Porter's World

Awhile back I took on a little bet with Ben Lowry, fellow game developer and founder of Playtomic. The name of the game I created for that bet was titled Pixel Purge. It’s come a long way since that time, and has turned into a rather successful flash game. Although the earnings for the game weren’t nearly what I was hoping for, I did learn more in the few months developing /selling it than I have with any other project to date. I’ll now do a break down of how I thought of the game, my expectations, what worked, what didn’t, earnings, and more.

ORIGINAL PLANNING

The idea came to me where nearly all good game ideas come to me, sitting in the mall eating Taco Bell. It was nothing completely original, in fact, I simply wanted to create a better version of a flash game I had dumped a few hours into myself. That game was Cell Warfare. Cell Warfare itself isn’t ground-breaking in any possible way, but it was at the time (in my opinion) the best arena shooter flash games had to offer. The first thing I did was play the game for a good hour or so, to get a feel of what worked and what didn’t. Here’s a short list of flaws with Cell Warfare, as found in my original GDD (Game Design Document) for Pixel Purge.

• The camera system in Cell Warfare was annoying. You moved closer to the edge of the screen at all times, not just when you reach the end of the arena. This feels cramped, and made the distance between the player and off-screen enemies unfair at times.
• The collision detection in Cell Warfare is horrid. The ink splotches in particular are nearly game-ruining.
• I found the yellow quick chasing enemies to be too fast. My deaths by them felt more cheap than my fault.
• Some of the achievements were just silly/annoying. Dying from each type of enemy is not an achievement, it’s failure.
• The game suffers extreme lag on older machines/laptops. Many people reported getting the impossible badge on Kongregate due to the slow down and their ability to navigate better while it lagged.
• The controls in Cell Warfare felt slightly loose. They weren’t that bad, but they weren’t spot on.
• At later levels in the game, some of the enemies have nearly impossible to see contrast with the background. This was reported by many users in reviews, and I noticed it myself when dying from an enemy I couldn’t see.
• The music didn’t loop too well.

That may seem like a big list, but I’m just being critical. Cell Warfare itself is a great game. It was made awhile ago, and has had a huge success on the web. That being said, the above were huge flaws. I wanted to create an arena shooter that addressed all those issues, and added to the core mechanic. Another game I looked at that was popular in the genre, was Amorphous+. While I’m not as big a fan of Amorphous as I am Cell Warfare, I did recognize it’s success as an arena game. The one thing I found interesting about Amorphous + was it’s inclusion of a Bestiary. Despite a ton of mockery from fellow game developers at the fact that I put in a bestiary for only 10 enemies, it was actually very well received in the wild and I’m sure it gave it a slight boost in ratings. The last game I found inspiration from, was Vector Effect. I had previously enjoyed playing Vector Effect for a long while, but felt it was a bit more on the Geometry Wars side of gameplay, which was not what I was going for. I did however like the upgrade system, and that heavily influenced my decision making when thinking of how to do my own. Aside from finding flaws with the above games by tearing them apart, I also took note of what specifically worked, such as the bestiary. Here’s a list of what worked in Cell Warfare as found in my original GDD.

• Easy to jump in and play.
• Clean menus.
• Addictive arcade feel.
• Achievements
• Increased power based on achievements unlocked.
• A sense of power is given to the player with every kill via screen shake, sounds, and animation.

There were other positive features about Cell Warfare and Amorphous +, but to me, those were the highlights. Lastly, I had to determine what additions I would add to the game. Here’s the list of additions as found in my original GDD.

• Add a combo counter to increase the sense of power for the player.
• Add the combo system into the scoring mechanic.
• Add a more advanced bestiary with back-story, stats, images, and unlockable data.
• Detailed data presented in game on total kills, deaths, shots fired, and other stats.
• Tighter controls.

In the end, not everything on these lists was included in the design of Pixel Purge, but all major issues were fixed, and most additions found their way in. Some additions were left out due to the growing size of the game, my interest in a sequel, and my lack of knowledge on exactly how well the game would be received. All in all, I think I picked a perfect place to cap what was going in, and what wasn’t.

EXPECTATIONS

My expectations for Pixel Purge were fairly high, but nothing outrageous. I had seen the success of similar flash games, read the reviews, old and new, and I knew that there was plenty of room for improvement, even among the best of the genre thus far. I knew that Cell Warfare had a solid 3.9x / 5.00 on Kongregate, a very high 4.1x / 5.00 on Newgrounds, and a solid 8.0 / 10 on ArmorGames. I figured with my addition, and the fact that the bar in quality had been raised since those games were created, that I had a fair chance at surpassing the scores on all sites by just a bit. As far as sponsorship earnings were concerned, I was looking to bring in about $5,000 with a primary sponsorship, and bring in another $1,000, – $3,000 in licenses and revenue. As far as viral spread went, I assumed that it’s high scores and views would correlate, I was wrong.

As the flash game market becomes harder and harder to stand out in, so does the reality of my financial expectations. To help pitch my game on FGL, I did up my first ever trailer. I’m not entirely sure how helpful it was for sales, but I’m decently sure it did indeed help. Either way, I learned my way around basic video editing, and it came out pretty well.

RECEPTION

As I had originally anticipated, the game was a rather large success (on some grounds, but not all, more on that soon). The game was originally released with a seven day exclusivity to ArmorGames, and had an 8.2 or so. Reviews were great, bugs were reported, and fixes were in place as soon as possible, all was well. We made a substantial number of improvements to the game during this seven day exclusivity, and this resulted in an even more solid product during the viral release. The score on Newgrounds upon launch was as predicted, in the 4.2x region. This won it a daily 1st place award, as well an an unexpected weekly 5th place award. On Kongregate it pulled out of judgement with a strong 4.2x as well, but when scaled, this was a much more successful score than on Newgrounds. All in all, it’s initial release was a huge success.

As weeks passed, the game continued to live strong. We had launched with medals on Newgrounds, and were then given four badges on Kongregate. We also got a very accurate, and mostly positive review from JayIsGames. Youtube videos of people playing, hacking, and reviewing the game were also popping up, which is always fun to see. We got a ton of PM’s from users on sites saying they loved the game, wanted a sequel, and many even listed suggestions. After about 3 weeks in the wild, we’ve hit a little over 1 million views and 1.7 million plays. Views are how many times the game is loaded, plays are how many times people actually jump into a game. For more stats on that, you can view the public reports. The scores as of writing this are finally starting to set in stone, and are as follows. Newgrounds is sitting on a very high 4.45 / 5.00 rating, with a review score of 9.5 / 10 with over 350 reviews. Kongregate has a very solid 4.14 / 5.00, a very respectable score. ArmorGames has the game sitting on a very high 8.3 / 10, nothing record shattering, but definitely way above average. All in all, the scores are excellent, the reviews make me proud of what I do, and the game is loved by most who play it.

WHAT WORKED

As we’ve seen, the game is a pretty huge success in the eyes of the players. So what exactly made it work? Well, if you go back to the beginning of this post, you’ll see most of the answer. All the fixes that were noted from other games, and all the features added are what makes this game tick. Most importantly, the game is easy to jump into and play. The menus are neat, the controls are simple, and there really isn’t much that can confuse even the slowest of people on the internet. You may be thinking that the gameplay and graphics are the core factor in this game’s success, but I assure you having simplistic controls and making the game accessible is just as, if not more important than anything else.

Next we have the genre. From my research, I found that action games that stayed simplistic did incredibly well. Cell Warfare and Amorphous+ were tried and proven examples. I knew this was more than coincidence, it was factual. I stayed true in design to these games, and as anticipated, it worked. The game was very action-packed, had large enemies, and great explosions. I’ve seen some pretty horrible games add the above and be relatively successful because of it. Add those features to a good game, and you get success.

Lastly, this game has enormous amounts of polish. Most people glancing at the game don’t even notice the sheer amount of detail in the game, but I assure you it’s there. Here’s a small list of polish that helps this game stand above the rest in the crowd.

• The thunder and lightening effect adds huge ambiance.
• Silhouetted enemies in the background add great detail (watch closely when lightening flashes).
• Intro story with pictures, text, and voice acting.
• Particle effects on the main menu buttons when hovering add a sense of high production value.
• Parallax scrolling gives the game world more depth, making the player feel more immersed.
• Explosion effects are randomly generated and not a single animation.
• The large blue particle effect ring when leveling up adds a sense of accomplishment to the player.
• The level-up sound when leveling adds a sense of accomplishment to the player.
• The screen shakes when taking down larger enemies, further immersing the player into the game world.
• The upgrade menu spinning adds a great deal of polish to what would otherwise be a boring, unoriginal upgrade menu.
• 50 achievements give the player a reason to keep playing, and reward them while doing so.
• The added bestiary adds back-story to the world, and the enemies that live within it, further immersing the player into the game world.

There are definitely more touches of polish in there, but those are most of the big ones. Weather this list looks impressive or not, without the above, Pixel Purge wouldn’t be half the game it is. All of these features combined, and only combined, are what makes this game as successful as it is.

WHAT DIDN’T

As you can see, a lot went well with the game. That being said, some things didn’t. The most complained about feature of the game is that we only gave the player a single life. For one reason or another, the idea of giving the player 3 lives or more never occurred to me. I myself am a pretty hardcore gamer, and believe that when you die, you die. That being said, I kept the game on the difficult side, it’s just what I like. As far as the games success goes, adding some extra lives probably would have helped the game be a bit more casual.

While we’re on the subject of casual, I’ll now add that I basically bombed that in nearly every possible way. The game may have been easy to jump into, and easy to play, but that’s about all I did right as far as casual gaming goes. Not adding a campaign was probably the worst decision made in the entire creation of the game. The reason this wasn’t added is because the entire project was supposed to be much smaller in size, and it just wasn’t part of the formula. Keeping it as a simple arcade game meant small, at least, that was the plan. The reason a campaign mode is needed in this kind of game, is because casual gamers need a short-term sense of gratification. Killing enemies in Pixel Purge is rewarding. There’s a giant explosion, a sweet sound effect, and particles fly everywhere. That only lasts so long though, and the next sense of achievement is getting a high score, when you die. There’s nothing between those points, nothing to keep the player satisfied and feeling achieved every few minutes. Adding a campaign would have solved this issue entirely. In addition, it also would have allowed me to scale the difficulty much easier, create some more unique gameplay, add some bosses, and an actual ending to the game. The voice acting intro to the game was great, but the story basically ends there. Players felt cheated when there wasn’t an equally awesome ending to the game.

Lastly, the viral distribution of the game leaves something to be desired. If you look at the public reports, you’ll see that the game only has a little over 1 million views. Many games that are significantly worse in the eyes of the player do 20x the amount of traffic Pixel Purge is pulling. There are a number of reasons this happened, and the most valuable part of this entire project was learning them. First off, having a space theme for this genre of game greatly reduces sponsor interest and viral distribution. I’m not exactly sure what it is, but a space theme hinders a games success more often than not. Proof of this would be comparing our last game Traverse, to Numz. Numz has a very similar rating to Traverse, however it’s viral distribution and earnings far exceed Traverse. Although the above reasons do hinder the viral distribution of the game, I believe there’s another reason the actual views are so low. If you look at the public reports, you’ll notice that the average play time is above 18 minutes for each user, that’s rather impressive. I believe that the replay value that was added, just wasn’t enough. The views mostly consisted of players leaving right off, or staying a full 40 minutes to an hour and beating the entire game in every possible way. In a sense, it’s possible the game was so fun that it was beaten in a single play and left little reason to come back for the average, casual player.  Between the difficulty of the game, the lack of a campaign mode, and the space theme, Pixel Purge just isn’t all that casual and doesn’t offer a reason to keep coming back, and that’s what killed it’s earnings.

EARNINGS

The actual time spent working on the game was roughly 3-4 weeks of solid 8+ hour days from two people. Keep in mind that I’m not an advanced programmer and still have a lot to learn, so every project for me is a combination of work and learning, more so than for most people. In the end, the money earned was barely worth half the time spent.

When the game went up on Flash Game License, it almost immediately received it’s first bid of $500. Bidding then climbed slowly, and eventually halted around $2,000.  The two competing sponsors were PlayedOnline, and ArmorGames. Bidding eventually drew to a halt, so I decided to personally message both sponsors to work out a final deal. I tried pushing for roughly $4,000, or a value of around $2,000 + a performance deal, but neither sponsor was up for it. I eventually got PlayedOnline to offer me $2500, and Armor to offer $2250, I chose Armor. The reason I went with the lower value and Armor, is because I felt that the Armor branding, distribution they could offer our game, and the relationship I would start with Dan, would be worth far more than $250. I still stick to that decision today, and feel that my new-found relationship with Dan of ArmorGames will go much further in the near future. I will admit that I was at first extremely pissed with the low value of the primary sponsorship earnings when I saw the games huge success on Newgrounds, Kongregate, Armor, and so on, but my realizations listed above about how the game isn’t very viral, casual and so on, quickly cleared that up.

Primary Sponsorship – $2250
Non-Exclusive Licenses – $1425
Kongregate Contests – $400 (Weekly 2nd and monthly 6th)
Kongregate Ad Revenue – $343

Total Earnings (To Date)- $4418
My Share (To Date)- $2209

CONCLUSION

The biggest disappointment with the entire project is that I was hoping for this game to be my lucky break. I was really hoping that Pixel Purge would bring us a bit more cash, and give me a chance to finally work on some more ambitious projects that I’ve had in mind for some time now. Although the earnings aren’t bad, a lot of additional post-production work went into raising the earnings to where they are now, which was more time dumped into an already finished game. Despite the somewhat low earnings, I did gain a lot of knowledge from this project. Hopefully with that new-found knowledge I can crank up the earnings on some of my upcoming projects, and eventually get to creating games I’d like to. Overall, I learned a ton, I’ve read hundreds of very inspiring reviews, and I know that I have what it takes to go big. This game may not have given me the break I’ve been looking for, but it’s definitely paved the way for such a thing to happen.

Organization and planning are key to the success of any project. As far as planning goes, managing your time is a big one. Over the years, I’ve found that every single game, web, or programming task I’ve ever set out to do takes significantly longer to complete than my original assumption. Even with the knowledge I’ve gained that things will take longer, I still seem to exceed the time I give myself. Poor time  management may not sound like it’s going to kill you, and it won’t (at least it shouldn’t, I can’t promise anything), but it could end up costing you thousands of dollars, especially when it comes to selling your games.

Good time management skills are definitely something you’re going to want in the flash game industry, especially if you’re new. As mentioned in my post, Being Your Own Boss, it’s incredibly hard to get started as a member of the self employed world; you better have some money saved, or excellent time management and game design skills. As someone new to the industry, you’ll find yourself looking for help more than you anticipated. Waiting for responses in forums, or looking online elsewhere for help can take a long time, a lot more than most people leave room for. In addition, you likely won’t have any contacts with sponsors, so the sales portion of the job will probably take significantly longer than someone with their foot in the door to the industry.

While on the topic of sales, let’s take a look at that bit about I mentioned about losing thousands of dollars. If you’re not working a second job, or sitting on a few thousand dollars of extra money, you may find yourself needing rent money, and soon. As great as this career path is, the time in which you’ll receive your money for a finished game is very unpredictable. Some sponsors will pay you as soon as the deal is confirmed, others will send it 30 days after they receive the final .swf. I’ve experienced the panicked emotions that arise when you’re counting the days until rent is due and frantically trying to finish a game and get it sold, it’s not a pleasant experience. The last thing you want to do is finish a game, or make a game because you need some cash; you should always be making games for fun, or it should at least be your primary concern (yes fun comes before paying rent). Sometimes games will get amazing bids within just a few days, as shown in this post on the SteamBirds earnings; other times you’ll want to give yourself a full month to find a good deal, sometimes two or three. That’s over 30 days of waiting just from the time you finish your game, and that doesn’t include waiting for payment.

Aside from giving yourself time for a proper bid to come through, you’ll also need time to accept, and be prepared for different types of deals. For instance, I’ve passed up performance based deals that would have earned me another $2,000 had I been able to afford having that money trickle in a bit slower (over the course of a few months). I was unfortunately not able to do so, and had to accept a more upfront payment at the time. If I had been prepared to accept payment at a later date, I could have had myself another couple grand, which would have been great.

It’s rather clear that there is money to be had (or lost) based on your time management skills, so it’s obvious that cracking down on those skills is essential for anyone looking to fully utilize their potential. I personally use Klok to keep track of my time management, it’s an excellent program and is incredibly easy to use; check out my review on that for more information. Hopefully with the above knowledge I can save a few of you a couple bucks, or perhaps a couple grand; feel free to buy me a drink or four if this advice saves you some cash one day.

Microtransactions have been a pretty hot topic of discussion in the world of games, especially flash games. Services such as MochiCoins and GamerSafe are making their way into more and more games every day. These services definitely accomplish their tasks, and people are using them for sure, but something is still missing. Aren’t the earnings just not exactly where you think they’d be? I think something is missing, and that something is persistence. We all know that microtransactions work, and work well. MMO’s such as MapleStory, Trickster Online, Combat Arms, and more, all thrive from the earnings generated through microtransactions. Well, if it works, and flash games now have services such as GamerSafe and MochCoins, all should be well right? Not as well as you would think actually, because most flash games lack what the above MMO’s don’t, that word again, persistence.

When an MMO is created and released to the world, it sticks around, usually for a very long time. When a flash game is created and released into the wild, it doesn’t exactly get the longest life out there. Sure it could get front paged, maybe grab some badges on Kongregate, but it won’t be a hit for long, at least not your average, or even above average game. It’s exactly this that makes the effort of putting microtransactions in flash games almost a waste of time. Don’t get me wrong, there are exceptions, and it does offer additional revenue, sometimes rather significant revenue, but with a bit more planning, perhaps some persistence, those numbers could be significantly increased.

So there you have, I’ve mentioned persistence three times now, elaboration would probably be a good idea at this point. As I mentioned, flash games have a much shorter life than other games, at least a much shorter life containing a significant amount of players. This cripples any selling of goods within the game because there simply aren’t that many people around to pay anymore. However, if your game was to offer some persistence, this could be fixed, and earnings could be substantially better. If you were to add weekly updates to your game, such as new levels, bonus maps, new quests, just anything to get players to keep the game in mind and coming back, you would see a huge difference. If the game continues to change, it will continue to grab peoples attention, and that will have them coming back over and over again; granted your game is good enough to keep their interest in the first place, and people can find it.

That brings us to our next issue, how do players find a game that’s old, even if it has persistence? Sure many players may bookmark the game, remember it’s name, and so on, but many will forget about it as soon as it’s buried in the depths of sites across the net. There are many options on how to go about this, some a bit risky, others less effective. One option is to self sponsor the game and release it into the wild, while having many links lead back to a site dedicated specifically to the game. This could include character class guides, rankings, weapon guides, so on, there’s plenty of things that would draw players in. Once a player has clicked one of these links, they will likely remember the game has it’s own website and play it there, or go there when they can no longer find it on their portal of choice. If your project is a bit bigger, and likely to be more successful, you can take a different approach. You could simply host the game on a single site (generating a lot of traffic to that site in addition), and spread the word to bring people in. This could be done by hosting a development blog, doing press releases, getting some of the bigger review sites to look into your game before, and post completion, advertising with ad networks, so on. This may be a bit harder to start up, but your players will always know where to go to find your game, and you won’t risk getting your game buried around the net. In addition, you’ll see a nice boost in ad revenue from all of your fans playing the game on your site, rather than all around the net.

So we’ve determined what works best and what doesn’t, let’s take a look at a few games. Guardian Rock was a pretty successful sliding tile puzzle game. It uses MochiCoins, offers a few free goodies to users, and allows you to buy additional level packs. Although this game did well, it never made it to the top games section of many sites, if any. This unfortunately leaves this game rather low in views at this point (in comparison to what persistence could have offered), leading to low revenue from MochiCoins sales. Had this game had a bit of persistence for fans, the earnings would have been greatly increased. Fantastic Contraption is an incredibly successful game that made amazing earnings off of selling the full version of the game. It’s perhaps the most successful microtransactions flash game to date, in fact, I’m rather sure it is. As you’ll see, this game has what Guardian Rock doesn’t, a persistent place to play the game, a site dedicated entirely to it. Lastly, my newest example, Remnants of Skystone. Remnants of Skystone is an incredibly well built flash-based MMORPG. The game hits the nail on the head when trying to pull players into their world, as well as their microtransactions setup. The game is free to play, but offers a ton of additional features to those who join the Nidarian Guard, AKA the subscribed users list. Certain NPC’s sell things to Guard members only, menus remind you to join the guard for bonuses (without being annoying), and certain additional game features scream at you (figuratively) to join so that you can use them. The game is constantly getting new updates, and in-game links lead you to the game’s site; this is exactly the kind of persistence that will make a microtransactions game thrive. I keep in mind that Remnants of Skystone is basically a full blown MMORPG. I’m not saying that every flash game with microtransactions needs to be an MMORPG, but somewhere between what Fantastic Contraption and Remnants of Skystone does would be a perfect balance.

Persistence in microtransactions games isn’t exactly a genius thought, but nobody seems to be taking the idea in. Perhaps the majority of flash game developers have no experience with PHP and Databases, and because of that leave the idea behind completely, who knows. Regardless of the reasoning, it’s basically common sense to see that persistence will make all the difference in the world. This doesn’t mean you can take a sub-par project and add persistence to make amazing earnings via microtransactions, the game obviously has to be good in order to get a dime out of anyone (or perhaps addicting, but that’s a topic for another day). Either way, you definitely won’t be seeing a game with microtransactions and a lack of persistence out of me, hopefully more and more developers will follow.

There’s always a lot of talk about how to make great games. From my experience however, there isn’t too much talk about what to do after your game is completed. Believe it or, there’s a lot of work to be done after your game is completed, and it’s quite possibly just as important as the work done beforehand.

Let’s take a look at the obvious work that must be done after completing your game, as said above, finding a sponsor. It may sound straight forward, but the sponsor you pick goes far beyond the current project you just completed. Picking the right sponsor could be your doorway to a stable relationship with that sponsor and help increase speed as well as revenue earned from future projects. If you own your own portal, you’ll want a splash intro screen that leads back to your site. It’s not he main branding of the game, but if the game does well enough this will get you a considerable amount of traffic. With this in mind, it’s very important to pick a sponsor that has a great distribution program. Some of the bigger sponsors will push your game much further than any of the smaller sponsors could wish to. Spreading your game to as many players as possible helps build you a name, and that name can prove incredibly powerful down the road when you have a few games under your belt.

Moving on from the more known knowledge and diving into the lesser known works of post-completion. Once your game is sponsored and released, there’s a lot to be done. Submitting your game to all the right portals is a must do. Such sites include, Kongregate, Newgrounds, Armor Games, MiniJuegos, AllGamesAllFree and FlashGameDistribution. It’s important that you the developer upload to these sites, because in most cases your sponsor can’t submit them. If possible you should add in medals to your Newgrounds games, and include the API on Kongregate in case Greg picks your game for badges, which is a huge plus.

There is also extra money to be made beyond getting your upfront sponsor payment. Sites such as, Newgrounds, Kongregate and Fizzy all offer revenue share plans to developers, and if you’re game gets enough views this could mean some very nice additional money in your pocket. Another huge plus to spreading your game around the net and getting exposure is the wonderful concept of non-exclusive licenses, or NE’s for short. Sites will contact you to buy a license for a site locked copy of your game on their site, given your game is successful enough. These copies generally sell between $100-$400, and up to $1000 in special cases. These sponsors pay for you to remove all outgoing links and original branding, which in most sponsorship cases is allowed according to your agreement, but always double check before signing a contract. In addition to the above, if you have in game advertisements in your game you can also see an extra chunk of change if your game does well. With all of the above you can be seeing a very nice amount of extra money, one that can sometimes exceed your original payment. I think it’s safe to say that under no circumstances should the above events be skipped before you jump into your next game.

Another hugely overlooked aspect of post-completion is relationship building. Making your sponsor proud to have selected your game is very important and builds a foundation for future sponsorships. Having this kind of a relationship scores you more money in the future, and also saves you time looking for a sponsor since you can directly contact your previous sponsor to pitch ideas or show them a finished product before anyone else sees it. This is exceptionally important seeing as one of the major loses many people suffer is a load of down time between games due to looking for a sponsor.

By now it’s no mystery that the work doesn’t end upon getting a sponsor. There’s reputation to be had, money to be earned and relationships to be created or fortified. The bonuses of having a good reputation help future games enormously, and a bit of reputation never hurt anyone’s ego. The extra money is great, and in cases such as mine can even pay rent between games. Overall there’s a lot of extra work to be done once your game is complete, but it’s certainly not without reward.