Category Archives: Thoughts and Opinions

Checklists and Trello

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Checklists are the most important organizational tool ever.
If you don’t use checklists, you’re not organized, and you should feel bad.

Wikipedia puts it quite well: “A checklist is a type of informational job aid used to reduce failure by compensating for potential limits of human memory and attention. It helps to ensure consistency and completeness in carrying out a task.”

Basically: “Your memory sucks. So make checklists so you can never forget anything.”

Whenever I work on a game, I make lists of features to add, bugs to fix, stats to set, and other things to do. I then work through these, and cross them off when they’re done. I’ve got checklists for items, foes, maps, stats, skills, treasure chests, menus, mechanics, ad locations, bugs, tweaks, user complaints, users to credit, and everything else. I have a look at each item in the list, and either address it, or decide that it’s no longer relevant and get rid of it. Once the list is empty, I move onto the next one. I even sometimes go further and add stuff like the current progress on each task, its priority, or how much time that task is expected to take.

This all makes it very easy to remember what I have to do, and to keep track of how much progress I’ve made. It keeps me focused and motivated.

At first I did this mostly on paper. I literally have piles of notebooks full of just notes and checklists.
I moved on to using notepad and other plain text editors, once paper started going out of fashion for me.

I’m currently using a webapp called Trello for my checklists. It does the job very well, using a sticky-note style interface. You’ve got different “boards” where you attach your lists, which look a lot like sticky notes. You can also include images, links, dates, colors, or whatever else you need.

There’s some pretty cool advantages of using Trello over traditional paper notes:

  • I’ve got the Trello app on my phone as well as on my desktop PC, so I can update my lists from anywhere.
  • Trello archives all of your activity, so you can always go back and find out exactly when you did what.
  • Trello can be used for collaborating! You can share your lists with others for managing projects, and assign different people to tasks.

Here’s what some of my lists currently look like:

trello

As you can see there, checklists aren’t only useful for work! You can put fun things on them too! My favorite use is making a list of in-real-life achievements to work towards. If people can do pointless and repetitive tasks to earn achievements in videogames, why can’t they do the same in real life, where the achievements actually matter?

If you wake up every morning and open up Trello, you’ll quickly remember what work you’re supposed to do today, what activities you’ve got lined up for your free time, and what your long-term goals are.

So yeah, I just wanted to get that out there. Occasionally I get questions like “How do you stay motivated to finish your games?”, and stuff like that. Well, checklists are a big part of the answer.

Mobile Games Research

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Hey, so as I mentioned before, I’m planning to start developing mobile games soon. I recently got a Galaxy Note 2 phone, or er, it’s almost big enough to be tablet actually. Anyway, I played a lot of games on it while I was in Sweden.

I’m trying to figure out what sort of games are popular, how controls are implemented on touchscreens, and how developers monetize and market their games. This post is mostly just some notes for myself, which others may find interesting or want to add to.

First of all, here’s a list of games that I played:

They’re all pretty fun and you should check them out. There’s still a lot more that I’ve installed and have yet to play…

Touch Controls

I found that the more simple the controls, the better they worked. A lot of the games literally had one type of input:

  • Rayman, Jetpack Joyride and Whale Trail have “tap the screen anywhere to go up”
  • Sporos, Monster Cube and Pixel Kingdom have “tap objects”
  • Fruit Ninja, Pudding Monsters, Unblock Me and Color Zen have “swipe objects”
  • Happy Jump and Labyrinth have “tilt the device to move”

Games that try to use traditional gamepad controls with onscreen buttons weren’t very fun to play in my opinion. They feel a bit awkward to play without physical buttons to guide your fingers: there’s a lack of physical feedback. Meanwhile, the above listed controls can be combined easily, as tapping, swiping and tilting are very distinct actions.

Lesson: Use simple controls that are native to phones and tablets.

Adding Replay Value

A lot of the same schemes are used in mobile games as in web games, so there’s nothing too surprising here. Most games have achievements, level rankings, upgrades, highscores and the usual stuff.

Something which I found interesting was that a lot of the unlockables don’t even add to the gameplay. There’s stuff like new skins for your character, or wallpapers for your phone, or links to promotional YouTube videos. I guess this is because it’s a more casual market and kids like that sort of stuff? Maybe. I don’t know. Sounds fun to implement though.

I also noticed that a lot of games are updated with new level packs or other content to keep users coming back. Most web games on the other hand don’t usually add new content once they’re finished, unless they’re really popular. This is down to the distribution method I guess: mobile games can easily alert you to new updates, while web games are hosted on a lot of different websites and can’t be updated so conveniently.

Lesson: Add plenty of stuff to unlock, whether it effects gameplay or not. You can also update games.

Monetization Strategies

This is the most important section, for developers anyway. I’ve noticed a lot of different approaches to monetizing mobile games…

  • “Pay for the game” – No free version, just a paid one. Not sure how these games are supposed to gain popularity if users can’t try them out for free. I guess this method relies heavily on good reviews to promote the game (that’s how I found them, anyway).
  • “Try for free, pay for full version” – A single payment that unlocks a “full” version of the game, which usually includes extra levels, or removes ads. Great because the user can get addicted before spending any money, and it usually means there’s no microtransactions (but not always!), which a lot of users don’t like.
  • “Pay to progress faster” – Microtransactions that give in-game currency or other upgrades to reduce the time spent grinding. I’m not a fan of this one because it means you have to make a grindy game. But on the other hand, it means players who don’t want to pay can unlock all of the content for free, but slower.
  • “Pay for more content” – Microtransactions for level packs, new characters, upgrades etc. Good because it lets you keep updating a game and milking dedicated players.
  • “Pay for cheats” – Microtransactions for, er… cheating. Pay to skip a level or to make it easier! Sounds really cheap, but most games have been quite careful with this, and make the cheats available for free too (although only a limited amount of them).
  • “Disable ads” – Usually thrown in as a bonus with any other purchase, but sometimes it stands on it’s own.
  • “Watch ads” – Of course, developers can earn money without taking any from the players. Not particularly profitable from what I’ve heard, but it can be if you have a really popular game. I’ve noticed that ads can usually be removed by disabling your internet connection (I wonder how many players have figured this out…?). Some games give out in-game currency for watching ads, playing the game once every day, and stuff like that.
  • “Get sponsored” – Some games include a lot of branding in exchange for monies from a large sponsor. There’s a Skittles version of Fruit Ninja! I’m not really sure what sort of sponsorships are available yet, but I’ll have a look into those. Kongregate and Armor Games do mobile sponsorships too, though they promote the games rather than receiving promotion from them, and take a cut of your profits. I think.

The best monetization method really depends on the type of game and amount of content you’ve got.

Lesson: There’s a lot of different ways of making money!

Anyway, that’s all for now. I still need to do a lot of research (income and download stats for different games, if I can find those!), but that’s a good start.

EBF4 Post-mortem

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So I’ve decided to write this lengthy blog about how much went wrong with Epic Battle Fantasy 4.
I’ll also be doing a talk on the topic at Mochi London in September.

Before I start, I’ll quickly go over what went right:

• The game was very well received by players. After 3 months it’s still the top rated game on Kongregate and Newgrounds, and has a pretty high rating on Armor Games too. It didn’t have a lot of bugs on release, it improves on the previous games, there’s plenty of content in it… it’s just a good game overall, and players like it.

• Premium content sales on Kongregate went quite well, and I suppose that shouldn’t be too surprising since the series is very popular there. I think it’s worth noting that the premium pack doesn’t really add very much content: just a few new skills and equips, and a Newgame+ feature. EBF4 is already a complete experience without it. Many fans just bought it to support the series, which was nice of them.

That’s everything good out of the way, now I’ll go over all the bad stuff…

Sponsorship and Distribution:

I went with a performance-based sponsorship deal for EBF4, the same as I’ve done for my previous games with Kongregate. This means that Kongregate pay me for the traffic that I send to their site through links in the game. Since the games are part of a series, a lot of users visit Kongregate to play the previous games.
This has always worked quite well for me, especially with Adventure Story.

This sort of deal means a game has to get a lot of distribution across the web: a lot of sites have to host it, and a lot of users have to play it on those sites.
EBF4 didn’t distribute very well at all. This may be due to some of the following:

• EBF4 is a big game. It’s not something that you can play for 15 minutes, like is expected from most web games. At 33MB, a lot of users probably won’t even be able to load it in 15 minutes. This probably hurt distribution quite a lot.

• A lot less people are playing games in their browsers, and are playing on their phones instead. This means that many Flash game sites will have reduced traffic.

• Having premium content in the game probably hurt distribution a lot too. A lot of sites probably didn’t want to host the game if it looked like an incomplete version. Telling users on other sites that they can visit Kongregate to buy the premium content will have boosted sales a bit though, so it may not have been a terrible decision overall.

• When I first published the game, I targeted the newest version of Flashplayer, and a few users quickly told me that they couldn’t run the game. I also used the new LZMA compression method for the swf file, which some sites (such as DeviantArt!) apparently don’t support. I reverted to older settings as soon as I realized these were a problem, but they might have also hurt distribution a bit.

Luckily, Kongregate was kind enough to give me a reasonably generous advance payment on the sponsorship deal. I didn’t feel I needed it at the time, but it turned out that EBF4 didn’t even bring in enough traffic to earn that amount. So it turned out being pretty nice.

Armor Games offered me a very good fixed sponsorship deal, but I turned it down. There’s a bunch of different factors to consider, but it might have turned out better for me overall. Oh well, I’ll never know for sure.

Greenlight Planning:

As I mentioned earlier, EBF4 is almost too big to be a browser game. A lot of players would prefer to play it offline, without the various limitations and annoyances that come with browser games. So I felt that trying to get the game up on Steam would be a great plan, especially since it wouldn’t require much work to port it, as Steam supports Flash games.

A Steam release probably was a good idea (I think EBF4 is of high enough quality), but I think I went about it the wrong way, for a few reasons:

• I felt that promoting the game’s Greenlight page during development would put off sponsors of the web version, so I only started after the web version was published. It turns out Kongregate wasn’t bothered by the game being released on Steam, and they wouldn’t have minded if I started the Greenlight campaign much earlier. Oops.

• I also didn’t realize that Greenlight is very accepting of unfinished games. I should have definitively put EBF4 up on Greenlight months earlier.

• I felt that having a free web version of EBF4 would generate interest in the game, which would later translate into Greenlight votes. Well, EBF4 didn’t distribute very well, so that was unhelpful. But more importantly, it turns out that it’s hard to get hyped over an upcoming Steam game that’s already available (mostly) for free. Maybe I should have done what Binding of Isaac and VVVVVV did, which was releasing only a demo of the game online. I didn’t really want to risk that though, since the web version was still pretty profitable, and there was no guarantee that the game would get on Steam anyway.

Currently, EBF4 is collecting votes very slowly. If it does ever get through Greenlight, it’s going to take over a year. I wouldn’t get my hopes up.
I am still considering implementing the extra content that I planned for the Steam version, and instead selling the game on some other service, or selling it myself. We’ll see.

Losing Saved Games:

A massive problem that EBF4 still faces is that saved games are being deleted, either by browsers, computer cleaning tools, or occasionally site updates.
I already knew this could be an issue, but it’s getting worse over the years as browsers are becoming more ready to delete your cookies. And it’s particularly devastating in EBF4, as the game can take as long as 20 hours to finish.

I thought Kongregate’s API would have a cloud saving feature, but it turns out they don’t. I was really planning on them having it. Armor Games’ API has one though, so there’s another reason I could have went with them for sponsorship.

I’m actually surprised that EBF4 manages to hold the spot of highest rated game on Kongregate despite this massive problem.

Data Mining:

So collecting data from everyone who plays your games is pretty cool. I like to track data to find out what sites users are playing my games on, what settings they use, where they die, what items they use, what their highscores are, what languages they speak, and so on. It’s great for balancing game difficulty, or learning who your users are so you can market stuff better.

It turns out that finding a reliable data tracking service is rather difficult though. I used Mochi Analytics for collecting data for Adventure Story, and was quite satisfied with them until their service went down for a few months. I eventually got all the missing data back, so that was awesome. But they no longer do custom data tracking, because developers over-used it and it wasn’t profitable. That should have taught me not to rely too heavily on similar services, but I didn’t take the warning.

For EBF4, I decided to use Playtomic to track data. It all worked well, and their graphs and heatmaps and all that were awesome. But then their service went down without warning or explanation, and I just assumed it would be back up soon. But nope, they went out of business just as EBF4 was being published. I got a bit of data during beta testing, but after that, I’ve got no data on EBF4.

That was a total disaster, and it could have easily been avoided if I used more than one data tracking service. I am mega disappointed.

Translations:

I spent around a month organizing a team of fans and refactoring code to translate EBF4 into Spanish, Portuguese, German and French.
It was an educational experience, but whether or not it was worth doing otherwise is unclear. It was quite time consuming because the game wasn’t originally programmed to support multiple languages.

Since I don’t have any data from Playtomic, I have no way of knowing how many people actually played the game in other languages, and therefor I don’t know if it’s something I should try doing again in the future or not. So that really sucks.

Conclusion:

Anyway, EBF4 still earned me around $60K (so far), so I shouldn’t complain too much. That’s not too bad for 1 year’s work, but it’s not terribly good either.
It’s definitely not enough for me to continue with a series that I’m getting bored of.

I’m taking a break from Flash games now. I don’t know whether I should try to sell an expanded version of EBF4, if sequels to Bullet Heaven and Adventure Story are worth making or not, or if I should finally move on to mobile games and ditch Flash entirely. I’ll worry about that once I get my social life sorted out.