Three weeks ago I launched the beta version of my new online games arcade, SmileyGamer.com. While the site is still in beta, I already made some changes to the design and color scheme. I went to dark text on a light background, to make it easier on the eyes.

Since the launch, the site has received almost 16000 visitors, and more than 45000 pageviews. This is definitely more than I expected! According to Google Analytics, almost 60% are direct visitors, i.e. not referred by another site. Most of these are people who click on the links in my flash game Enigmatica, which I released not long after the site went live.

In the past few weeks I’ve been spreading the freeware version of Enigmatica to several online game websites. It is surprising to see how many people visit the site thanks to the game. So the free version of Enigmatica is not only giving me a small residual income with the included MochiAds advertisement, but also through the advertising on my website.

Making money with a games arcade is rather hard though, the revenue from Google Adsense ads is very very low. Most visitors visit the site to play games, not to click on ads! But fortunately I was accepted with ValueClickMedia last week! They are an ad network that also pays for pageviews of the ad, so I make money even if people don’t actually click on the ads.

The rest of the traffic was mostly obtained thanks to banner exchanges, like MoreGamers and ArcadeBanners, social bookmarking sites like Digg and StumbleUpon, and link exchanges with other arcades.

I still have several features planned for the website, before I can call it final. But even more important is to continue work on Smiley Memory, which will be my next Flash game! Already mentioned before, Smiley Memory will be the first game from the Smiley Puzzle Project. This game will feature the 3D smiley’s also used on the Smiley Gamer site. I expect it to become a lot more popular than Enigmatica, so it will be a great promotion for the site! It’s great to see the Smiley Puzzle Project, originally started more than a year ago, finally come to life!

In case you were wondering, yes, the Smiley Puzzle Project is still alive! While the actual games are still under development, the project has gotten a new scope.

As discussed before, the SmileyPuzzleGames.com site was intended to become a small games arcade featuring my smiley related games. But instead of developing this site, it seemed like a better idea to take it a few steps further, and actually build a full-blown online games arcade.

So I registered the SmileyGamer.com domain, and started building my arcade based on PHPArcadeScript. It’s now in a reasonable state, which I just declared the beta stage, so have a look for yourself:

Some of the reasons for dropping my original plans:

• A full-blown arcade can be used to showcase my own games to a wide audience.
• If I can let my arcade grow and start getting serious traffic, the site can start generating some decent advertising income.
• I will spread freeware versions of my own Flash games to other arcade sites, with links to my arcade, as a way to get more traffic.
• Since I wont be focusing on smiley related games alone, a general games arcade is a better home for my first Flash game, Enigmatica, and my java game Bubblomania.
• Also, I will not only make puzzle games, but other genres as well. So the SmileyGamer.com domain is better suited than SmileyPuzzleGames.com.

This change of plans also means I will be focusing my attention to webgames made with Flash, rather than downloadable games made with Java. I wrote previously about why to make this switch. I might still decide to make a downloadable version if any of my webgames becomes wildly popular, but for now, sticking to webgames makes more business sense.

If you visit the site, and find any problems or have feedback, please let me know by using the contact page on the Smiley Gamer site, or leave a comment here on this blog.

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!

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!

Recently we added a phpBB forum to our Speeltijd website, to start a community where people can discuss the articles posted on the site.

The website itself is a WordPress blog, and I wanted to do some integration between the blog and the forum. When making a blog post, I want a forum thread to be created automatically, where the blog post can be discussed. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any plugin which does this.

So, I devised my own solution I found some PHP code by netclectic on the phpBB forum, that allows you to insert a post in your forum with a single funtion call. The code can be downloaded here. Then I started to write a WordPress plugin to call this code when a blog post is published.

This, of course, was the tricky part… It turned out that it’s not possible to call phpBB code from WordPress code, because both have several functions with the same name. This resulted in PHP errors about function redeclarations!

So I did the following: I wrote some PHP code that uses this insert post function to create a thread in the forum, for a blog post with a given title and URL, passed as GET parameters. And then I wrote a very simple WordPress plugin that calls this PHP script through a socket, with the blog post’s title and link. This solution turns out to work very nicely!

The code for this is currently very specific for my situation, that’s why I don’t make it available yet. But if I can find the time, and there’s enough interest, I will publish a decent customizable solution here!

A new year has started, so, Happy New Year to all my readers!

For me, this will be the year to take things seriously, and to make my business work! It will be tough, but I hope to come out at the end of 2007 with a lot more assets, and a lot more knowledge! And preferably with a couple of extra income streams

As per usual, I’ll give a quick rundown of my website stats for the past month, starting with the Speeltijd site.

As you can see on the Google Analytics chart, the site had 5409 visitors, which is down 10% from last month. As a result, Adsense revenue also dropped about 16%. This little dip was to be expected, because of the Christmas holidays, and the school exams period before. We expect traffic to pick up again, and increase when we launch the forum this month.

Traffic for this blog and the Dark Moon Software site also decreased a bit, again caused by the holidays, and a lower blog update frequency. Both traffic and blog posts will increase again, when I’ll be writing about my indie business plans for the coming year. I’ll be doing some experiments with my Bubblomania webgame, and start again with the Smiley Puzzle Project.

This blog also had a new sponsor through Text Link Ads this month, bringing it’s revenue for december to over $50! A nice way to pay for hosting All 5 sponsors will continue sponsoring next month, so I want to thank them all again: Mortgage Lenders, Cell Phone Covers, Iron Realms - Text MMORPG’s, MaraPets Games and Be The Dealer!

I also added the Performancing Partners program to this blog last month, through which you can advertise here for only $20 a month! You’ll get the same deal as when buying a text link ad: a small review of your site on this blog! This means you’ll get a permanent link on a this PR4 site for free! The same applies when you buy a Performancing ad on our dutch Speeltijd site.

Have a great year!

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