My online java game, Bubblomania, has been updated to version 1.1. The most obvious change is the addition of music! This was long overdue, but I finally found some time to do it. There are also a number of smaller improvements under the hood, and to the site.

Bubblomania is available for licensing, meaning that you can put a branded version of the game of your own website. More info about that is available here. Note that my Flash puzzle game, Enigmatica, is also available for licensing now!

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!

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!

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

Until a few hours ago, I used to think that a certificate to digitally sign code was expensive. But then I read this post on the Coke and Code blog, pointing me to the Thawte Freemail Certificate. I learned that this certificate is indeed free, and that this great guide explains step by step how to request this certificate, and how to sign your JARs with it!

So I signed my Bubblomania webgame with my newly requested certificate, and now the applet will show up as trusted. This is a lot more reassuring for a new player, especially those not familar with certificates!

This week, I added a new game mode to my Bubblomania webgame. The new mode is called “Extreme Action”, and is somewhat similar to the Action mode from Bubblomania X.

This mode will throw you in the middle of the action, and is meant for players who like fast-paced gameplay. The bubbles are floating up even faster then in the other modes, but you get lots of ammo to throw at them!

I’ve been testing the game under Windows, and did some bug fixing. I also made improvements to the website layout, which behaved a bit weird in Internet Explorer.

Today I moved the Bubblomania X page to my new bubblomania.com domain. It makes more sense to put both the Bubblomania web game and the downloadable version for MacOS X on the same website.

I also changed all links on the Dark Moon Software website, and on some of the sites where Bubblomania X could be downloaded. This should drive some traffic to the new domain, and allow more people to play the new online version!

The last release for Bubblomania X is already 8 months ago, but it still has about 20 downloads a day, and even a registration now and then! But when there’s enough interest in the online version, I plan to extend it into a downloadable deluxe version, to replace Bubblomania X.

The Bubblomania web game is still in public beta phase, and some people are reporting very weird problems But according to people who know more about LWJGL, at least part of these will be fixed when the new LWJGL beta arrives. And that should be very soon!