Tag: Fantastic Contraption

  • Hey Guys

    This is from a series of posts I wrote about Fantastic Contraption when I originally released it. They were originally published on our travelogue but I have back dated them and moved them over here where they fit in more.

    This is a post I wrote on the Fantastic Contraption forums. Someone (OfficiallyHaphazard) asked me a few questions and I ended up writing a whole thing.

    It was an attepmt to sum up this particular life-altering experience.

    The original thread is here: http://fantasticcontraption.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1212&st=0&sk=t&sd=a

    Hey guys.

    Sorry I don’t post much. Sorry I don’t get more bug fixes out.

    This has been an incredibly overwhelming experience for me. Weasel’s bang on in all his answers. But I can offer my perspective. Come with me on a trip down memory lane.

    Imagine yourself a corporate web developer. You are a .Net and SQL server ninja. You hate microsoft but accident and the world have made you really good with their web-dev suite. Which is not an easy thing to be good at.

    So, my young ninja, you decide to move to San Francisco after taking a year traveling in asia. You end up in a job really quickly. There is a ton of work in this city. The job looked really good on the packaging. But after you sit down and start taking on projects you realise most of your day is going to be hacking asp and tweaking existing sites. “can we add another item to that dropdown?”. And every time you drop a wicked prototype for a database-enabled flash front-end on them they look at you like you just dropped a turd on their desk.

    Seven months pass. You are a thoroubread greyhound (who can’t spell) forced to jog beside a fat owner. You are the bazooka swatting flies. You are bored out of your gord. You listen to the entire back-log of “this american life”.

    But then you get this idea. Out of the blue, an idea. A game. Kind of like Armadillo Run, kind of like the Increible Machine. But with a twist. Instead of making an environment that the armadillo moves through, you make an armadillo that moves through the environment. You’re pretty sure this is a good idea. You run it past a few friends who’s opinions you respect (weasel) and they also think it’s a good idea.

    So, what the hell, you’ve got alot of creative energy left at the end of the day. Pretty soon every spare waking hour is writing code and learning flash. No weekends for four months. Hoping to get sick so you can stay home and write code.

    Ideas are considered and rejected, flash is puzzled over and solved, bugs come and go. A game begins to take shape.
    Eventually menus and graphics are made, everything ends up actually working pretty well. And your family and friends doing the beta-testing are hooked.

    Time to put it out into the world. Forget ads. Ads suck. And forget selling it to a portal. You made it, you’re going to host it. So try charging a few bucks for the level editor and mabey it will buy us all a round at the pub.

    And up it goes. You bootleg some bandwidth off of a friend for 10$ a month. Announcing this momentus event are two blog-posts. One on your travel log that gets zero traffic, and one on weasel’s bloggy web-space-thing. That gets alot more traffic than yours but not a ton.

    A few days pass. Life goes on as expected. The game gets a few small blog posts. A small gaming site links to it and the users rate it pretty well on that site. Then, one fateful sunday, you come home to 20,000 users on the server.

    Stumble-Upon has found you and likes what it sees. From then on it’s a roller-coaster ride to over 1 million views in the second month of release (august). This rollercoaster is punctuated by constant server meltdowns. A steady stream of server upgrades and massive database changes are the only thing keeping the hungry behemoth at bay. Even with all your best efforts the servers still spend the better part of some days offline and when they are up it takes 3 minutes to save. People start writing you emails: ‘how much money do you want to put it on our portal?’, ‘how much to make an iphone version?’, “we’re discussing the possibility of a DS version of your game internally. Are you interested?”. Pretty heady stuff. And you’re getting these emails while trying to write asp code at the day-job.

    So the day job has to go. The game is making more money than your day-job is at this point anyway (thank you everyone, and a bunch of it gets kicked back to almost everyone in the credits page).

    The last day of real in-the-office work is August 8th. Just under a month from the day of release. Not that now your life is easy. This is in the middle of the server meltdowns. But eventually you switch hosts, become a reasonably skilled DBA, and things start running smooth.

    But behind the maelstrom crazy things are happening. People are playing the game hard. They are doing amazing things, mind-blowing things. You have now gotten your head around 1 million page views in terms of server resources. But not in terms of actual people playing the game. And mabey that’s a good thing. Mabey you’ll pay a good friend to get his head around it instead. Mabey if you spent too long on the forums or too long flipping through levels and solutions your life will be paralyzed by the idea that _millions_ of people are playing, loving, and hating, your game.

    Can you really imagine what that means? Millions of people? I can’t.

    I know when I went to PAX the Wizards of the Coast guys treated me like a rock-star. I know people at Blizzard play my game. Gaming heroes know Fantastic Contraption.

    And all of it leaves me just stunned.

    It’s hard to think about Fantastic Contraption now. About the things that need improving. I probably won’t be spending alot of time on it. It is wildly succesful as it is. There are things that could be much better. But I might leave those for Fantastic Contraption 2. Or some totaly different game. I can let my imagination go wild and play with game ideas _full time_ now.

    Interesting times though. Even if I don’t spend a ton of time on the game from now on it looks you guys might get the game that you deserve anyway. The polished game with a good level browser and graphics that took more than two weekends to knock out. I don’t want to jinx it but there could be some very exciting news in the future indeed.

  • Administration

    This is from a series of posts I wrote about Fantastic Contraption when I originally released it. They were originally published on our travelogue but I have back dated them and moved them over here where they fit in more.

    More in the series of articles about writing Fantastic Contraption.

    With some measure of success comes some measure of administrative problems. The game is up and everyone loves it and all the press is good and the world is generally being my oyster. So that’s awesome.

    But remember how I made this game in my free time? And how that is limited? Well development has dropped off to a slow trickle. Because all that free time I used to use to write code I now use to wrangle servers and write emails and put out fires.

    Turns out having a massively popular flash game with login accounts, saved contraptions, a thriving board and a pay version generates alot of random little tasks.

    Luckily Travis Stone is taking care of the hosting problems. So when the database went down today and when the hosting company is dragging its feet over upgrades he takes the brunt.

    But when that happens there are also a bunch of PayPal payments that fail. Well, the payments don’t fail. I get the money. But the user is obviously never registered as paid. So I have to go correct all of those manually and write sorry notes to people if they’ve been waiting for a while.

    Also it turns out there are just a ton of ways to buy things with PayPal. And I don’t support all of them as gracefully as I should. And my PayPal code is in PHP and I kind of hate PHP and don’t know it very well. So there is alot of trialing and erroring while I try to get all of that working.

    And then there are the wonder-mails. The random emails of wonderous or possibly wonderous offers or events. Like job offers and offers to do things with the game and the like. Some of those are just awesome (thanks Pez for hosting the music for us!) but alot of them require negotiation and carefully worded replies. Which sucks up more time.

    I think I spend more time replying to board posts about future development than I spend actually doing development.

    But things are just going so peachy-well it’s impossible to complain. I’m not bitching, I’m merely cataloging. So the next guy knows what to expect.

  • User Studies

    This is from a series of posts I wrote about Fantastic Contraption when I originally released it. They were originally published on our travelogue but I have back dated them and moved them over here where they fit in more.

    More in the series of articles about writing the physics puzzle game Fantastic Contraption.

    Today: usability. Or specifically: teaching people how to play your game.

    Some of is going to make specific references to the game so you should go try out the game first. Be cool, it’s free, you can be your own little user-study.

    Fantastic Contraption launched with a fairly simple tutorial system (as of the time of this writing is still has it). I basically just came up with it out of thin air. I guessed what people would need to know, what they would be confused by, and what they would figure out on their own. So I tried the make-it-up-as-you-go-along school of thought.

    I took a usability class in university from one of my favorite profs Dr. Tzanetakis. And his mantra was ‘user testing’. The idea was that all the theory in the world falls down and you won’t know what is working and what isn’t without putting a user in front of your UI.

    So I finally did some belated user testing (this is after the StumbleUpon traffic bomb). And I made some interesting discoveries.

    For people who think like me the existing tutorial is great. Gamers tend to get it. It takes a little time to figure out the draw when stopped, hit go and you can’t touch it thing. And they try to drag and drop instead of draw. But mostly they clip through the tutorials and rock straight on through to Up The Stairs.

    But I have left non-gamers in the dust. In the dust, choking on it, wondering why I hate them so much.

    Just some of the things non-gamers are not taught well enough by the existing tutorial:

    -draw not drag and drop (this is universal)
    -have to draw inside the blue square
    -you have to get the pink thing to the pink goal to win (despite pounding them over the head with it)
    -you can’t draw when the simulation is running (the red reminder arrow goes completely unnoticed)
    -your contraption can’t overlap terrain
    -the basic principles of construction

    I’m going to write a bit more on that last one: The basic principles of construction.

    There is one tower of UI failure that towers mightily over all others. It may be the only thing that you need to truly understand in order to play Fantastic Contraption:

    You must attach the rod to the centre of the wheel to make it spin. That little bit that is equidistant from all the other bits. The focus, the key, that of overriding importance. The Middle.

    And I am a total fail on that front. I have one concession to teaching this truism in the current tutorial. There is an example contraption in the 2nd level that is a clockwise and a non clockwise wheel connected with a stick between their centers. But people don’t even get that this is an example contraption. And sometimes they do but then they start trying to replace the goal wheel with a non-spinning wheel.

    Most often people put a rod between the two closest points of the wheels. Unfortunately this pretty much ends their gaming experience. They have now totally broken the contraption. They will have to find the delete tool if they are ever going to finish the level. So the thing non-gamers do most often also ensures that they will never play the game again. That is what UI experts call “bad”.

    And oddly enough I never even considered it. It wasn’t before I did some good old fashioned user testing that I discovered I was turning away a huge percentage of my traffic angry and sullen, probably feeling stupid.

    So now it’s time for quest redesign-the-tutorial. The tutorial is going to get very constraining and guided. It’s going to be alot of work, and it’s going to annoy the gamers (hopefully skip buttons will keep them happy). But something needs to change pretty drastically.

    So there you go. More evidence that Dr. Tzanetakis’ mantra is completely correct.

    Do User Testing. You don’t know what’s going on until you Do Some User Testing.

    real quick: The user testing methodolgy I’m using is getting a co-worker, friend, neighbor, or friend of a friend to play the game. Then I reasure them that they aren’t an idiot and any failure is a failure on my part not theirs (this is important so they don’t get all nervous and freak out when things start going wrong). Then I just watch them, and don’t answer any questions. Let them fail and recover on their own. You won’t be there every time someone tries to play your game. I very occasionally prod them about what they are thinking. I’d do voiced-thought style studies but already have trouble getting people to participate.

  • Why am I Doing This?

    This is from a series of posts I wrote about Fantastic Contraption when I originally released it. They were originally published on our travelogue but I have back dated them and moved them over here where they fit in more.

    So I have been ruminating on this really weird question. Why am I writing/hosting/keeping up this game?

    It’s a weird question because I totally love it. I loved writing it (mostly) and I love that people play it. And I’ve gotten all these great compliments which I love. Some favorite quotes: “I play a lot of online games and this is the best one I have ever played” (in this case online means flash), and “this might be the perfect game”. These aren’t even things people have said to me. They are reviews and comments on random blogs.

    I love everything about it. But damn it it’s exhausting. Sarah accused me of acting bi-polar today because I’ll be all up and happy and then alternately down and doomfull. It’s not the work. The only real work I’ve done has been hanging out on the forums and doing a few bug fixes. It’s the just the mental energy of having this amazing thing in the world that people seem to love.

    It’s like I have a duty to think about it constantly. Like I am morally obligated to make it more and more popular. Like it is wrong to just sit on my hands and see what happens. I should be doing user studies and improving the hits to player conversion. I should be pimping it on flash sites and making deals with portals. I should write embedable solutions to leverage the power of social networking sites. gah, so much to do. The list is literally endless.

    Every time I manage to calm down for a minute something awesome happens. Like people have started buying the game. Not in droves but enough that we’ll have some scratch to spread around to the various people who made this possible. And every time I get a little email pop-up saying someone else has bought it it’s like a tiny injection of heroin.

    I mean I’m a professional programmer so the idea of being paid to write code is not novel. But being so close to the spigot is kind of like staring into the sun. That little pop-up just meant some stranger, that I have never met, decided something I made was worth actual money.

    It’s an experience I’ve never had before and I’m just not sure how to handle it. It’s like I can feel the game changing my future but I can’t tell in what way it’s changing. Will I end up in flash development? Corporate website flash? Game flash? Will it change nothing? I do know I like it. I guess I’ll just stay strapped to the roller-coaster and see where it’s going.

  • Traffic

    This is from a series of posts I wrote about Fantastic Contraption when I originally released it. They were originally published on our travelogue but I have back dated them and moved them over here where they fit in more.

    Just a quick post to keep everyone who’s interested in the game updated on what’s goin on.

    Crazyness is going on.

    StumbledUpon.com stumbled upon the game on friday to the tune of 3000 hits. Which got me some more blog links. Then, sometime while I was out of the house sturday, StumbleUpon came back with a vengence and funneled 20,000 people into the game. Which was a shock. The last three days have all seen an order of magnitude increase in traffic. That’s three orders of magnitude in three days and five orders of magnitude in the six days since we went up.

    It’s been up for only 6 days! So here’s something interesting. The path to 20,000 hits:

    Day 1&2:

    First Andy put a post up on his blog, v-log, magazine.
    Our first piece of non-friend press was a mostly plagerized post on a small Puzzle Blog

    At this point I was getting 10s of visitors a day.

    Day 3&4

    Then a flash games site, Coin Castle, put up a link with a screen-shot.

    This jumped the traffic up to 300 hits a day.

    Day 5

    Flash Game Blogs, another flash games site, posted a short review. It was positive but lamented the 10$ price for getting the full game. Which jumped the traffic up again. This also led to a brief StumbleUpon burst of 3000 hits.

    Day 6

    I left the house and all was well, we were on pace to break the 3000 barrier. Mostly with the flash games site traffic (a few more sites have linked us).

    When I got home around 10pm I found that StumbleUpon had come back and packed the server to the brim. Which was great. But it also kind of destroyed the server. People were still playing but server requests, like saving and loading levels, were slow and spotty.

    Something like 400% of the bandwidth is Jame’s great music. So I had to take out the 7meg main-loop and replace it with the short 600k menu-loop. Which was an order of magnitued decrease in bandwidth usage. And allayed the responsivness problems.

    Amazon runs a sort of data-warehouse. Their calculator recons the music was going to cost 500$ a month to host. They aren’t the cheapest around but if anyone knows a cheap place to store a few terrabyres of upstream traffic a month let me know (note that those ‘unlimited bandwidth’ plans are bs).

    So I have no idea what’s next. I mean we’re on day seven of the ‘soft launch’ and have 6 thousand hits by 10am. Mostly from StumbleUpon. I don’t know if the StumbleUpon traffic is going to peter out or ramp up again. God help us if we get dugg or something.

    I will say that we are far from making a fortune off of this traffic. We couldn’t pay any significant hosting bills with the money comming in (although there have been a few purchases).

    So, my ass is strapped to this roller-coaster. I guess we’ll see what happens.