New Game : Balance Of Power

After many months of hard work and heartache my latest game Balance of Power is finally available. This game is a real departure from my last two games Wheel of Death and Perpetual Motion (both using the Box2D physics engine). Balance Of Power is a turn based strategy game. While most games are about resource depletion : a resource called health. Balance of Power is about resource distribution : a resource called influence. The more influence you have the greater your status. The higher your status the more influence you can take. The aim is to take all the influence from the enemy. When their influence is gone they will start to see things your way.

It's probably not the easiest game in the world. But like many board games it rewards the effort of learning a few basics with many hours of challenge. I actually built most of Balance prior to starting the physics based games. But I felt that it's genre would be an obstacle to it's success. In the end I came back to it and decided I really liked the game and so committed to getting it published regardless. I hope that you will give it a fair go as I think it will be worth your efforts.

Perpetual Motion : Walkthrough

A while back (OK 11 months and 2 weeks ago) my Perpetual Motion game was released. It is now available on 180 different sites and has been played 270,000+ times. It's probably a bit late but now I've finally re-done my website it seemed a good time to publish a walkthrough for Perpetual Motion. It's a bit of a task so I'm publishing one level a day until all 36 are complete (level 8 was published yesterday). If you've never given the game a go, or you got stuck on a level, now may be a good time to have another go.

GeekGlue Site Update

Over the last couple of years my GeekGlue website has become increasingly out of step with my current interests. I've been thinking more and more about how I should use that space. In the last year I've become very interested in casual gaming and have (as noted on this blog) published a couple of games. Therefore I started to think that I would like to use the GeekGlue site to support my game publishing and perhaps focus my own research into casual gaming. I was also keen to use Drupal (which we've been using extensively) to make the site more flexible. Hence the new GeekGlue is born with new games added daily, a blog posting a daily review of the best new game of the day, walkthroughs of my games (and probably a few others) as well as casual gaming news. The site is very much in a formative state and I expect to regularly add new features in the coming months.

Perpetual Motion : My New Game

A few days ago we (myself and the nice people over at King.com) published my latest game : Perpetual Motion. This new game has much in common with my first physics based game : Wheel of Death. In Wheel Of Death you had to arrange props to get the wheel to the goal. Walls, bus and various other obstacles provided variety to the levels. Box2D was used as the physics engine to allow some realistic collision and physics. While I was developing Wheel Of Death I regularly found I was more interested in building perpetual machines with the available props than I was in completing the levels. By perpetual machines I mean a combination of props that cause the wheel to cycle for an indefinite period. It seemed to me at the time that it would be simple enough to "quickly" build this new game as it used much of the engine from the original. To be honest much of the engine from Wheel of Death remains unchanged except for a few enhancements to make it more reliable but as I became more interested in the concept I started to invest more time in refining the user experience (dialog transitions, a world map with each location having a unique landmark and a different background) and introducing instructional elements (numbers to show the sequence of prop interaction). Getting a meaningful scoring mechanism was probably one of the biggest challenges and from the comments on Kongregate I don't think I went far enough in explaining the scoring system. Still I feel Perpetual Motion is a real leap forward from my first game. I hope you enjoy playing it.

Amazon Founder Invests In Kongregate

Yesterday TechCrunch reported that Amazon founder Jeff Bezo has invested $3 million into the casual gaming site Kongregate. From the article it seems that Kongregate didn't particularly need the money but didn't mind taking it either.

This news gives me great hope for the future of casual gaming. At the moment there are a lot of gaming portals. Many with their own API's and revenue sharing systems. This is bad news for developers. The more your game is played the more revenue you create. At the moment this means publishing your game in as many systems as possible and this may mean developing an understanding of a number of these API's. Companies like MochiAds simplify this to a degree. But you still want to optimise for sites like Kongregate (which don't display MochiAds). What casual gaming needs right now is the emergence of a small number of dominant gaming sites. This will simplify the number of API's developers need to learn, establish a common revenue sharing model and provide casual gamers a shared destination. The success of Kongregate, evident in Bezo's investment, is a clear step in this direction and consequently a good thing for developers and players.

The Kongregate Sidebar

I'm a big fan of Kongregate.  I don't play everyday.  But if I'm in the mood for "casual gaming" then Kongregate is my home.  So I was very excited last night to discover the Kongregate Firefox Sidebar.  Kongregate has this great system of badges.  When you achieve a certain level of play in a game that has a badge you get the badge.  Badges give you points.  Points increase your level.  More than that badges point to games that someone thinks is worthwhile.  Often it's the games that have won the weekly prize that get badges.  For developers badges mean more game views and that means more revenue.  So everyone on Kongregate is interested in badges.  Therefore it's a wonderful thing that the Kongregate sidebar shows you all the badges, shows which ones you are missing and links to the games.  It also shows you the current challenge, your points and if you have any friends online.  Just another reason why Kong is King!

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Mochiads : Adds Revenue Stats

If you've made a Flash game and posted it on any of the many game portals then there is a good chance you've heard of Mochiads. In case you haven't Mochiads allows you to easily add ads to your games and provides some handy tools for managing your game ads. One great thing about Mochiads is that if someone rips off you game and posts it on their site then you will still get revenue for everytime the game is played. Another neat feature is that they will post your game to some game portals therefore saving you lots of work. They mention some of these portals on the site but it turns out there are quite a few others. The reason I discovered this is because of a great new feature. Mochiads now provides details about the countries and domains where your games are being played including the eCPM (effective cost per thousand) for that country or domain. Now I only have one game (at the moment) and it's not a world beater. But I was still interested to discover that Wheel of Death is being played more in Israel than anywhere else (Estonia was ranked third for plays). Despite that I still earned more from America where the eCPM is 78c compared to 23c in Israel. Mochiads is a great service and this new addition makes it even greater. If you are building Flash games and haven't used Mochiads then perhaps you should take a look.

Surrender (to Guitar Hero)

My question today is how off topic can a post be and still be on topic. I ask this because my son brought home Guitar Hero (for the Playstation ) yesterday and despite being very bad at it I'm totally addicted. It's terrible to discover that much cherished favorites like Cheap Trick's Surrender are a walk in the park. While a deceptively casual sounding Nirvana track is almost impossible to master (for me at least). What I really love about Guitar Hero (and no doubt a reason for it's success) is that it is so far removed from all the battle/adventure games that have been dominating the market. Gaming was sadly in need of some diversity and Guitar Hero is evidence that new ideas can succeed. So now for all the air guitar wannabees out there ; all together 1..2..3...