Archive for March, 2008
Whirled Beta
Posted by SimianLogic in blog on 03/29/2008
After getting a friend request from a complete stranger (MySpace style), I logged into Whirled last night–only to find out that it’s no longer in super-top-secret alpha any more (confirmed at Daniel James’ blog). I have pretty favorable feelings towards Three Rings in general. I love Puzzle Pirates, and I love the idea of Bang! Howdy–that’s exactly the sort of game I used to play when I had endless free time.
There’s also Game Gardens. A year or so after I got to Georgia Tech’s program, I’d run across GG while looking for ways to do multiplayer java games (I was using Processing at the time for most of my stuff). I jumped on board, made a couple of experiments, and won 4th place in the contest they were running in the fall of 2006. I guess due to the fact that I was active on GG, I got one of the earliest invites. The fact that the thing ran in Flash was the only thing that got me to give the Flex SDK a shot, so in some ways I wouldn’t even be doing what I’m doing now if not for OOO. I was immediately in love with the idea–”a way to make money off of games? and do multiplayer? sweeeet!” (ahh, naiveté). Read the rest of this entry »
I Dream in Polygons
Posted by SimianLogic in blog on 03/21/2008
I have pretty strange dreams. Some people attribute to eating right before bed, but I’d say it’s more likely an overactive imagination. Last night I dreamed in polygons. Sort of. I essentially dreamed up a new idea for a game. Rather than playing the game in the dream, though, I was actually in the game–a sort of bizarre abstract rail shooter/space invaders hybrid with square enemies bouncing around the screen. I don’t know if it would actually be fun or not to play, but it sure was pretty to look at (maybe I’ve been playing too much Rez). I spent a little time this morning brainstorming how I would actually take a surreal dream-game and turn it into something, but I think the scope of the project (maybe XNA?) would be just a little too much for my schedule right now. I’ll have to do a few sketches and take some careful notes so that I can add it to my list of games I’ll make when I have a little more free time.
The Paid Search Experiment: Another Reason Why MochiAds Rock
Posted by SimianLogic in blog on 03/12/2008
Remember that first website you made back in the 90’s? Did you ever join a web ring? I did. I joined lots of them. While I was in middle school, I’m pretty sure at different points I had an Aliens fan page in a sci-fi web ring, a “download movie quotes in wav form” website in a movie ring, a personal page dedicated to my short stories (this was before “blogs” existed) in a writer’s web-ring, and a few others that are even more embarassing. There was no such thing as Google Analytics back then, but if I had to guess the incoming traffic from those web-rings was piddling at best. After using MochiAds service for a couple of months now (ok, well, I’ve been a member since last April… but let’s just say I wasn’t “utilizing” the service until I released Filler back in January) and running a new experiment this week with paid search, I’ve come to the conclusion that the web ring is back in a big way–and it rocks.
How much do we get paid (hourly) for flash games?
Posted by SimianLogic in blog on 03/06/2008
For most flash game designers, making the games is a hobby. It’s nice that there’s some monetary reward possible now, but for a lot of us we’d make the games anyway. I’ve been doing casual games in some form or another (Shockwave, Java, now AS3) for a few years now–but only since I’ve discovered things like MochiAds did I actually get motivated enough to finish a game and release it. A debate that’s come up on the Mochi forums a couple of times is exactly how much we developers get paid for our time.
I could estimate the number of hours I put into Filler, but it would be just that–an estimate. I could then take how much money I’ve gotten so far and figure out an hourly wage… but even then it’s a stab in the dark. I stumbled across a tool today that might help with that: Klok. I haven’t actually used it yet, but I love the concept–and I’ll definitely be using it on my next game (and various other side projects). Afterwards, it should be relatively simple to work out exactly what the “hourly rate” was for that game (though, clearly, it won’t factor in the actual desire to work on this stuff =]).