Author: Sarah Northway

  • 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.

  • Wild Things


    Monty
    Originally uploaded by apes_abroad.

    Today was a very doggy day. As soon as I opened ‘the wall’: our front doors which make up a full 1/6th of our hexagon shaped house, our neighbor Larry’s dogs came over to greet us. Nearly as soon as they left, a trio of dogs I’d never seen before took over the deck. One of the females looked suspiciously similar to the puppies we’ve seen hanging out at the bar. They were probably strays although it’s hard to know here, and they were friendly and healthy and content to lie at our feet in the morning sun. Larry and I hatched a plan to adopt one of them while we’re here and get her spayed before we go.

    Later in the afternoon the half owned, half stray pack from the next cove over crossed the river and caused a ruckus with the local dogs. We only worry if they go after the iguanas, who are cat sized dinosaurs with a tendency to fall off the roof and surprise us. The biggest, which Colin nicknamed ‘Monty’ (pictured here), comes out to bathe himself in the sprinklers at midday while all the dogs are sleeping.

    We haven’t seen a howler monkey yet but today we found tracks by a stream, and of course we can hear them in the hills every morning and evening – I can hear them now like the roar of distant lions. One morning we had scarlet macaws in our yard pulling huge bean pods out of the trees. They used to be common here but disappeared in the 80’s during a time of local development. They’re coming back now with the help of a raise and release program in Tambor.

    This place is a birder’s paradise, but so far I’ve only identified the macaws and the long tailed grackle which is basically a crow with an expanded vocabulary. There are lots of green parrots and yellow birds with squawky voices, hummingbirds and seabirds. The pelicans are fascinating, how they so clumsily dive into the water and bob up, then float about for a minute trying to swallow their fish.

    Yesterday we watched people come to take the coconuts from our neighbor’s yard. One guy climbed up barefoot then a machete was passed up to him on a rope. He tied ropes to big bunches and they lowered them down slowly so they wouldn’t crack. Huge fronds were sent crashing down with a well aimed chop from the machete and a shout of either warning or joy, I wasn’t sure. In the end they had too many coconuts to take away so Colin grabbed some, borrowed a machete and started practicing his coconut opening techniques.

    Sometimes, in the middle of the day or night, a coconut will fall off one of our trees and land with a loud and recognizable thud. We hurry out to see if it is a tasty liquid filled brown one, or one of the sad aborted green ones which usually split on impact. I know they’re not great for you but the allure of eating something from our own yard is pretty strong.

  • Stunning successes and stunning sunsets


    Sunny and Happy
    Originally uploaded by apes_abroad.

    My game Rebuild went up on Kongregate, Newgrounds and the general public last weekend, and rocketed to the top of the charts. I expected a decent turnout since there aren’t a lot of Flash games like it, but I’m genuinely surprised at the number of people who have stayed up all night playing it, trying to get all four endings in one day. They aren’t turned off by all the reading either, which was my biggest fear. So many players are posting their suggestions for a sequel that I guess I’ll have to make one after I finish my next game. I have a suspicion Word Up Dog is going to disappoint my fans, having no zombies or visceral stories of life after the apocalypse. I suppose it could be post-apocalyptic, in some future where mutated animals find a collection of early 90’s hiphop albums and base their culture on them.

    It’s going to be great.

    Pochote’s been treating us very well this last week. We’ve made friends with our neighbours Larry and Angie and their three dogs. We took a trip with them to the next cove over and spent a beautiful day on the secluded little beach, swimming and exploring and getting rather too much sun as usual. Larry’s been in the area for several years and has lots of advice for other fun things to do nearby.

    Our neighbour on the other side is actually a sleepy little bar/restaurant run by expat Canadians. We head over there every second night to watch the sunset and have some fabulous roasted chicken from their big clay ovens. They just opened it a few months ago and so far it has a very quiet and chill atmosphere, lots of families and some nights with nobody there but us.

    On the same property the owners also run the free Harmony Music School for local kids, which they started out of their own pockets but the government has finally recognized and begun to fund. They are part of a volunteer program where people come to teach in exchange for accomodation. Pochote is a very small fishing village with few extracurricular activities for kids besides “futball”, so this school is a big deal for the area and is making a real impact. A number of their students have gone on to play for the national symphony orchestra.

    A couple days ago we walked with Don (a founder of the music school) all the way down the beach, past Tambor and another fishing village out to a place called the Jesus Tree. This was a spectacular little beach with one lone tree inexplicably growing out of the rocks in the ocean where no tree should be. High tide stopped us from going farther, but Don regularly walks all the way to Montezuma along this coastal path, about a 5 hour walk. And he does it without bringing water; just shorts and flipflops and an early morning start.

    I’m getting opportunities to practice my clumsy Spanish and to cook with unusual ingredients, and we are both working hard. During our daily beach walks and dips in the ocean we talk about game design. At 5:30 we take in the sunset on a beach log or at the (still nameless) bar next door. We rise and sleep with the sun here, it just seems to make sense that way.