Flash Game - Pyro

[damijin]

So, I had that thread about Demon King and Naga and actually a couple of other games. Flash development can be hectic with projects falling through and collaborators disappearing. I'm actually going back to Demon King at some point, but the past month and a half were spent making a game called Pyro.

You can play it here:

http://www.kongregate.com/games/damijin/pyro

Pyro was a pretty easy project as far as they go. We used an open source, free physics engine called Box2d, which a lot of physics flash games use these days whether they give it props or not.

The fire effect is completely procedurally generated, and the concept was intended to be something between a mix of the classic Bloons game (throw darts at balloons) with a more pachinko feel as the ball bounces around with more random elements than Bloons had. Levels were designed right in the Flash IDE. I think we'd do a level editor for a sequel if we do one, that way players can make their own stuff.

Ultimately the response has been pretty good. Hovering just under a 3.7 on Kong right now. 3.6 on Newgrounds. Hoping that I can actually push back up to 3.7 on Kong because I'd like to get some badges on it. The advertisement revenue that they generate is nearly essential to the overall success of the project, so we'll see how that pans out. Othrwise Im trying to spread it around. Folks are off for Christmas/New Years, which is alright. I have a free slot on the front page of Kong until the employees come back, so that exposure will hopefully be nice.

[Krakrok]

Does the Kongregate sponsorship preclude you from releasing it through MochiAds? If not, you should. Free frontpage on Kongregate is nice though.

[damijin]

I have Mochi in it. Kong and Mochi share an investor, and are down the street from each other, so they have a bit of an agreement:

So that Kong can host it's own preloader ads and get good revenue from advertisers, Mochiads are automatically disabled on Kongregate. As a result, Kong pimps Mochi during it's upload process, and encourages all of it's developers to use Mochi.

[Krakrok]

I don't see it in the Mochi distribution feed.

[damijin]

Haha, simply forgot to click the checkbox. Good catch! They have to approve it, then it'll be on the feed.

[Aez]

NIce one.  Lots of niches touch - like the level selection.

Kongrats!

[Slyfeind]

Very fun. It's interesting, I was just remembering the early days of hand-helds, and there was a football game a friend of mine had. I totally wasn't interested in it, even though the gameplay was simply move across the screen while dodging the other blips. If it was a knight trying to dodge arrows, but the same mechanic, I would have loved it.

So I play your game, and imagine it as a basketball trying to get it into hoops, and I'm not so interested anymore. But it's a fireball, and we try to light torches, and so it's awesome.

[Venkman]

Nice work Damijn. Reminds me a bit of Peggle, but with a point

Sly, could you be  remembering Coleco's Head to Head Football.

[Slyfeind]

Oh holy crap yeah, that's the one. 

[damijin]

For people interested in flash development, this was roughly a 6 week project, and today has made around $1300

I expect the profits to exceed $2000 before the game is two weeks old. This revenue comes from over six different sources including two main advertising revenue sources, donations, a sponsorship, contests, and non-exclusive licensing agreements.

Thanks for the compliments :)

[Venkman]

Nice!

Oh holy crap yeah, that's the one. 

Yea, they just repackaged it recently (under the Coleco label to boot). They were in Target in 2007 from what I recall. I just don't hit the consumer electronics section anymore, so they could still be there. Same form factor and screen, but I believe the insides were updated to more modern ICs and now take 3 AAA batteries instead of one 9-Volt like the old one.

[eldaec]

Yay, you have badges, and a card challenge.

[damijin]

That I do. Revenue has now surpassed $2,000.

It's not inconceivable that it would reach 3k or 4k within its first month at this rate, but 2k was my goal so its all just added awesome at this point.

Score is tanking from the badges/card, but who cares, I'm getting hits, and honestly, its clear that a lot of people are into it. So, whatever!

The motivation from this is awesome, can't wait to get our next game out. Reception has been wonderful.

[WindupAtheist]

Just chiming in to say, this is pretty fun. I beat the 40 normal levels, unlocked 3 and beat them too, and aced 20.

[Slyfeind]

So like, Damijin succeeded in the fun, whereas industry giants spending tens of millions of dollars have failed?

I'm not disagreeing, just saying.

[eldaec]

So like, Damijin succeeded in the fun, whereas industry giants spending tens of millions of dollars have failed?

I'm not disagreeing, just saying.

To be just a little fair, even WAR and WoW are fun for a day or two.

[FatuousTwat]

Fun game, got through the 40 levels.

[craan]

I liked the game.  Nice to see an f13 presence on Kongregate.

Can you describe a little bit what you went through developing the game and tying it in with Kongregate?  I've been thinking about doing some Flash web game development myself but it'd be a one-man-in-a-garage type thing.


Edited:  Of course I see the Demon King thread after I posted this.  Dur.

[damijin]

I went through everything in the demon king thread, which was a lot of "I want to do something big and awesome and radtacular", the problem with which was that... Its tough to do that.

So, we we kind of ran into a wall, and rather than just throw it all away we were like "Lets do something small. Greg, remember that fireball effect? Lets do something with that."

I thought about the formula for Bloons for a second, and I guess at some point I decided you could essentially replicate Bloons, but with fireballs lighting torches instead of darts popping balloons. I wanted to do something more like pachinko though. More physics, lots of bouncing around. As I started designing levels, this idea largely got left behind, and it just became a more physics-oriented version of Bloons with fire. Initial feedback from people was "I want to burn more shit" so we invented crates.

The reason powerups are pretty sparse in the level design is mostly that they weren't coded until I had already made 25 levels or so, and I honestly had a tough time working out ways to use them. But I wanted them in there, even if they weren't used a ton. Just for what little variety they might add.

To talk more about actual development for a minute: There was no design document. Game concept was small enough not to warrant one. We just sort of went back and forth over MSN talking about how the game would work. Greg Soedharmo did most of the work. It was his effect, his code. He made a prototype that used movieclips in the Flash IDE to generate levels. he sent that to me, and I started replicating it and building more levels. I would send him FLAs every once in a while and he'd get them all implemented. We did about 6 weeks of development including 8-or-so days of beta testing, which just involved passing the game around, asking people to 'rank' the level difficulties, so that we could order them in a more logical progression. We did a 36 hour power crunch on December 22/23d to get the game out before everyone went on Christmas break, and we actually got that done which was awesome.

Tying it in with Kongregate wasn't really anything. I worked there. I instant messaged Greg McClahanahan from Kong on the 22nd with: "Hi, I want to sell you this. Im not going through FGL cause that shit will take forever. What do you want to offer me."

He replied with:

"I don't think this will do terribly well, but if I'm wrong, you'll make a lot of money. I'll give you a performance deal for 5 cents per click."

"Can I have badges?"

"If you get a 3.7 or better. 3.4 for front page when it comes out."

"$500 advance?"

"Sure."

So, it came out. It started with a ridiculously high score. 4.3 or something because my rather large network of friends were passing it around. Greg put it on the front page, it stayed above 4.00 for hours, slowly going down to about 3.7 over a few days. It then went off the front page for Christmas (two holiday games were put up, but they were both garbage), and Pyro was put back on the front page on the 26th. For whatever reason, the score raised from 3.7 to 3.75 over the next few days. I had a lot of supporters that had my back, including the guys who run Kongreguide.com. They were sending traffic directly to Pyro and encouraging high votes for me.

In any case, with 4,000+ ratings, and .05 margin to spare, I felt secure that I would get badges. I asked Greg, he told me that the sponsorship was doing well. I had already made about $660 in nickle-clicks, beating out my $500 advance and padding some profit on top of it.

Badges and a challenge were added Thursday night at midnight. Gameplays have just about quadrupled since then (earning over $1000 in ad revenue on Kong alone). Its been played well over a million times between Kong and the rest of the web. My clickthrough rate is about 5% which has earned me in the neighborhood of $1500 on the sponsorship. I sent my game out to various portals in an email including all sorts of details including a blurb that said "The game currently features MochiAds and Kongregate branding, if you would like to have these removed, please contact me about non-exclusive licensing."

I got 3 ping backs for non-exclusive license, 2 of which resulted in deals, netting me another $400. I won a Mochi contest for best game of the week for another $100, and raised $60 or so in donations. Its also garnered enough attention to earn me some cred in the flash circles, which I find to be more important than anything else. Well, more important than anything other than the cash anyhow. The cash is what we needed to keep developing, so fuckin' a.

Demon King is still dead on arrival though, cause I'm trying to avoid doing projects that involve anyone other than me and my programmer. Waiting on an artist can kill momentum, so when it's just us two working full time together, things go a lot better.

[tazelbain]

Since you are being all frank about this stuff: how long has this been/ close is this to becoming your day job?

[damijin]

Its been my day job since I left Kongregate in mid October. It makes a lot less than my day job did, but the goal is to use savings and the meager earnings to eventually surpass what I was making at my job over the course of the next year or two.

(And if you're interested, I'm 21 and my rent is $600 a month.)

[WindupAtheist]

I went through everything in the demon king thread, which was a lot of "I want to do something big and awesome and radtacular", the problem with which was that... Its tough to do that.

So, we we kind of ran into a wall, and rather than just throw it all away we were like "Lets do something small. Greg, remember that fireball effect? Lets do something with that."

If only a lot of developers everyone here can name had the sense to step back and make a small profitable success, rather than stick to their 'vision' for what turns out to be a giant grandiose trainwreck.

 

[damijin]

If you continue with the trainwreck metaphor, it was a lot easier to throw the brakes on our little 2-car locomotive, than it is to halt a 10 million dollar funded, 300 car freight train.

Being small is limiting, but the agility can't be compared to anything else. I mean, I know its trendy to hate on the triple A's for their fear of making mistakes (and the massive disasters that happen when they do), but I still think big budget games are awesome.

Im a cartoon fan. The cartoons of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s are some of the most amazing works of animation that will *ever* be made. They had big budgets, talented people, and were just amazing. They weren't feature films, they were 7 minute shorts that took months to produce.

If you took a look at Adult Swim lately, you'd see that todays trend is toward cheaper animation techniques (flash), and maximizing profits while maintaining very entertaining quality.

And yeah, the shows are entertaining. But they aren't art like a Popeye the Sailor meets Sinbad the Sailor or What's Opera Doc.

I think we need more emphasis on people who know what the fuck they are doing, before the people who don't turn the future of video games into the present of animation. Flash games are wonderful, but this is not all that should exist. Wii is not all that should exist. We should have monolithic games. We should have massive blockbusters that blow peoples minds, the amount of effort and money involved should be staggering.

But people seriously need to fucking learn what they are doing. I don't deserve a 10 million dollar budget. I dont know what I'm doing. Valve clearly does. Investors and publishers need to identify the difference between me and Valve, and stop giving money to the me's of the world until they become the valves of the world.

To all the me's: Small, agile, learn to not fucking suck at what you're doing before asking anyone for *anything*, or you'll ruin it for fucking everyone.

Edit: Also, old people, retire. You're straight fucking up. You know who you are!

Edit #2 because my rant was angry, and I'd like to make the thread less 

Here's some ultra cool f13 exclusive renders of our next project, which is as of yet, untitled.





They're not impressive renders by any means, Flash doesn't handle 3d well yet, and developers have used it in absolutely shitty ways so far. So, I figure someone should show people how to do it appropriately, eh? Gotta start somewhere!

[Slyfeind]

I think there's a lot of pseudo-Darwinian culling of the herd, with people trying to do big budget before they're ready, like you say. Still, there is that element of screwing it for everybody else.

I love how simpler "casual" games are making such a huge comeback. Now all we need are more flash-based RPGs, holy crap, Bard's Tale 4, 5, and 6 for flash, yesplz.

[Mrbloodworth]

Still hoping to hear from you.

[damijin]

Ack, forgot about that PM, sorry Bloodworth, I'll respond. Got a little busy with the release of Pyro.

Relatedly, AddictingGames just bought a non-exclusive license off me for $700. Drinks on me, cha ching motherfucker.

[schild]

Relatedly, AddictingGames just bought a non-exclusive license off me for $700. Drinks on me, cha ching motherfucker.

Grats!

[Sauced]

Wow - really glad this is working out so well for you.  And it sounds like you got yourself a little buffer for work on the next project, which is excellent.

[Krakrok]

Relatedly, AddictingGames just bought a non-exclusive license off me for $700. Drinks on me, cha ching motherfucker.

We haven't figured this part out yet as far as licensing games (unless they bought the source). $700 or a few second splash screen in front of the game for Kongregate. Hrmmm... So far we've opting for the slash screen.

[damijin]

You can actually do both. See, my sponsorship deal with Kongregate allows me to do what are called non-exclusive licenses. A non-exclusive license is basically stripping out the Kong branding (and in this case, AG is paying extra for us to strip out our developer credits and adverts), but the the AG branded version is LOCKED to addictinggames.com and wont work if people try to spread it elsewhere due to sitelocking code.

So, the idea here from Kong's perspective is: AddictingGames would not put the game up unless they have their own branding in it. So they have nothing to lose by allowing me to do this deal, and it makes me happier (and richer) to be able to do it, so they allow me to. Not all sponsors allow these sorts of deals, but its becoming more and more common place.

So yeah, you get to do a regular sponsorship *and* sell extra versions for extra dough.

[Krakrok]

Right. I'm looking at it from a buyer's perspective though. Why would I want to pay $700 for a non-exclusive site locked version when I have it for free with a Kong splash screen?

[damijin]

Most portals I've dealt with are weary of sending traffic to other sites, this is particularly true of AG. They get a lot of hits based on their name recognition and being an established force, but they know Kong is sticky as hell, and that if people click that link, they may leave and not come back. So in their estimation, buying the site locked version with their branding is worth the $700 for the potential to retain their userbase by denying them of the knowledge of an alternative portal. One that is arguably far more addicting than AddictingGames.

This is also the reason I got from the owner of Bubblebox.

[Yegolev]

That is a sound explanation and I find it to be true, although I can't remember which game it was that made me think so.  Probably Puzzle Quest, but whatever it was could be purchased for download and was also part of GameTap, which led me to call out my wife for buying it when we have a GameTap sub.  Or something like that.  Basically, small and cheap games are likely impulse buys rather than strongly-researched purchases.

[damijin]

Pyro just hit the top content slot on the second largest portal in the world, AddictingGames.com

The result has been a lot of resurgence in game plays on other portals. I was getting about 50k game plays per day for the first week, then it dropped down to about 30k, until today, which is already at 38k, with 5 hours still left in the day, so it looks like I'll be seeing 40k+ gameplays today thanks to the exposure on AG.

The AG hits aren't being calculated in that number. I have like 100k+ plays each day on AG alone so far.

Which means the game has been played something like 1.7m times total around the world.

[craan]

Start on Pyro 2, quick!  Or some additional levels.