We’re hiring for a Junior PHP Developer at Aardman Digital. This role would suit a University graduate or someone relatively new to the digital industry, with a couple of years experience under their belt.
We’re a fun and fast growing team, working on some really cool stuff. If you live in and around Bristol (UK) and are interested then please go here and apply. I promise to go easy on you in the interview 
Last week I attended the Children’s Media Conference with lots of other people from Aardman. It was a 3 day mix of presentations, panels and meeting really interesting people. And everyone there had something to do with the children’s side of the media and entertainment industry. I just wanted to share a few insights that I picked up there. Some are obvious, some less so …
1.) Children are no longer just watching TV, they expect to interact with it. On their phones, via MSN, on YouTube, etc. And often do these things simultaneously (watching a show while chatting to friends about it). The distinction between TV and online is a non-plus for them. They have an extremely rich media diet.
2.) Traditional broadcasters (and “offline” producers) are increasingly worried they are taking too long to resolve the provision of content. And children are just going online instead. The world is changing faster than a lot of them can cope with.
3.) Children prefer “home grown” material – i.e. they don’t want to hear American voices in their cartoons. The same applies to games, only to a much lesser extent.
4.) Broadcasters recognise that the future is on-demand, and in the long term, online. The BBC specifically made a point that they were perfectly aware that digital is the future.
5.) Lots of Children love manga! (no surprise there) The style of artwork allows them to clearly see the emotions that the characters are experiencing. And manga / anime characters do actually show emotion, unlike most US made cartoons in the same area. They find the super powers and stories generally more exciting, and want to be part of that fantasy. There is a really strong “collect, compete, play” association with most popular manga/anime (think Pokemon, Yui Gi Oh or Bakugan). Manga/Anime is less concerned about dealing with emotion and more complex subjects.
6.) “Transmedia” is now what they are calling the latest iteration of “new media”. But it’s all just media really. Transmedia (like before it) is just the means of telling or experiencing a story across multiple platforms.
7.) “Games Bibles” are vital, no matter what scale game you are working on. Matt Costello gave a brilliant (although sadly very brief) talk about how he created the game bibles for games like Doom 3 and Just Cause 2. They should start off as a paragraph, explaining the concept behind the world in which the game lives. And then expand from there, eventually encompassing as much detail as possible in order to bring the game alive. Bibles shouldn’t just focus on the game itself, but look into the backstory and what could happen in the future, should the series run or adapt across to a different media (game made into a TV show or comic for example).
8.) Girl Gamers: Girls love tech! They adopt it way ahead of boys. By 8 years old most of them will own a gaming device (like a DS), by 10 lots will have a mobile phone of their own and a laptop/PC. By 11 they’ll have Facebook accounts (and boys will have XBLA accounts). By 13 most have personal iTunes accounts or equivalent. Between the ages of 9-10 is when most girls peak at their interest of gaming. They are competently using online services (for social and gaming aspects) and use of their mobile is massive. Age 10+ and they mostly now focus on social spaces and social networking. To them Facebook IS a game. Creating private worlds is key, the ability to build a social space away from their home.
9) Games that can tick the following subject boxes appeal strongly to girls aged 10-13: Manipulation (!), Relationships (Sims), Problem Solving (puzzles), Responsibility (pet games), Private Worlds, Role Playing (Imagine Teacher), Identity, Risk Taking. In reality most games fail to keep their long-term interest. A quote from a 10 year old: “I classify my phone and my laptop as my toys”. The Blackberry mobile phone is huge for girls and is often their top “most desired” item. This is due to the social nature / features it provides (Blackberry messenger). Social networking for them becomes obsessive around age 12. By age 13 they want cues from the real world in their games.
10) Graphic Novels and Comics are making a huge come-back for children, and are no longer mostly for adults! Publishers like Walker Books are reporting sales up by 29% over the previous year. They are finally coming “back to kids” – picture books aimed at 8-9 year olds (such as Savage by David Almond) are breaking new ground. Visual literacy is just as important as reading ability. Jamie Smart gave a brilliant talk about how he can release a new comic strip on his web site, and earn a decent living from the merchandise surrounding it. The team at Pulp Theatre are releasing graphic novels through their Alien Ink range, aimed at teenagers and issues they find hard to talk about. Has been a huge success, now sponsored by Channel 4. Again they did the whole range of releasing online and on Facebook before going into print form. They took the comics to where the kids hang out, they didn’t expect them to “come find them”.
Please bear in mind that figures given should be taken in the context in which they were delivered (i.e. are probably only relevant to the UK)
Despite the heat wave it was a great conference. And interesting to see how other people are applying the same kinds of professional skills that we have (from web development to game design) and applying those to entertaining and educating children. Perhaps even yours?
20 man months of work.
Copious amounts of writing, editing, re-writing, re-editing and editing once more.
Stacks of demo games and hundreds of lines of quality source code.
All to make this the finest 650+ pages of AS3 game development ever commited to dead tree.
Jeff and Steve, the 8-bit Dynamic Duo have done it! Their book is finally out …
The Essential Guide to Flash Games: Building Interactive Entertainment with ActionScript
Despite having a slightly odd title (how many games have you ever played that weren’t interactive?!) this book looks awesome. I’ve pre-ordered my copy from Amazon UK and will give it a proper write-up when received. I have major respect for people who hold down full-time jobs / families, and still manage to produce such a mammoth book as this.
There is a bit of blurb on the Friends of Ed web site about it, although not as much as I would have liked. For example no contents listing, no sample chapter, a poor quality cover image and no index even. Given how many books on web development FoEd produce it begs the question why their own site is so shit. But I digress (and hopefully they will update this page over time). So for now the best place to learn about the contents is from the horses mouth so to speak, here on the 8-bit Rocket.
Congrats Jeff and Steve – I wish you all the best with sales. All you have to do now is stop calling my games advergames and the world will be perfect 
All of my personal (and work) projects are stored in subversion reposotories. For all its quirks and foibles svn does, generally, just work. And is has saved my ass on more than several occassions.
I keep all of my project files under source control including all of the Photoshop PSDs files that compromise the artwork for my games. Up until now this has been fine, as i could commit changes to PSDs and svn would take them quite happily. But when it came to rolling back you had to rely on the comments to really know what the previous PSD may have looked like.
So I was extremely excited to get an email from my svn host, Beanstalk, to say that they now supported use of PixelNovel Timeline direct with their service. PixelNovel is a plugin / stand-alone app for PC and Mac that lets you preview any PSD stored in svn, and any previous version of it too. So you can easily, and visually, roll back to an earlier version. It works in a similar manner to Adobe Version Cue, but the interface is simpler and the software considerably cheaper, plus of course it works with any svn host (be it a 3rd party one like Beanstalk, or your own). You can commit changes to the PSD to svn direct from the plugin, and it only uploads the differences. It works with CS2, SC3 and CS4.
It costs $60 for a single license, but if you use the code BNSTLK you’ll get 30% off that (this offer expires in 2 weeks time from the date of this post).
So if you use Photoshop and svn I’d strongly recommend downloading the free trial and checking this out. It could save you a lot of time in the long run!
Beanstalk – svn hosting at http://beanstalkapp.com
PixelNovel Timeline – svn for Photoshop at http://pixelnovel.com/timeline
I read this thread on the Mochi forums today where a portal owner was complaining about the forth-coming Mochi Coins system, and asking why were they not going to get a % cut from it. I.e. why should the developers get all the money. The post went something like this:
I understand that a lot of developers and maybe even the Mochi gang believe that they don’t need the independent portals…. So if you are a publisher and think that we should also share in this new wealth please clearly state in this thread what you and your portals offer and contribute! Let these guys know what you have done for them lately!
Now it’s easy for developers to read this and get incensed. After all the vast majority of the 30,000 or so Flash game portals out there do pretty much nothing to benefit the developer or their games. In fact I’d go so far as to say they don’t even care about the developer. The game was just another item that popped-up in their Mochi / FGD feed that day. And they do little beyond creating a shit quality thumbnail, or maybe a “we’ll totally screw the look of your game” full-screen button.
Weed out this vast majority of shovel-ware portals and you are left with those that actually care about the games they feature. They have what I feel are some genuine issues. How is this going to effect proper commercial portals, the sort that actively fund game development via sponsorship, and that do treat the games and developers with the respect they deserve.
There are several issues that spring to mind:
Let’s face it, Mochi doesn’t exactly have the highest security track record going. Their Mochi API is so easily hacked that script-kiddie programs exist to automate this process. But I don’t limit this section to Mochi alone, it applies to all similar services (such as GamerSafe). All of these systems will have been developed with the best intentions, and by talented development teams. But I wonder did any real security audit ever take place of their code or systems? Having built online booking systems for major corporations in the past I’m all too familiar with the very real, and very complex sets of security measures that needed to be in place. And even if the server side of things is as secure as you can make it, the ActionScript side never can be. The SWF format is so easily hackable that nothing is safe. Up until now hackers have only really had highscore table defacement or competition entry rigging to motivate them. Introduce real money and suddenly you perk the interests of a far darker side of the hacking community. Yes the money in-game might be virtual, but it still translates to real money somewhere along the line.
I’m not advocating that there will be a flurry of hacked bank accounts as a result of this. Because nearly all the Flash micro-payment systems I have seen use trusted 3rd parties to deal with the actual transactions. But as soon as real money turns into digital goods, all it takes is for the ownership of these to be hacked and things start to fall apart. How happy would you be if you logged in one day to find your GamerSafe balance had been wiped out? Or all those items you bought in the latest Mochi Coins game had suddenly vanished? You’d be pretty pissed. And who would you take it out on? Most likely the portal that delivered the game to you in the first place.
If portals start receiving a barrage of emails from extremely angry site visitors who have had their virtual game items stolen, there is nothing they can do but explain that they are not responsible and to pass those people onto whoever is. Of course “pass the buck” isn’t very good customer service, and will leave a sour taste in the mouth of those involved. The damage this could cause to a portals reputation could be significant.
I’m a Zend Certified PHP developer as my primary profession. I’ve been doing it for over 10 years, and right now if I was a portal owner I would be scared as hell. I would like to see professional code audit reports from all the major transaction vendors as a first step that they take the security of their systems as utmost priority.
That still doesn’t address the issue of hacked games of course. We all know that it’s impossible to 100% secure a SWF. Once decompilation has taken place and fake requests / responses start getting fired I believe it’s only a matter of time before vulnerabilities are exploited.
Portals primarily sponsor games for two reasons: To draw people to their sites, and to keep people on their sites. The new games offer incentives for users to remain loyal, and serve as magnets to get them in the first place. Lots of portals spend a lot of money making this happen. They’ll sponsor a few “large” exclusives and lots of smaller games with custom logo / API work to make those games sit better on their sites. On the whole portals get a very good deal on the price they pay for games. But with the advertising market in the dire state it’s in right now a lot of them are no doubt seeing much smaller Google AdWords checks than they did a few years ago. In short I bet the smaller ones, or ones without alternative income streams (like skill gaming sites) are struggling.
If they start seeing developers making income from the games as they exist on their web sites, as they going to want to offer even less money than they do already because of this? Are some of them even going to argue that in order to carry a Micro Payment enabled game then they won’t pay you anything because they will be making you money anyway? I can see why both of these arguments will occur.
When selling games lots of portals already have quite comprehensive “Your game cannot contain …” lists. Think about this: If most of them don’t even let you link your developer logo to your own web site, what hope in hell do you have of them allowing a complete payment system?
One of the arguments is that they cannot control what you have linked to. During testing your logo may link to a perfectly nice developers site. But once live you could change it to the latest Goatse.cx and it is their visitors who are affected. Or (possibly even worse to them) one of their loyal visitors may link out via your game to an even better portal, with cooler features, and move their daily gaming fix over there. Portals are extremely precious about their visitors, the market is fierce so I can appreciate why. A whole section of a game that links out to an external payment site, or sucks in game enhancements or awards that could feature anything, must be frightening to them. What if that “Rocket Launcher” item suddenly turned into a “Giant Spurting Penis” a few weeks later. It’s an inherent lack of control over the content that scares them.
Paranoid in the extreme? Yes. A little short-sighted / stuck in the 1990s web mentality? Yes. Highly unlikely to happen? Yes! But not impossible. To portals who make money from their users the potential of a “scandal” like this could be a big issue.
The whole GameJacket incident royally screwed over a lot of portals who carried their direct-linked content. If a portal sponsors a game with a transaction component which suddenly dies (servers go off-line, get hacked, company goes bust, etc.) then unless the developer was very careful about how that was implemented it could mean the entire game is crippled as a result. I think this is a very real problem. I know for certain that a couple of my games would literally stop working once the game ended should Mochi Leaderboards vanish overnight. I recognise this is bad practise on my part, but I’d place good money on the fact that I’m not alone. Transaction enabled games could very easily have similar issues. Perhaps less of an issue for portals who took your game from a Mochi feed for free, but definitely an issue for those who paid for it.
So far I have done nothing but defend portal owners in this article. I’ve given nothing back to my fellow developers, who really want to try and make some money from these new systems. I drafted a whole section devoted to developers and then realised that I didn’t actually need it. Because the whole “issue” of Micro Transactions isn’t actually an issue at all. It’s something that is happening, and it isn’t going to stop.
Right now we’re at the crest of the Micro Transaction wave. Some early adopters will wipe out, and others will find new and lucrative revenue streams open up to them. But what is absolutely certain is that this isn’t a flash in the pan. This isn’t going to go away. Some portals may put up a fight and not carry such enabled games, but as more and more games start to feature these kinds of benefits it will become the norm, not the exception. Once the really great games start doing it the portals will have to face-up to the fact that in order to carry the latest cutting-edge Flash games, they will have to adopt this new trend, or sink and die.
This change is still new, but it’s happening and it’s only going to snowball and get more intense. The game developer / publisher relationship is symbiotic. One needs the other. Without the players that portals provide, the transactions will fall flat on their face. Without great games the portals will do the same. It’s time for portals to wake up and smell the coffee, because this is going to happen regardless. There are some very valid reasons why they should be apprehensive, and I can only hope that the transaction service providers deal with these issues comprehensively.
I’m sure it means we’ll start having to broker new deals with portals. $1000 + 10% from in-game transactions for example. But this isn’t a bad thing, and I look forward to it. My next game will definitely be GamerSafe enabled (if they approve it) so I’ll be curious to see how it effects take-up rate from portals. I’ll be sure to report it here.
I very rarely blog just to tell you to read another blog entry. But this is a true exception to my rule. Over on Lost Garden is Part 1 of a brilliant write-up about the issue with why the majority of Flash games make so little money. And more importantly, what to do about it.
Can’t wait for Part 2.
On May 9th I posted the second part of my report on how my game Kyobi was doing. This is the final part of the report, nearly 2 months on.
The Kongregate referral payments have now finished. When I sold Kyobi Kongregate were my Primary sponsor. They offered me $200 upfront on referral payments (basically any time someone clicks one of the Kong logos in my game, I got paid for it). The last time I wrote they had just paid me my first months worth of clicks (just under $800). Since then I received 2 more payments, one for the month of May at $1548 and June at $382. I know that if GameJacket hadn’t died then the June payment would have been a lot higher. That is now the end of the agreement I had with Kongregate, and it certainly was an unexpected bonus to the games earnings.
Of course as we all know by now, GameJacket have gone bust. This means I never got paid the $1000 they owed me, so I have to deduct that from the previous total Kyobi had made.
Kyobi on the iPhone has enjoyed moderate success, and there is still a constant trickle of sales coming in. Between launch in late March and the end of May it has sold 5802 copies (an average of 77 copies per day). Because of the way Apple report sales I cannot give figures for June yet. But I do know that they are much lower than April and May. Summer time, plus now being an “old” game don’t help. It was fascinating to see how the sales changed. Some days it would shift nearly 300 copies, and then drop down to 100 the next day. Chart position played a really important role, as you can imagine. Right now it still enjoys a healthy ranking in European countries and, strangely enough, Japan. Bear in mind that I only get a percentage of sales (the lions share going to the publisher) but it still equated to $1563 to the end of May.
I sold two more sponsor branded copies of Kyobi since the last report. Both were very small scale and only netted me $200 in total, but it’s still all helpful. Incredibly off the back of these sales I also sold two copies of one of my first ever Flash games, Abombinaball, so the knock-on effect was pleasant to say the least It also gave me two more portal contacts that I can approach when my new games are ready.
So how does it all stack-up now? Well taking the figures from the last report into account ($10,105). Deducting the $1000 GameJacket will never give me ($9105). Add in the new iPhone sales, sponsorships and Kongregate payments. And the total from my little game stands at $12,798. At the current exchange rate that’s £7833. Of course you then need to deduct the UK tax I have to pay from this.
In “real life” terms after tax that equals what I get paid from my day job over the course of a couple of months. So does this mean I could quit my job and do this full-time? Well, no. For a start I wouldn’t actually want to. While extremely demanding my job is also very satisfying. I work with a great team of talented people in one of the most creative places in the UK. That alone has value to me. The other important factor is that this money came in dribs and drabbs over a period of 12 weeks. That is not helpful when you have fixed mortgage payments, food to buy, etc. I know a lot of people who can and do work like this, and are very successful at it, but I just don’t really have the self discipline needed to stay on-top of all the paperwork. I admire greatly those that do.
And it’s a risk because not every game I make will be this successful. Perhaps I’ll never get this level of success ever again. Of course I’m optimistic that the game I’m working on at the moment is original and fun enough to do well. But that’s like saying I’m optimistic that my lottery numbers will come in next week. Granted it’s not a gamble on the same level, I mean you can’t sit back and look at your lottery numbers and go “damn, that’s a fine piece of work there”. But there’s an element of risk in all game releases, and logic or fairness doesn’t always win. You never know who you are up against that month. Or what the overall feeling of the gaming world will be. And you never will.
So to conclude I just want to say that whatever you do, keep on coding, and keep on making great games. Because there is definitely a market for them. Many people far greater than I ever will be demonstrate every day that there is a life to be made in building beautiful Flash games. And living from those proceeds. If you are one of those people, I tip my hat to you. If you aspire to be one, you have my best wishes for your success.
This is the story of the little game that just keeps on traveling. Since writing about my experience selling Kyobi a couple of weeks ago I just wanted to update you on what had happened since…
This was both unexpected and great news! I’ve blogged about Whirled before, the anarchic but beautifully freeform Flash virtual world. They run a quarterly developers competition where games are split into two categorys: multi-player and singer-player. Obviously Kyboi is about as far from a multi-player game as you can get, so that category was out of bounds for me (which is a shame as it has significantly bigger prizes!). But I spent some time making Kyobi Whirled compatible, uploaded it and hoped for the best.
And it paid off (thanks Chris/Adam!!) It paid off to the tune of $1000 in fact. You can see all the winning games here.
What I find interesting about Whirled is that my game is for sale in the shop there. I get in-world credits from these sales, but I also get my share from the developers bling pool too. The terminology might be a bit “what the hell?” but once you get over the pimp-my-ride lingo it starts to make sense. In short: for as long as your game is on Whirled, and brings people to Whirled, you get a cut of that. This translates into real money. If your game brings people to Whirled and they sign-up, you get 30% of whatever they spend for life. That could add-up significantly, so don’t ignore this fact.
You can also sell “furniture”, “backdrops”, “toys” and “avatars” in the Whirled shop. So I pulled apart the graphics from Kyobi, put them into the shop and now they are on sale. Every day people are buying these items. I took the background from my game, changed it a little and now it’s a room background to buy. And people do buy it!
Here is a picture of my room, decked out with most of the Kyobi game items available on sale:
I believe this is an easy avenue for income, both real and virtual. Given that you made the assets for your game already, it’s a no-brainer and I’ll certainly be doing it again.
This question gets asked a lot, most recently here on the FlashGameLicense forums. Honestly, I was quite skeptical about it at first. When Kongregate made me a Primary offer for sponsoring Kyobi, the money was paid as an advance on the income these referral links would make.
To be brutally honest I took the offer and ran, never expecting to hear anything again. I’m glad to say I completely misjudged this part of the deal and my first months payment was just shy of $800. I will get paid another 2 months worth of referrals before the deal ends. While $800 doesn’t sound like a huge sum of money (and on its own it isn’t) you have to remember Kongregate sponsored the GameJacket version of Kyobi – so not only do I get money from someone clicking “More games” for example, but also from the pre-roll ad at the start. Combine these together and with a really popular game that travels well it can add-up significantly. I consider the total plays Kyobi is getting across all versions to be really good, but there are lots of games that do significantly larger numbers of plays – and if they are being paid per click there is some very serious income potential here too.
My advice? Don’t under-estimate these kinds of offers from sponsors. And never under-estimate just how valuable those “more games” links are to your sponsor. People really do click them, in their thousands. So sell your game for a decent price accordingly!
On the most basic level Skill Gaming sites are sites that offer payments based on how well you play the game. It’s a form of gambling really, with payouts being based on who else is playing the game, how well they are doing, etc. King.com is an example of a site that makes a seriously large amount of money from this market. But there are many others, and I believe this is a growing sector in more ways that one.
At the moment King are sponsoring games left right and center, because they drive large numbers of people to their site – lots of whom then go on to spend real money. Most (if not all?) of the King sponsorship deals are just standard Primary ones though, they pay for branding and your game is a magnet for players to their site.
However this is changing – new sites such as SkillAddiction.com are starting that take your game, convert it to be more “skill game” focused and then you can get a percentage of revenue it generates on that site.
I have been contacted by two different companies, both of whom want versions of Kyobi for their sites on this basis.
There are some factors to consider when it comes to skill gaming – first of all it doesn’t suit all types of game. They have to be quite specific in nature, often they have to be completed within 4-5 minutes, and you have to be able to know the sorts of scores that are possible. For example I’ve had to change Kyobi to make it a lot harder at the start, and to make the play just get progressivly faster until it finally beats you – the current game doesn’t work like this, I inject “breather” levels into the game ever few rounds to give the player a break. But obviously you can’t do this when they are trying to win money.
Lots of current skill gaming sites buy-up Flash games just to pad out their sites and draw people in, then they hope those visitors will explore the “other” side of their site. But as I said this is changing, new skill gaming sites are appearing that will use your game directly with the players, offering pay-outs when playing it. And if they offer you a percentage of this then there is massive potential here. Contact the guys at SkilAddiction.com to see if your game would suit their site, it could benefit you.
I’ll report back to let you know how Kyobi fares in this market soon. I still need to finish my SkillAddiction version of it for release (an insane workload during crunch time for an MMO delivery has prevented this so far sadly)
After what seems like an eternity Kyobi finally passed Oberon Media’s QA process. Their API is pretty complex to work with, and you have to build your game running under a JavaScript test harness that simulates calls and events to/from your game. Certainly quite far removed from the simplicity of most sponsors APIs. It’s not massively challenging, but definitely more time consuming.
They also required a huge load of paperwork to be signed, and contrary to all the other big sponsors (Shockwave, BigFishGames, etc) you have to actually print and post the paperwork to them. Sending via UPS cost me nearly $80. Why they don’t accept it via email like the rest I don’t know. On the plus side once you have sent them one contract you don’t need to post them another in future, should they buy a new game from you.
Their payment terms are also extremely poor compared to every other sponsor out there. You are looking at a wait of around 60 days from the date the game goes live across their network. 60 days is an incredibly long time even for standard companies, let alone an indie developer. On the upside of course I don’t rely on this money for anything essential like the mortgage or feeding my family. But if you do then bear this in mind if ever dealing with them. It’s not a deal breaker at all, I’m just saying be aware of it. I also don’t believe the payment should be from the date they release the game. It should be from the date they approve the QA of it, but that’s another story.
So why go through all this hassle? because it will place the game across a number of sites with extremely significant visitor figures. They run MySpace games for example. I’d wager that the volume of plays my game gets when it hits the sites they licensed it for will be significant. I’ll report back later in the year to see if my thoughts confirm this.
Sadly Oberon don’t offer advertising royalty payments on Flash games (they do for ActiveX/C/Shockwave games). Originally when I first started talking to them it looked like this could be a deal, but things changed internally and it fell away. Had they been able to offer me an ad cut then I actually would have sold the game exclusively to them.
It surprises me that sponsors are still licensing Kyobi. I don’t know why it surprises me, I mean it’s still a fun little game – I guess it’s just the “Flash mindset” where you assume your game is only popular and of interest to sponsors for a month or so, and then is swallowed up in the ever changing tide of new releases. I’m quickly realising this assumption is wrong, and there is actually a bit of a long-tail for game sales, just as in every other medium.
The most recent sales was to Shockwave.com, who contacted me via FlashGameLicense (that site is worth every single 10% they ask for!). Their offer was a good one, and the requests were simple. Logo here, few button changes there, basic API for highscores.
Then they asked if I could change the title page. Apparently the girl didn’t sit well with their demographic. When I commision work from artists I always insist that they create it over as many layers as is possible within Photoshop, so it’s easily changed. This meant I was able to open the title page, hide the girl layer, shunt the logo around and create a new more “subtle” version. All-in about 10 minutes work. I was happy, they were happy. Job done. Or maybe not …
Then the “Nazi” issue hit. Yes, you read that correctly. If you’ve played Kyobi you’ll know it involves throwing coloured blocks around. Apparently there was an issue with my pink block. The problem was that it featured a triangle. A pink triangle.
Highly confused by this being an issue they explained that a pink triangle was what Nazi’s used to brand homosexuals with while in concentration camps. I had always assumed the pink triangle was the gay pride symbol. A little Wikipedia reading later and it confirms both are true. It’s origins are one of the horrific brands used by the Nazi’s, but these days it is more commonly associated with the paramount opposite of this.
Also the actual symbol is an inversed triangle. The triangle in my game is the other way up.
Anyway, not wanting to be seen to promote Nazi’s in any way at all (even if it feels more like it would be promoting gay pride if anything) I agreed and modified the block, turning it a brown colour instead.
So there you have it – the Shockwave version should be released on May 12th and will be 100% cute girl and Nazi-branding free! If you’re going to sell a game to Shockwave be prepared for artistic change requests, and whatever you do avoid any of these shape/colour combinations!
I reported last time that the iPhone version of Kyobi was enjoying success thanks to a promotion on the hit game iDare. I wondered if this might just be a flash in the pan, or if the sales rate would be sustained. Thankfully it’s still going strong and shifting 3 digits worth of copies per day. The amount varies a lot, but averages at around 250 sales a day, with the usual peaks and troughs you’d expect. I don’t know for how much longer this will last of course, but it does mean I’ll see at least one months worth of decent royalty payments from it. And of course it won’t ever stop selling, it’ll just reduce back to a much lower rate – but even this will ensure a nice small payment coming in each month.
Wow, I had no idea this would turn out to be such a long piece when I started. I could probably have broken it into 6 different blog posts. But if you got this far (and actually read up to here rather than scrolled) then thanks and I hope you found it interesting and some of it useful.
Factoring in new sponsored versions of Kyobi, the unexpected Kongregate payment, the Whirled prize money and money I know I’ll receive from iPhone sales so far, I can report that this one little game has now netted me $10,105. I know there will be more iPhone and Kongregate payments to come over the next two months (although I expect them to be lower). And maybe another portal may even buy it, who knows?
I’ve learnt an awful lot from this one game. Things I will take into my next game for certain. The Whirled link-ups, the possibility of skill gaming revenue share, not to under-estimate referal payment offers and the long-tail of sales.
Edit: Thanks to Kevin Luck for pointing out a flaw with the code in my original post (there was an extra assignment taking place, which caused the byte count to increase). Remove that and ternary will match if/else on a bytes-used basis. I’ll keep this post up here regardless, just ignore everything from this point on
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I’ve blogged about Social Arcade before, the 100% Flash based game development system that runs on Facebook. It was entered into the Facebook fbFund program along with 600+ other apps. 25 apps won, and Social Arcade was one of them. Today they had to submit their pitch for the next round (the prize being a cool $200,000). Only 5 apps will get that far, and having seen what Social Arcade can now do, I sincerely hope it’s one of them.
Watch their new pitch video below (the HD version is here)
Social Arcade – Facebook App from Richard Vanner on Vimeo.
While planning some new routines for the PixelBlitz engine tonight one thing struck me – is it actually worth it?
There are a number of articles across the web about pixel blitting in AS3 (most of them at 8-bit Rocket but I did wonder if anyone had actually done some tests to see just what difference it makes in real-world terms.
After all, why mess around “blitting” things about if using a Sprite or MovieClip is just as fast anyway? Infact you could easily argue that using a native Flash display object gives you far more control (as you get to play with scaling, alpha, rotation, animation, sound events and more, easily).
Another thing also struck me – when building up the display for render the AVM will automatically use a dirty rectangles system. If you’ve got two overlapping movieclips then it won’t waste time drawing pixels that would otherwise be obscured by the one in front. Traditional blitting on the other hand doesn’t care about this, it’ll gleefully copyPixel() until the cows come home, pasting image after image on-top of each other (PixelBlitz suffers from this issue too).
[ Side note: It's true we could add a similar dirty rectangles system to Pixel Blitz, to avoid copying data when it's guaranteed to be overwritten further up the chain - but this is not something we've found a fast way to do yet (the potential alpha channel of a bitmap causing the most problems), the overhead of sorting and checking for overlaps is always taking longer than just brute-force copying everything each time (if you can help, email me!) ]
Tonight I decided to write two simple tests. They would measure the speed of the AVMs dirty rectangle system vs. raw bitmapdata copypixel power. I was interested in 3 things – the overall time it took to run the test, the amount of memory it used and the average fps rate.
I took a 550 x 400 sized stage published at 30 fps. All tests were run using the Debug version of the Player (9.0 r 124). The test consisted of creating an array of X number of sprites (to test the AVM) and PixelSprites (to test blitting). Each sprite was 50×50 in size and contained an alpha channel. I then drew all of the sprites onto the stage and moved them along by 4 pixels per frame, if they hit the left of the stage they wrapped around to the right again. The Sprites had cacheAsBitmap set to true (see note below)
Then I ran the tests multiple times, with varying numbers of fish, for varying durations, recording the data at each step and averaging it out.
I agree that this is in no way a truly “scientific” test, but I wanted a general “feeling” as a result, to see if this was an avenue still worth walking down or not.
With 500 sprites both the standard Sprite and the blit method kept a solid 30 fps frame rate. Using Sprites consumed 15MB of RAM, using blits 11MB.
At 1000 sprites we’re still at a consistent 30 fps, but there is noticeable “tearing” in the visuals as the sprites move across the stage. It’s not terrible, but you can easily see it. The standard method is now using 20MB while the blit is using 14MB.
2500 sprites and we see both techniques struggle to keep-up with the 30 fps rate. The traditional Sprites actually outpace the blitting at 23 fps vs 21 fps, but the memory consumption is more than doubled, 35MB vs. 15MB.
At 5000 sprites they are both starting to feel the strain, each level pegging at 12 fps. But the standard Sprites technique is using a staggering 58MB, while the blit is only up to 20MB.
7,500 sprites all moving at once and both techiques are virtually bought to their knees managing just 8 fps each. Given the amount of data moving this isn’t totally surprising. The blit technique at this point is literally copying 18.7 million pixels around in memory. The AVMs internal dirty rectangle is feeling the full force of what’s going on however, and is now consuming 237MB of RAM vs. the blit techniques 25MB.
10,000 sprites crashes the Debug player for both versions, it literally runs out of memory
As I mentioned at the start, the Sprite version had cacheAsBitmap set to true. This is the main cause of the huge amount of RAM being used. As our Sprite only contained a single Bitmap this wasn’t needed. By removing this setting the amount of RAM used dropped, ending up only a few MB higher than the straight blit method.
So what can we pull from this?
First of all, the AVM dirty rectangles implementation is pretty damn sweet! But brute-force blitting is equally as fast in this test case. Logic tells us that adding redraw aware optimisation to our blit engine should increase this gap in our favour significantly.
NEVER enable cacheAsBitmap on a Sprite or MovieClip if all it contains is bitmap data.
The blit engine uses less memory. If you need to cache vector Sprites in your game, then it uses considerably less memory!
No-one really needs a game with 7,500 fish swimming around in it
Maybe the test wasn’t “real world” enough – even at the 1000 sprite level (at which both methods kept a 30 fps frame rate) we were still moving 2.5 million pixels around a 550 x 400 stage. That’s enough to fill the stage 11 times over (and still have some spare). Is this likely in a real game? Well no, I don’t believe so – but it isn’t that far off either. Games are getting bigger (we published one at 800×600 today for example), and if you had a game featuring multiple layers going on (foreground, player, background, distance, etc) with alpha showing through them all, then it doesn’t take long to start using pixels in the millions range.
There are instances when I believe it’s just easier to deal with things on a blit level – for example building up a large n-way scrolling tilemap, where you constantly need to redraw the scroll buffers. Doing the same by placing (and updating) hundreds of Sprites would be an exercise in pain I wouldn’t wish on anyone.
Is a combination of both worlds the way to go? Quite possibly. While I loathe using the timeline (or Movieclips in general) for anything, they do offer Flash animators a rich featured tool-set that let’s them create vibrant moving games. Whereas the blit method requires graphic artists trained in the way of the pixel, and I believe those are a dying (and expensive) breed indeed. Creating quality animations at that level is time-consuming and costly. But as we’ve seen, animating on a vector level introduces both resource and speed issues into your game.
What about collision detection? Well we all know this pretty much sucks in Flash. So we have to roll our own methods anyway. For pixel perfect collision detection we need to inspect the elements on a pixel level (surprise surprise), at least with the blit technique we’re already operating on that level, so there’s no extra draw() overhead involved.
Are AS3 Sprites “evil” for those of you trying to create arcade style games? No, I don’t believe so. They can hold their own in the speed stakes thanks to the power of the AVM, but you do have to watch yourself and be very careful re: memory consumption.
Is “blitting” really that much faster the using normal Sprites? No, it isn’t. It does have less memory overhead and a “cleaner” feel to it, but it’s no speed demon in comparison.
Would a hybrid solution work? (i.e. a fully blitted tilemap with Movieclips characters on-top) – yes, absolutely!
Don’t feel that because you have travelled down the “blit” route you need to have the whole game living there. If you can mix and match your game logic and most importantly your collision systems, then there’s no harm in splitting these elements up, using both at once.
P.S. If you’ve got some ideas or concepts on optimising blit level drawing, please get in touch. I’ve been reading a lot about this recently (what I can find at least) but it’s always good to pick someone’s brain.
Ok so you need a seriously monster PC to run this – but, bloody hell – just LOOK at it!
Maybe one day in Flash..
PC and Mac download from here if you feel so inclined:
http://www.octaveengine.com/casual/dltrial.html
The company I used to work for have been busy hacking away at Google’s Android platform over the past 3 months, and they’ve just released this cool video onto YouTube showing what they achieved:
Very nice indeed! I wish them all the best in the competition – although secretly I hope they don’t win so they can concentrate on making something for Flash
There’s another fine post over at Grey Alien Games asking (and answering) the question: is it possible to earn a living making Indie or Casual games? The article itself is interesting reading, and while it focuses on the PC side of game dev the core concepts still ring true. The comments section throws some more ideas into the pot too.
Jake over at Grey Alien Games has blogged an interesting piece about the excuses people come up with for never finishing a game, and his take on how to overcome those.
http://greyaliengames.com/blog/how-can-i-overcome-game-development-obstacles/
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