The trip started off wonderfully, with a 90+ minute delay before I even left. Got into SFO around 12:45 and waited for about 20 minutes until John and Joey’s plane landed. Got bag and left to get a BART into the city. Now, John grew up in this general area, so we trusted him with the simple task of airport navigation to the BART station… and instead we wound up doing a giant loop through a parking garage that put us right back where we started. At that point, I took charge, and we quickly made it to the train and eventually to out swanky hotel.

I guess I should note that I stayed in a suite with Dan, John, and Joey from Armor Games. Dan flew in on Friday to see some friends, so we were expecting him to be at the hotel and get us access to our room. But apparently he was 20+ minutes away, driving an ‘82 pick up truck for some reason. We wait and eventually Dan arrives. Our room appears to be too small for 4 people, so Dan decides to get us a swankier suite with plenty of extra space. And a freakish lack of outlets.

Not too much interesting stuff took place in the room… we were pretty tired from the trip in, and took an hour or two to relax before the party that night. Then I get a phonecall from a developer I know, benologist… except I don’t remember giving him my number. He wants to bring another guy I know, who makes music, to the party. Dan, being the nice guy he is, allows this. Except beno called me from a hotel, didn’t tell me his room number, and I couldn’t remember his last name to get connected to him room from the hotel staff.

We head to the party, which is next door to where last year’s Armor Party was. I volunteered to go with Dan in the ghetto cruiser. Thankfully, I did not die. The party was solid. About 30 people, many of which I knew already… few I didn’t. Had a few beers, some food, good conversation. All in all some good fun. With dinner over, it was off to a nearby bowling alley for some heated competition with big prizes.

Me, being the giant douche that I am, brought one of my bowling balls with me from LA… along with my shoes. This did not wind up helping me, as I bowled like complete crap. But, developers tend to not be the most atheltic people… so I still handily won. Everyone seemed to be having a good time, which was the most important thing anyway. The top 5 scorers were put into a drawing for 5 prizes… basically as a method of preventing me from getting the top prize automatically. I really wanted that NetBook too. Instead, that musician that beno brought along wound up getting it… grrr. On the other hand, I now own a DSi… but apparently it does not come with games? Not sure what to do about this, but I’ll figure it out.

After we finished bowling, we still hung around and talked for a bit at the lanes. Then walked back to our hotel with a drunk Weasel (not the Thing-Thing one, the Frantastic Contraption / Streambirds one). We were going to have a nightcap with him at the hotel bar… sadly it was already closed. He left, and we went up to bed.

Not too bad of a first day, in spite of the 5am wake up. Will have storytime on Day 2 later, along with commentary on FGS.

I spent some time on 2/17/10 compiling a spreadsheet of my top 100 videos, their aprox viewcount (rounded down to closest 1000), sponsor, developer, and whether the video was featured in-game or not. From there, I tabulated the top sponsors and the top developers (only calculated devs with 3+ videos in top 100, unless they have 800k+ views).

I have 450+ total videos, so this is less than 25% of my total videos… but these 100 account for over 22 million of my 27+ million views, so they are a fairly accurate representation of the whole. Obviously, the farther down the list you look, the less accurate it is (like LegitGames having 1 video on there, but they have 2 others that just missed the cut).

Any questions or additional data you guys would like to see? I did not include the raw list of top 100, nor did I do any analysis of in-game vs not in-game. And TITOL2 is not counted in this list for Armor or jmtb.

So after all this type and posts and whatnot… the game is now out. Play it. Post comments telling me your thoughts on it.

Play TITOL2 here on Tasselfoot.com. Play TITOL2 on Armor Games.

If you need assistance (you probably will… the game is harder than the first!), try this.

Ever wondered what it would be like to work side-by-side with one of your favorite developers and create a game? Well, with This Is The Only Levels 2 slated for release tomorrow, these are my thoughts from the process:

Developing games, when you don’t have to do any of the grunt work, is REALLY fun. I got to come up with a ton of really fun levels and assist with the entire creative process throughout development… without having to do any of that pesky “work”, like coding or making graphics.

A lot more goes into a game than just code and art. Besides all the creative stuff, which we pretty much hammered out on the 1st day, all of this stuff needed to be done as well: UI for the menu and other off-menu screens, game save system, high scores, bonus modes, and API implementation.

It’s amazing how many bugs pop up in the oddest areas. This is something I already know, from all the testing work I do… but that is all AFTER the dev QAs his game. In a game as simple as TITOL2 (same engine as last game, just new levels), we easily found 20 bugs. From a certain level having an unexpected exploit to the save file not wiping deaths when you clear your level progress, and everything in between.

You can’t get too attached to any one idea. Given unlimited time, John could code any crazy level that I came up with… but one level we wanted to use left gravity for the level, so you’d have to jump from left to right on the edges of the platforms to reach the exit. Sadly, the engine (which John said could DEFINITELY handle left/right gravity) did not like this idea. I wasn’t given the full explanation, but it would have taken a lot of time to mess with the engine to get this 1 level to work. Better solution was just to use a different level idea that didn’t make the original cut. One other level that we liked wound up not being nearly as fun in actuality as it was in my head… so again, we tweaked it… and now it’s one of my favorite levels.

Don’t rush the process. The first TITOL took John 12 hours, start to finish. So going in to this project, I thought it would take 2 or 3 days, tops, for this one. It’ll wind up being released on the morning of the 10th day. There’s a lot more extra features in this game, and my level designs are a bit more complex than what was in the first game. Combine that with the AS2 to AS3 conversion… and a 1-day game becomes a 2-week game. At the same time, you don’t want to take TOO much time… when you think everything has been found and is ready, let it loose. I’m really nervous that we’ve overlooked something, or some major bug will pop up as soon as it’s released… but, if that happens, we’ll know about it soon enough. Not much more we can do about it now.

Altogether, this was so much fun. I hope that all of you guys wind up enjoying the game as much as I’ve enjoyed working on it. And give insane props to John… all the little things he puts into games are what makes them great, not my level designs. The UI, the elephant, the polka music, and a dozen other things that I won’t mention so that you can discover them all tomorrow.

I want to preface this by saying that I’m not upset or angry at my panel not being chosen. I also have no clue how any other conference selects its speakers… whether FGS is doing what they all do or is doing its own thing.

So now that the speakers have been announced, I see a bit of good and a lot of stuff I’d like to see changed. There are now 2 rooms of speakers for the day, instead of just 1. That’s good. The large room seems to be focused on monetization and panels about making money. That’s expected. The small room looks to be about flash development and ways developers can make better games or make games easier. This is a start.

The major problem I have is that there is a clear conflict of interest with the advisory board. The board was made up of 6 people… and 3 of them were selected to speak, with a co-worker of a 4th speaking. The people making the choices of who speaks should not have any self-interest biasing them in their role. Going forward, anyone who accepts the task of picking the speakers should be disqualified from speaking. Frankly, this seems like obvious common sense to me… and I wrongly assumed it to be true for this year’s summit.

Another issue I have is in the submissions of panels. Granted, this year only has 3 panels (vs 9 solo-speakers), but that wasn’t the case last year. I have 2 issues. First, people should be limited to 1 (maybe 2) proposed speaking topics/panels and they must be on their own panel. I heard second-hand that someone submitted 10+ different topics, and that just seems silly. It’s a monopolization of the selection group’s time, and it shows that you aren’t focused on any one specific thing. Really, it says to me that you desperately want to speak, and by submitting a crapton of proposals… hopefully 1 will be selected. For being on your own panel, it’s the same basic thing… people shouldn’t be submitting random stuff that they want other people to talk about; they should be submitting something that they themselves can benefit others with. Second, any panel submission must include all the panel members. I know for a fact that 1 panel topic that is in this year’s FGS did not get its panel members until this past week. Greg and I worked hard coming up with members for our panel proposal. The people on your panel is a crucial aspect of the panel itself… how can a topic be selected without knowing who is going to be speaking about it. You also can’t submit someone else’s name for your panel without speaking to them about it ahead of time; again, I heard of a situation where this happened.

One more issue is that there are multiple speakers at this year’s FGS who also spoke last year. 3, specifically. Granted, they’re speaking about different things this year than last year… but let’s be realistic; they’ll likely say very similar things to what we’ve already heard. No speaker should be allowed to speak in two consecutive years. We’ve got a large enough industry where we can hear from new people on a year-to-year basis and still fill 2 rooms of speakers. Greg and I specifically made sure that everyone we considered for our panel was someone who didn’t speak at last year’s event. By re-using people who already spoke, the audience is being neglected the opportunity to hear more and different opinions/advice.

Also, can someone explain to me why we need 2 different panels on “Monetizing Your Game Outside of Sponsorship” and “Monetizing Flash Games Through Virtual Goods Model”? Aren’t they going to be saying identical things? The monetization models are, what? Sponsorship. MTs. Ads. We all know ads pay almost nothing for the majority of devs. That leaves sponsorship and MTs. And casual gamers are not likely to open their wallets for MTs unless it’s on a game that gets updates after release… which is basically MMOs. Which is virtual goods. Also, the 3 speakers for the virtual goods panel are all owners of MT platforms… GamerSafe, MochiCoins, and Kreds. Why no love for a developer who creates MMOs? Oh… because the non-sponsorship panel is 4 developers. Why was this not combined into 1, with 2 developers and 2 MT people? This could have also eliminated at least 2 (possibly all 3 if they brought on HeyZap as a 2nd MT person, or just used 1 MT person) of the speakers from last year. It also would have opened up another hour for another topic.

Finally, I’d have liked to see some panels in the developer room. The dev room will have 6 topics, and a total of 7 speakers (the Annal brothers are co-speaking for their topic). I get bored hearing 1 person speak for 30 or 60 minutes. I like to hear multiple and different opinions on a topic. Panels give this. 3 of the topics are about flash technology (haXe, pushbutton engine, and papervision3d)… so it makes sense that these are solo speakers. The other 3 are basically storytime with 3 different developers. While I’m sure it will be interesting to hear what the Annals, Sean Cooper, and AdamAtomic have to say… I’d rather have gotten at least 1 panel, so we could have gotten 3 or 4 people’s stories instead of just 1. Not to mention, no offense to Adam… but how on earth is he going to keep us interested for 30 minutes about Canabalt. It’s a fun game… it’s done very well… but it’s still just a 1-button action avoider game; it’s a wee-bit lacking in content.

I’m still excited about FGS. I can’t wait to meet all kinds of people. I’m just not so thrilled about all the on-stage discussion that will be going on.

So I submitted a speaking proposal to FGS for a panel. I wanted to have a topic that would focus on game development, and not on ways to maximize profit. Last year’s panels and speakers seemed to almost entirely focus on making money, not touching on what makes the products worth paying for. A good game is going to result in profit. I thought about what I know and would be able to tell other people about, and game polish seemed like the most appropriate topic. With that in mind, I set to work on putting a panel together and hashing out a basic framework of what would be talked about.

To me, the most important thing was to get a solid panel, full of well known, experienced, respected, and diversified people. Naturally I would be on it, as it’s my panel. I reached out to Greg to speak from a sponsor’s perspective, and he readily agreed. Together, we chatted about who else we wanted to ask to join us. Jared Riley from Hero Interactive was my first choice, and Greg quickly agreed. Jared makes high quality games that are almost always highly polished. He is also someone that I talk to on at least a semi-regular basis. He quickly agreed, seeming really pumped at the topic and people involved. The 4th member was a longer road. We weren’t sure who we wanted, but we decided we wanted a 2nd developer. It took a bit to narrow it down, and we had one or two people who weren’t going to be at FGS this year… but we eventually brought Daniel Stradwick (garin) in. After that, I felt we had a perfect group… myself from a gamer perspective, Greg as a sponsor, Jared from his dev role running HI, and Daniel as a dev who works 6+ months on massive RPGs.

I named our panel, “Game Polish – Make Your Games Shine,” which I thought was a really catchy title… always an important thing. I also wrote up a catchy session description. However, what I’m guessing resulted in our panel being passed over is the lack of fully describing the benefit of the panel. It was something I had a hard time doing, as it just seems so obvious to me how beneficial this topic is… if you don’t make a game that has all the little things done well, it’s going to wind up pissing off too many users to the point where they stop playing it. I tried to put this into more business-like terms, but I didn’t really have much substance there. There was also an option to add a secondary abstract that was much longer, but I did not include one of these. I have a hard time putting my thoughts down well into writing, and when it’s something formal I tend to be curt.

My other fear is that I am the cause of my panel’s rejection. I’m not a sponsor, I’m not a developer… I’m just a gamer. I could see some of these people look at who I am on paper and think I’m not qualified to be speaking, or am not a big enough name to be on a panel. I really hope this is not the case. Besides the fact that I have the support and ear of many of the top portal owners and developers, I did also run the most popular casual flash game ever created for 3+ years. I may not fit inside that little box of sponsor-developer… but I damn well know what I’m talking about, I provide a completely different perspective on things than most industry people, and that seems like something that other people would benefit from.

Now I am anxiously waiting to see what the speaking topics will be at FGS. Hopefully looking at them I’ll see that my panel was outclassed. I will be very disappointed if this year’s topics all deal with profit and don’t have anything to do with game design. And I am disappointed in having my panel rejected… I was looking forward to having the opportunity to share my insight with everyone. Oh well… there’s always 2011.

January was shaping up to be a very bad month for me… worst since June, when my content still hadn’t really taken off yet. Then this weekend happened, and while the month was still sub-par compared to the previous few, it at least made it respectable. Why was January going to be such a bad month? A few reasons that I can think of… I was away for almost 3 weeks at the end of Dec / start of Jan, and made almost no videos in that time. Between Dec 11th and Jan 14th, I didn’t have a single monetized video do even 50k views… and all told, I only made about 20 vids. Not many games released over the holidays, and those weren’t very good. Also kids off from school go away on vacation during this time, etc etc.

This weekend changed that. The past 7-10 days, some good games started to hit my plate… i remain, werebox, and foreign creature 2. The planets aligned, you could say. The result was 3 of my 4 best days in terms of both ad impressions and money made (excluding my one crazy click-fraud day) and 3 of my 5 best days ever in terms of views (including #1). First, weekends always produce more views than weekdays… for obvious reasons. But what happened this weekend to cause this massive jump? Let’s look at these graphs I pulled from Insight:

(ignore that it says 1/30/10… for some reason Insight always displays the graphs as 1 day earlier than they actually are).

The least expected, and biggest, reason for this weekend’s success is that Addicting Games added This Is The Only Level to their site on Friday, leaving in the walkthrough link in-game. This pulled in 40k+ hits alone, each day… compared to the 4-6k/day it had been doing for the past few months. Second, WereBox… although I’m not 100% sure why yet. It’s on BubbleBox, but didn’t take off until 3-4 days after release. It’s on a few other mid-large portals (notdoppler, gamesfree.ca, etc), but none of the largest ones (just went onto Kong today)… yet it pulled in 25-30k for the past 3 days. Third, i remain was given a completion badge on Kongregate on the 26th (Tues), so it was already starting to taper off by the weekend. It also has yet to hit any of the other large portals. So those 3 alone were 80-85k/day views (out of the 150-160k for each day). Add to it Foreign Creature 2, Cargo Bridge Armor Edition, Alice is Dead Ep2, and Demo City 2 all contributing 5k+ each and then 400 other videos, it works out to 150-160k a day.

Basically, what this says to me is that this was one hell of a weekend… and it might not be over with yet. Numbers are definitely dropping big time today, as expected, but when WereBox and i remain hit the other large portals, it should jump their numbers big time. Plus I have 2 videos sitting finished on my desktop for Kongregate (one probably won’t do very well, the other will do at least decently with upside potential to do well). I have 2 games waiting to hit my desk for another site, one of which will do VERY well. And, let’s not forget about TITOL2… which might be released as early as Friday of this week.

There are many categories of games. There are the obviously good games: creative idea, good graphics, solid content, well polished. There good games that aren’t well received. There are mediocre games that become popular anyway. There are games that are flat out awful… often 13 year olds first touching Flash and following some tutorial. But what I want to know is why developers decide to go ahead and release games that they know aren’t very good (for whatever reason), won’t do well, and likely will do nothing more than put a stain on their name.

Money is clearly not a reason, as games like this either won’t be sponsored or will be sponsored for very, very little and they’ll never get a payout on the in-game ads (ad companies have a minimum amount before they’ll cut you a check). Neither is notoriety or e-fame. I know that if I created something that I knew wasn’t very good, I’d keep it to myself… why do you think I haven’t posted my stick figure drawings or macaroni dioramas?

There are really only a few reasons I can think of to release a bad game (as opposed to keeping it all to yourself, tucked deep in the recesses of your hard drive). The most logical is feedback. A bad game is often the result of an unskilled developer… feedback is a great way to get unbiased information about your game and you as a developer that can help improvement moving forward. Another is the “why the hell not?” mentality. I’m sure some people feel that just because they made it, and there are sites where they can publish it, we all want to experience it… let me assure everyone that this is not the case. Just because I’ve had ants crawling all over my house doesn’t mean I want to eat them. Finally are those few jaded or naive people who actually think their content is good and just don’t understand why nobody else agrees… and we need to take away these people’s computers.

To give you an idea… there are almost 24,000 games on Kongregate. Around 210 of them (less than 1%) have a 4.00 or higher rating. Roughly 1100 are 3.50 or higher. Only 3500 games are even 3.00 or higher. And on the other spectrum, there are over 300 games at 1.75 or lower and about 3500 of the 2.00 or lower variety. Almost 14,000 are 2.50 or lower. So over 20,000 games were released that weren’t even rated as “average” by the masses (we’ll debate whether the Kong userbase is an accurate representation of the masses another time). Why? Why did these thousands of developers feel the need to upload their game in the first place, when they KNEW (or damn well should have) it wouldn’t be good. I wish I knew, because it really doesn’t make sense to me at all.

A few months ago, I mentioned that I was writing the script to a game and working with some friends to do the coding/art.  That project is currently on hold, but I’ll probably finish working on it at some point.  I need to figure out what I’m trying to do with the game…  otherwise it’s just going to suck.  And I won’t put my name on a project that sucks, especially when I’d be the major reason it sucked.

I’ve also been approached by a few different developers to design levels… and I shudder at this thought.  Playing and solving levels is super fun; the battle of wits between myself and the cunning developer.  Coming up with 20 or 30 creative levels to try and stump players, having a linear ramping difficulty curve, and designing levels that are all going to be unique… it’s daunting.  And that’s just the design process; then you actually have to do the grunt work of making the levels in whatever editor you’ve given to work in, which may or may not be user friendly.  It’s tedious, arduous, and is the complete opposite of fun.

However, there is one game that I had a different reaction to.  It’s a game that when I played it, I immediately started to bug the developer about wanting to assist on designing levels for a sequel.  Ma nishtana ba-mischak ha-ze mi kol ha-mischakim? (That translates to, “Why is this game different from all other games?”)  The answer is simple… it’s a game where level design is not tedious, arduous, or un-fun.  It’s a game where levels can be designed in seconds or minutes and each level has 1 specific trick to it.  The goal of level design in this game is to screw with the player in a way that the player is still enjoying himself (or herself).  And I get no greater pleasure than screwing with people…  why not take it to the grand stage?

So you must be asking what game this is.  I gave a vague hint about it the other day.  The game is This Is The Only Level, and I’ll be working in the Armor Office later this month (or early next month) on the sequel.  Expect fun and delightfully evil levels from yours truly.  :)

I’ve also been working on a big project for the past 2+ months, but I’ve been asked not to talk about it.  Expect some stuff about it once I’m cleared to discuss it or once it’s public.

A classic battle in monochrome: You vs Chopper vs Scissors vs Sheep. Who will win? Navigate your way through 21 levels and become the masta of yo choppa.

Play Hanna In A Choppa! A walkthrough is also provided, of course.