Why are we all sitting in a row anyway?

As a mechanic it is both easy to grasp and strategically deep – as you become more familiar with the game you are drafting for you start to not only draft to get cards you want, but also to pick cards that you don't want your neighbours getting once you pass on your remaining cards. It's no wonder that such fantastic games as Ascension, Dominion and 7 Wonders all use drafting as a base. Read on to find out how I fared!

An Industrial Theme

Our 1GAM splinter group One Game A Month Dublin runs its own monthly themes and for May ours was INDUSTRY. This gave me a fantastic focus for my card drafting game, and I quickly came up with the idea for a game set during the Industrial Revolution of about 1800 (ish). You would be an industrialist of the era building up your production & trade empire. Here you can see some early investigation into the possible industries and technological advancements of the time:

Some interesting facets of the Industrial Revolution..

My initial thoughts were to make a game where you alternate between drafting to get cards and playing the cards to expand your empire. I could have cards that represented some of the ideas pictured above, with the overall goal being to get the best trade empire by the end of the game. I started thinking along the lines of having both basic resource cards and more complex ones that were more powerful but needed prerequisites to be able to play them – so that early in the game you would be torn between choosing the basics to get you started or choosing the super cards that you wanted to be able to play later on.

A Paper Prototype

With a rich theme in hand and ideas for cards a-plenty it was time to build the first playable prototype. This by the way is the absolute best thing about building a physical game – it is just so easy to prototype. All you need is pen & paper plus some card sleeves (€6 got me 100 sleeves from a local comic book shop). This part is far faster than coding up a computer game prototype!

The pen (and card protector sleeve) is mightier than the .. um..

Very soon I had a playable game! I had cards that produced basic materials (initially cotton, coal or iron), cards that doubled your output, cards that doubled your sale price for materials, and cards that messed with your opponent's play. Even at this incredibly early stage I was able to play the game and get a sense of how it was coming together – and already there was the makings of a fun game!

Making It Shiny

My next step was to draw up some card designs in photoshop. Once again the theme of the industrial revolution made this easy – everything from my colour scheme, fonts, patterns (from wallpaper!) could be inspired by historical counterparts. In a single evening I had a workable template for all my cards:

Shiny!

Here you can see the three types of card you could draft and build: Holdings (which produce materials), Events (which have a one off effect and are then discarded), and Technologies (which give you alone some sort of permanent upgrade). As I worked through the nice-looking prototype stage I was also reworking the rules of the paper prototype, which was an easy side effect of having to type up each card as I created it. At this point I also added a fourth material type (Wheat) to round out the production side of the game. I also settled on a name for the game: Captains of Industry.

Card Sleeves. Seriously just get some!

Now I could print and cut up a nicer looking prototype – reusing those all important card sleeves – and I was ready to get some people playing the game. At this point I'd say I had spent about 4 evenings total on this (far less effort than my previous month's flash game Dungeon Delver for example).

This is starting to look professional!

Playtest Until It Becomes Fun

Another massive advantage of building a physical game is that most of the key rules simply exist in your head. Tweaking things that only exist in your head is really, really easy. Every time I was able to get 2-4 players together to play out the game I was able to tweak rules to make things simpler or better, often between games! The power of not having to code rule changes is extreme. This is why even computer game designers often make a paper prototype first! And when I wanted to change the cards themselves, I could do it with some self adhesive labels and a pen. Nice.

Captains of Industry at dubLUDO

I brought the prototype of Captains of Industry to the monthly 1GAM Dublin meetup, and then to a similar event called dubLUDO which is all about showcasing your in-development game. I even forced coworkers and family to try it out! And every time I was watching like a hawk for ways to make it simpler to grasp, or richer in depth, and incorporating them into the prototype.

Print It Professionally

Now it was time to get a proper professionally printed set of cards. I went back to my design templates and reworked them with all the rule & card tweaks I had incorporated into the sleeved prototype. When this was done I then uploaded my card art to a print-on-demand service called The Game Crafter and ordered myself a couple of copies of the game.

A new card for managing play

Once these arrive I will be looking into doing a proper print run of the game. Get in touch or leave a comment if you are interested in getting your own copy of Captains of Industry!

Make Gamedev Challenges. Not Excuses.

Not only that – but I've helped set up a meetup group for fellow 1GAM enthusiasts in Dublin, Ireland. We are going to meet at the end of every month to playtest each others creations and generally swap war stories. Our very first meetup was last night and was a great success! If you want to join us sign up to the 1GAM-Dublin google group. But what about my game for April? Read on!

The Theme

To mix it up a bit 1GAM Dublin will be picking themes slightly differently to the main 1GAM group – for April we kept it simple by reusing the main site's March theme which was 'Rogue'. After a bit of brainstorming the game I decided to make was 'Dungeon Delver' – A game where you explore a dungeon by laying out new room tiles one at a time. A bit like a 1 player version of the boardgame DungeonQuest. Here was my initial design doc:

My design doc 'sketches' are becoming legendary in gamedev circles

As you can see this was pretty basic. I purposely kept the design as simple as possible as I knew from past experience how hard it is to finish something in a short timeframe. My initial target was to try and build something that would be possible to get working in a single weekend – I could always spend the extra time on polish & extending it once I had a playable prototype.

My first day of work got me clickable random dungeon tiles:

Not very exciting - yet

The next step was to give you a target to aim for in the dungeon – I added a treasure room:

Cha-Ching!

Plus – a little bit of player choice. Every time you clicked one of the yellow explorable spaces you had to pick between two different possible tiles:

Hm. Not much of a choice here.

And soon after that a little more spice.. some rooms contain treasure or monster encounters!

So bags of gold or being savaged by a monster? Let's see..

At this point April was drawing to a close so despite having more ideas I wanted to implement I decided to spend my last evening on a round of polish, adding much a cleaner overall look + sound effects to the game.

Play The Game!

Go ahead and give it a go right here. Comments and feedback welcome!

The purple really sets it off, doesn't it.

Sweet logo guys!

I recently attended Gamecraft, an excellent 12 hour gamejam held in Dublin. About 80 people turned up on the day, with the theme announced at 9am leading to 12 hours of frenetic game-making by all involved, followed by 2 hours of judging & trying out other people's games. Yum!

The Theme

What game would YOU make with this?

This is the theme we got for the day. It was a combination of the color blue + the above picture of a bird on a branch. You could interpret the theme in any way you wanted and after a short brainstorming session I decided to make a game where you are a seabird and you have to dive into the sea to catch fish. Here is my entire design doc:

You can already tell how amazing this game is going to be right here.

Early Prototypes

Time is precious at a gamejam. Even with 12 hours available it's important to get something actually playable as soon as possible. I got to work, hacking away in AS3 (using Flixel), and it still took me a few hours to get some basic gameplay on the screen:

Better graphics than Far Cry 3 amirite?

At this point you could flap around as the bird and there was basic gravity and buoyancy in place to make you fall down or float back up out of the water. The fish moved around at random but nothing else happened. Over the next few hours I added:

• A diving animation for the bird, so when you held space you tucked into a high speed dive (letting you get deeper underwater)
• Collisions so you could eat fish when you hit them
• Bubbles that the fish burped out occasionally and which happened in a big trail when you dived into the sea
• A title screen with instructions
• Lots of tweaking of how gravity & buoyancy worked (still not perfect in the finished game!)
• An expanded sky box so you could fly up high (and thus see less of what was in the sea as the camera moved with you)
• Bigger yellow fish that looked kind of mean
• A score counter that went up when you ate some fish!

And it's done! No wait, let me just add one more..

At this point I was out of time! But I was very happy with what I had created – you can play the version at the end of the gamejam right here. A couple of days after the gamejam I was able to spend about 3 extra hours adding a few missing features:

• Sound effects!
• Multiple types of fish, plus the big mean yellow ones now ate YOU if you hit them
• A game over + reset if that happened

The finished game in all its glory - just look at those SWEET bubbles man!

You can play the complete version right here: http://gambrinous.com/gamecraft2/

But Wait There's More!

Not only can you relish in the incredibly satisfying seadive (CAAAAW) by playing the game – you can also dig into the code itself! That's right – the full code for this game is available on github: https://github.com/clarkin/gamecraft2

Octocat says YES

Help yourself to some delicious bits of ActionScript 3 + Flixel gaming goodness right there!

Earlier this year, Tim Schafer (of Day of the Tentacle and Grim Fandango fame among others), launched a funding drive on Kickstarter. His studio, Double Fine Productions, was hoping to raise $400,000 from their loyal fans to create a new game and create an access-all-areas documentary of the game production process. After their 45 day campaign had ended, they had raised more than $3,300,000 — eight times the target amount.

Looking at the facts, it made for very impressive reading: until very recently, it was the most funded project ever on Kickstarter, more than 87,000 people had reached into their wallet and pledged millions of dollars in real cash, and the project had received coverage from BBC World News to the Sydney Morning Herald.

There was something less obvious — and potentially more important — about this success however. What had all these people actually purchased? In the vast majority of cases, they had pre-ordered the game, but virtually no details of the game actually existed — no concept art, no story outlines, not even a title. The only detail that was disclosed was that the game was going to be classic point-and-click adventure. That's it.

A parallel universe exists where Tim Schafer and Double Fine are trying to get this game funded through conventional means. They're drawing up the concept art right now, fleshing out the story line, coding up the game demo and putting together the kick ass presentation to show to potential publishers.

The publishers don't like it. The game's theme is too dark. Who's going to buy a game about a suicidal monkey? They don't like the title. The concept art? The less said the better. Sorry Tim, better luck next time.

Power and Freedom

This is the power of Kickstarter. It's complete freedom — freedom to make the decisions that are right for the game, to set the right price, to publish through the channels that make the most sense and to push the release date past Christmas because you need that extra time. It's also about ownership and independence. Your backers on Kickstarter are merely consumers with an extremely early pre-order of your game. They haven't taken gross points or stock options. Any profit you generate is yours to keep.

Kickstarter is not the right platform for everyone however. Did you know that you have to be an American citizen to start a project on Kickstarter? Did you know that there are similar platforms to Kickstarter that actually let you keep the money even if you don't reach your funding target?

Funding Platforms

I've collated some of the best avenues to explore if you're looking to get your game funded.

It seems like the obvious choice to start with Kickstarter. Kickstarter is a consumer democracy. Businesses and individuals pitch their ideas and those ideas live and die by the consumers' vote.

John Gruber described Kickstarter like so:

Kickstarter is one of the most amazing, inspiring, empowering things I’ve ever seen.

However, I think Kevin Dent summed it up best when he said:

I love Kickstarter, I want to marry Kickstarter and I want to curl it up and eat it. The problem is that the pitches range from fantastic to dog shit.

To launch a project with Kickstarter, you must have an Amazon Payments merchant account. To open one of these, you must be an American citizen with a bank account based in the United States.

Once you have set up your Amazon account and your Kickstarter account, you can begin to put your idea pitch together. All you really need is an idea at just about any level of realisation (from concept to physical product), an amount you want to raise and a series of awards for users who will be backing your project.

Kickstarter's funding is all or nothing, so if you set a goal of $100,000 and you raise $99,000, you get nothing. The target must be met or exceeded. If you are lucky enough to meet your target, make sure you have budgeted for the fees that you'll incur. Kickstarter takes 5% of the final amount and Amazon take 2.9% + 30¢ per pledge. Double Fine's bill would have been $289,715.91 for example.

Kickstarter isn't all love, fun, happiness and rainbows however. There are examples of games looking for far less funding that would be required to actually build a successful game, and there has been at least one example of a more insidious side where developers have ripped off other games and posed them as their own creations.

Exercise caution as a backer, and do everything you can to prove you've thought about your project and the process involved in seeing it to reality as a project owner.

IndieGoGo is a similar platform to Kickstarter — you post a project and people back it for specific rewards. There are two critical differences however:

1. You are allowed to create projects that receive all money pledged regardless of whether the target funding has been met or not.
2. You don't have to be a U.S. citizen to create a campaign.

Financially speaking, IndieGoGo take 4% of the final amount if you reach your goal, and 9% if you don't meet your goal. There are also third party payment processor fees and currency conversion fees, but these varies depending on who you choose (PayPal or similar).

IndieGoGo certainly doesn't have the audience of Kickstarter but they do still receive millions in pledges across all projects each month. You also receive the money immediately, whereas there is a delay in receiving funds from Kickstarter.

Gambitious (no relation) is a European based platform, aimed specifically at generating funding for games. The site has been live for only a couple of days at this point, but they already list a few projects on their site.

They don't work on a pledge / reward basis like Kickstarter and IndieGoGo — users will be able to actually invest in, and take a share of your game. The Gambitious founder, Korstiaan Zandvliet, described it like so:

"A developer decides what percentage of the required funding people can buy. Someone who invests money in a project, becomes a shareholder and is entitled to dividends."

You have to be a citizen of the European Union to invest and they offer two paths for people looking to invest in a game:

1. Donate. It's not clear if you receive rewards for your donations, though they are sometimes referenced as "prebuys" in the copy on the Gambitious site, so you may receive a copy of the game.
2. Invest. This is where it gets interesting — the developer offers up a percentage of their game and you can purchase a chunk of the game. This means that you will actually own a share in that game and receive dividends from time to time if it ends up being successful.

As a developer, it costs €250 to register a project to be considered for funding, and when funding is complete (and assuming you're successful), 5% is taken by Gambitious. They take the money immediately from investors, meaning that you should get paid very quickly after a successful fundraiser.

As an investor, the process seems a little unwieldy. Each share in a game is actually one unit of "electronic money" which must be purchased before investing in a game. One unit of electric money is worth €20, so, if you wanted to buy 100 shares in a game, that would cost you €2,000. A general administration cost of 2.5% is added to your investment. A VAT administration cost of 19% is applied to the administration cost (seriously), followed by a payment provider fee and VAT on the payment provider fee (totaling a flat rate of €1.19). This is also coupled with multiple agreements to terms and conditions along the way. Overall, a €2,000 investment would cost you €2,060.69 with fees.

If the project is successful, all investors become part of a newly formed legal entity, titled the Investor Cooperative. At this point Gambitious recommends that you consult taxation lawyers or the like to make sure all your tax affairs are in order should you receive dividends from the game.

Overall, it's unclear how this model will work in practice, but it should be an interesting one to keep an eye on. The process feels a little complex, and my fears are not allayed from reading the supporting documentation on the website. I also feel like they'll need to open the platform to US investment to really be successful, but let's wait and see.

AppStori is a launchpad specific for mobile applications. You must be developing an Android or iOS game to qualify for funding here.

They are virtually identical to Kickstarter — all-or-nothing funding, you must be a U.S. citizen to post a project (but not to back one) and users get rewards for pledges.

They are different on three fronts:

1. Project submissions are manully reviewed before being published. They will check to make sure that your project meets their mobile guidelines, and that it's not an obvious scam.
2. Your game must be a mobile application. Games for any other platform will be rejected. You could post a project to create a mobile version of a game that exists on another platform however.
3. They take a bigger slice of the pie: 7% of the final amount, plus the Amazon fees (2.9% + 30¢ per pledge).

You can't apply directly to the Indie Fund for cash, but I've included the Indie Fund here as they are a potential suitor to your game. They mention three ways to improve your chances of getting noticed on the website and they'll contact you if they're impressed by what you're doing. The fact that they take nothing more than a portion of your revenue also means that they are also a great deal for the developer.

The specific details of what kind of funding available from the Indie Fund is shrouded in secrecy, but the mechanics are freely available. The Indie Fund provide you with a sum of money. When you launch your game, all revenue goes towards paying that money back, until they've recouped 100% of the loan.

At this point, the Indie Fund will continue to take 25% of your revenue until they've either doubled their investment, or 2 years elapse from the launch date of your game.

After that, you're debt free.

Revision 11. It didn't do much more than you can see here.

Here's the oldest build saved into our SVN repository, from November 2008, representing the first few weeks of getting my head around Flex and tiling. There was no animation or smooth scrolling yet, the little guy just jumped around on screen as you clicked on a target space.

Revision 18. It Moves!

By December 2008 I had cracked animating the unit (hilariously, instead of a walking animation he sticks his sword up and down as he moves), and locking the view to him and smoothly scrolling along as he moved.

Revision 27. Glorious background tiles.

I didn't need those nasty guideline squares anymore so you can see Dan Cook's excellent background tiles in all their glorious detail here.

Revision 35. I'm not sure I can charge for this yet.

By March 2009 we really started to impress, as I added a SECOND UNIT to the prototype! I also finally cracked the 'only scroll when you aren't near the map corners, damnit' algorithm (a real head-scratcher), so the nasty black space was banished.

Revision 40. An enemy! Can I attack him? Ans: no

April 2009 and we've thrown in AN ENEMY plus a nasty-looking forest tile – you aren't allowed walk into either so this is where pathfinding was first added.

Revision 47. Your eyes are not deceiving you, that is a minimap alright.

Plus, a minimap! You could even click on it to jump the main view to that part of the map, which was pretty handy on this test map that extended beyond what you could see at once BY THREE TILES!

Revision 57. Added in a GUI, of sorts. Also AI.

By June 2009 the enemies have a mind of their own. All they do is move one square randomly on their turn, but luckily you can still call that AI. Bam, feature ticked!

Revision 60. Sexy, sexy background tiles. Unf.

I also had a play around with the quite large number of different tile types, and built a section of map using them. There's still loads more varieties to play with but this gives you an idea of the high quality backgrounds you can make.

Revision 69. Color explosion.

August 2009 sees a lot of vital improvements after spending some time designing our basic battle system. Zones of control are in (once you move next to an enemy you can't move further), and units now have stats & weapons & armour. Sure it's practically a full hard-core RPG at this stage.

Revision 76. Combat is in… at last.

There was one key thing missing however – getting to finally attack those enemies! You can't really see it well in a screenshot, but damage floats upwards from the unit being attacked and disappears.

Revision 87. Health bars, though not the ones with nuts in them.

Health bars were a natural addition to this. Look closely and you can also see that death knight is counterattacking, wowee.

Revision 89. Long needed usability improvements.

September 2009 and there's a few more things going on under the hood that make playing it slightly more bearable, such as being able to click on an enemy to both move there AND attack him, including remembering which path you wanted to take to get to him. Those green dots would make a lot more sense if they were a snaking arrow, like they eventually will be.

Revision 99. If you say it's super fancy it's automatically better.

By November 2009 it was time to implement a better unit description card, one that shows up in the bottom right when you hover over a unit, so you can see their stats and equipment and (later) skills. Some super fancy icons were found to make this look better.

Revision 99 pt II. The test units are really stacked against you.

This is pretty much where it's at now. The next couple of months should bring this to a fully playable prototype of a single battle of the game, which will be a fantastic milestone to reach!

A note on graphics. Everything nice you see here (so you can leave out the nasty grey GUI stuff) is thanks to free graphics from the following sources:

• Background tiles from Dan Cook's fantastic range of free graphics for games. (There's more to pick from too, check out the full range)
• Unit graphics (including animation) from the open source game Battle For Wesnoth. (An excellent turn-based tactics game which you should definitely try out)
• Icons for armour & weapons from DeviantArt member Ails.

To all of you: please accept this hug as thanks!

Are you trying to make flash games for a living, but having a hard time making ends meet? Have you made an engaging & fun game, then spent months polishing and tweaking it to perfection before releasing it onto the world? Maybe you got it right and it's a hit – it's been played and enjoyed by literally millions of people! Well time to sit back and watch the pennies roll in, my friend, because that's all you're going to be getting. This may sound alarming, but it's what most flash game developers have experienced using what I call the 'Ad Model' of monetisation.

All this could be yours!

The Ad Model

Over the last few years Flash gaming has enjoyed a massive rise in both the quality and quantity of games on the market. What caused this? The online ad market boomed. It suddenly became (marginally) profitable to build a flash game, throw in some easily-included ads and set it free on the internet. A few well-documented hits made a relatively large amount of money, yet were often made by a single developer working in his spare time over the course of a few months (as previously flash simply couldn't fund an actual team of developers), and this caused a 'gold rush' effect of developers piling into the flash games space. Over time the ad model for flash games has matured into a market where developers can make money from various sources:

• In-Game Ads: in-game ads such as MochiAds, usually shown once while the game is loading
• Around-Game Ads: site ads like Google AdSense shown around the flash game either on the developer's own site, or on a site like Kongregate or Newgrounds which offers revenue share to developers
• Sponsorship: this is where a portal pays the developer to 'tag' their game with the portal's branding (and usually a 'more games' link), effectively paying for traffic delivered to the portal as the game is distributed around the internet. FlashGameLicense was set up to help developers find sponsors for their games, and it has proven to be very effective.
• Licensing: this is where a portal or site pays a developer for a one-off license to use their game; generally they pay a fixed fee to be able to use the game without the sponsor logo, in-game ads, links to the developer's site, etc on their own site; multiple licenses can be sold alongside a sponsorship

Generally speaking you can, and should, use all these options at once as Ada Chen advised in a talk she gave at Casual Connect in 2008. This model is working for some developers, the ones who can efficiently make engaging, short flash games and keep churning them out, but it's really only been a success for very few. Most flash game developers are still relying on other sources than ad-funded games to keep going full-time (for example, making games on contract for third parties).

Not Enough To Go Around

The problem with the ad model is that all the money is coming from one limited pool: advertising. You might find that sponsorship and licensing get you significantly more than in-game ads, but the money from those things comes from that same pool. Portals buy traffic from you (via sponsorship/licensing) with the money they earn from .. advertising! The amount of money in the advertising pool is limited, plus needs to be shared out amongst a whole load of middlemen before it trickles through to developers. No one has explained this better than Dan Cook in his recent Flash Love Letter, Part 1:

Image by Dan Cook, used with permission

A Better Model

Luckily there's a better way to fund game development than scrounging for ad-pennies. It's been proven in almost every form of consumer entertainment ever made, from theatre to music to cinema and yes, even games: ask the consumer of the entertainment to pay you for providing it. That's it. Asking the players to fund game development takes away the dilution effect of trying to get ads to pay everyone's cut, and directly rewards the developer regardless of the size of their 'aggregated traffic-power'. It works for all those other kinds of entertainment, and it certainly works for the rest of the gaming industry.

And it can work for flash games too. Several developers have been successfully charging players for full versions of their free flash games, by integrating a payment processor such as PayPal. This method (often called a "demo", write that down) is so proven that almost no console or PC game doesn't use it. Others have tried splitting out the purchase into smaller bundles using a microtransaction/virtual currency provider, and are charging for decorative things like a fancy hat or small upgrades like level packs and new weapons instead of selling the whole game in one go. In fact recently launched providers such as MochiCoins, GamerSafe and Heyzap have made it easier than ever for flash developers to take payments from players. One advantage of the idea of using virtual items, temporary powerups, or other small purchases is that you aren't putting a cap on how much your biggest fans are able to spend on your game. Generally speaking selling virtual items works best in a persistant-world / MMO style of game, where you can put all kinds of social and economic effects into play to really leverage the idea – just look at this breakdown.

Regardless of how you are charging players, or what they are paying for, the fact that you are charging at all means you are using what I call the 'Premium Flash Game' revenue model.

Premium Games Need To Be Frickin' Sweet

One downside to charging money upfront is that you need to make players fall in love with your game before they will pull out the credit card, and that means spending a lot more time polishing the gameplay and expanding the content before release. The quality level of today's (and yesterday's!) flash games is definitely high enough to convince players to pay – developers just need to focus on expanding the experience; make "long form games" instead of focusing on quick, throw-away games. Again no one's explained this better than Dan Cook, so make sure to read his Flash Love Letter, Part 2 – you can do it right now if you like, we'll pause this part of the internet until you come back.

And Now For Some Examples

Lets have a look at some real-world examples of revenue made by flash developers using the Ad Model, and compare them to ones using the Premium Model. I'm going to use 'Gross eCPM', a term I just made up, as the baseline stat to compare these ad-based apples versus premium oranges. If you aren't familiar with it, eCPM is an advertiser's term and stands for effective cost-per-mille – or how much an advertiser has to pay out per 1,000 impressions of their ad on average. As the payee, you can think of it as how much revenue you made per thousand plays of your ad-enabled game. What I call Gross eCPM is calculated by taking the total amount of plays of a game, and dividing it by the total revenue made from them (whether it be from ads, sponsorship, microtransactions or full game purchases). This handily lets us compare two very different ways of monetising with a single comparative number.

First up let's look at the numbers for some flash games using the traditional Ad Model to generate revenue:

Desktop Tower Defense (play)
One of the original 'break out hits' of modern free flash games, created by a single developer, and supported by ads inside & around the game.

Total Plays: 15 million in the first few months
Gross Revenue: ~$12,000 in that same time frame
Gross eCPM: ~$0.80
[source]

Mytheria (play)
A fairly typical successful flash game, though not a massive hit in terms of plays

Total Plays: 3.7 million plays to date
Gross Revenue: ~$8,200 to date
Gross eCPM: ~$2.22
[source: email interview]

Armor Wars (play)
Another game by the same developer as Mytheria (Diffusion Games), released afterwards to stronger interest from sponsors

Total Plays: 2.2 million plays to date
Gross Revenue: ~$9,300 to date
Gross eCPM: ~$4.23
[source: email interview]

Chronotron (play)
Another game created by a single developer, and supported largely by revenue share on ads on Kongregate.

Total Plays: 7 million at time of this article
Gross Revenue: ~$15,000 in that same time frame
Gross eCPM: ~$2.14
[source]

Now let's have a look at some games using the Premium Model by selling full games:

Fantastic Contraption (play)
A free-to-play flash game, hosted on it's own site plus some portals, with a premium unlock for $10 that let you make your own levels and play other people's custom levels. Included solution-sharing via unique URL that helped it spread virally.

Total Plays: "over 3.5M unique users in the first 3 or so months"
Gross Revenue: "for every unique site visitor, he converts 0.5% to a paid version [at $10]" = ~$175,000
Gross eCPM: ~$50.00
[source]

Now Boarding (play)
A free-to-play flash game hosted on various portals that had an upsell to a downloadable for-sale version (at ~$15)

Total Plays: 4.2M – 6.2M plays (some portals made it impossible to track this, hence the range) over the last year
Gross Revenue: 10,500 sales so far x $15 = ~$155,000
Gross eCPM: ~$25.00-36.90, depending on above
[source: phone interview]

And some games using the Premium Model by using microtransactions:

Twin Shot (play)
A free-to-play flash game by Nitrome with various virtual currency unlocks, including a level pack and cheats

Total Plays: "over 10 million plays"
Gross Revenue: unspecified (but calculations from the eCPM they gave says it would be about $25,000 at the time of the Q&A)
Gross eCPM: ~$2.50 but up to around $5.00 in english speaking territories (based on 60% developer cut of Mochi Coins revenue alone)
[source]

SAS: Zombie Assault 2 (play)
A free-to-play flash game by Ninja Kiwi with various virtual currency unlocks

Total Plays: "about 5.7M plays and 700k plays from the expansion pack" = 6.4M plays
Gross Revenue: ~$22,400
Gross eCPM: ~$3.50 but up to over $11.00 in english speaking territories (based on 60% developer cut of Mochi Coin revenue alone)
[source]

Minions On Ice (play)
A free-to-play multiplayer flash game by the Casual Collective where you could pay to get bonuses and access to extra vehicles quicker than normal

Total Plays: n/a
Gross Revenue: n/a
Gross eCPM: an ARPU of $0.40 was mentioned by the developer, which means $0.40 revenue per unique player. My Gross eCPM counts total plays rather than unique plays, but if we ignore that we would get a Gross eCPM of $400; if we had the 'total plays' number this would be lower – but not all that much lower.
[source]

That's a massive, orders-of-magnitude difference between the revenue rate for ad-funded flash games and premium flash games. And once you start charging the players instead of hoping for ad money, the sky's the limit. Puzzle Pirates, a casual MMO run by Three Rings revealed last year that they make make an ARPU of ~$1.50 per player, per month – which would give a comparative Gross eCPM of ~$1,500. Yep.

Edit: Daniel James (Three Rings CEO) left a comment giving me a much better way to calculate a comparable 'Gross eCPM' for Puzzle Pirates. He says for every 1,000 new visitors to the site they get about 100 who actually download & play, leading to a lifetime value of about $200-$500; so a better 'Gross eCPM' for Puzzle Pirates (over many months) is ~$200-500.

Set Phasers To Premium

I hope this has convinced you, the flash game developer, to seriously consider moving away from the Ad Model and moving into Premium Flash Games. It's the future – embrace it.

PS- Many thanks to all the flash developers who have shared their revenue numbers with the rest of the industry. We too will be doing this as we work on our first game.

This post has also been published on the Mochi Land blog. Thanks Mochi!

We're building a fairly simple game featuring turn-based battles with fantasy units. This is the skeleton of the battle system I've devised – I'd love any feedback or comments anyone has to help me improve it.

Overview

The game is a turn-based tactics game where you start with a small warband of rookie units, then fight battles with them. Doing well in battles can improve your units, and give you money to expand your warband or improve the equipment of your existing units. It will be a single player game.

Battles

Battles take place on fairly small square-based maps (top-down), probably under 20×20 tiles. Your warband will start with about 3-5 members and probably max out around 10, so battles shouldn't be massively long affairs. You win by eliminating the enemy.

Battle System Goals

1. Be simple & easy to understand at first
2. But have emergent complexity
3. Have an element of chance, but not be ruled by it
4. Be fun to play through each battle (tactical choices + challenge)
5. Be rewarding to build up your warband over time (strategic choices)

Units

Each unit is a fantasy-themed warrior with the following stats:

• Speed: squares moved per turn (avg 5)
• Health: Damage taken before being removed from battle (avg 20)
• Strength: Ability with melee weapons (avg 5)
• Agility: Ability with ranged weapons (avg 5)
• Armor: Depends on equipment

Units can also have skills though most will start as rookies with no skills. Skills will give new abilities and are the main vehicle for 'emergent complexity' where combinations of skills will yield new & interesting tactics.

Units' battle power will largely depend on their equipment, particularly as rookies. This can be upgraded between battles. Units will be of a certain type/class that will dictate their skill choices (eg infantry / archer / scout / cavalry).

Attacks

Each turn a unit can move and then attack. Range of melee weapons is adjacent; for ranged weapons it is adjacent + diagonally. When you move into a square next to an enemy (their 'zone of control') your move ends (though you can still attack them), meaning you can't run through to target the weaker/wounded enemy at the back.

When you make a melee attack you add your strength to the strength of your weapon and roll a 1d10:
1-2: miss
3-9: hit
10: critical hit

If you hit you add the roll value (3-10) to your attack strength to get a damage total. The target's armour value is then subtracted from this to get the actual damage sustained. A critical hit means the target's armour value is halved for this attack. Also some weapon types have some special rules, explained below.

Ranged weapons work the same way except you add your agility to the weapon strength, and the enemy can only counter-attack if they are also using a ranged weapon.

Counter-Attacks

If a unit survives an attack they immediately attack the unit that attacked them, using all the normal attack rules. Each unit can only make one counter attack per turn, no matter how many times they are attacked that turn. A unit with only a melee weapon cannot counterattack when attacked by a ranged weapon. A unit with a ranged weapon attacked by a melee unit counterattacks with their knife rather than their ranged weapon.

Equipment

All equipment is of a certain type with basic rules governing it; within each type there are actual items of varying cost & power (eg of type sword: short sword, long sword, fine broadsword, etc)

Armour Types:

1. None: +0 to armour; no penalties.
2. Leather: +1-3 armour; no penalties.
3. Chain: +4-6 armour; slight penalty to speed and medium penalty to agility
4. Plate: +7-10 armour; medium penalty to speed and high penalty to agility
5. Shield: +1-4 bonus to armour; bonus doubled vs 1st attack sustained each turn (shield block)

Weapon Types:

1. Knife: free for all units (eg ranged units), allows basic melee attack with +0 strength
2. Sword: versatile melee weapon; +strength based on quality of sword (eg short sword: +1, long sword: +2, etc); allows 'parry' which adds strength to armour vs 1st attack sustained each turn (vs melee only)
3. Axe: offensive melee weapon; +strength based on quality but higher than comparable swords (double?); bonus vs shields (bonus halved?)
4. Spear: defensive melee weapon; +strength based on quality, similar power as comparable swords; bonus to +strength when counter-attacking; allows 'first-strike' when attacked which lets you deliver your counter-attack before the enemy makes their attack
5. 2-handed sword/axe: same special rule as 1-handed version but higher strength (eg +4); can't use shield
6. Bow: Ranged attack (uses agility; can attack diagonally; melee units can't counterattack); can't use shield

Thoughts

The main goal here is allowing a fairly complex 'emergent' set of tactics from a simple enough system. Things that allow this are the choices of weapon types vs different targets; positioning during battles being important (ganging up is best, but difficult due to zones of control). Your first battle would feature pretty much all of the above.

Later you would add some more complexity with the 'skills' units gain as they level up. For example a scout type of unit could choose 'Evade' which lets them ignore the first zone of control they walk into each turn, and so on.

We're currently putting all this into our game prototype to play around with it; we'll feed back on what we think works in the future. Oh and if you've gotten this far, you must be some sort of hardcore turn-based strategy / RPG nerd, so give us some suggestions we could use to make the battle system better!

What were we trying to achieve?

As mentioned in Part I, what we wanted to build was slightly different from the usual. Rather than grabbing an RSS feed from somewhere like Kongregate and re-publishing everything they publish, we wanted to hand-pick our favourite games and just publish them. Quality over quantity; unless you're talking about cupcakes.

Naturally we still wanted all the normal things that game portals do (categories, RSS feeds of games, ratings, comments etc). Both of us being programmers, we considered writing our own game portal software for, oh I don't know, maybe 6 seconds? We ultimately decided against this because it would take too long and maintaining the code would be a bit of a nightmare (seriously, you have never seen my code).

We took a look at the portal software that was already out there. The two main players were Arcadem Pro and PHPAS. They both had some neat features alright, but overall the solutions seemed too messy. They did way more than we could ever want or need, and it really just seemed like way too much effort to apply our own design to either theme. In our search for simplicity and flexibility, it turned out we had been looking at the solution every time we visited this blog.

WordPress: The Unlikely Hero

WordPress is a blogging platform that I'm sure many of you are already familiar with. It powers millions of blogs all over the Internet, but we were able to take many of the features it offers and use them to build our portal.

So, what makes it great for a game portal?!

Our basic need was simply to publish games that we had hand-picked from various sources, and include a few details about the game and our own mini-review. We thought about it for a little while and realised that the process of publishing games for the portal was very similar to how we published out blog posts. The features that WordPress offered also made many aspects of managing the portal a lot simpler.

1. RSS Feeds: WordPress automatically creates RSS feeds of content published through it, so we had a ready-made feed where people could subscribe to see game releases right in their feed reader.
2. Pretty URLs: They're nice to look at and it's easy for users to remember them. Google is pretty fond of them too. All these factors make games on the portal a whole lot easier to find.
3. Scheduled Posts: This one's a beauty. You could spend one night queueing up your planned releases for the next couple of months and then fly out to the Bahamas while WordPress sits at home in the rain, busily publishing out your games just like you told it to.
4. Comments: WordPress makes it very easy for your users have their say about each game that you post.
5. Categories & Tags: It's super simple to add games to specific categories or tag them with specific keywords straight out of the box.

A little help from our friends

Of course, WordPress didn't bow to our every command straight out of the box. We wanted our users to be able to rate the games that we published, and, being the Twitter nerds that we are, we wanted to announce the launch of each game via Twitter on our dedicated Gambrinous Games feed. Luckily, all of these issues were easily rectified by the vast WordPress developer community. We added the following plugins to help us along the way:

• Twitter Tools: A nice a simple plug-in that will automagically add new posts to Twitter.
• WP-PostRatings: Add ratings to each post in WordPress. It also has a nice feature to allow you to customise what information gets displayed around the star ratings.
• Akismet: This comes with WordPress and is a must for any blog that accepts comments. It will filter out all those nasty Viagra ads.

Already at this point, we had the bones of our game portal. There was one more feature in WordPress that came in handy, and that was Custom Fields. There was certain information that wasn't easily conveyed through WordPress' default functionality or through plug-ins. Certain things like setting the width and height of the flash game or setting thumbnails and screen-shots of each game we publish.

To get around this, we added a few custom fields to our blog posts for each piece of information that we needed, then added it to our WordPress theme where required. It really was remarkably painless.

The Science Bit

We brought everything together in a WordPress theme. We took the default Kubrick theme and modified it to fit our needs. The excellent WordPress Codex served as our guide throughout this process, required reading if you're going to be making your own templates. The first thing you need to understand is the anatomy of a WordPress theme. All themes are stored in individual folders named after the theme. If you created a theme called "My Super Game Portal", it would be found here:

/wp-content/themes/my-super-game-portal/

Another handy feature of WordPress themes is the functions.php file. Simply create a file called functions.php in your theme folder and add any custom functions to it. Everything you put in there will be available to your theme automagically. We have custom functions for pulling our top rated games and our newest games out of the database.

The final technical detail you really need to know before being able to customise your own WordPress theme is how to use those custom fields I mentioned earlier. One way we use the custom fields is to set the width and height of each game that we publish.

To use these fields in our template, we simply use the following code on the game page (single.php):

<?php
echo get_post_meta($post->ID, 'game_width', true);
echo get_post_meta($post->ID, 'game_height', true);
?>

That should be enough to get you started. For more information, you should check out the Theme Development article within the WordPress Codex.

Finally and in Conclusion

So, that's how we did it. It was quick and simple, and all made possible by our new friend WordPress. What are you doing still reading? Go and use WordPress to build that game portal you've been talking about for the last 2 months!

This article originally appeared on MochiLand.com. A special thanks to Ada Chen and all the great guys over on MochiLand.

The Best of the Best

Make It Big In Games

Top notch articles from Jeff Tunnell about the business of making & selling games. Exceedingly high average quality of posts.  A must-subscribe.

As an Indie game developer that is going to spend your own money to make a game, it is extremely important to decide which market you want to tackle, and that really comes down to what game you want to make. I believe it is incredibly important to only make games that you are passionate about. All game development gets hard, and when the going gets hard, the only thing that will get you through it is passion. Read full post

Lost Garden

Superb writing on art & design in games, with the fantastic bonus of giving away actual art resources you can use in your own games! Infrequent posts but totally worthwhile.

Out of all this discussion about graphics, never lose sight of the big picture. The single most important thing is for you to finish your game. Iterating towards completion is the root of all practical knowledge about game development. Putting a complete game in the hands of player is how you'll learn to make your future games shake the world to its core.

If you are telling yourself "Oh, I can't complete my game because I don't have an artist," be honest with yourself. You are making excuses. Graphics are not an impediment to making a great game. Do what ever it takes to finish your game. Read full post

The Bottom Feeder

Jeff Vogel has been making old-school single player RPGs since 1994 but only started blogging this year. A treasure trove of insight for indie game developers already, and will only get better.

I am going to give full sales results for our game Geneforge 4: Rebellion. I am not the first Indie developer to reveal this sort of information. However, most public sales figures come from projects that were either blockbusters or disastrous. But our games have never landed in either pool. I have been doing this for a living for almost fifteen years. I make good money, but I'm not a rich guy. At the same time, I have been unusually successful in this business, if for nothing else that I HAVE done it for a living for a long time. Read full post

The Forge

Interesting business-themed articles, particularly about charging models for MMOs, microtransactions & virtual goods.

Despite my obvious affection for virtual asset sales in a free-to-play model, I don’t think the decision to go free-to-play or subscription (or one of a myriad of other business models for MMOs) is that simple. It’s not purely about whether you’re reaching a larger audience and I don’t believe it’s a given that you’ll make more money, overall, with the free-to-play model. I think it’s largely dependent on the game you make and the audience that ends up developing for it. Read full post

Untold Entertainment Blog

Covers a variety of topics but what I really love are the rants (example below). Love the epic rants. More please!

You wouldn’t wax philosphical about how you’ll dilute the intellectual property or how the fanbase will criticize you for selling out. You’re running an advertising-based world, and as far as advertising goes, Coke is the holy grail. You will relax your muscles and allow the Coca-Cola corporation to ram its fistfuls of hot, sweaty cash wherever it so chooses. Read full post

game poetry

Great all-rounder blog covering business & technical advice with a slant towards Flash games.

The ultimate question for a sponsor is, “How much traffic will this game drive to my site?” The quality of your game is ultimately only important with regard to its potential distribution/viral spread, and its viral spread is only important with regard to how many clicks this will generate. But the CTR is crucial as well. A game with 1 million plays and a 5% CTR is not as valuable to a sponsor as a game with 600,000 plays and a 10% CTR.

So show your sponsor what kind of CTR your game can drive. Put in some placeholder branding. Show where the links will be. If you’re willing to offer some exclusive content, show the sponsor — make one version with the content unlocked, and another version with it locked and what the link back to the sponsor’s site to play this content will look like. Don’t wait for a sponsor to request these things. Read full post

Worth A Look

MochiLand: Mochi Media run this community blog that showcases top flash games and content written by game developers themselves. Example

DESIGNER NOTES: Writings by one of the designers on Civ 3 and 4 – I particularly like the longer posts. Example

Photon Storm: Focused on flash game development and marketing. Definitely check out the example. Example

8-Bit Rocket: Covers a bit of a wide variety of things (from Atari retro to Flash to Silverlight), perhaps too wide! Example

Flash Truth: Flash games, particularly the business side of things; some great stuff. Example

Emanuele Feronato: Flash games & more. A little too much filler but I found the 'numbers' posts to be excellent. Example

Streaming Colour Dev Blog: Some great posts about (not) making money in the iPhone space. Example

Ludus Novus: Really, really like the column he's writing for GameSetWatch, follow the blog to find out when they are posted. Example

Freelance Flash Games News: A mixed bag of flash gamedev related stuff. Example

Gaming Your Way: Frequent gamedev tips & other nuggets. Example

Made That Cool Game

2D Boy Blog: Creators of World of Goo.

Kloonigames Blog: Creator of Crayon Physics Deluxe

Cliffski's Blog: Creator of Democracy / Kudos

Wolfire Blog: Creators of Lugaru / Overgrowth

Braid Blog: Creator of Braid

Suggest More!

I'm always on the lookout for quality game development blogs, so if you know some I haven't covered please leave a comment! Any that make it into my RSS reader and survive my next RSS-pruning massacre will be added into this post.

Update

Plenty of good gamedev blogs suggested in the comments. Check out these worthy additions to the list:

Michael James Williams: Very focused blog with excellent AS3 tutorials, including a full series showing how to make an avoider game.

Mr Sun Studios: Another blog focused on AS3 game tutorials, with a big backlog of articles.

Trent Polack: Excellent game design blog, in particular check out the game design round table posts.

Iain Lobb: Only just subscribed but it's pretty good so far- a mix of flash and general game design.

Tales of the Rampant Coyote: Excellent blog covering design & development of RPGs of all kind. Nicely focused!

Troy Gilbert: Another good one with plenty of reading in the archives.

That should satisfy your RSS cravings for a while!