I have just completed a new Flash game called Worderfall this month with my good friend and fellow game designer Jeremy P. Bushnell.  This time around it is a word game that utilizes an extremely large database of valid English words.

The concept is a fairly simple one.  You have three minutes to create as many high scoring words as you can.  The game increases pace with each minute that passes.  There are a ton of game statistics that are tracked as well for those who would like to improve their scores or at least measure their progress.

Here is a game play video which explains how to play:

Here is a game play screenshot:

I welcome your feedback and thoughts positive or negative.  Thanks for giving it a try!

My idea on the theme was that you play as the cavern.  You have to use your natural defenses like stalactites and steam vents to eliminate the creatures that have come to call you home.  In this version you are mainly facing off against bats and cavemen though in an expansion I hope to add in many time periods of history of various cavern dwellers and users.

Here is a scene from level 5.  There are currently only 5 levels in the game.  You have limited amount of time on each level to try and destroy as many creatures as you can.  There is a nice combo system and random bonus creatures that will help you go for some big points.  There is also a completion bonus with extra rewards for perfect completion.  To encourage some friendly competition I tied in MochiMedia’s excellent global leaderboard system and even wrote up a simple leaderboard tutorial ahead of the competition in case any other LD15 participants who used Flash wanted to give it a go.

Once again Ludum Dare was an absolute blast!  There was record turn out like last time and 144 games were submitted in total!  You can view the current game list here.  My LD15 dev blog can be viewed here too.

I used the Flash CS4 IDE to develop this game in Actionscript 3.0. I also used SFXR to generate the sound effects and composed the menu and level music in Reason.  You can even view a timelapse of my games 36 hours of creation compressed into 3 minutes!  Congrats to all the participants of Ludum Dare 15!

Click here to give Angry Caverns a try in your browser!

Description:

How good are you with your tongue? Got a bad case of scurvy?

See if you can handle the Orange Frenzy!

Orange You Glad features 20 levels of citrus madness. 10 special power effects and 25 unique and humorous items to avoid. Can you lick enough oranges on each level to advance to the next? It’s not as easy as it sounds.

Play Orange You Glad

Background:

This is my second Flash game and first ActionScript 3.0 game.  This is also my first foray into Flash sponsorship and licensing.  I am quite excited that after putting this game on Flash Game License as well as emailing marketing materials to over 50 sponsors I was able to secure both a primary sponsorship from Flasharcade Gamessite as well as a non-exclusive license from Big Fish Games.

I worked on this game during the month of March and the beginning of April.  It was a little slow going because I was under heavy learning curve from both ActionScript 3.0 and the Flash CS4 IDE.  This project was a great learning experience from both a technical and business aspect.

The game received a few different bids for primary sponsorship on Flash Game License and it only took about two weeks total from posting time till I accepted a favorable bid and delivered the sponsored SWF file.  Both Flasharcade Gamessite and Big Fish Games have been great to work with and I am quite happy with both deals.

My primary sponsorship allows my to sell non-exclusive site-locked licenses and keep my MochiAds which is one of the prime reasons that type of sponsorship model was promoted by Flash Game License.

I am very excited to see how my second game does out there in the wild.  It has been almost 6 weeks since I started this project and it is definitely a test of patience controlling your enthusiasm as you wait for the day you can release your game.

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!