Quick Look At How Blocking Links Has Affected Profusion

 Experiments, Games, Other, Ruby Star  No Responses »
Jun 132011
 

Taking a look at our game stats, we have a record of most of the links out in Ruby Star. It is our most recently released game. With only a small bit of branding, located in a credits menu, users have to click 1 button to reach the credits menu. Then they can click links out. We have still been able to secure a good number of clicks out. However, the game was hosted mainly on a Chinese site that blocks links, and we have only had a 7% success rate. We have recorded that 2,525 links out to our blog alone have failed (though, the unique player number would probably closer to 1000, since failed users might click twice), while only 178 actually made it through, and of these 159 were unique.

There is a solution to lower these failed links in an attempt to force portals to allow links, though you would be sacrificing game plays most likely. PortalBlacklist will display a message on sites where links out are blocked and not let the user play the game on that site.

The Sponsorship of Ruby Star

 FlashGameLicense, Games, Ruby Star, Sponsorship  No Responses »
Jun 072011
 

To begin this massive offload of data, we will start from the day Ruby Star was complete and published on FGL. That was December 31st of 2010. Over the course of two weeks we got all the developer feedback we were ever going to get, as well as feedback from GDR. It wasn’t received well, and it seemed sort of obvious after the game was complete that it wasn’t going to be as smashing of a hit (or anything close) as we thought it would be when we first started production back on August ?18, ?2010 (had to check the folder creation date to get that date).
Four months of development time was put into the game, with work getting sparser and sparser towards the end until we made one final push to finish the game.
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Ruby Star

 FlashGameLicense, Games, Ruby Star, Sponsorship  No Responses »
May 222011
 

Long time since we posted any information on Ruby Star, the game we finished making in February. After some months, it has finally gotten a bit we are satisfied with, and we are at the end of the sponsorship process. When, and if, we get permission to post about the sponsorship process, we will elaborate much much more and in great detail how things went.

Ruby Star with Pre-Review on FGL

 FlashGameLicense, Games, Ruby Star, Sponsorship  1 Response »
Feb 182011
 

When going to upload the game for bidding and a score, there was an option I had never seen or heard about. It was a prereview. What they do is take your game and try to give it a score as if it was up for bidding and provide some reason behind the score so you know what to improve before the game goes to bidding. A bit like getting feedback from developers on the system but you got a better idea if your game would sell or not. They have 2 administrators review the game and give you point scores so you know that each one has an unbiased, individual opinion on your score.

Ruby Star did worse than Spin the World in score. Why? Because Spin the World was uploaded before FGL updated their scoring system and made it more difficult to get a higher score. However, Ruby Star’s score is a great awakening, in a way, that we need to stop producing half-made games and go the extra mile to polish games rather than relying on awesome graphics and terrible gameplay.

Here is what both reviews looked like:

Intuitiveness: 7 Good
Fun: 7 Good
Graphics: 7 Good
Sound: 7 Good
Quality: 7 Good
Overall: 7 Good

Historically, games rated 7 have found a satisfactory FGL sponsorship 41.8% of the time.

and

Intuitiveness: 7 Good
Fun: 6 Average
Graphics: 6 Average
Sound: 6 Average
Quality: 7 Good
Overall: 6.5 Slightly Above Average

Comments:
Mouse-based avoider/collection game
Intuitive gameplay, easy to understand the premise and obstacles
Bug: Music sometimes cuts out mid-level
Lacks innovation to set this game apart from similar games of this genre. Consider implementing an upgrade shop or unlockable achievements to bolster replay value

Historically, games rated 6.5 have found a satisfactory FGL sponsorship 20.3% of the time.

We’ve definitely paused on the idea that our game is near complete and we’ve decided to take a closer look at what needs to be done to make Ruby Star a better game. To start, we’ve gone ahead and have been working on an awards/achievement system which looks pretty good. Its going to need some more polish and more awards, but its a step.

Before you get a game back with a junk score like this one, please, don’t dump the game. Look at what your doing wrong with your games. Spend some more time on it. Spin the World took 7-8 months. Ruby Star took 4 months. Were getting faster by eliminating excess, but were not getting better quality games. We’ve got to find that balance.

What Profusion Has Been Doing…

 Games, Mother, Other, Ruby Star  No Responses »
Feb 102011
 

We’ve been incredibly busy working on a variety of projects. Here’s a quick list of what we’ve been doing.

Unnamed Penguin Game
– Brayden Black, Unnamed Developer, David Arcila
Jump around on platforms, doing your best to not impale the cute little penguin on the spikes above or fall to a perilous death below.

Game Development Room [GDR]
– UnknownGuardian

Hang out with other developers in the GDR on Kongregate, to get help and give help. Working on version 2 which will be a lot different from version 1.

Sudoku [Pics soon]
– UnknownGuardian, David Arcila
We want to get into Android development! So bad! So we thought, we need a simple game. And whatever we have done isn’t simple, so we’ve got to pick an already made simple game to force ourselves to make it easy and figure out how to work with Android. We’ve begun creating the game based off existing source code to reduce development time on the AIR platform for Android, using FlashDevelop which really helps the AIR building. A lot.

Unnamed Platformer [Pics whenever graphics get made]
– UnknownGuardian, Brayden Black, David Arcila
As a team, we have been looking at the platformer idea a lot. We enjoy platform games as a whole and its a great idea to start working with level designs and tile based games. We tried to code our own engine, and got pretty far, but we’ve ended up using some existing code to help speed up development time a lot, again. Its got a basic engine so far, with a tile made world, but that’s about it so far.

Ruby Star [Pics in former posts]
– UnknownGuardian, David Arcila
Its up for review by the FGL team finally, which will help us get final feedback for the game before released to sponsorship. Since we didn’t end up getting lots of feedback from FGL users, we’ve gone ahead and put our game in the queue for staff pre-review feedback. We’ll implement the feedback for sure (they know what they are doing) and get the game reviewed and bidding as soon as possible.

Unnamed Multiplayer FPS [No pics]
– UnknownGuardian
Haha! I wish this project would go through, but its not, probably. I spend a good while trying to understand the basis and how stuff worked in Multiplayer real-time games, involving what data to send and when, as well as techniques to remove visual lag like extrapolation, interpolation, etc. If you guys saw my thread on Kongregate, it goes into a lot of detail. I’ve got a very basic top down prototyped that was modified off existing source code (again….) since it used a lot of unfamiliar techniques that I’m not even ready to learning how to program. Currently handles player movement and shooting. A purely fun-driven learning experiment.

Mother 2 [No Pics]
– UnknownGuardian
Spent a few days looking at ways to expand Mother 2, but what I was looking at turned into an incredibly complex project that doesn’t seem similar to the original game much, so I dumped it. I’d like to go back and re-expand on Mother some time. Source code for this game (Mother, not Mother 2) should be up sometime soon, even though its not good source code and was slapped together in 24 hours for the FGL competition.

Ruby Star is on FGL

 Games, Ruby Star  No Responses »
Jan 012011
 

Ruby Star looks like its pretty much done. We’ve finally put it up on FGL today to get developer feedback. If you have an account, then you can play the game here. If you think its a bit easy, please by all means, make a few levels for us. We’ve made a public level editor, which you can view here. We’d love as much feedback as we can get on the game.

Since the beginning of the game, the game play has changed a ton. Originally we planned a game very similar to this, but more similar to XQuest, if any of you have played that. Just go around dodging enemies while collecting points with some very tricky controls. It evolved into a much much larger game with 3 game modes. After implementing a single game mode, we could see this was heading where Spin the World had gone. Into the territory of bloated and excessive. The game received a massive cutback and we now have a good dozen or so unused actionscript classes that were fully working of enemies, bosses, as well as the assets for these. Of course, the good part is that we can now easily integrate these back into the selected version of Ruby Star if we needed to, to make it more fun. We actually did that with the instructions. The ‘operator’ as we call her was designed for the story mode, with 4 different faces to give you aid and point out missions and such. It saved a ton of time reusing the retired code and I’m glad we didn’t trash the code completely.

You probably can expect to see Ruby Star out in public in maybe 2-5 weeks if we get good feedback and ratings, and the sponsorship deal goes smooth. (Not to mention the Spin the World deal is still floating around doing nothing. We might end up taking a total loss of the sponsorship after all)

On the topic of source code, as with Spin the World, the source code of Ruby Star will probably be released. We’ll hold it back until the hype over the game is over, and the game dies down a bit. Precautionary against those who like to profit off recompiling the game with their names, which we don’t like at all. The open source is for learning. We might end up holding the source code back if the game stays popular for a while, as we try to do a level pack or something.

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