Author: Sarah Northway

  • Pochote to Montezuma in four hours


    Rock shop beach
    Originally uploaded by apes_abroad.

    Looks like I forgot to record our epic stroll to Montezuma, although you may have seen the pictures on Flickr. We’d previously made it as far as the lone “Jesus” tree with Don before the tide cut us off, but on our second attempt we had the timing perfect. We started out after a hearty breakfast of gallo pinto and egg, and made the first hour along our beach before the sun was too high and hot. In Tambor we tried to recruit some guys who’d been keen on the idea at Neisy’s birthday party the day before, but they were all talk so it was just me and Colin, Don, Riley’s girlfriend Pauline and her friend Tom.

    From Tambor to the Jesus tree on the point is a nice shady stroll, then you head out over some rocks, then along a stunning white sand beach, then over some rocks and another beautiful empty beach. We were mostly following the old road, which used to be the only way to get from Tambor to Montezuma before they build the inland road. People still used it to get beach access for camping and picnics, although we met very few people on the trail. The sun rose and it got hot going over the rocky points and we were glad for the breeze and the cool shady bits.

    Don was usually out front setting the pace. I hung back a bit and chatted with Pauline and Tom in French, which was refreshing after all the trouble I’ve been having with Spanish. It got me and Colin to thinking of where we might go next that we could practice French and live on the beach – well why not French Polynesia? They seem to have been hit hard by the recession so we found a great deal on the island of Moorea just off Tahiti. The next time we saw Tom, Colin noticed he was wearing a Moorea t-shirt, because it turns out he grew up there! Coincidence, or subliminal messaging?? Anyway he has given us all kinds of hints, contacts, and a map of his favorite spots.

    About midway through our walk was a long stretch of black rock, and we were all getting pretty hot. Up ahead, we heard running water. It was the waterfall! We scrambled faster to get up to it, a perfect cascade of water coming over the cliffs that at high tide would plunge into the ocean. We sat under it for nearly ten minutes, cooling our faces under the torrent of clear cold water and filling up our bottles for the second half of the journey. Don carried no water; he just filled up like a camel before we left and he did so again here.

    After that we walked along the most interesting beaches: two of them had drifts of perfectly smooth stones in candy-like colors of red, yellow, blue, green. Another had piles and piles of perfect shells, mostly olive snails which I guess the hermit crabs have trouble getting into. We started to meet other people on the trail as we neared Montezuma. Some sort of bicycling event rode past us, thirty or more of them looking hot and exhausted, accompanied by cameras and water trucks. The sun had passed overhead and we were starting to flag, hungry and hot and stiff. We stopped at one last deliciously cool swimming hole and I could feel the heat radiating off me as I lay facedown in the water for as long as I could hold my breath.

    Just around the corner was our destination – Montezuma! We collapsed into chairs at a beachside sushi restaurant for the most delicious food I’d had in weeks (Colin reminds me that hunger is the best spice). Then we tottered around the little touristy beach town for a bit and caught the 2:something bus back to Pochote.

    Quel journeé!

  • La visita de mi familia


    Aunt Diane and the Falls
    Originally uploaded by apes_abroad.

    Last week was our long-awaited visit from the Mishkins! Colin’s aunt Diane and our cousins Ariel and Aaron came all the way from Nanaimo, BC to hang out with us in beautiful Costa Rica. Colin flew up to San Jose to meet them and help with the process of getting a car and navigating the four hour drive over to the Nicoya Penninsula and our house in Pochote. They stopped at a zoo near Alajuela and saw all sorts of rare local animals from ocelots to alligators. First order on arrival was a walk on the beach (the first of many) followed by roast chicken at Gabe’s place (also the first of many).

    For the last five weeks we’d been making do sans vehicle, bumming rides off our kind neighbors and walking to the Super Lapa Grocery at the other end of the bay. With the rental car we were eager to get out to see other towns and nearby reservas and refugios. We drove down to the cute surf town of Montezuma (which we’d previously seen at the end of our 4 hour beach hike) and checked out the waterfalls and Cabo Blanco reserve. Colin had a bit of a headache (understatement!) but he pulled through and we finally had our first encounter with the howler monkeys that we’d been hearing for the last 2 months. Sitting in trees, they look quite a lot like big black termite nests, but it’s easy to tell the difference once they start hooting. Later we walked up to a nice little swimming spot at the base of a waterfall. Colin and a local guide dove off high things together (the pool was small but 10m deep!), and I found a nice spot to sit right under the falls.

    We continued our daily routine of walking down to the river to skim and swim, now with Aaron on the skim board and Ariel with me in the water. Even Diane tried bodysurfing! We took them over to the Playa de los Muertos one day to go snorkeling. Crossing the estuary was a challenge at high tide, but Ariel works as a lifeguard and was able to swim across with our food above her head, not getting it even a drop wet. On the way back we met a family of howler monkeys on the hill and stopped to watch them crossing in the trees above. It was an amazing experience seeing them right here in Pochote and knowing that these are probably the same monkeys we hear every morning.

    On their last day we drove up to the Refugio Curu near Paquera. It’s a hotel as well as a wildlife park so I was prepared for tourists and plasticness, but there was none of that. We took the lovely low trail that goes from beach, through mangroves, across a rickety wooden suspension bridge, into the dry jungle for quite a ways, then through an overgrown mango plantation that has been left to the monkeys. We saw all sorts of wildlife: orange crabs licking their sand balls, lazy iguanas, skittish brown lizards with and without their tails, a huge inland hermit crab, a skunk, white-tailed deer (you’d think you were in Nanaimo!), snakes, “Jesus Christ – lizards!” (they run on water, and yes you have to pronounce it that way), howler monkeys, white faced capuchin monkeys, rehabilitating spider monkeys and a nasty goat that stunk of urine.

    I should explain the last few. They had a rehabilitation pen where spider monkeys that had previously been pets and were being prepared for release into the wild. One of them ran right to us when we arrived and stuck his arm through the bars. I held his hand and he gazed at me as if to say “I can’t take it in here – call my lawyer, you have to get me out of here!”. Then this horrible reeking goat (the prison guard, I think) chased the monkey off to the other end of the pen. The other monkeys just looked on in silence, fearing solitary should they step out of line.

    The best part though was the capuchin monkeys (as seen on Friends), which unfortunately only Colin and I got to see. A big family of 20 or so were hanging out in the mango trees chewing on fruit and bean pods and for some reason breaking off all the sticks (gardening?). There were little babies and bouncy teenagers and we abandoned the path to get as close as we could. Eventually one of the males got sick of our presence and went all monkey-aggro, baring his fangs at us with his butt all up in the air. I bravely snapped pictures until a second one picked up the stance then I booked it. Scary monkeys! Turns out they wanted us to back off so they could cross the road and head over to the other side of the river. One of them followed us and sat over our heads as guard, while the rest of them crossed through the trees with some amazing leaps (and some misses).

    They headed off to check out an active volcano before flying back to BC. I can’t believe it was over so fast! I had such a great time with the three of them. Cooking and making smoothies, swimming and kayaking and hiking and walking on the beach. We were so happy to finally be able to share our little corner of paradise.

  • Rebuild: selling a Flash game on FlashGameLicense

    FlashGameLicense is as far as I know the only Flash broker out there and is used by every Flash game sponsor, so it’s amazing that despite their monopoly they’re working so hard to improve it all the time. When I uploaded Rebuild I got great feedback from the FGL admins who play every game before it’s allowed up for bidding. They were really enthusiastic and helped personally through the bidding process, so I was happy to pay their 10% commission – they really do deserve it.

    FlashGameLicense sale data
    Most games on FGL sell for under $1000

    Of course, FGL doesn’t come through for everyone. The average winning bid for primary sponsorship is under $1000, usually for things like dressup or seasonal games that sponsors can easily judge the value of because they’ve seen them a thousand times before. Colin tried to find a sponsor for Fantastic Contraption through FGL, but the best he got was an offer of $300 for full ownership of the source (try 1,000 times that, asshole). This was three years ago and FGL has improved their content discovery tools, but it’s still hard for sponsors to know if a confusing, wordy game like Rebuild is going to be popular.

    I’m not at liberty to give you exact numbers (visit Andy Moore’s blog for that) but here’s how Rebuild’s bidding went on FGL. It started out with a bang, a higher-than-average-sale bid from a fellow developer looking to promote his Zombie-themed MMO by featuring it on other games’ loading screens. In my opinion a pretty cool way to simultaneously advertise and support other developers. Three other sponsors I’d never heard of joined in and by the end of the second day I’d made my minimum wage.

    Jay Is Games Review
    Launch day review on Jay is Games!

    Someone put a bid in for a sitelock, which is a secondary sale made after primary sponsorship. You create a version of your game locked to one domain, stripping out ads and primary sponsor logos and implementing the secondary sponsor’s high scores api. It was early, but they were letting me know they were interested no matter who won the primary bid. JayIsGames contacted me to say they wanted to review the game when it came out. This is my go-to site for casual games so I was pretty stoked! I got excited about how fast things were happening and pulled in some contacts to invite the other major sponsors to take a look.

    Then I heard nothing – no bids – for five days.

    At this point there were two highest bids for the same amount with different contract terms. One of them included ads and extra work, so I contacted that bidder and told them that I was favoring the other offer. Bidding sprang to life again! I still hadn’t seen hide nor hair of any big sponsors, but the guys who were bidding seemed to personally like my game and were willing to go above budget for it.

    From then on, every time bidding stalled I messaged the runner-up again to let them know that, although I really liked them and their bid was great, the other offer was a little better. I gave a specific dollar amount they’d have to put in to beat it. I think I would have missed out on a lot of bids if I hadn’t done this. We were well into the holidays at this point but I got bids even on Christmas day (a marvelous present!).

    Two Towers Games logo
    Zombie-themed splash screen for Rebuild

    Until then the offers had been for primary licenses with additional work requirements (apis, new features, etc which were increasing in complexity as the bids went up). Two Towers Games asked about switching to exclusive, which meant I wouldn’t be able to sell sitelock versions to other sponsors. Implementing sitelock apis seemed like effort I could be spending on my next game instead, so I agreed. Their winning bid went in 20 days after bidding started and sat for another week before I accepted it. Again, I can’t tell you how much it sold for, but I will say it brought me into the FGL top-sellers list.

    My sponsor Two Towers was new on the scene, and the exclusive license gave them more time and control over Rebuild’s release and traffic. I was a little dismayed to find I’d agreed to implement ads (this is standard in most licenses) but we agreed there’d be none in the Kongregate version which was what I really cared about. It took about a week to make all the necessary changes for launch.

    Ads in Spanish
    The only CPMStar ad in Central America

    Rebuild spent the first month live only on twotowersgames.com, then I uploaded versions to Kongregate and Newgrounds and it began to make its rounds on the internet. Two Towers devised a cunning system of dynamically showing content based on a call to their servers, which lets them control on the fly which sites see ads or bonus content. I was also able to sell a few sitelocks with their approval, so long as their branding stayed on.

    For reasons that I don’t fully understand, Rebuild shot to the top of the Kong rankings, won the weekly and monthly contests and after one month is still the #3 highest ranked game with 1.5M plays.

    I’ve gotten hundreds of emails and pms with suggestions for the sequel which I’m eager to get started on, but first I need to finish the game I started during bidding: Word Up Dog. I’ll try to post updates here on the progress of both games.

  • Rebuild: Tech-nomadic game development

    Rebuild game title screen
    I described it as Zombie Sim City, except no you don

    When I started Rebuild, I wanted something I could write, sell, and be done with. I wasn’t planning another Fantastic Contraption. I didn’t want to deal with servers and payment methods and message boards. I was looking for a sponsor, following the model my friend Andy Moore used to great success selling his game Steambirds to the highest bidder.

    I’d been rolling around the game idea for about a year. I’d originally conceived it as a multiplayer Facebook game where you could see your friends on the same map and trade resources with them. I was working for Three Rings who were doing some neat Facebook games and I had hope that the Facebook audience were maturing as gamers and would soon demand more sophisticated games. Or at least real games which involve some sort of decision making and aren’t just glorified slot machines.

    As you may have guessed, I became soured to Facebook games’ simplistic play and shady propagation methods. Also, although I think multiplayer is where the future (and money) is headed, it poses extra problems like server communication, synchronization and security. Too many hurdles for my first independent game! So I thrashed out a single player version over two days which was basically the entire game right there, finished. All it needed was a little polish. Or maybe six months of polish.

    I think it took me about 3 months full time to finish it, but spread across six months in which we travelled through Europe and Central America. Some places I got almost no work done (In Czech Republic we were too busy with friends, pilsner and pork knuckles). Our month in Malta was super productive since it was hot as frack and there was nothing to do. We always planned ahead to make sure we’d have a net connection in every country, and although some were more reliable than others we had few major problems. We met up with other indie developers, and I always had enthusiastic playtesting and idiot checks from my husband Colin, who was working on his own game at the time.

    Rebuild version 0.01
    Version 0.01 after a couple days of work

    I did the design, programming and art for Rebuild; everything but the music which I licensed through Shockwave Sound. I hummed and hawed about hiring an artist to help out but I was nervous of letting a stranger in to my project and had no idea how well the game was going to do. Instead I learned a lot about vectors and enjoyed being able to switch to something creative when I needed it. I learned I can still produce art and story text after two glasses of wine, even though it only takes two sips to totally wreck my programming skills. So the art took me longer than it should have, but Rebuild was ready for final testing by November.

    I’d posted earlier versions to Facebook and sent them to friends and relatives, but got little feedback except from a few diehard fans (including Colin). I sat down with a couple people and watched them play, but I find the process nerve-wracking and I always end up explaining things rather than quietly observing, because I’m afraid that they’ll get confused and frustrated.

    FlashGameLicense has a system called First Impressions where you can get strangers to play your game and give feedback for $1 a pop. Unbiased strangers playing my game! I ordered 10 and sat refreshing the page until my first review came in:

    User: ExamineDeepish
    Played for: 7 minutes
    Ease of Use: 3/10 – the game really make little sense
    Fun: 1/10 – waste of time
    Graphics: 5/10 – nothing to shout about
    Sound: 5/10 – the sound is cool
    Polish: 3/10 – the game needs some work
    Parting Thoughts: The games should be more interactive of a real game. People don’t want to read so much for a game they just want to play and get on with the fun.

    Rebuild 1.0
    After six more months of part time work.Too many words??

    A fun rating of one?? People don’t want to read so much?? There was no way I was going to make minimum wage (my humble goal) with this game. I knew it was a good game, Colin knew it was a good game, but if your average Flash player downvotes anything with words in it, no sponsor was going to touch it. The second review gave it an even lower score, so I slunk to bed dejected.

    The next afternoon I grit my teeth and checked the reviews again, and was delighted to find some of the new reviews praised the game, giving it 9s and 10s and speaking in full punctuated sentences. They managed to drag the overall rating up to a 7/10 with Ease of Use being the worst category. Two reviewers got lost and had no idea how to play, so I spent another day tweaking the tutorial before I made the game visible to other FGL users then started bidding in early December.

    Next time I’ll talk about FlashGameLicense and the bidding process.

  • Pura Vida


    Tap Dancing Horse! a video by apes_abroad on Flickr.

    Out at Gabe’s bar again, where we ended up for drinks after dinner. We finish our last beer on the beach under the new moon sky so filled with unnamable constillations. Colin’s been bugging Jose to have a game of pool since Thursday, but there are always too many dishes. Finally they’re into their second game, so I leave them to it. Wander back tipsy through the sand and baby palms, ducking under the clothesline and stepping carefully over the ageing barbed wire fence into our yard. Our beachfront yard in Pochote, Costa Rica. Taking the secret backup key from its hiding place and penetrating the hexagonal wooden capsule, our little shiplike home. Nuking some leftover Gallo Pinto, setting the aircon to stun and settling down to my laptop on the dining table.

    </wierd present tense>

    I was just saying to Colin today: Colin, life is good. We were floating out in the water near the little stream where the skimboarding is usually good. Today we went out at high tide and the waves were good instead, so Colin left his board to go bodysurfing instead. He’s quite good at it, and when he gets it just right you will see him coming towards the shore like a disembodied head in the middle of a rolling white wave, grinning ear to ear. We collected shells and looked for Mary’s beans on the walk back.

    It was our usual break to a day spent hard at work, as we have been for the last month. A writer’s retreat, Colin likes to call it. There’s not much to do here and we are both so excited about our games that we’d rather work on them than do just about anything (though we make time for swimming!). Tomorrow I’m sending Word Dog off to FGL for strangers to poke and prod and give me their first impressions. Today Colin sent Flora & Fauna (short for Flora & Fauna on the Isle of Ajav, his new working title) to a few people for personal review. He weighs those reviews so highly! If I had done that for Rebuild I never would have finished it, and it just won the Kongregate monthly contest and is their #3 ranked game – hah!

    Colin spent the last 2 days doing art for Flora, which has taken the style of a mid-1800s botanical text. It’s really quite beautiful what he’s done with it and his artistic strength seems to lie in his willingness to try crazy things, like bending the entire play screen as if it was folding into the center of a book. It really looks great and the gameplay is super fun, kind of like Contraption but with more organic kinds of creations.

    I whussed out again and did the art for Word Dog myself rather than getting an artist, but it was much less work than Rebuild and I did most of the character stuff in one afternoon. The gui and tiles are… well they’re good enough for now. I actually spent forever on the logo trying to get it to look like the spraypaint title to Wild Style, but I am just not that cool. I picked music for it yesterday which consisted of me listening to every song in shockwave-sound‘s “hip hop” category and eventually picking the cutest, least hip-hoppy song in there. I got some excellent feedback from friends and family this week and I think the tutorial is pretty solid. Today I fiddled with dog barking sfx and drew a pretty halfassed dynamite explosion. Totally nearing completion!

    Next up for me is a tossup between doing the iOS version of Word Dog myself (I’ve been meaning to learn) or jumping in to Rebuild 2. I haven’t decided if I want to make that sequel 1) a straight flash game, 2) a multiplayer facebook game, or 3) some flash demo/content pack thing. I guess I could add 4) full downloadable game in there because so many people have suggested it but the scale of such things is intimidating. Just hiring an artist to do some animations has me fretting but I’m going to have to bite the bullet this time. I just don’t trust other people to work hard and come through on things and I don’t want to end up in a relationship I regret.

    But anyway, it looks like I’m going to make my deadline of getting Word Dog done by the end of Costa Rica. The Mishkins are coming to visit about a week from now and we’ll have a nice break from our writers retreat to do some of the fun local things we’ve been planning. I’m determined to see monkies in one of the parks nearby and go snorkeling at the popular Isla Tortuga.

    Oh I nearly forgot to mention, one fun local thing we did do already was go to the annual Rodeo in Cobano. The bull riding was pretty wild, because they let spectators down into the ring where they run around drunk trying to get the bulls to chase them. This is after the riders dismount of course, when they send out guys on horseback to lasso the bulls. I was a bit disappointed nobody got gored (Colin was horrified at this remark, to which I replied, “just a little gored!”) but some of the rides were pretty amazing and looked scary as hell. Those bulls really can jump. The pupusas and churros were yum and we got to practice bad Spanish (and at the same time, bad English) in a bar playing salsa music and spanish rap. A Good Time Was Had By All, or as they say here, Pura Vida.