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.

Just wanted to post a fun image I assembled from seven different games I’m working on releasing still. The top of the image which contains the aliens in the mushroom landscape is from For The Twin–a game that I’ve finished for the “A Game By It’s Cover” Competition over at TIGSource and which will be released in September or sooner now that it has found a primary sponsorship from Spil Games.

The rest of the images are from unreleased games that I’m still working on. They are roughly listed in the order I expect to complete them though that could change a little bit of course.

They are all between 50-80% finished though and I am not going to work on any new game projects until I clear out my backlog!  This of course doesn’t mean I won’t be participating in August’s Ludum Dare 48 hour game competition–I wouldn’t miss that for anything especially since I couldn’t attend the one in April.

I also will continue to complete my contract game projects like the one I recently finished up for Kongregate and Cheetos called Mouth Full of Happy.

A big reason for wanting to knock these game projects out is that this year I’ve only officially released two games so far compared to the six I released in 2009.  It’s not that I haven’t been working on as many games it is just that I have not finished as many. I believe in the importance of finishing your games and I fully intend to.

I also believe in the gameplay and the sponsorship potential of all the games above so I need to finish them off and get them over to Flash Game License for bidding before the year ends. That is the plan anyway–wish me luck!

It has been almost 60 days since I released TurnStyle and as I’m gearing up again to do another big round of game development in the next few weeks I think this time is as good as any to get this off my plate.

I will share my MochiAd developer screenshots below:  I have created 3 reports all of which show the entire history of the game in the wild.  I will report my numbers on Traffic, Hosts, and Countries along with some of my own thoughts and markings on the screenshots:

(All images can be clicked on to view larger)

TurnStyle Traffic Data

The purple area on the image above represents the typical viral spike present in most games that are released on the internet.  I have looked at a ton of these graphs of released flash games and their signature is almost identical.  Yes there are bumps and spikes along the way depending on various sites or occurrences that may happen to your game but the underlying spike and then long tail down is the same.  The main difference between games is that the higher your spike is in the beginning then the higher the hits per day will run you during the long tail down.  TurnStyle has tapered off to generating around 100-200 plays a day now.  The highest spike I had was around 8500 or so and earned my around $3 in a single day. Woot!

The green area on the image above represents when I got approved for the excellent service called Flash Game Distribution by the same guys who run the Flash Game License site.  I was allowed access into the beta version of the service, submitted my game and enabled my options and got a nice spike in my traffic.  I can’t recommend them enough for how easy they make it to get a decent boost.  I imagine it paying off quite well on a more successful game.  In less than 15 minutes of your time you can have your game emailed to over 451 publishers, enabled for portals who subscribe to their game feed API, and use their manual submit accelerator to walk through 100s of the most popular portals which don’t have an auto-submit.  All your games data is featured on the left pane of a frame and you can paste it right into all the portals submit forms.  Cake!

TurnStyle Host Distribution Data

Here you see the hosts view from my MochiAds developer Stats page.  Once again I am viewing all date data for TurnStyle.  Early on my game got picked up by arcade.fi and got a ton of plays.  This was great for the players in Finland but not so great for my revenue.  You get paid various amounts depending on where you game is being played.  Every country and domain have different eCPMs that they pay.  This is due to all the various ad inventories or deals that have been struck between Mochi and the ad buyers.  If your game is played in certain countries you won’t get any revenue at all sometimes since there are no ad campaigns running there.

You can also see here that bored.com really gave me some great revenue as a single site.  As I mention in my image above, the MochiAds domain is listed as the top one because this is an artifact of the Mochi Distribution system.  Most publishers subscribing to their feed are going to be using the Mochi embed to save on hosting fees.

TurnStyle Country Distribution Data

Just for fun I thought I’d also include the country data for TurnStyle.  You can see the top 2 countries which aren’t that surprisingly are United States and United Kingdom but then something funny is that Finland is the 3rd highest.  Well I have no idea but they really enjoyed my game.  I was even using the Google translation tool to read the comments users were leaving in Finish and that was quite fun.

It has been a great learning experience self-publishing TurnStyle.  I couldn’t be happier for what knowledge I’ve gained about the Flash business space.  It has also shown me why working out better deals and new models with publishers will be crucial to running a successful Flash game studio.  I’m coming to see what I had read others talking about that MochiAds (and other ad networks for that matter) should be considered more as secondary or tertiary income or even a viable tool for getting some leverage in your dealings with sponsors and licensees of your game.  You should be aware that if they are asking you to remove your ads you should consider this in the cost of your sponsorship/license deal.

I am trying out Flash Game License for my new game Orange You Glad and it is going great so far.  I’ve had sponsor interest and am receiving bids so I’m quite thrilled with my progress on my second Flash game.  I will be posting more on my experiences in that department down the road I am sure!

Here is level 4 from a new Flash game I am making with my good friend and fellow game designer Jeremy P. Bushnell. It marks the first collaboration Hybrid Mind Studios has done and I’m very excited about co-designing this game with Jeremy.

We’ve been working hard on this during the month of April.  I did an initial prototype in about 3 hours which I sent out to my play tester email list and initial response was very good.  Since then Jeremy has been working on creating 10 great levels, art assets, sounds, ambient loops, title and inter-level screens.  I have been programming the game engine and integrating all the levels and assets and coding in some nice animations for the different collectibles and units in the game.  We’ve both been playing the heck out of it too and working together to tune the game mechanics.

That’s all I’m gonna say about this new game for now but we plan to do another play tester release this weekend.  Probably on Sunday or Monday at the latest.  After that we will likely make any changes based on feedback and we’ll be posting it for developer review up on Flash Game License before finally opening it up to sponsor bidding.  You want to set the best first impression you can and make the best use of the sponsor’s valuable time when you are trying to monetize your Flash games!

I’ll have more info and a big announcement once the game secures a sponsorship and/or is ready to be released into the wild.  In the meantime I’m going to be combing my list of sponsor email addresses encouraging them to take a look at my game over on FGL.