millions of players rather than thousands.

I can see a definite trend with the games I have entered over the years in Ludum Dare. This is my fourth game submitted to the regular competition and I feel it is my best so far:

• Ludum Dare 11 – Minimalist – 2008: MinMo 32nd overall out of 71 entries (top 45%)
• Ludum Dare 14 – Advancing Wall of Doom – 2009: Fleedom Flies 19th overall out of 123 entries (top 16%)
• Ludum Dare 15 - Caverns – 2009: Angry Caverns tied 10th overall out of 144 entries (top 9%)
• Ludum Dare 18 – Enemies as Weapons - 2010: AVOIDAL 14th overall out of 172 entries (top 8%)

I believe this not only shows how participating in regular game development competitions can help you create better games but also that it can teach you how to work better within constraints so that you can make better games outside of competitions too.

I am really happy with the way AVOIDAL has come out and I look forward to it finding a sponsor before I release it globally. I have a good feeling that it could be my most popular game yet.

I have the new polished up post-competition version over for bidding on Flash Game License and it is already receiving good bidding interest of which I am most thankful.

I have been playing this game quite often as I worked to improve it after the competition and it has been in my subconsious a good bit.  On Saturday I spent about 3 hours creating a concept art illustration based on the game.  I decided to have fun creating it in a very different style than the one I used in AVOIDAL. I also recorded a complete timelapse of creating the illustration since I’ve had a lot of people contacting me lately that were quite curious about my drawing process and tools.

Before I can really talk about what games mean to me I think it is important to provide a brief amount of background on where I am coming from on this personal subject.

I began developing a love for both drawing and programming as a young child and have spent countless enjoyable and priceless hours on those activities over the years. I caught the art bug bad in the late 70s after encountering Speed Racer on TV and the first Star Wars movie.

I filled page after page in my father’s art journals with little car race and space battle scenes. I remember him taking a lot of time showing me how to draw and even how to do flip book animations on the corners of the journal pages.

Even before we had a home computer my parents started sending me to Radio Shack computer camps at age six for programming in LOGO where I would get very familiar with that friendly drawing turtle and pen up and pen down. Then when I was about eight years old my parents got our first home computer. It was a TRS-80 but we only had it for one night–the salesman from Radio Shack called back to say they had received something better and wanted to know if my father wanted to upgrade.

That is how I ended up with a Tandy 1000 and a great book on BASIC by David A. Lien.  I will never forget noticing the author’s middle initial and last name could form the word Alien and would always wonder if that was a joke or not. I would use that book on BASIC along with numerous Mother-chaperoned trips to the Public Library to spend all my free time filling floppy disks with hundreds of BASIC computer games.

This dual exposure at a young age to both art and computers ended up having a very lasting effect on me. I have equally split my time between science and art related pursuits. I remember piling on the art and math classes in high school and always being frustrated at how both subject tracks wanted to exclude access from the other. Teachers always wanted you to pick your path. They couldn’t seem to comprehend why you would want to do both. This made no sense to me. I’ve always seen art in science and science in art.

I have attended four different colleges trying to get degrees first in Illustration and Painting, then Film, then Psychology, and lastly Computer Engineering. I always did well in college but would eventually get too impatient with what I felt was a slow pace and drop out to pursue various self-employment opportunities either by myself or with other like minded people I’d meet in college. I still have no degree but it hasn’t really slowed me down any. I have been self-employed full time for over ten years now even though the types of businesses may have varied.

I feel this background I’ve shared critically relates to what video games have come to mean to me. I believe the frustration I found when I was younger in having to pick between either “being an artist” or “being a scientist” drove me mad. I didn’t understand why someone couldn’t be interested in both. I eventually decided to stop trying to pick and realized that I just love learning about anything that interests me.

It wasn’t until the past two or three years that it finally dawned on me that the only career and passion of mine that has existed since I was a child and that could encompass everything I was interested in was video games.

I believe you can make a video game about anything at all and it can utilize aspects from every art form yet created by humanity. This realization absolutely blows my mind with excitment.

I love creating the art, the sound effects, the music, the game mechanics, solving the math problems, engineering the software, writing story or dialogue if applicable–the list is endless as to what a game can contain. This inspires me beyond anything I have yet found in my life so far to create and I’m quite thrilled as to the possibilities that await people in general for both what games will continue to teach us and where they yet have to go as a medium.

All this debate I’ve witnessed over the past few years as to whether video games can be art or not makes no sense to me at all.

I am a person that truly believes a life well lived can be art.

Life is art.

Games can be art.

This is what games mean to me.

I have done a few illustrations for this game working through various game mechanics, styles, and ideas.

This is a useful creative tool for me to rapidly try out different concepts and see what they might look like before I even write a single line of code or start creating any game assets.

Creating concept art becomes a way I can immerse myself in the world and atmosphere of the game ahead of time because as I am drawing these illustrations I am imagining the various aspects of the gameplay occurring.  This can even include me making hand gestures and sound effects without me realizing it as I try out the game in my mind’s eye.  As embarrassing as that might sound for some people it has been something I’ve done unashamedly since I first started drawing as a child.  It makes the experience that much more involved and creatively useful for me.

The mechanics of the game are fluid and easy to change when I am prototyping with illustrations so I can work through many ideas quickly as I form my plan about what to implement in the first prototype. It also serves as a way to get myself psyched about the game and really feeling the emotion and experience I want to try and create for the player.

This latest game has been inspired by a specific title I came up with yesterday.  I’ve been brainstorming various game ideas for it and think I’ve finally settled on a concept I want to implement a prototype of. I’ll keep the title in reserve for now but I expect to make a few more updates along the development cycle.

If you are a game designer feel free to let me know a little about your creative process when you are beginning with a new game.  I have used many different approaches and there are obviously many ways to do it.  I’d be interested to hear if anyone else has used a concept art driven approach to good effect with their games.

This is not only my first Flash game but also the first thing I have ever really released onto the internet as well so it has been a real interesting learning experience!

If you don’t care about tech mumbo jumbo if you skip down near the bottom you can see some funny stats from which countries are playing this game and my personal thoughts on my experience so far.

Distribution and Ad channel technology I used – MochiAds:

I decided to go with MochiAds to do my game distribution. It is non-exclusive and free so I am also able to make other deals as well. One of the main benefits they offer is that they “wrap” your Flash game in a preloader that contains customizable and controllable ads from their network. So, the further your game spreads on the internet the better for them and you. You get a percentage of the revenue from the “impressions” that the ads receive as people wait for your game to download. I like that people have the ability to skip the ad by clicking the ‘x’ because let’s face it- ads are annoying. I also then think that let’s face it, I have to eat too.

Another great free benefit that MochiAds provides you is that the preloader that wraps your Flash game is encrypted as well as version controlled. This means that I can update my Flash game with bug fixes, new links, new ads or whatever I want in ONE location and that anyone playing the file (even if they have downloaded or are linking to a SWF somewhere on a portal) will receive a “diff” of the changes in the version. All seamlessly while it downloads. This is really incredible in my opinion. It has been a joy to work with and I have made quite a few tweaks and changes to my game already and it is nice to see them being picked up by all the portals which have received a copy of my game. The encryption is a nice benefit too I would guess though I don’t know much about Flash obfuscation yet I just hear it slows down someone decompiling your code a little bit.

Along with the distribution channels your game is automatically placed in you receive a full stat report at your MochiAd dashboard page. This is where you setup all the keywords, game thumbnail, description, instructions etc. that are distributed when a partner of MochiAds receives your game. I have watched my game spreading to over 40 sites now all without me having to do any further work. They do this because they benefit as well as the developer the further the game gets. They also have a more detailed stat service through MochiBot which I also signed up for which provides further detail on people who saw more than the ad. In other words, people who actually played your game.

The stats are a blast to watch! Especially for someone who is a complete stat and number junkie like myself.

Other portals I have released my game on:

Kongregate:

Kongregate was the first portal I uploaded my game on myself. The submit process was very easy and only involved a few steps. You must have a Kongregate user account obviously but besides that it is really straightforward to get your game up there. You fill out the form with info on your game, upload a thumbnail, check any of the API options you may be using, and also let them know whether your game is “exclusive” to the Kongregate site or not. Options like this one, along with the stats API question control how much your percentage of the ad revenue will be.

Since Kongregate has a deal with MochiAds already they will suppress the display of your ads in your MochiAds preloader. The preloader download bar still works fine but no ads will display. They do this for many reasons and it seems to make fair sense.

Anyway, back to the percentage points: You get 25% of the ad revenue that your game receives just for uploading it to the site. If you also integrate either (or both) of their APIs (HighScore and Statistics) you receive an additional 10% for this bringing your total possible to 35%. Now, if you make your game exclusive to Kongregate you can receive a another 15% bonus bring the grand total to 50%. A nice thing about the exclusive is that they do let you turn that off if you ever feel like putting your game elsewhere and you will revert back to the 25% or 35% share depending on your other options.

Once your game is uploaded and published it will show up on their new games list. At this point it is up to the portal users to rate and view your game past a ‘under judgement’ period. The judgement period is a timeframe where you can’t view the rating of the game yet when you go to rate. I guess the idea is that this helps early reviewers judge with less bias. In actuality most early commenters during this phase like to post their ratings in the comment feed below the game. Once your game has received 75 ratings the rating number is revealed to all. If your game does well enough it will move through the rankings accordingly. TurnStyle seemed to fair pretty well for a first attempt. TurnStyle’s rating seems to fluctuate around 3.25/5 stars over there. It is ranked around 240/3200 in the puzzle game category currently on their site too. I guess that isn’t too shabby at all with everything considered. As of this post date my game was played over 3500 times, rated over 450 times, favorited 17 times, and earned me 1 fan.

Newgrounds:

This is the only other portal I have submitted to so far. Similar to Kongregate it followed a manual form submission process. Once your game is up on the site it also undergoes a judgement mode where people have to vote and review it for it to acheive it’s placement ranking. The system is similar enough to Kongregate’s that I won’t go into great detail here. They also offer an API but I haven’t looked into that yet. I am allowed to have my MochiAds viewed up there and they seem to get me a pretty good eCPM rate so far based on my MochiAd stats so that is good.

It seems TurnStyle faired a good deal better on Newgrounds than on Kongregate. My game got 7 reviews: 6 perfect “10s” and 1 “9″ for a review rating of 9.9. The voting system seems to indicate that my game has a vote rating of around 3.5/5 stars with 298 votes received and over 1200 plays.

The cool news was the first day I submitted it my game did well enough to get voted 6th Most Hottest Game for Monday! That was pretty exciting. I missed the coveted 1-5 spots that would have gotten my game even higher in views. It was still on the front page though just didn’t have the icon next to it. Oh well, pretty good for first Flash game I guess.

Traffic Stats and Ad Revenue so far:

So, I wanted to provide all the above data for context to what I will now share so that other developers can see how these stats relate to what distribution technology I used and where I have manually uploaded it. I will detail the rough number of hosts my game has reached (remember only two of which I submitted to myself) along with traffic numbers, impressions received, and revenue received so far. I do this because I have found it really helpful seeing the other Flash developers who have been transparent about this business space so that all may learn to be better.

TurnStyle Stats: 3 Days in the wild

Dates: Feb 28, 2009 – Mar 02, 2009
Ad requests
Total: ~15000
Impressions: ~10000
Skips: ~5000
Revenue: $2.40
# of Hosts: 42
# of Countries: 101

% of Plays by Top 5 Countries:
39% from Finland (this is crazy.. also almost half the leaderboard scores are from Finland too.)
20% from USA
7% from UK
4% from Canada
4% from Germany

I have also made about $3 dollars from my 3500 plays at Kongregate through their system.

So, while this game hasn’t been a financial success yet at a whopping $6 of ad revenue so far the education that I have received and continue to receive is fairly priceless. Also, ad revenue is more of a long tail approach as my game (and future games) spread through the internet. I try to visualize a day where I may have 10-20 games roaming about each bringing me a couple bucks a day potentially. Well, that ads up when these little critters can “work” 24/7. Heck, who couldn’t use an extra 10x $1 a day.. that’s almost $4k a year when you think about it. So, while $6 earned so far on 200 hours of work at least might initially discourage some- I believe that is a short-sighted reaction. There is also the idea that while most of your games will end up relatively “unplayed” in the scheme of things- you only need 1 or 2 to really “blow up”. I think the more quality games you can release over time the better.

In order to work on a different angle to monetizing the Flash business space there is also the world of licenses and sponsorship to consider. I have signed up for an account over at FlashGameLicense which lets you sell licenses to released games and find sponsorships of various types for unreleased games that portals buy. It allows bidding and reviewing and other matchmaking services to allow Flash developers to get a fair price for good work. I am excited about the potential that FGL offers to do this kind of work fulltime. I will be posting more experiences regarding those adventures in later posts!

Aside from all the business aspects and traffic aspects I’ll share a few personal joys from this experience:

The thought tickles me so that potentially 15,000 people have seen my illustrations and played my game. I can’t believe I didn’t do something like this earlier in my life because it is so much darn fun! There is something so tantalizingly weird about hitting refresh on your browser while watching your MochiAd stat page and seeing that every 5 seconds 20 more people have tried your game. It blows my simple mind.

I would also like to thank all my close friends and friends of friends that have played this game and offered their feedback. In the anonymous world of the internet it is still the opinions of those I am close to that I most value hearing. I can’t wait to make more games!