Skill Room is an informational site about skill games. They host resources, a number of articles about skill games, descriptions of online skill gaming sites, and of course some games too.

From the site:

Skill Room is your space for online skill games information.
Ever wondered if you have what it takes to succeed at different games of skill? The answer is now right at your fingertips, as it’s easier than ever to play all sorts of games of skill online.

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That’s the question that has been wandering around in my mind recently.

It all started with a surprising statistic: from all the unique visitors to www.bubblomania.com since the beginning of this year, only about 13% actually entered their name in the Bubblomania webgame. When the game is started, it asks first-time users for a nickname for the topscores, so this way I can measure how many different people have played it. Of course there are people who visit the site without starting the game, or who don’t want to type in a nickname. But I find it hard to believe that 87% of visitors are like that.

So maybe there’s a technological aspect to this. When I tried to license the Bubblomania webgame to other websites, like online arcades, the major problem turned out to be the fact that it’s not a Flash game. Arcade owners complained about this, because they use standard PHP scripts that only accept Flash, and not Java applets.

Bubblomania is written in Java, using the LWJGL library. I’ve written previously why I like these technologies. But the feedback on the game made me doubt my decision. I still think Java and LWJGL are great tools to make downloadable games that need the performance. But they’re probably the wrong tools to make webgames…

Some of the problems encountered:

• Long applet loading time, which cannot be used to display something useful (like logo’s, advertisements,…). This is the biggest turn-off for people who tried to play the game for the first time.
• There seem to be quite a lot of people who do not have a recent version of the JRE installed. Furthermore, installing Java can be a difficult process for inexperienced computer users. The download is also rather large. Too much trouble just to play a webgame.
• LWJGL requires the applet to be signed, thus requiring the user to confirm (s)he wants to run it. This can be confusing for people who have never seen this before.
• LWJGL contains an OpenGL binding, and thus requires a video driver that supports OpenGL for hardware acceleration. It suprised me how many PC’s don’t have up-to-date drivers, resulting the game to run very slowly using the software renderer. Again, nobody goes through the trouble of updating drivers to play an unknown webgame.
• Using LWJGL in an applet still results in some strange behaviour on some configurations.

So last weekend I decided to investigate the use of Flash for future webgames, so I wont have these problems again. According to Adobe, 98% of PC’s have some version of Flash installed.

This interesting article on AjaxWorld Magazine by Bruce Eckel pointed out to me that the new Flash 9/ActionScript 3 is the way to go for internet applications, thanks to increased performance of the new ActionScript virtual machine. Since the Flex 2 SDK is available for free, I decided to use that as my platform. It only supports the new ActionScript 3, but since I’m a total noob to Flash, I might as well start with the latest and greatest!

After spending a few days with the documentation, and playing with the Flex Builder trial version, I can say that switching from Java to ActionScript 3 and the Flash API ain’t all that hard. I’ve made a small prototype using the Bubblomania assets, to get a feel for the performance. And while it’s nowhere near the performance of Java + LWJGL, it was better than I expected.

So, am I going to switch from Java to Flash for game development? Well, yes and no. I’m definitely going to use Flash for the web versions of the Smiley Puzzle Project games, since these games do not require a high framerate to be playable. I’ll probably investigate if it’s possible to do a higher quality downloadable version of these games in Flash.

But for action games like Bubblomania, I’m going to stick to Java for the downloadable version. I should mention that the final 1.0 version of LWJGL has been released recently, and it has become a very decent library!

A couple of days ago, I posted about the Google pagerank and Alexa rank increases of my Bubblomania and Speeltijd websites. Now it’s time for some traffic stats of january, beginning with the Speeltijd site.

The second week was really good, we broke another record, with 381 visits on 1 day! Total visits was 7965, 47% more than last month. Google Adsense revenue was only 7% higher, for some reason, the CPM was significantly lower last month…

Traffic for this blog remained more or less the same from last month. It’s still making some nice money with these 3 Text-Link-Ads sponsors: Mortgage Lenders, Cell Phone Covers and Iron Realms - Text MMORPG’s.

The Bubblomania site has seen a serious traffic increase, thanks to StumbleUpon, a couple of banner exchange programs and Project Wonderful.

A few weeks ago, I started using Project Wonderful for advertising and selling advertising space. They use an “infinite auction” system, where you bid on an advertising place in CPD, which stands for Cost Per Day. The advantage of their system is that eliminates click fraud, so it’s an interesting change from the usual cost per click (CPC) or cost per impressions (CPM) advertising. All bids start at $0, which means you can do free advertising!

I’m also using them to sell advertising space on my 3 websites. This brings in a bit of money, which I use again to advertise through them. Sites with higher traffic quickly run out of free advertising spots, and paying a few cents a day makes sure you have a good spot.

The only drawback for me is that a lot of the sites advertising and publishing at Project Wonderful are from the comics community. It could use an influx of game related sites! But apart from that, I’m happy with the results up till now.