That’s it, folks, I’m hosting my blog on my site!

It’s a 2D shooter called GlowSpace, inspired by Raiden X and Geometry Wars. I think it’s fun, and hopefully it will sell…

I also made a Jade Wolf 3 video, showcasing a little of the new nature of the game – you run around and bite stuff – it’s no longer just a Sonic clone. There’s 3 Islands, each with their own distinctive architectural styles: MesoAmerican, Balinese, and Thai.

Each island has a different play-style, as well.

I’d really like to get a demo of the first island online by the end of May.

Yeah, time to get serious about games again…

I’ll put a demo up soon – I haven’t actually done any work on it for 3 weeks, cos of moving and everything…

Dammit, Sonic IV was not as good as I’d hoped. Is nothing sacred, anymore?

Cool, huh?

I just published Jade Wolf 1 and 2 in Chinese, on 7k7k.com and youyouwin.com. Here’s how it went:

I received about 8 emails/PMs across a bunch of portals where Jade Wolf is hosted – ie newgrounds.com, kongregate.com, mochiads.com etc… These expressed an interest in porting Jade Wolf into Chinese for 7k7k.com. I wrote back, but got no reply.

A month later, I was browsing flashgamelicense.com, and saw an ad for youyouwin.com – they were looking to translate games. Anyway, they offered me $150 for Jade Wolf 2, and $75 for Jade Wolf. Both versions would be sitelocked to their sites, contain their ads, and have no links back to seditiongames.com.

I found them helpful, prompt, and easy to deal with. I received translations within a couple of days of sending them, and was paid in paypal immediately. I had a little bit of trouble with Chinese text (I’d accidentally embedded the font 4 times, making the swf file 30 MB! Note to self: that was retarded. Don’t do it again).

So are they preferable to the Mochi translation service? Not sure yet. Anyone know?

Play Jade Wolf Chinese

Play Jade Wolf 2 Chinese

I offer up my own stats, that they might be of help to others. Note that I’m not a successful author, and though my games have been played millions of times, I’m still just scraping by.

Anyway… As of October 4, 2010, here are the earnings (in $US) for the games I’ve made:

Super Slash Ninja:

My first ever game. Yeah, it kind of sucks, as you’d expect. It was released without sponsorship.

Total Plays to date: 37,323

Total Income: $14.95

SlashQuest:

This game was again pretty poor. Addicting Games very kindly sponsored it to appear without ads on their site.

Total Plays to date: 249,360

Total Income: $512.45

Jade Wolf:

I took a year to make this (just working in my free time). I really learnt a great deal about making games during this time, and the quality of Jade Wolf is a marked improvement over my earlier drivel. Again, I went with Addicting Games as a sponsor, as they did not require a logo to be permanently onscreen.

This game contained HeyZap’s microtransaction system. However, it was only there so that people could donate if they liked the game. The game made about $20 through this, but since that’s not enough to get a payout (need $50), it’s not counted in the total.

Scholar Games bought a sitelocked version of the game.

Chinese portals YouYouWin/7K7K also bought a sitelocked version in Chinese – they provided the translation.

Total Plays to date: 2,455,965

Total Income: $1,427.07

Jade Wolf 2:

I was really happy with this game when I released it. I still think it’s a solid game. It was released with CPMStar ads initially, followed by a MochiAds one month later. The sponsor (Flash Ninja Clan) gets 33% of ad revenue.

Chinese portals YouYouWin/7K7K also bought a sitelocked version in Chinese – they provided the translation.

Total Plays to date: 2,973,300

Total Income: $2,147.87

AdSense:

AdSense for seditiongames.com total income: $200.97

I also have $16.20 in my Newgrounds account, and $19.05 in my Kongregate account. Since neither get paid out till they reach $100, I’ve not included them above.

Which means I’ve earned a grand total of:

$14.95 + $512.45 + $1,427.07 + $2,147.87 + $200.97 =

Goddammit, I need to get my shit together if I’m going to make a career out of this… Lucky I’m living in Thailand, I guess… Next up: 30 reskinnings of the same, shitty game. For the coin, yo!

Here you can see an early example of some of the new skills in Jade Wolf 3:

- Enemies no longer die if you roll into them or jump on them – instead, you stun them.

- you need to bite enemies to kill them… however, this takes time, and you are vulnerable to other enemies’ attacks while you do this

- you also have magic. There’s a magic bar up the top left of the screen. For demonstration purposes, you can see a bunch of abilities, such as green magic, blue magic, yellow magic, red magic etc. In the game, you will only have one magic at a time. And there will be more things you can do with it…

No idea when I will release this – I’m working on 2 other games, and there’s HEAPS more to do on this…

To overcome this, you need to load the world dynamically – that is, load and display just the section of the world that you’re in… Fair enough, it’s what most non-flash games do, anyway. The problem is, it takes a lot of calculations to convert vectors to bitmaps – and this leads to times when the game freezes (for only half a second or less) as you leave one map area and enter another. Which kind of kills the feeling of boundless speed and freedom of movement.

So what’s the alternative? Most people use tiles – such as in William and Sly -

William And Sly

Unfortunately, this leads to everywhere looking the same, as it’s composed of the same graphic cubes… An alternative is to do what they did in Braid:

from David Hellman's page, http://www.davidhellman.net/

But this will lead to a large filesize. So the 3rd option is Bitmap shading:

Jade Wolf Bitmap Shading experiment

In the end, I think this is the effect to go with… though it has its own problems, which are too boring to talk about (yes, even more boring than the post I’ve just authored).

So… blah! I’m 70% convinced that bitmap shading is the way to go. The end, bitches.

I’ve been trying to upload Jade Wolf 2 to fizzy.com, but something about the site alters the x/y coordinates in the game, making it unplayable.

I’ve been planning a downloadable version of Jade Wolf over fizzy, but I can’t do it if this shit goes on.

Um… the end.

Well, I also hate having sore eyes, and a sore back. Both are results from too much computer use – in fact, I now feel that laziness is a virtue for a flash programmer, as it saves your body from crippling pain.

Anyway, I need a sponsor. Last time round, I settled on Addicting Games, for though they take 3 months to pay, and offered 25% less than did MaxGames, they did not require a permanent onscreen logo. I’m not disclosing the amount that Addicting Games paid me, as per their request… but I’ll say that it was less than the $1000 I was aiming for as a minimum.

Personally, I like Jade Wolf 2. But hey, I liked Jade Wolf 1. However, I can see that it likely has less replay value than, say, RetroShoot 360.

RetroShoot360

I chose this game as an example because even though it’s a good game, it is repetititve. Like many Flash games these days, players do the same thing over 50 levels, with each level introducing a new enemy/powerup etc. This means the developer has less to develop, in order to get several hours’ worth of playable game.

It’s a bit of a conundrum for makers of ‘art games.’ Doing the same thing over and over (for example, in a puzzle game like Zookeeper) can keep gamers playing longer than a game where they run through 20 distinct levels… Unfortunately, if your goal is to ‘finish’ a game like Jade Wolf 2, then there’s very little reason to keep playing it once you’ve reached the end. Whereas if your goal playing ZooKeeper or a similar game is to ‘survive’ and get a highscore, then you can keep redoing the same thing over and over, seeking perfection. And hey, I love ZooKeeper, but I’d rather play games like Mario 63. Sadly, Mario 63 took 2 years to make, whereas ZooKeeper could have been done in a day or two.

Zookeeper

Which brings me to the point. Jade Wolf 2 reperesents thousands of hours’ labour. Yes, it was a labour of love, but I still need to get some cash, cos I’m hungry, and my balls hang out of the holes in my undies… um, in case you were wondering, that was meant to illustrate my poverty, not my peversion. You sicko.

But if people are at most going to play it to completion, then I estimate that to take three hours or so. Whereas they might play a skilltester game like ZooKeeper for 5 minutes a day, every day for a month. Which, of course, creates thirty ad-views for a sponsor’s site. Part of the reason I made Jade Wolf 1 an ‘exploration game’ was that I could get more out of limited assets by having the player run back and forth. And, of course, that it wasn’t too similar to Sonic the Hedgehog or Fancy Pants… but whatever.

Anyway, I’m being paranoid. Gimme some fucken money! Sponsor my fucken game! Buy me some new underwear!