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.

Mochi Interview with Toge Productions

 Games, Other, Other, Sponsorship  No Responses »
Dec 192010
 

Mochi had an interview with Toge Productions a few days back. The interview was a live video feed, a powerpoint presentation and a chat room. It lasted a good hour and ten minutes, and none of it was worthless. I fully enjoyed the interview, in its very analytic detail of their games. In case you missed it Mochi provided a copy of the powerpoint, audio, and a chat log. You can view the event recap here, which contains all of those.

In addition to Mochi’s recording of the event, I also did a recording (9 recordings actually). If you find Mochi’s video boring since its just the powerpoint with audio, go ahead and check out the screen recording playlist here, which has the live video feed of Toge Productions, as they speak about their presentation, with the powerpoint and chat included in the videos.

Spin the World – Status Report

 Games, Spin the World, Sponsorship  No Responses »
Dec 152010
 

We’ve past 60k views a few days ago! Its not much in comparison with some major games, but we feel that it is a great accomplishment for our team. Its the most an individual game has ever performed for any one of the team members. And its pulled in a nice slice of ad revenue compared to the ~$0 that had been earned previous to this occasion. If you’d like to host the game on your site, its up for free distribution. If you want some branding added, or an API integrated, feel free to contact us. We’re pretty cheap. :)

On a side note, not everything went well with the sponsorship. From talking to other developers, we discovered that the sponsor’s API was not currently working, so instead of pointlessly spending more time on top of the 2.5 months trying to fix the code to get it to work with them, we are probably going to drop the bid. It would have more than matched the ad revenue supplied by Mochi, but nothing really can be done.

With Mochi ads, and Christmas time, we have happened to chance upon an awesome time to release our games. The high eCPM paid in mostly US/European regions during this time *greatly* improved the revenue from the game. It doubled our estimates of the ad revenue rate we thought we would get (0.50$, when we actually got 1.00$ eCPM). I highly recommend the time around (mostly a bit before) Christmas to release a game for this reason. The viral spike your game should get will help you maximize some profits. Of course though, if your game is done in March, why wait?

If anyone is interested, I can post some links to the current view count and revenue of Spin the World that is and will always be up to date.

Spin the World’s Current Position

 Games, Spin the World, Sponsorship  1 Response »
Oct 162010
 

Just to fill you guys in on the last few months. We’ve finished Spin the World to a satisfactory point. After this, we uploaded the game to FGL (flashgamelicense.com) to see how we did. The game ended up with a not to bad 7.5 editors rating with some nice coments. Here’s what was said:

The game was nicely put together. The music was repetitive at times, but the fact that you could adjust the different volumes, made it appropriate when it looped to many times. I like you different types of customization in the game, it gave me a good sense of pace on what i wanted to upgrade on top of being able to upgrade during the fight and not in between waves. That being said I also enjoyed how you could unlock wallpapers after leveling the mystery item to level 5, it gave me a reason to level it up instead of shrugging it off. I did like the variety of enemies, though some different designs would be a welcome edition. Overall great job on the game and enjoyed it thoroughly!

The games rating itself was based off of these:

Intuitiveness: 9 Amazing!
Fun: 7 Good
Graphics: 7 Good
Sound: 7 Good
Quality: 7 Good
Overall: 7.5 Very Good

I was very glad that we got a 9 on intuition, but I thought the art for sure would have been at least a 9.

We’ve received to bids so far on FGL, but both not on par with what we want. I don’t think I’m allowed to disclose any financial related information without the consent of the sponsors but I can surely say that they weren’t what we were looking for. One of the bids however, is not a primary and looks like a good offer. What may end up happening is a self-sponsorship of the game with many small licensing to smaller portals for a cheap amount.