The free online gaming site Game Garage was the first one to buy a license of my Flash puzzle game Enigmatica. Yesterday the game went live on their site, and it’s now featured as the Game of the Week!

Play Enigmatica!

In a few weeks, the game will also become available on this site, and a couple of others. If you would like to add it to your own website, contact me!

Last week I completed my very first Flash game, written in ActionScript 3! Almost a month ago I wrote about switching from Java to Flash for web game development.

As the first game to learn Flash, I chose Enigmatica, a game I made a long time ago for Nokia mobile phones. It’s a unique and challenging puzzle game, which I think is suited for an online version. Now that I have some experience with Photoshop, I could make the graphics better than those for the mobiles. I tried to make the graphical style different from the average flash games, which usually look very vectorized.

To monetize this game, I’m currently trying to sell licenses to online gaming websites. When I get accepted to MochiAds, an ad network for casual games, I’m also going to distribute an ad-supported version for free. So, if you have a website with online games and are interested in buying a license, please contact me!

Backgammon Pages is a site about the game of backgammon. It contains lots of information about the game, and also explains how you can enter online competitions and win money by playing.

From the site:

A few games are combining the game experience and the thrill of betting in the way online backgammon for money does. If you play poker or roulette, the affect of luck on the game is so big that you can’t feel like playing (unlike offline poker- a completely different story). Most other online money games don’t have a gambling tradition. Of course, you can play any game for money but it won’t feel right… the online backgammon for money is giving you the feeling of the real money games with the comfort of sitting wherever you want and whenever you feel like playing.

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Today I woke up, realizing it’s already March! It’s amazing how fast time flies when you’re having fun! It’s that time again to ponder a bit about my business and what happened during the last month. Checking my blog, I noticed I only published 3 articles last month…

On the other hand, this blog is getting more visitors again, thanks to the article To Flash Or Not To Flash, which was included in the second Carnival of Game Production on GameProducer.net! I’ll follow up on that article soon, when I have some screenshots of the first Flash game I’m currently developing.

It’s also still doing good with Text-Link-Ads, thanks to these sponsors: Mortgage Lenders, Cell Phone Covers, Iron Realms - Text MMORPG’s and Skill games.

Our Speeltijd.net site has had a little fallback again, with 6792 visitors last month (15% down). Of course february was a couple of days shorter than january As a consequence, Google Adsense income also dropped. But the good news is that I received my money from Google for the first time since I started using Adsense, little over a year ago. I had let the money pile up a bit, so it was already over $250!

I’ve been thinking about my business model last month, and decided to change it a bit. More precisely, I’m going to move from the shareware model to a combined model: webgames with advertising and a deluxe shareware version for the popular webgames. This is also the main reason I’m partly moving to Flash.

There’s a huge audience for free online games, and there are an increasing number of possibilities for developers to monetize on them, using advertising. Of course, it’s also a great method to make more people aware of the deluxe shareware version, although the conversion rate with this audience will be pretty low. I’ll write more about this as my plans develop!

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.

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

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.

It seems like Google has done another round of pagerank updates. My www.bubblomania.com domain has received a PR of 3, coming from 0. Also the Alexa rank of that site has improved: currently at 981,176 (with a 1 week average of 323,024).

Our www.speeltijd.net site also received a PR of 3, coming from 2. The Alexa rank has changed to 2,063,153, coming from over 4,000,000 previously (with a 1 week average of 575,064).

This site, www.darkmoonsw.com, is still at PR 4, with an Alexa rank of 637,113 (slight improvement).

This is a very good evolution of these sites, which I hope will help in raising their advertising potential. I didn’t expect that the change in Google PR would have such a big effect on Alexa rank, but I’m not complaining!