If you would like a copy of the game for your site, leave a comment or contact us. If you are a portal owner and want to get a copy of the game without advertisements and branding, contact us as well and we can work something out.

If you want to host the game on your own site, (or even want to buy a version without ads/sponsor branding for your site), contact us! If your portal is small, we can do it for a bit less as well. If you want to go through FGL, it is in the Game Shop there.

Unfortunately, the great service has some not so great qualities. We’ve had our fair share of downtimes and bugs. While those could be expected and dealt with just fine, the latest issue has left GDR with many annoyed developers. As some basic background, this thread outlines the initial report of the problem and administrator responses. The bug was reported on March 11th, though if I recall correctly, had been appearing for a day or two before that. The first admin response came 5 days later and was just a “we are working on it”.

Sure that’s fine. If your response was actually the day after. When your whole service is experiencing the bug how could you miss this for so long? Seems interesting. I don’t mean to say they should be paying attention all the time to their service but once daily should be minimum. And quick acknowledgement has always never led to anything bad. The fix was rolled out three days later, which was sort of ok, considering it was the weekend and all. However weekends are when devs get the most traffic.

The fix didn’t work. Three days later an admin posts that they are working on it and will get a fix ASAP. It is depressing to me that it takes 3 days to realize that your bug fix didn’t work. Shouldn’t this be tested almost immediately and tested the following day(s) to ensure your fix worked and stayed working?

By now, its the 24th. Only 2 weeks after a bug report was made and a fix hasn’t come through. Playerio isn’t very appealing to me anymore. A friend from GDR recommended Gamooga. If Playerio keeps it up, it may be well worth investigating this service.

As a conclusion, I mainly wanted to outline one of the downsides of playerio. They’ve gotten plenty of good rep from a lot of sources (including me!), but its important to recognize the parts that are lacking with their service.

Sponsorship works. It really does. Just counting some quick stats and we sent (well) over 100k visitors to the sponsors site. (Intentionally vague on actual numbers there, and the numbers below isn’t close to the real sum of visitors sent to the sponsors site). For the price of the sponsorship, that’s not a bad deal for the sponsor. Links that we thought were boring and that nobody really clicks on actually work. 10,000 people click the in-game logo in the bottom left corner. We suspected next to none would click it. The logo on the game over screen? 40,000 clicked that. The More Games Button on the Main Menu? 24,000 clicked that. There seems to be a pretty large conversion rate for links out that are present in many parts of the game.

Credits Screens Work. Ish. Of course, the worst part of them is that you miss anyone who doesn’t click credits or care about them. We were able to give attribute to the many people who helped work on our game including the music sources, icon source, and music designer/engineer.

People Stick to the End. Even when grinding, some stick to the end and get the best possible upgrade. 13,000 purchases were made to Pandora’s Box. That is really hard to get to for most people without closing the game first or dying. It was nice to know that these people stuck around and, in my opinion, beat the game like that. 250,000 or so people played a full game. They died at some point. The rest didn’t quite make it.

Players Don’t Care Where the Gun Points. The average accuracy from 250,000 sample games was 63%. The best part is that the lowest percent anyone got was 2%. Obviously if you have infinite ammo, no one cares if you hit those zombies in the beginning or not. As a player, I always hated the ammo constraints, so we chose not to include them in this game, and rather make reloading part of the strategy.

There are 19,000,000 less zombies out there. 250,000 players killed 19,081,879 zombies. That doesn’t even count the rest of the players who didn’t end the game. The average zombies per game killed was 76, and the most zombies killed in a game was 26,332. Congrats to that person!

Cool Developer Splash Screens Are Nice. With the lack of planning and time, we chose to implement a static slick splash screen (which we have since animated). From this, we were able to get 20,000 people visit our blog.

Now for some graphs!

With the discussion up there, I decided to chart the links we had from our Credits Menu. I also have a heatmap, if anyone is interested that I can post. A lot of theory can go here. I think placement and interest was the largest factors of out going links. Game Design and Art was obviously a large part of the game and so it got the most links out. I was still surprised that the Special Thanks links got out. As a guess, I would say that many of those players knew what those sites were and used them actively.

It’s pretty obvious about weapon distribution. Interestingly enough, people hung on to buy the higher priced items. Pandora’s Box was picked much less often than the Minigun, despite only being priced moderately higher. Possibly because everyone knows what a Minigun does. No one knew what Pandora’s Box did. On the topic of Pandora’s Box, we messed up on that one. The weapon is essentially useless compared to a Minigun. A more powerful and predictable weapon should have been offered.

The Shotgun and Chainsaw were the first few guns available to the player since they were priced cheaply. It seems that ranged weapons are more fun than close up weapons, since it appears unlikely that the 10,000 purchase difference would drop out between the time those two weapons were both purchase-able.

Finally, I wanted to thank Playtomic for most of our analytics. Even though you went down on us for a day and graph a lot of stats funny, we still love you and want you. I encourage all new developers to check out their platform if they want to start recording game statistics.

The difference between the two service’s reports is actually quite astounding. Playtomic reports close to 40,000 less plays than MochiBot did. Why did I put a picture from MochiBot then? Well, Playtomic has been having a lot of trouble since the beginning of the year. Too much trouble with all their APIs and the server migration problems. In addition, our ad service, CPMStar, also reported a number of ads served that was higher than the playcount from Playtomic. We only server 1 ad per game so this tipped us off quite a bit.

Unfortunately, all of our custom statistics were recorded with Playtomic, because their API was very simple to use. Since the data is close enough, and the sample is fairly large, we are still able to draw conclusions from the game, like which weapon was the most popular, how many zombies did most people destroy before they stopped playing or died, among other things. When Tribulation hits 500,000 plays, another post will be written with some charts and data examinations to checkout what worked and what didn’t work in Tribulation.

In the meantime, keep annihilating those zombies.

The official entries (vote on the Kongregate thread):

Entrants:
Bobikas – Organise a GiTD
truefire – Wizard’s Quest (devlog)
LIDgames – Looper
TheKaveman – Level Quest
Rafael_MJ – Pinky’s Dungeon Escape (walkthrough)
DrYoshiahu – Just Another Shadow
Abigayl – Invader Breaker
Krankdud – Millennium Pork in Castle Crisis
byrono – Clown Death
orandze – The Floor is Lava
Moshdef – Fight Scene
Ace_Blue – GITD24 Bob the Blob

(Clicking on the picture will send you to where you can buy that one)

It’s also super cool that I run Cross Country, so it fits what I love to do. Be fast or be lunch! Anyways, they have a couple of T-Shirt designs on that site that look pretty good (and have nice quality) if you want to check them out. Pretty cheap at $16 too. They also seem to do things like preparedness kits and whatnot in case the zombies come knocking. D:

You have 10 days to make a game based on a chosen theme revealed on the start day. When the 10 days are over, users will vote on the best submission. The developer with the most votes wins of course. Check out the Kongregate GiTD #24 thread for more information.

This time, GiTD’s theme is Only One Level. The theme is up to interpretation, but be wary of your idea. The point isn’t to make Pong and call it only one level of course.

ProfusionGames will also be attempting to participate in this jam, by modifying an idea that we were possibly going to use for a future game, called miniQuest. Hopefully we can get a lot done for this project and submit it in time. The technical effects and game mechanics miniQuest calls for seems challenging, so I hope we are up for it. I’ll be updating the blog periodically with samples of the game.

Oh, and last but not least, prizes for the competition are some Kreds (for Kongregate if you have an account) and if more than 10 submissions are entered, then I will buy the winner K+.

Hope to see you there!

Updates!

Here is some stats we are seeing for Tribulation. Plays and Blog Visits are Per day.

Day 1
Plays: 8,118
Blog Visits: 112

Day 2
Plays: 26,070
Blog Visits: 601

Day 3
Plays: 40,070
Blog Visits: 674

Day 4
Plays: 47,310
Blog Visits: 1,091

Day 5
Plays: 34,586
Blog Visits: 1,143

Day 6
Plays: 33,106
Blog Visits: 1094

A link to the game will be available shortly.
You can play the game here!
You can find our GGJ Project here!

Meanwhile, here’s a screenshot.