Strike Eagle - From April 1st to May 10th

So far, Strike Eagle has produced close to 170,000 hits on the Internet with 140,000 ad impressions.  Today, I submitted Strike Eagle to “Flash Game Distribution” a site affiliated with “Flash Game License.”  Once the game is approved on FGD, I will track how many more impressions it gets once the automated system starts submitting the game around to other portals and sites.

When I wrote Danc of LostGarden on May 4th, Strike Eagle barely came over the 100,000 mark in ad impressions.  It has been steadily climbing and remaining close to 6,000 requests a day since.  In 6 days, it produced another 30,000+ impressions.

Frankly, I am astounded that the numbers are still climbing.  I only submitted my game to MochiAds (Distribution-enabled), NewGrounds and Kongregate.  For the latter two, the game no longer gets gameplays.  I’m not sure how it is being driven because I honestly believed that the game hit its peak with the spike occurring back on April 20th and then will slowly be dropped off the Internet in the wave of new Flash games coming down the pipe.  So I’m not sure what is driving up the numbers again recently.

So I submitted the game to Flash Game Distribution and will report my findings in the next few weeks to report on how much an impact FGD has.

Danc was very gracious to write me back and asked me about some of the things I learned from the experience.  This is what I wrote.

Hi Danc,

Thanks for writing back.  I hope that things are going well with your game, “Bunni.”  Your blog continues to be one of the most insightful blogs out there on good game design.

I learned quite a bit from the experience of programming my first game: a lot having to do with tenacity and making design compromises to hit the contest deadline.  But upon reflection, I see my game as focusing too much on technical prowess and too little on gameplay.  One of the major design requirements for the contest was to use a 3D element in the game and I used the a 3D plane quite extensively.  However, because of that, the focus of my design became technical mastery rather than “fun” factor of game design.

My game was modeled after “Afterburner” from the 1980s arcade.  But the reason why a game like “Afterburner” is fun, is the novelty of using a flight stick in a fast-paced arcade-like shooter.  Translating the experience to the keyboard and mouse loses a lot of what made “Afterburner” fun.  I’m quite proud of the technical tricks I used to get the moving background effect to look convincing, but in the end, what matters is if the players enjoyed it, and will come back again telling all his or her friends.

I am quite proud of the numbers my game has produced: over 100,000 in ad impressions in a month, and a spike in site traffic on my blog, however there is also the reality of spending over 120 hours of long sleepless nights for a low return.  So far, I’ve gotten back about $.40 to every hour I’ve spent working on the game and to be frank, there are many great games that I’m competing against that are far more polished and deserving of credit that I believe I will not win the contest.

But as my Dad would say, “Count this as a tuition fee.”  I am still a student of game design and have much more to learn.  I will be sure to make my second game a lot more fun and I’ll let you know when it is posted.

Again, thank you for all the incredible posts on your blog, and especially the art that you so generously let game developers like myself use in their games.

Sincerely yours,
Paolo

Now, the next question is, do I go on or do I give up?  Is it worth the price especially looking at my son sleeping next to me as I write, the countless hours of sleep I will lose on my next endeavor, especially in the face of even more hours at work in the coming weeks?

You better well believe it.  Let’s do this again until we get it right.

Earnings from Strike Eagle

Now granted, I have no network.  I am a virtual unknown coming into the Flash Game Development field, and until the contest results come in and I place, I’m virtually no one.  My rank at NewGrounds was a little above average and same with Kongregate.  So with approximately 30,000 ad impressions, I’ve made close to $20.  If I somehow break 3,000,000 impressions, I make $2000.  But only the best games with the highest replay value ever get that high.  So this is not a viable way to make a living or start a gaming revolution.

Several people have taken me aside and said that if I put the game up on Flash Game License, I would have easily gotten $1500 for the game.  Which again means that I still have a long way to go to get effective games done.  I put in over 120 hours into “Strike Eagle”, and if you divide it up into an hourly rate, is not very high.  I actually make more money doing freelance web programming than I do making Flash games at that rate.

Urbansquall recently posted about his business model with how he makes money for his Flash Game Development company.  And oddly enough, he also states the same thing.  He makes the majority of his money in Licensing and in Contracting – not in advertising.

I think that for my next game, I will try licensing the game I create rather than going for a contest.  As much as I think this contest experience on MochiAds was great and a giant motivator to get me moving and especially to finish a game, waiting for the contest result and the uncertainty of knowing if all the hours you put in are going to be worth your time is very frustrating.  Worse still, since your game is already out there, you can’t go back and license it.

So I may have to reneg on the Jennifer Ann contest.  It is a noble venture, but I currently have a small freelancing job I have to complete, which I will document here on my blog to show the agile software development process for an overseas client.  By the time I complete this job, I will have no time to finish for Jennifer Ann.  But I will seriously consider it for next year.

For now, I will let a possible sequel to Strike Eagle sizzle on my mind and I will document and finish my small freelancing project using Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF).

Strike Eagle Icon

It’s been a couple days since Strike Eagle has hit the Internet on MochiAds, NewGrounds, and Kongregate.  And none of the ratings and feedback really surprise me.  There were a couple bugs I had to quickly remediate and repost, but nothing drastically bad.

On NewGrounds, the folks there asked for more enemies, bosses, power-ups – the usual fare that you find in a shooter.  But overall, I got positive feedback and a score of 7.8.  I think it mostly has to do with the technical merit of the game.

The 2.5D effect was incredibly hard to achieve.  My original design idea was just to make a regular 2D shooter that had a transition screen that used the FreeSpin3D component as an effect.  But after some consideration, I thought that it was a cop-out and that the folks at FreeSpin3D were hoping for something that would truly showcase their product’s strengths.  So after some fiddling with the ActionScript 3.0 API for FreeSpin3D, I decided to do an “Afterburner”-like game.  I really didn’t know what I was getting into in terms of technical difficulty.

Mig-23

The game itself is really 2D.  There isn’t any 3D background, much less z-ordering or z-calculations going on for the background or enemies.  That is what made it really difficult because I had to somehow “fake” a way of making it act like it was 3D with no clue whatsoever of the z-location of the enemy planes, player players, missiles, etc.  I originally wanted to do gunfire with tracer rounds like it was in Afterburner, but without a z-location, I couldn’t do a proper collision test.  So I left it largely to the mouse location.  I also wanted planes to have hit-points, so it took more than one shot to take it down.   But considering the difficulty it would be to track the planes with a mouse, I left it at one-shot kill.

I think I’ll be revisiting the shooter genre later this summer when I have more time to create more a thought out design.  But I think I’ll cut it down to a 2D shooter with robust particle effects similar to Space ROX than making it 2.5D/3D.  3D is hard enough to achieve, and good-looking 3D is impossible without a dedicated artist.  There have been quite a few indie games out there that use 3D and unfortunately look very amateurish because of how difficult it is to create good looking 3D models.  Sometimes I think that it is better to stick with great looking 2D than it is to go for a decent 3D look.  Strike Eagle suffers from that.

Landing Strip

With the less than 5 weeks of time I had, working only in the late evenings, and with no real 2D or 3D artist support, I had to make due with any art I could find online.  In either case, I had to do with the minimum available.  As it was, the artist of Space ROX, only really created the runway.  The rest of the game was taken from free sources and modified slightly to make it look more appropriate for the game.  For my next shooter game, I’ll be sure to make some extra time to really take more time to produce some quality art assets.

The other factor is sound.  I really didn’t feel like I had enough time to truly dig up some great music or buy some decent sound effects for the game, so I made due with whatever was free online.  The  music was something that was dug up from the archives of older songs that the artist of Space ROX, had done.  If I could have had the choice, I would have loved to have kept Kenny Loggins’ “Danger Zone” still in the game, just for sheer comedic effect.  But it would not have been legal to do so.

All around, this is a complete game with excellent technical merit for the 2.5D effect, but it isn’t polished to the level that I think it should have been for a full release.  But given the time-constraints and limited resources I had on hand, I think that it turned out rather nicely.  But if I had all the time in the world, I would have put a more robust z-calculations to make it look even more realistic, longer levels with refueling cutscenes, and an end scene where you would be gunning down the actual missile silo for the nuclear warheads.

Code Boom

I think that I will have to do a follow-up “post-mortem” for the Actionscript code because that is the ugliest part of the game.  I’ve learned a lot about design techniques from just getting my hands dirty in Actionscript 3.0 and there are a ton of things that I would never do again.  But that is the strength of the Agile development method I used to get the game out.

Rather than focusing on proper object-oriented techniques and planning and fully thought out requirements – the game was finished in an astonishingly fast pace with many clean iterations to review and look at.  Halfway through, I didn’t realize how difficult it would be to determine collisions and attacks because I created the 3D ground effect without one.  But instead of focusing on what I hadn’t designed, I kept on going with the current design and found ways to “cheat” a 3D effect and produce a game rather.  It would have been counterproductive to have scrapped the game design to do things “properly” but instead, I kept going with what I had.

My initial attempts of game development were really slow and because I tended to “over-think” the game-design and thus I ended up doing nothing.  I’m sure many indie game developers suffer from “analysis paralysis.”  So doing things the “Agile” way really broke me free from spinning my wheels.  Fast-iterations and tangible results are the best way to getting feedback and excitement over a product.

Jennifer Ann and her Father

For my next contest, I’ll once again be putting my interim builds in private for others to comment on and review until I submit it.  The game will be for Jennifer Ann’s group who want a game that is both fun and educational that talks about “Teen Dating Violence”.  The big design constraint is that the game itself cannot use violence.

I’ll be starting in about a week and a half.  I first need to finish a minor freelancing job.  I may post screenshots ofmy freelancing product online as a demonstration of the Agile methodology at work once again.

Strike Eagle V 1.0

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!
Check it out!

The game has been completed and is now pending approval on MochiAds for publication on their site and for the contest. It has been a long month and it feels like I’ve been working on the game forever. Now I am officially releasing all the interim builds along with their mistakes under the “Strike Eagle” tagline. I think it is important not only for myself, but for other indie developers to see the struggles, compromises and changes that go into game development especially when under time constraints and pressure. This blog is meant to educate and inform and show game design and development in action.

Among several major compromises was that the game is far too short for my liking. I would loved to have done several different landscapes, levels and breaks in the middle of the game. But I had put in about 3-4 hours a night for about 6 weeks to get it this far and I had to cut back on my final vision. Admittedly, a complete rewrite of the 80’s “Afterburner” arcade game in Flash in less than a month and a half and working only at night is quite aggressive.

During this time, I had to sacrifice an astonishing amount of sleep which I recovered on the weekends and on some weekday nights where I could not stay awake any longer. My youngest son, was constantly by my side, sleeping on the couch and waking up from time to time to remind me that I’m human and that I need rest. My eldest son was encouraging me by his excitement and enthusiasm to just play the game and asking for more features such as shooting down enemies – and maybe someday I’ll add the robots he asked for in another game.

And my beloved wife… I couldn’t have done it without you. I almost gave up had it not been for you.

There were some very unexpected events that happened during the making of this game – most especially sad was the loss of the beloved cat Louie “The Count of Monte Meo.” He is actually the mascot in the logo for “Counterpunch Games” which is a play off his nickname “The Count.” After much discussion and deliberation, we retired the logo and put a dedication to him in the actual game. We hope to resurrect his memory in a much stronger and more thought out brand for our future game endeavors.

There is a long list of people whom I wish to personally thank, especially the friends who helped me, inspired me, and encouraged me along the way.

Mike Bilter and Scott Lightfoot who I first met in my first attempt to start a game development career and inspired me to go indie. Scott, thank you for the late-night discussion of making a game just like this.

Sheridan Layman and Jeremy Alessi who I met through the Richmond Game Designer’s Special Interest Group. Thank you Sheridan for creating the group and getting us all together. And thank you Jeremy for your inspiration as a published indie game programmer with much accolades from indie guru Jeff Tunnel himself.

Jeremy Kane, Brian Lowry, and Todd Scarola are some of the most brilliant and talented people I have every had the privilege to work with. Thank you Jeremy for showing me that no matter how busy your family keeps you, you can still make time to learn more and master your craft in the wee-hours of the night. Thank you Brian for your entrepreneurial spirit and inspiration. And thank you Todd for encouraging me to not doubt myself standing shoulder-to-shoulder with programming giants.

Thank you everyone. I hope you enjoy the game and I especially hope to make many more of them in the future.

But for now… I need some sleep.