My first Tiny Defense update is ready. Excited?

Lee Lee has been hard at work. Right now her job is not to create sprites, but instead explore different styles, colours and concepts so we can nail down what the final game will look like.

This is an important process and might take a little while! Once we’re done, the next step will be to begin to turn these sprites into game ready sprites – smaller, more stylised and more polished. Before that happens though, feast your eyes upon these:

Monster Concept 1:

This was the first batch of monsters Lee Lee made. As you can tell there is a wide variety of styles and concepts. This is especially important, not just so that we have an idea of what we like, but also we will know what to avoid.

My personal favourites? 1, 8, 10 and 30. Lee Lee loves 31!

Monster Concept 2:

I really drilled Lee Lee with feedback. You should see my emails to this girl, each one is a freaking essay, I feel sorry for her. She really took the feedback to heart, and came back with a second iteration.

My personal favourites here? All of them. But especially 6, 9 and 11.

Towers Concept 1:

This was our first dabble with towers. There is still a way to go before we settle on a style, but we sure are making progress.

My personal favourites are 31 and 32!

Reference Images.

The other important process at this stage is finding references. Games which are similar stylistically, and just down right sexy.

I’ve been digging around the internet a lot to try find great styles that we can emulate. So far I’ve found one game which nails the color and style pretty well – it’s just a bit TOO cartoony. Monster Mayhem for the iOS is definitely worth checking out:

I also love the monsters and style in maple story:

I also loved the stylistic treatment of the towers in Edge World:

Onwards!

So this weekend I’ve started getting lost in Xcode and Cocos2D. I was planning on banging out the core engine, but right now it looks unlikely. I’ve been running into some frightening challenges – I’ll go into detail about my pain points in another blog post soon!

In the mean time, let me know what your favorite monsters are! I’m also always happy to look at new reference games.

So a lot has been happening in my life recently: I launched Mr Runner 2, I moved from Australia to San Francisco, I scored a job working for Zynga and now I’m being kicked out of the country while my visa is being sorted out. Things have been pretty exciting.

But somehow, amidst all this chaos, I have two months of complete freedom. I’m going to use this two months to start work on a new game. But this time, I’m going to do things a little differently.
Here is what will be new:

A New Game: Tiny Defense

Announcing Tiny Defense! Tiny Defense is a tower defense game for the iPhone that happens in real time. You’ll be fighting off monsters for days at a time, wherever you go. As you check back each day you’ll level up and unlock new towers to fight more and more bad ass monsters. You’ll even face off against epic boss monsters!

A New Artist

I’m bring Lee Lee on the team to help me churn this baby out. She’s a cool girl – she’s been working on a web comic for the escapist, Name Game. Now she’s making bad ass games with me.

A New Platform

For the first time I’m developing on the iOS. I’m using the library cocos2d. It has a shitty logo, but its a great product! The API is actually very similar to flash’s display structure. I’ve also got a great friend Joey (he made Cave Dweller) helping me out learning XCode and Objective-C.

A New Development Style

I’m going to be doing Video Dev Logs every few days to show off what I’ve done. I’ll be using Screen Flow, which is a great (but expensive) piece of screen recording software.

I’m also going to be doing a Time Lapse of some of my coding sessions, so you can see the development of the game in action – from start to finish. I’ve found a great piece of software for time lapses – check out Screen Ninja.

Lets do this!

To kick things off, I’m doing a Game jam this weekend with Joey, Sam and Jeremy. Jeremy’s rocking HTML 5, Joey’s working on some IOS stuff, Sam’s drunk right now and playing mine craft. Scratch that, he’s now using an exercise  ball amusingly  incorrectly.

I hope it has some useful perspectives you can take away if you’re looking to get started making money off flash games. If you have any questions just leave a comment!

This is what I’ve done so far, it got me thinking about all the things I haven’t done yet

What is a guy who hasn’t done any of these things doing presenting to people aspiring to do these things?
I’ve got a long way to go.

But I am doing what I love. It’s my job to make games – I don’t have a job on the side, I don’t work for someone else.
And so far, its payed for my university education on the same subject.

Everyone and their mom’s has the greatest game idea
Hard Lesson: Having the best ideas doesn’t make you a talented game designer
Skill: Turning that idea into an experience – it has to be learned.
You won’t get it right the first time. Or the second.
Best way to learn is to practice, the same way an artist or musician has to.

Minimalism if perfect for indies, especially when your starting out – cuts down time, makes up for lack of artistic talent.
Make a kick assed half, not a half assed whole

As an indie it is almost impossible to predict what will make money.

Your best bet is to make something that you’re passionate about. Something that you want to play. That passion will seep into every aspect of your game and chances are it will excite people as much as it has excited you.

As an indie, you’re the only one who will ever see your code. Programatic Perfection is masturbation as long as it works it doesn’t need to look good. Don’t ever rewrite. Ever.

You’re a game designer, not a programmer, concentrate on where your skills are needed the most. The places that people will actually experience.

Never program anything that has been done before. And almost everything has been done before and done better.

There is no reason that your next spare hour shouldn’t be spent making an game. After those 5 slides, you have everything it takes to be churning out your own games. Go!

Use FlashGameLicense.com to sell your flash games with ease!

Since this time I’ve also made:
Mr Runner 2: $19000
Mr Runner 1: $2500

Great set of resources: http://www.pixelprospector.com/indie-resources/

Recognition and respect: the successes of your previous works are presumed in your latest games. People come to respect your brand and the games that you make. It’s almost guaranteed that Mojang’s new game, Scrolls, will take off purely because of the respect generated for the studio by minecraft.

Often you’ll find that your games cross promote themselves. When Chaos Invaders was featured on Rock Paper Shotgun they mentioned Mr Runner 2, and I had a surge of beta testers. Often sites will refer to BitBattalion as “creators of Chaos Invaders and Gnop”. This type of validation works wonders for generating interest and also getting published at all. My latest game “Pathos” wasn’t well received by indiegames.com, but published simply because of BitBattalion’s previous relationship with them.

Your online presence will do work for you. If a sponsor comes across one of your games through your site or an article, they’ll often inquire about secondary sponsorships. All you have to do is negotiate the right price. Almost a quarter of my total income has happened through this alone.

Last but not least, I’ve received multiple of contract offers through my online presence, 2 of which I’m currently working on – there are a great deal of enthusiastic startups and companies that are actively looking for great game developers to work with. Your online presence is your key to their hearts and their wallets.

Contract work pays really well. And once you have built up a successful brand, you’ll have more contract offers than you have time for.

But just because you’re doing contract work doesn’t mean you have to do the worst contract work imaginable. There is a wide variety of contract work available, and if you’ve built up an awesome brand you’ll have the liberty of choosing.

Thanks Guys! Hope you could take something useful away from that!

See that sexy new link up the top? It’s coming! Mr Runner will be running again on your browser early next year, with all new graphics, controls, levels, and all new everything. Check it out the FAQ here.

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.