To increase the appeal of Bubblomania for new players, I changed the gameplay of all the game modes to evolve more quickly. This should make the game more fun and challenging, and at the same time decreases the play time of a single game, thus increases replayability. Eh, does this make sense?

Besides improving the gameplay, I also added 2 new background, and a couple of visual effects to the game. Check out the cool background changing effect when you pop a bubble containing a star!

Today is the official launch day of the Bubblomania webgame! Hooray!!!

What started out as a small project to get to know LWJGL, of course ended up as a total remake of the classic downloadable Bubblomania shareware game. Can you believe it’s already more than 10 years ago that the first Mac version was released? Neither can I…

To celebrate this event, the new online version is available to anyone for free! So spread the word!

The past weeks, the website has been redesigned, and now features more info about the history of Bubblomania, a FAQ and a contact form.

I hope people enjoy playing the game as much as I enjoyed making it!

I found out today that Cognitoy is developing a simulation game about global warming, named Melting Point. According to the website, the game will let players experiment with policy decisions in areas that affect climate change. The goal of the game is to prevent climatological disaster.

I’m happy someone is making a documentary game like this! I hope it will help to educate people about what can happen to our climate. When you read some of the comments made on my previous post on global warming, and in this forum thread, you can see that educating people is still very necessary!

The most interesting aspect of this game is that the scientific and economic models used are based on the best research available. I really hope the author will succeed with this game. Just imagine that by playing it, you discover a great solution to one of the world’s biggest problems!

Be The Dealer is an online casino, where you can not only play as a regular player, but also as the dealer. I’m not into online casino’s (or real life casino’s for that matter), but playing as the dealer seems to be an interesting twist. To play, you have to download an application, which seems to be windows only. So I couldn’t try it…

From their site:

BeTheDealer’s unique concept was created so that each of our players receives the best possible odds when playing at our Casino. Unlike other online or land-based casinos, our Casino allows you to decide whether you’d like to serve in the traditional player role or if you’d prefer to experience life on the other side of the table as the dealer.

This was a sponsored message. If you would like to become a sponsor, buy a link on this blog at Text Link Ads.

It might seem a bit strange to see this post on this blog. But I just saw the movie An Inconvenient Truth, and I was touched by it. It seems very hard to deny that we humans are responsible for the current runaway effect. That means we are responsible for fixing it!

So, I was wondering, what am I doing/going to do about it? I came up with the following list. It’s still short, but it’s a start!

• Since a few months, we have made it a habbit to completely turn off appliances that normally are in standby.
• I immediately remove chargers for mobiles etc after usage.
• We’ve been complaining to the owner of our apartment to replace our burner (water heater). So since a few months we have a new one, including a programmable thermostat, that is 40% more efficient! This should also have a positive impact on our monthly gas bill
• We put as much dishes as possible in the dishwasher, before turning it on.
• We try to keep the fridge filled, which makes it more efficient.
• I try to eat less meat. Livestock produces greenhouse gasses, and consumes lots of the earth’s resources that can be better spent otherwise. So I not only started to eat smaller portions of meat, but also started experimenting with vegetarian products. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to, or even want to go fully vegetarian. But eating less meat ain’t hard at all, and it’s also healthier!
• We buy and eat more fresh foods, as opposed to frozen foods.
• Since I started working from home 2 months ago, I use my car a lot less.
• I’ve added the pledge widget for An Inconvenient Truth to my blog, and writing about it, to encourage people to see the movie, and take some action.

Most of these are small things, and easy to do. Other things we’re gonna try are replacing some of the light bulbs with the fluorescent bulbs. Turning the heat down is also a good measure, but will be very hard for us, since we hate having cold

There are a lot of good tips at the climate crisis website, and on several other sites.

So, tell me, what are YOU doing, or going to do about it?

Ok, this sounds more impressive than it really is, but our dutch website Speeltijd is named website of the month by the site Het Knutselhuis, a dutch online shop for hobby and crafts products!

So this means we’ll be on their front page for the month of December. I expect this to bring in some extra traffic!

My girlfriend, who creates the content for that site, is really happy with this. It seems our efforts really are appreciated!

Another month has passed, so it’s statistics time again! Yay, I love statistics!

Our Speeltijd website reached 6000 visitors, representing a growth of 24%. Exactly the same growthrate as last month! With almost 28000 pageviews, we’re maintaining a nice average of 4.6 pageviews per visitor. On our best day, we had 281 visitors!

The adsense revenue of the site grew by 57% this month, which is very interesting considering the fact that pageviews only grew by 22% and I did not change the ad layout at all! So it seems to be true that ad revenue grows at a faster rate than traffic.

The site still has no other revenue streams besides adsense, which is a bit disappointing. I have yet to see the first Performancing link, and AdEngage declined the site. On the bright side, there have been early talks with a major brand about a possible cooperation! But I can’t say anything about this yet…

Traffic on this blog and the Dark Moon Software site in general grew by 22% this month, despite moving the page for my Bubblomania X downloadable game to the new Bubblomania website. Adsense revenue for this site is negligable, but since traffic has been growing for several months, I re-introduced the Google ads on the blog today.

On the other hand, the Text-Link-Ads on this blog are still going strong! Big thanks to the 4 current sponsors, who will continue sponsoring for the whole month of december: Mortgage Lenders, Cell Phone Covers, Iron Realms - Text MMORPG’s and MaraPets Games! I still have 4 spots available for sponsors, click here to buy a link, including a blog post with permanent link!

The beta version of my new Bubblomania website has been launched a few weeks ago, and it already has a number of repeat visitors. So it looks promising, although there’s quite some work left on both the webgame and the site. I’m currently thinking hard about possible marketing and monetization options.

Ok, this was a longer than usual post, time to shut up