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[compositeredfox]

I've been wondering... FGL guides tell you not to make your game public before posting it for bidding(so sponsors get the "exclusive "), but in some cases (I don't quite remember wich games) some developers told about how they got higher bids because their games or trailers got mentioned in games blogs.

So,  specially for a first game,  is it better to use an open development approach and generate hype,  or put the game for bid once it 's finished?

[bateleur]

The two approaches are not incompatible. The press do not need to play a finished game to provide coverage. If you have a development blog and produce video clips of your game then that can generate interest prior to release. If you're feeling particularly assiduous you can always offer private play opportunities to journalists who you think might be interested.

[aeiowu]

yea. what they mean by "making you game public" is in regards to the game itself... as in the actual .swf. If you're doing open development and recording progress via a devlog or something, it's up to you to mark the time when you should stop uploading .swfs for public consumption. You can still be open about development, post trailers, generate interest (which should only help your cause) while not making the game the slightest bit public.

[compositeredfox]

Thanks for the answers guys!

[HybridMind]

yea. what they mean by "making you game public" is in regards to the game itself... as in the actual .swf. If you're doing open development and recording progress via a devlog or something, it's up to you to mark the time when you should stop uploading .swfs for public consumption. You can still be open about development, post trailers, generate interest (which should only help your cause) while not making the game the slightest bit public.

Another good practice is to use a tool like SecureSWF to obfuscate your SWF and put an encrypted site-lock on your SWF so that you can still get press / limited exposure by maybe having just one version of the game hosted on your own site. In this way it can't really go viral which is the main thing that sponsors don't want to miss out on. There is a really distinctive traffic peak graph that occurs on any distributed flash game as it makes it's rounds out there and a ton of traffic would be lost if it already went viral ahead of securing a sponsorship.  Exceptions of course exist if the game is a monster hit and is generating run away traffic every month but that isn't something you can bank on.

Great thread here though.

I've been using FGL for almost 2 years and highly recommend it. I've successfully had sponsorships on every game I've listed through there and have been quite happy with the amounts received. In fact it is one of many reasons I can consider doing this as a living.

[Melly]

Okay, so here's my current experience with FGL so far, and I'd love it if more experienced people could help me a bit.

Recently I completed my first 'commercial' game called Action Escape Kitty, a simple score-based endless shooter I made in roughly a week and a half, and have been making minor improvements to for over a week after it's been approved for bidding. I really like the FGL website's design and layout (even though I'd probably pick a different aesthetic myself), and they're very good at explaining to you terms and conditions you've never heard of before in detailed layman's terms.

This is the link to the game in FGL (requires Flash 10):
http://www.flashgamelicense.com/view_game.php?from=dev&game_id=12364

You can play the game if you have an account, as I left it pretty open, using their Kindisoft site-locking and encryption tool.

Like I mentioned, bidding has been going on for over a week, and so far it has been very poor, with only a single bid for a very low ammount for an exclusive sponsorship with pretty much no benefits (I had also unmarked the exclusive sponsorship option, which this sponsor apparently ignored). The game has a little over 100 views and the developer rating is around 9.3, so I know people are at least liking it. Several sponsors have tried it, but only one has provided a bid.

Lately I've been working on a short and hopefully fun trailer to post and maybe generate a bit more interest. After that I also plan on contacting several portals directly, to see if they're interested.

Either way, I honestly expected a little more interest than what I've been getting, especially with how many sponsors have already tried my game. Perhaps there's something specific I've been doing wrong or haven't been doing at all? Should I send information about my game to game blogs? Was it a mistake to post the FGL link in this forum? Was it a mistake to open it to anyone with a FGL account to try?

[aeiowu]

Hey melly,

Pretty game!

I think there are a few things going on here.

1. There is no text to tell the player what button to press to begin the game. I started by pressing "Z" and navigated the menu with the arrows keys, and meandered over to "C" after a few seconds. I would either put something like "to start, press [C]" and then start the menu up or go right into the game and have the menu pop up after you've played your first time (using save data in flash). Or... just have "Z" "X" "C" "A" "S" "D" or even "spacebar" all be the action button. No reason to have the player press the wrong button from the outset.

2. I think the enemies are a little too hard for being so basic. I'm not talking about the behavior itself, but the fact that the snake-block enemies that you start with are at the very top and bottom of the screen is a little... unfair. You can't hit them all. I would try and give players one block of snakes in the beginning right in the middle of the screen. Stuff coming from behind you is also an issue and should happen much later in the game. Are the enemies "random" or procedurally generated? If so, then I think you can still do a fair amount to ramp up the difficulty on each playthrough by tweaking the values. (played through a third time, it seems like the same enemies, so not procedural?)

3. There's not a lot of depth to the gameplay. While the game is simply fun it doesn't leave much to come back to or reason to keep playing. Things like bonuses, multipliers and other layers of gameplay that can affect your hi-score can help provide that to more advanced players.

There's a little piece of advice I go back to often and I think following it would really help your chances on FGL. "Design for the extremes".

That is to say, design for the worst and best players, not the in-between. If you the worst players on earth can play your game while the most advanced players can still have fun, then everyone in the middle will fall into place.

The way we usually design stuff is by starting out with making it fun for ourselves and then a lot of the _work_ is making it accessible and easy to jump into for non-gamers or people that are simply bad at games (since most of our games are action-based, like yours).

I think those are the main things that stuck out. I should say I think the game is beautiful and well designed/programmed. It's quite polished, but there are some definite design holes that you could fill with a little bit more elbow grease that might just boost your chances of making a fair sum from sponsorship.

 

[Melly]

I'm not really looking into making it very complex. I think I understand your points, like the menu keys not being obvious. I'll add a small text saying how to start the game with C or X, so people already know which keys are actually used in-game by deduction.

I honestly never had difficulty hitting the two snake-chain enemies. They also take a long time on-screen to actually fire at you, and always converge to the middle. Did you hold the fire key to rapidfire? (that's mentioned in the instructions).

Enemies come from behind, but I never felt there was much issue since you can't be harmed by just bumping onto enemies (you can stay right on top of them), only by their bullets, and besides the lasering enemies (that always give ample warning of their attacks), nobody else attacks just as they're coming on screen from behind. I had several people give me feedback before that the game's beginning was very slow, so I felt it was a better idea to have the initial waves be easier, but keep the pace fast, as the game's really not meant to last very long.

The enemy waves are preset, with many of them increasing in number of enemies that show up as the difficulty increases, and the order of the waves is randomized, with some influencing delays on themselves and others to keep things fair.

The game's meant to be a simple test of skill. I did give thought to multipliers and the like, and I will test the idea. Might make it more interesting. I have a lot on my plate right now though so I'm not sure how much of the gameplay I can rework in that way.

[raiten]

I think Aiewou gave you some solid advice, but I don't think you're necessarily doing something wrong just because you're not getting bids on FGL. Now that the 10% fee is mandatory, I think everybody should just try shopping around on their own before putting the game up there. Just e-mail Armor Games, Kongregate, Newgrounds etc. and you'll probably get a bid or two that you can enter as proxy bids. The more bids a game has, the more interest it generates (at least that's what I heard).

Best of luck!

[jrjellybeans]

I don't know if this helps or anything, but here's my experience:

I worked on Earth Tower Defense for about 2 months full time while I was in between jobs.  It's a simple Tower Defense Gemcraft clone, but I hadn't really used Flash before and wanted to finally FINISH something in Actionscript.

The game is using the Mochi service for in game ads and stuff, and when I first uploaded the game, I had accidentally allowed them to distribute the game.  It was an incomplete 5 level demo of the game, but the game got uploaded to several sites.  According to the Mochi stats, the game was played around 4000 times [the actual number is probably higher because some sites seemed to rip out the Mochi stuff].  This probably affects the results I've gotten, but I offered to change the name of the game and the beginning levels if a sponsor wanted it.

Anyways, here are the overall stats that I'm looking at for Earth Tower Defense:

• The game has been available for sponsorship since around July 1.
• The game hasn't had any bids on it yet.
• The game got a 7 out of 10 Editor's Rating.
• The game has a little more than 120 views.
• The game has had around 20 sponsors who viewed it.
• Doing a very quick estimate, the game duration stat seems to be around 3 minutes.  The first week, people were playing the game for less than a minute.  For the past week, people have been playing the game for a couple of minutes.
• I e-mailed ALL of the sponsors on the BIG LIST OF SPONSORS on July 6.  A couple of them have responded back saying that they played the game but were not interested.

Overall, I like the service and I have no complaints with it.  Jon, from FGL seems to have answered my questions within 2 days of writing them and he seems to be quite helpful.

Obviously, I'm disappointed at the results, but I can understand the reason: the game has a glaring problem with the art.  Similar to how people keep telling YOU that the game needs more features, people keep telling me that the art is bad (which makes sense because I did it myself). 

While I am disappointed at my own failings, I'm not TOO worried about the game not selling because:

• Getting a 7 out of 10 is quite an achievement for me.  I'm just quite proud of that
• As soon as I find an artist, I'll be able to make a different version of the game reusing much of the same code.  As the #1 problem people have mentioned, when the art is finally fixed, the game should be a lot better.
• I've heard that FGL is slow.  Although I'm beginning to think that the game won't get any bids
• I screwed up the release by distributing the demo (I'm not too sure how that affected things.)

My overall idea now, is to wait until a month has passed since it's been available, then just release the game without a sponsor and hope to earn some money on ads.  While I'm waiting, I'm working on a different game and looking for that artist (I'll probably make a post on the collaborations unpaid forum soon, so if anyone is interested now, just PM me). 

I hope this helps anyone considering flash games.  I think this is a really important and interesting thread, so I just wanted to add my two cents.

(If any one is interested, I plan to do a complete post mortum on the game that I will put on the Jr. Jellybeans blog.  I'm just waiting until the game is officially considered to be "released" to do it.)

[tametick]

Is there any chance at all of getting a java game (such as http://www.pulpgames.net/milpa/) on FGL?

[Eraser]

Is there any chance at all of getting a java game (such as http://www.pulpgames.net/milpa/) on FGL?

Seriously doubt it, considering it's a service dedicated to flash games.

[tametick]

Is there any chance at all of getting a java game (such as http://www.pulpgames.net/milpa/) on FGL?

Seriously doubt it, considering it's a service dedicated to flash games.

Well, Chris said:

we're not even limited to Flash, believe it or not

Which is why I asked.

I think "Flash" in this case might actually be used as a synonym for "web games", or at least a certain type of web games (most of which are flash, but there are some odd exceptions here and there).

[Brother Android]

My game was rated a 7, and has received 0 bids over the course of a couple of months.

[Melly]

I'm still waiting for anyone to tell me whether or not it's a bad idea to talk about the game to gaming blogs and such, though I'm thinking it shouldn't be a problem.

Personally, I'm thinking of doing something different. If the game doesn't get a good sponsorship despite my best efforts, I'll take it back from FGL, improve it considerably, and sell it as a standalone game like Machinarium and VVVVVV, possibly for a pretty low price unless I do something amazing with it.

Also, nice link jrjellybean. That should be helpful.

I think that, in general, the Flash game market is already getting pretty saturated. You need to offer something pretty amazing (or incredibly addicting) to impress people.

[moi]

I think people shouldn't listen to all the talk of flash games being like a new eldorado.
IMO there is a couple of big portals who are just throwing VC money out the window in order to build brand recognition (kong, armor,etc...). If your game happens to be seen at the end of the month when the employee in charge of buying is tired and has a remaining $10k on his hands, you could become a very lucky guy.
On the other hand you have all the normal portals (which are not very many either) which can only bid normal amounts on games (like $200) in order to not be losing on the deal.
I left a game on FGL for one month and a half, got a $200 bid straight from the first day, and then nothing else despite the dozen of portal views.
I decided $200 was not enough for the amount of work I put in and decided to go the self sponsoring route.
After two months on mochi ads I go a whooping 5 dollars and a bout 1-2 visits a day on my site.
I think making good quality flash games is worth it if you want to do self sponsoring and build up traffic to a website (if you know how to monetize traffic) .
The problem with sponsoring money is that you can't bet on it, you can make a great game and don't get any good offers.
Oh BTW the most sure way to get good bid offers is to make a very simple game with a shop and dozens of upgrades. Oh and achievements. Yes, "you started the game" kind of achievements.

Next time I'll make a PC game and try to sell it. I probably won't sell a lot but it will be more worthy of my time.

[PROTIP]There are like 50 new games every day on FGL these days.

[jrjellybeans]

Yikes!  It's good to know that it's just not my game doing so badly.

It would seem to me that what moi and melly said is true; ie the flash market is insanely saturated.  I still think there's an incredible opportunity to earn money in it.

Also, something that I'm curious about is selling in game stuff.  I'd like to to release some sort of level pack for Earth Tower Defense for like a buck.  I don't see many people doing it, and I wonder how well it would work.  Not a lot of people seem to do this and I'm wondering why.  Anybody have any experience with this?  [Based on what I've read, this seems to be the second best way to earn money...]

Also, I read that a game didn't need to be in Flash to be accepted as well.  I'm pretty sure that Java games are acceptable.  Why don't you ask Jon at FGL?

Lastly, here's a list of portals that you can upload your game onto.  I don't know if people know about this either:
Big List of Flash Portals

[Captain_404]

I know there was a developer survey recently which indicated they were looking into hosting Unity games in addition to Flash games. I can't speak to Java games though.

[raiten]

moi, you've completely misunderstood how the flash business works. I wouldn't draw so many conclusions from the single fact that one of your games wouldn't sell.

[moi]

Thanks, care to share your views about how the flash game business works ot is it just a little jab?