O - Outcomes and Analytics

When I designed my 3D puzzle game 'O' I had two main intentions: to learn the webGL technologies and to learn about the broader social environment in which HTML game development exists. In service of this second goal the game has comprehensive google analytics functionality that was designed to tell me exactly who played what sections and how long it took them.

My basic idea was to actively try to promote the game across a few different channels and see if I could:
1. Just get people to play the thing I worked so hard on
2. Get useful, usable, intelligent feedback on various features of the game

Doing this wasn't going to be fun for a number of reasons: self promotion is culturally and personally loathsome to me; I have no interest, experience, knowledge or skills in social media and therefore come across as a 10 year old with a precociously impressive vocabulary when communicating online; also I'm a introvert mostly, anti-social mostly and misanthropic often.

So I made a list of sites and decided to work one each day for a week or so and see which groups paid attention to me.

About 30% of the hits on the game came with out referral information suggesting that they had linked directly to game from an emailed link - these users I suspect are mostly my friends, family and business associates to whom I sent the link. I didn't ask them for feedback of any sort and so didn't get any. A further 7% directly from this blog which suggests people from the small following that blog had recently gathered through js13k.

My plan was to provide a brief description of the game a screen shot or two and ask for comments and feedback on four specific points: the difficulty of the game, the learning curve when you start, the style of the rendering and the audio components.

I started with the social programmer places with which I am (slightly) familiar; specialist in these technologies is http://www.html5gamedevs.com/ a place for browser game developers to ask, show, help etc. In all I got 23 test plays from posting in their game showcase section, almost all of these players actually played the game over half way through - I got two comments on the game, both were constructive and extremely useful.

Locally the organization that seemed relevant was http://makegamessa.com/ a mixed group of amateurs and professionals in the South African scene whose meetups I have occasionally attended in the past. Although the site indicates that my pretty screen shots and links got 150+ views only 10 people actually played the game, most of them for a long time. I got three comments from this forum, all of these were useful and interesting, one was from an expert in audio who warmly, correctly (imho) and concisely pointed out my flaws - basically the best feedback you could ask for.

My next point of call was the sites that are specifically intended for indie game devs to showcase their work; these sites are not (mostly) communities but they exist to promote indie games and get players to look at them.

http://indievideogames.com/ has an elegant form that you fill in with all you details that makes a pretty page on their side and is promoted by a complex and widely followed social media community. I got 23 referrals out of this site from a profoundly international audience which pleased me.

http://gamejolt.com/ is a small but active community of developers and associated game artists who aggressively promote indie work. According to ther site the page only got 46 views - however I got some 20 players from this source; two of these rated the game and someone left a useful and constructive comment.

Finally on my list of things to try where the big places - Facebook and Reddit. I found these communities extremely difficult for an outsider  to understand and I suspect someone with a deeper understanding of these worlds might have found some more appropriate places and have extensively cross posted.

On facebook I made a post on the groups 'Gamedev show and test' and 'Indie Game promo' - together these garnered 41 players and the 'show and test' group included two accurate, explicit bug reports (which is great).

On reddit I used this sub-reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/playmygame/ and got around 10 plays from this source. The playmygame folk gave me three great and detailed responses, specifically responding to my request for feedback (and also an accurate bug report).

I did all this because I wanted to understand and get some real-life experience with promotion on the internet, I learned some things:
1. These communities are supportive and sweet places - I expected a lot of trolling or ignorant, mean-hearted comments - the comments I got were the opposite: thoughtful, intelligent and elequent .
2. I thought is would be harder to get players - I got more than 200 people to play the game (most of whom played with it for more than 15 minutes) by just writing a few posts in communities where I am not an active participant/
3. I thought it would be easier to get comments and - Perhaps my tone was not right on the introduction texts; perhaps it's always like this; certainly I need to learn a lot more in this area. If I were to release a commercial game I would need about 10 times the amount of players to give me good solid feedback before release - this experiment gives me little hope of achieving that through public media sites.
4. People liked my game, and many played it through to the end - the comments I received indicated that the wider audience agrees with my design sense about what worked and what didn't in the game.

That was my social media experiment - I hope all the folk that played the game had fun with it and sincerely thank those who took the time to comment.

O - Time to show it Off

It may seem that I have been slacking off on my puzzle game project but in fact I have been obsessively working at it. I decided not to post regular demo versions because by the nature of a puzzle game you can really only play it once.

The game only uses WebGL and some serious graphic card features so you really need a computer and a 'real' browser to run it - Chrome, Firefox and Safari work fine. Very high end android devices seem to run it okay but reports are that the frame rates are very bad on Apple devices.

The game is unique in this collection in that it has no tutorial, no instructions, no score - in fact no text or numerals of any form. Never the less I think it is easy to understand and quietly meditative if not exactly difficult as a puzzle. It also has sound effects and some beautiful ambient music so all in all it is probably my most 'complete' release.

Here then is my final version of the game.

Game 10 - Called 'O'?

I have done some recent work on the 3D puzzle game; I have decided to call it 'O'. I would like to make the game as non-linguistic as possible and will the idea is that it will need no explanation and the player will just find their way by fiddling.

Have added textures and better lighting to my models and they look pretty good. This demo shows a typical level of the game (perhaps level 3) - the idea is to free the gold rings.

Game 10 - Nails on the Mind

I have been having technical and architectural problems with my Noah's ark game and have decided to work a bit slowly on it for a few weeks so that I can get the basics right.

I wanted another project that is more fun and carefree to do in the meantime. As part of the twelve games I wanted to explore the new 3D technology provided by WebGL using a famous library called three.js.

So my tenth game is going to be a puzzle sort of thing created in 3D - I get to play with textures and pipe-line shaders which is all good fun for a techie.

Here is an example (desktop only atm I think)  of the webGL stuff running - you can drag to rotate or click an object to move it.

Game 9: Still Waiting for the First Turn

Life, laziness and work have been getting in the way some but the Noah's ark project is progressing at a deliberate crawl.

The new demo looks a lot more fancy and has interactive cards and action menus which show interface. I have decided on a four pane layout for the various bits of game the simulation involves.
Game state and a 'card state' for a specific action are now stored and can be accessed by the scripts and card validation rules can be set up - so I have a lot of what I need to get started.
I have also redone all the main art work which is now a bit better if not good enough for release.

You can take a look at the latest demo here.

Game 9: Waiting for Rain

I have been making slow but steady progress on my Noah's Ark simulator for the past quiet weeks; I have created a system to display arbitrary simulation spaces which display some aspect of the simulation. These spaces are square and only one can be 'active for interaction' at once. Spaces can contain various elements and currently support condition displays of graphics layers and a full mark down text layout engine.

Some elements in these spaces are linked to action lists which allow the player to open cards - a card is a modal surface containing details on a specific issue and can include controls that can be selected from and manipulated.

So I have a working demo of this technology here with some scrappy art work - it doesn't do very much but you can see the basic ideas are in place from an interface perspective.

Game 9: A Kind of a Sim Thing

Next on the hit list for game genres is a more serious simulation sort of thing - I have a background in business and technical simulations for education and am looking to develop a framework in which such ideas could be rapidly prototyped. In preparation for that long-term project I wanted to do a fun, quick concrete example of such a game as one of my twelve games.

One of my favourite business associates has a game idea around a complex and technical large scale engineering project simulation; her idea also encompasses the social and economic changes and pressures such a project is associated with. That idea is very exciting to me but the part about modelling the process in such a way that people would find it 'realistic' seems really boring.

So I was looking for an engineering project in a fantasy domain that was famous enough that most people would easily grok. So I thought of Noah's ark - it seems to fill all the criteria and some vast portion of the world would know what I was going on about (seems like as much as 50% of peeps are born into Abrahamic traditions). A bit of investigation suggests that the story is much older than our bible and extends to the very earliest written records.

So the plan is to play as Noah as the project manager on the most outrageous project ever (build an ark to save to world from a flood that no one else believes in). Given the inevitable rains the game will be about managing the resources you need to equip for the flood, build the ark and collect the animals.The old testament provides surprising detail as to the technical specification of the ark and the personages involved although fails to list a complete set of of animal species in sufficient detail.

Part of the experiment must be to present this simulation across a broad range of devices using local device storage to save and retrieve simulations.