All in a days work

So the adventure with Mr Runner’s development is pretty much coming to a close. I’ve still got a bit of work to do with selling some more non-exclusive licenses, but it’s done. It’s time to sit back and look at what has come out of the chaos of my experience. I’ll be talking about the creation process, finding sponsorship using FGL, working in partnership with cool sites like GameShed, and my personal analysis of the game.

I’m hoping that this article will be useful for any developers that are planning on making flash games of their own and finding sponsorship using FGL. Feel free to send me off an email with any other questions you might have about the development process!

Creating the game

First off I would like to wham you with some statistics about the time I spent on Mr Runner.

6 months all up - Part time
4 months – Development of the game from idea to implementation
1 month – Find a sponsor over at Flash Game License
1 month – Releasing it to the public

This was all really part-time. For the most part I was at university studying full-time while it was in development. Working full-time on the project these numbers would have probably been halved! But that’s all just a big excuse, just a feeble attempt justify a profession as a flash game developer.

So lets start from the beginning.

The Initial Game Idea

I mentioned in my Experience Driven Game Design article, I approached Mr Runner from a slightly different angle than my previous games. Mr Runner doesn’t have any mechanics that are all that unique, it just plays off tried and true platforming mechanics. So why would I bother making it in the first place? This is something I had to answer for my self, and it turned out not to be that hard. I made it because it was a game I wanted to play.

Mr Runner emulates an experience that I absolutely adored having in the past. It’s heavily inspired by games such as Yoshi’s Island, Trials HD, Mirrors Edge and even Canabalt. When I decided to make Mr Runner, I decided I wanted to make a game which emulated the essential experience of these games, and focused its mechanics around fast, difficult, smooth-flowing platforming gameplay. This was my initial idea; an idea about an experience, not a mechanic.

My inspiration - spot the difference

What’s interesting is that while I had all these ideas in mind, I didn’t know exactly how the final gameplay would turn out. Initially I planned for Mr Runner to be a game filled with enemies whose death would be part of the speed running process. I wanted the player to be rewarded for doing things smoothly by having a “Fever Meter”, like in Peggle. I wanted to have collectables. I wanted everything. It didn’t take me long to realize that not only was this not feasible being one man, but it would have also distracted from the core platforming experience.

So as I started developing Mr Runner, the gameplay became more and more refined. I didn’t have an exact plan from the beginning, I had the goal of a particular experience, and the gameplay mechanics evolved through out the development to suit this experience. At every stage I would compare the latest feature to the overall experience, and adjust it accordingly.

Looking back on core gameplay mechanics, Mr Runner is almost exactly how I wanted it to end up. That’s not to say it’s perfect, but I’ll look into that in the Analysis section of this article.

Coding

Before I dive into specifics of the coding process, I’ll give you a bit of context. I developed the entire game from scratch. The tile engine, the rendering, the player controls, the editor, everything. I only used a few libraries, in fact just Tweener and Mochi leaderboards. The rest I coded my self using the classes I had designed for previous games and projects, and a whole lot of new code.

Looking back on it, the project would have lent itself quite nicely to Flixel project.

My Code - See if you can guess what that bit does

I managed to knock over most of the code pretty quickly, in fact the bulk of the engine and control coding was over within the first few weeks. I spent about 30% of the time making Tile Engine that it ran on. As always, looking back on it, it was pretty patched together, but it worked pretty solidly in the end. Another 20% or so I dedicated to the editor, which I finished before I even started making levels. Surprisingly, this left about 50% of my time dedicated to working on the player controls. I took longer than I expected to get the motion, wall jumps, sliding, etc. exactly how I wanted it.

The completion of the engine had been a significant milestone which was good and bad. The problem was that I hadn’t actually done too much game design yet. It is always a daunting prospect to have worked on a project solidly for two weeks having no tangible player experience. I think for many game designers, it becomes psychological barrier which catches them out and turns them off the project. It’s at this point in the development process that really drains the motivation of the developer.

Level Design

Surprisingly, I spent the next few months working on levels, which turned out to be the most time-consuming part of the project, but also easily the most fun. The level design in Mr Runner was tricky because it was the level design which really was to make or break the game. Looking at some of the user-generated levels, I found that the game’s Experience was almost entirely defined by the levels I had created – some of the user levels were an almost entirely different experience!

Keeping the levels cool. With ice. And bad puns.

When I was designing the levels, I was continually challenged to evoke the desired experience but at the same time create original content. I decided to theme each level, so they were identifiably unique. I wanted players to be able to easily verbally identify and differentiate between levels by their defining features, while still having loads of fun when playing it.

I found after this initial hurdle, the levels actually came quite naturally to me. The level design process would start off with a single idea or theme, and I would just make it up on the go, thinking of cool ideas that worked with the previous parts of the level. It was too much fun. Also, because didn’t require all of my concentration at once, I managed to devour the entire Avatar the Last Air Bender series while designing levels. I highly recommend it.

Art

I’m not much of an artist, and the game probably reflects this. Animation I can do, but art has always been a bit tricky. For me, this is where Mr Runner falls down. I enjoyed stylizing the graphics to a particular theme, but I worked to strictly in the confines on my engine. I had very few unique tiles sprites, so the level’s interest was something that was defined purely by their challenge and dynamics, which is a bad sign for flash games. Unfortunately, since I was so caught up in the experience of the mechanics, it was too easy for me to overlook this aspect of game design. I’ll look into this further in the analysis section.

Monetizing and Finding a Sponsor

I didn’t even begin to think about monetize my game until it was completely finished, exactly how I wanted it. In fact I think outside of my close friend group, nobody had heard of it. I’m not much of a businessman, so I didn’t exactly go overboard with marketing. But luckily there is a super easy way to get a game very quickly well known to sponsors; through Flash Game License.

Why Yes. Yes that is a piggy bank made of solid gold. You can have one too when you're awesome

You probably already know all about Flash Game License, but for those who don’t basically it’s a site where you can quickly and easily make your flash game known to all the major flash game sponsors and have them bid on sponsorship conditions for your game. It’s like an ebay for flash games, pretty much the ideal system for monetizing flash games.

I’ll outline my experience to give you a better idea of the system.

Selling Statistics and Stuff

Again before I get right into the details of Flash Game License, I’ll hit you up with a few statistics. On FGL in 2009:

Average Flash Game Sale was worth $1484.10
Number of Flash Game Sales was 4087

Don’t worry too much about the low averages on this, a good game won’t be subject to them as I’ll show you later on in the article. But you can check out the full article on these stats here . Mr Runner performed much better than the average game on this site. In comparison to my previous game:

Spacetacular Voyage received 2 bids all up.
Mr Runner received 24.

Spacetacular Voyage sold a primary license to Bubble Box for $2500.
Mr Runner sold a primary license to Kongregate for $8500.

Spacetacular Voyage sold a single non-exclusive license for $350.
Mr Runner sold four totaling $4250, and hasn’t finished selling.

So you get the idea.

Exclusive, Primary and Non-Exclusive Licenses

I think I had better cover some of the terminology I just threw at you. Basically when you sell a flash game, you can sell it with one of three condition attached:

Exclusive: There will only ever be one copy of the game out on the internet with the sponsors branding. You can’t sell any more licenses once you have sold one of these.
Primary: The default copy of the game on the internet will have the sponsor’s branding. You can, however, sell non-exclusive licenses to other sponsors.
Non-exclusive: A site-locked version of the game with the purchasing sponsor’s branding and API’s. It cannot be used anywhere but on their site.

So essentially you either accept a single exclusive license, or a single primary license with multiple non exclusive licenses. Generally a primary license is ideal, especially in high grossing games since a sponsor would have to make an especially large bid to encompass the cost of all potential non-exclusive bids. In the case of Mr Runner, the highest exclusive bid was $10000, which was a whole 30% less than the final amount including non-exclusive bids.

Don’t expect every flash game to do this well. I’ve had friends submit games that have earned less than $1000. It really all depends on much money the sponsor’s think your game will make them. To them it’s all business. That being said, if you make a good game, it will pretty much definitely do well.

Flash Game License - Where all the cool kids go

In summary I highly recommend FGL. I suggest banging a good game out quickly to test the water and get a feel for the place. Spend a bunch of time on the chat there talking to developers about their experience, and when you do put your game up for bidding, send out a few personal messages to let sponsor’s know what’s out there. Lastly, don’t be afraid to try out the FGL services and pay their commissions. Making a presence in the community there can be a pretty big deal, it will let you into places like the editors spotlight, and might even get your game recommended to sponsors in things like their news letters (which Mr Runner was). Basically, if you’re good to them they’ll return the favor for a good game. Adam and Chris are great guys.

Reflection on the Final Product

Awesome, here is where I get to do what I’m good at. Being an arrogant jerk. Okay I’ll try refrain and give you my honest opinion on what I though of the game.

The Gameplay

I really enjoyed Mr Runner! As I mentioned before, I decided from the beginning to design a game around and Experience that I personally loved. I felt like I achieved that experience in many respects, especially once you were good enough at the game to properly enjoy the fast paced smooth flowing gameplay. I might be the only person in the world to have unlocked all the platinum medals, which I guess is to be expected since I created the game.

That's the end second last level. Finished in just over 13 seconds. Now you try it.

The Learning Curve

I didn’t experience it. From the very beginning I was familiarized with the controls. But after a bunch of play testing, it became apparent that there was a super steep learning curve. The problem with this is that to fully appreciate the game you must have, to a degree, mastered the controls.

Looking back on it I should have tried harder to lessen the curve, ease up the first couple of levels so that people could more fully appreciate the game. Currently, the game has had half a million views and only 1000 of those have actually finished the game. The last level is pretty tough.

The Art and Feel of the Game

The art style I felt was where I let myself down the most. The art was stylized, sure, but it wasn’t engaging. There was very little about the art style which held interest past the first couple of levels: the tiles were the same for the most part, the colors were dull and muted, there were no extra bits of scenery, no animations etc. A bunch of feedback I got treated me with the “Awesome old school retro pixel graphics”, which is true, but they just aren’t all that engaging.

But now I have to qualify their suck. The reason I published a product I wasn’t content with was development time restrictions. Remember I was developing this on my own, so I had to do all the art. Adding in extra features would have meant extending the engine, and by the time I got around to it I was so burnt out that I wanted to get it out the door. I had hoped people would appreciate it for the gameplay and not “judge a book by its cover”.

The problem with this mentality is that players initially have very little investment in flash games; they would just as easily close the browser tab as play the game. They are expecting trash. For this reason, first impressions (which is for the most part the graphical style) is actually fundamental to creating this investment. I don’t think Mr Runner’s muted style was too successful in this regard.

Done and Dusted

So that’s it! That was more or less the last six months of my life compacted into a lengthy and grammar deprived article. I hope you learned even a sliver of what I have. Just pop me an email if you have any questions! I’ll be good and make sure to reply.

Bit Battalion Out.

He is here.

It’s been a long time coming but Mr Runner is finally here! So before you read the rest of this post, go enjoy it. You can play it here.

So what took so long? Mr Runner spent a bit to long being bid on over at FlashGameLicense.com, but for good reason since there was plenty of competition. According to the site, only 30% of games actually receive bids, and of those the average sale is worth about $1500. In total sales, Mr Runner was worth about $12500, and received over 24 bids.

He ended up finding his home over at Kongregate.com who have a really nifty level sharing API built in. Implementing this was where the rest of the hold up was, but now you can make your own levels, email them to friends, share, rate and play them on Kongregate. You can only do that at Kong, so make sure you check it out!

Let me know what you think. If you make any sweet levels, feel free to email me at sash@bitbattalion.com, and I’ll give them a whirl if I get some time. I would love to see what you guys can do.

And the plan is to eventually release a series of video walkthrough’s showing you platinum times.
Enjoy!

It's that time of the year.

So you might have noticed a total lack of posts about anything with substance the last week or two. I know. I’m sorry. I also have an excuse; I’m actually still at uni finishing up my third and last year of computer science. By far the most interesting subject that I’m doing is a special project in game design, which means I pretty much get to do anything I want that relates to games. Sweet right? I could basically play games the entire semester, but I figure I’ll do something more constructive.

What I have in mind is to work on a paradigm for designing games. Basically, I plan to continue working on the Experience Driven Game Design article I posted earlier (check it out here). This will involve doing a whole bunch of research on existing game design methodology, constructing a full-blown for-serious report on my methodology and actually designing a game by way of applying my research. It should be fun! And I’ll blog about the entire process, so you’ll get to hear all about my research and ramblings, and ultimately about the game that comes out of it. I’ll even throw in some good book references when I come across them.

But most importantly, this means that there will be another game in the making! And this time round, I’m not going to keep its development under wraps. In fact I’m going to blog about the progress I make with the code, the game design, the art and I’ll be totally open to your recommendation and feedback. In fact I would love your feedback. I’m not going to announce it until Mr Runner is released (which will be this week!), but don’t worry, I’ve got a serious plan underway.

All this will take place over the next couple of months, so I’ll keep you in the loop. I’ve already started writing an article about deconstructing game experiences which will be up in the next couple of days.

Watch it here!

Our New Logo. With extra shinyness.

After waiting it out for a long ten days over at crowdSpring, we finally have our new logo. We present it to you here with extra shine, just for good measure.

Global Game Jam Wrap Up

In a one word summary: super-awesome-and-fucking-tiring.

In a more than one word summary, I’ll start by giving you a bit of context. Global Game Jam is a worldwide event set in one hundred and something different locations. It runs simultaneously over 48 hours where a bunch of nerds, like me, don’t sleep, don’t move, consume too much caffeine and perhaps most importantly, team up to create a game. You’re given a topic, a couple of computers and the chaos is left to settle into a bunch of cool, short game experiences.

Both of the Bit Battalion crew were in the Sydney Game Jam and it was a rather dashing jam at that. When I first walked in, I found myself looking at bunch of guys that were just about as nerdy as me. Some even managed to top that, which I’m still impressed by. A couple of guys had brought some of their own gear; one guy Chris had brought the most hectic looking set up I have ever seen. He had about 5 peripheral devices I had never seen before, his screen was a Wacom, and his computer was in a glass case. Rocking.

Just one half of the Jam

After sitting in for a few presentations that the Museum had lined up, including one by Farbs the guy that made Captain Forever, we got back into the room where we were going to be locked up for the next 48 hours. I’m not going to do any super dramatic drum roll before saying this; the theme was deception. On top of that, we had a local theme of either sewing, snowing or rowing. And it had to have an 80′s reference. Oh god.

So there I was, with 20 minutes to think of a game which would convince the rest of the group it was worth working on. Including Sam, and Sam is a hard judge. And it had to have snowing, rowing, sewing, deception and an 80′s theme.
Great.

Pretty much my diet during the Jam

I came up with a few ideas, but nothing spectacular. I was stumped really. Sam and I ended up both pitching something, but didn’t really look too far into it. There were a bunch of cool pitches, some that seemed way out of league, but actually ended up being made. I still can’t believe how well one particular game worked out; check out Gnilley.

I ended up betraying Sam for two awesome dudes from Soap Creative. Ash and Hendrik had pitched an idea involving luring people in, then brutally massacring as many of them as possible in one move. I figured the idea sounded inherently fun, which meant that even if it wasn’t fully complete by the end of the jam, it would still be a pretty damn cool.

Me and Hendrik, working hard

I just have to point out now, these guys were absolutely amazing to work with! Hendrik is such talented guy, my god. He’s an amazing artist as well as a genius programmer, a guy with natural talent that everyone wishes they had. You can check out his stuff at here. Ash knew his stuff, he’d run soapcreative.com for 8 years, so he’d kept us on track well, and managed to churn out AS2 more quickly then I had ever seen. Sure it was rough, but the guy did so much coding so quickly, it was insane! Oh, and I helped! Woot. Go team ginger beer.

The next 48 hours involved a total of 3 hours of bad sleep, about 15 red bulls (we had a fridge full of them), and a whole bunch of game design. We had some awesome plans for our game “Tentacle”, which involved tactically moving about a map to avoid police while luring people in. Police were going to be able see line of sight, and you were supposed to lure people out from under their noses to kill them in one big giant explosion of tentacles. We got the police in, and we got the killing in, but we totally missed out on anything that resembles tactics. Our game turned into a giant bloody blood fest of death. We concentrated heaps on getting the graphics and audio spot on, so that the game really had a satisfying sensory experience. We put a bunch of work into music, the intro and GUI. It was probably the most complete game of the bunch, but the least ambitious as well.

Yup, this pretty much sums up our game.

It was a satisfying game to play. Nothing beats lining up about 50 innocent little people and brutally massacring them, spreading limbs everywhere while the game screams at you “F@*%ED UP”. Deep gameplay, right? We finished up pretty early as well, and even managed to polish everything off.

Everyone finally all staggered into the presentation room, where we showed off our games. There were so many cool games, I’d love to go into detail describing them all. I already gave you my personal favorite, which was Gnilley, but there were a bunch of other cool ones, some involving gesture recognition, tactical networked gameplay and bunch of other cool stuff. Farbs’ Break Up was an awesome clone of breakout, which unveiled a hidden message as you broke the tiles. It was some seriously original and cool stuff.

Presentation Hall

And we won!

I was pretty god damn happy with that. It meant a whole lot of interviews. We’ll be appearing on the ABC’s Good Game, and on byteside.com. I’ll update when they’ve come online! If you can dig up any more media around the event, feel free to comment about it just below.

Good evening. I'm Ron Burgundy and here's what happening in your world tonight.

You might not have noticed, but this site is empty. Really empty. So what have we been up to here at the Bit Battalion HQ?

First and foremost, I’m hard at work getting Mr Runner open to the public. I’m happy to say that after three long months, the development is done! The level design has been finessed, and the engine is bug free. Right now its up on Flash Game License clocking up views – it’s been getting an awesome reception so far, some developers are playing way longer then I anticipated. More than a few people have clocked up an hour and more, and then come back!

What’s holding it up right now is that I’m putting together a media pack to send out to sponsors when I open it up to bidding, which means that there will be a whole bunch of Mr. Runner screens and videos heading this way soon. Only a couple more days. Start counting sleeps.

Next up, we have desperately been trying to find a logo for this site. After checking out a blog post over at Gambrinous, we decided to put a bit of money into crowdSPRING and croudsource our logo. For those of you who don’t know what croudsourcing is, it’s where you offer a monetary prize for a design, and you have a whole bunch of people compete for it. This means that you get huge amounts of entries (usually over 100) to choose from. Check out the Gambrinous article for details, they do a good job summing it up. We’re two days and about twenty-five entries in, which will mean you can expect a fancy new logo within a week.

Also, and possibly most exciting, we are getting ready for the Global Game Jam in Sydney this year! It starts tomorrow, and it’ll be our first ever game jam. EVER. You have no idea how excited we are. Also our Game Design lecturer at UNSW is kinda-pseudo-running the whole thing, so in return for carting a bunch of computers to the Powerhouse museum we got free entry, and we’ve been asked to feature in the media coverage of the event. I’m not going to lie, it’s kinda intimidating, especially since its our first one. We’ll be documenting the experience from the inside, so you’ll get to see how insanely nerdy we actually are. Stay tuned if you like that kind of thing. Really, you’ll be jealous.

The last bit of news is just how well Sam’s game Gnop has done. Don’t lie, that’s how you found out about us. It was so well received that it almost flooded our servers! We went through more than 50% of our bandwidth in a day, and had to upgrade pronto. Sam will be talking a bit more about it later on.

Anyway that’s it for now. I’ll be hard at work on the media pack, so expect some more Mr Runner screens soon!
Over.

Who are you?

We are Bit Battalion, and that’s Sir Bit Battalion to you.

Okay, who are you actually?

We are actually two guys from Sydney, Australia that like making flash games. Like, really really like making flash games. So far, there are a total of two games to our name, but come on, we’re still young. We have two more currently in development. We have been coding in AS3 for a couple of years, and been using Flash for even longer. Its crazy how much of our lives we spend staring at Flex Builder. I sometimes end sentences with semicolons;

What’s the point of this blog?

It can get lonely being a nerd. We’ve spent so much time writing code all on our lonesome that we finally decided it was time to share the love. We’ll be posting up plenty of stuff about the way we approach game design, game programming, AS3 and of course, our games themselves. You will be sure to find something useful.

So what games have you made so far?

Sash made Spacetacular Voyage a while back. Sam made Gatecrasher even further back. Neat right? Later on we’ll be posting more about them.

So what games are you making?

It’s a surprise. For now at least. I’ll say this much though: they are a whole three steps up from our last games. I’ll be posting full post on the games that we are working on pretty soon. Be excited.

What do you guys actually do, apart from make games?

Well we both do Computer Science at university. Sam is extra clever, so he’s doing a double degree – Computer Science / Mechatronics. Video Games and Robots. Sash works as a flash developer for a small, high profile web design company in Sydney and loves it.

But thats just when we have our suits on. Usually, we play too much Xbox, drink too much beer, and argue for too long about stuff which is too nerdy to mention here.

Woah, have you guys always been this nerdy?

…

That is all for now.
Bit Battalion out.