XlanderSoftware

I am being more prepared this time around and getting my goals for the month of November in before November starts.

Release two Flash games

I will program two Flash games in the month of November. I plan to create one short and quick Flash game earlier in the month while working on a larger Flash game as the month progresses.

My reasons for this plan is I don't have enough free time or Flash development skills to create one big title yet. By creating one small game I can keep my income from Mochi ads trickling in and keep my traffic share kicking along. I redirect the traffic share ads to the games on my site here to gain some exposure to my Adsense ads.

Then as the month progresses I can work on a larger title where I hope to get a bigger income boost by releasing a game of higher quality.

Earn $25 for the month of November

Over all my income streams I aim to earn a total of $25 for the month of November. I plan to do this by adding my Flash games to as many portals as I can. I will compile a list of Flash portals and keep a database of games added and the dates I added them. This will help me in the future to release my Flash games.

I only have two goals for November as I do not think I will have a lot of spare time this month and both goals are pretty ambitious.

I have started making some simple reports to show the breakdown of my earnings this month so far. Apears I have all ready hit my goal of earning $5.

So far I have three pages of reports.

Overall Earnings This report show how much money I have earnt over all my income streams and how much I have actualy been paid out as cash in my hand.

Earnings For October 2008 This report shows three graphs. One for how much each income stream has earnt for the month.  One for how much I have earnt each day during the month and finally one for the running total for the month. These graphs are not complete as the month has not finished and thus flat line out for the last week or so currently.

MochiAds Performance This report shows how many hits my MochiAds games have had and how much they have earnt for me in their lifetime.

I have not found any interesting results from the data yet but I think in a few months time I will have enough that I can start to see some trends and do some rough estimates from the graphs.

Survival is an exciting game of cat and mouse! Dodge the invading horde of red squares and try to survive as long as possible.

Survival is my latest game. It has not been released, it has been unleashed! I think that is what happens when you listen to White Zombie while you program games.

I had a few goals in mind when I made Survival

• Increase the overall level of polish
• Have a clickable weblink to my site in the game
• Make it easy for people to embed the game in their site
• Implement Mochi ads interlevel ad
• Experiment with the Flash glow filter
• Build some reusable Flash game framework code

I have started to program a new Flash game and wanted to add a splash screen for XlanderSoftware. The requirements where to display an image that when clicked would open a new browser window to my website.

This is pretty easy to do in Flash. The only tricky part was bitmaps can not have mouse events attached to them so you need to have your logo bitmap inside a sprite. This makes it very easy to make a custom sprite class that shows your logo and when clicked takes opens a new browser window to your website.

Here is an example class.

import flash.display.Sprite;
import flash.display.Bitmap;
import flash.events.MouseEvent;
import flash.net.URLRequest;
import flash.net.navigateToURL;
 
public class XlanderLogo extends Sprite
{
   private var logo:Bitmap;
 
   public function XlanderLogo()
   {
      logo = new Resources.XlanderLogo();
      addChild(logo);
      this.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, LogoClicked);
   }
 
      private function LogoClicked(event:MouseEvent) : void
      {
         var url:URLRequest = new URLRequest(Resources.XlanderSoftwareURL);
         navigateToURL(url, "_blank");
      }
}

You may have noticed that recently I have been messing about with the sites layout and experimenting with some web advertising.  This is part of my goal for October to earn $5 from all my income streams, more on that later. For now I wish to make a quick post about some thing I found humors why I am busy waiting for my SQL Server install to finish on my development box.

In selecting my choice of web advertisement I would all ways press the family friendly option. While this site is not aimed directly at children, children do play games and some want to learn how to make them too. So due to this I selected family friendly where ever the options present them selves. Ya me!

So after injecting in the required advertisement code I refresh my site to see how it looks. Lo and behold there is an ad. Hurrah! Wait a minute it is for Free Amateur Web Cams with a mini montage of screen shots portraying women in their underwear and a half naked man with one hand down his pants. This does not fall under my definition of family friendly but I guess it must have been hot out where those women where and the guy was umm itchy?

Luckily I have a robust sense of humor and found it funny, plus with the global finance crisis I am a desperate man who will do any thing for 10 cents

Here is my very late list of goals for October

• Design, program and release another Flash game
• Earn $5 over all from my income streams by the end of October
• Gain +1 feed burner readers
• Create 1 Flash programming tutorial
• Maintain 100 blog views a month

Wow it is half way through October, I have been pretty busy
Here is my late September postmortem.

September Goals
Gain +1 feed burner readers
Status: Failed
My feed count has spiked up to one every now and then but they are all just bots from the data I have on them. To counter this I should write some useful blog posts about Flash that people actually want to read. I think some Flash game tutorials would be a good idea once I have some more Flash programming experience under my belt.

100 blog views
Status: Success
For September I had about 194 pageviews and 90 unique visitors.
Not massive numbers but it is a start and I achieved my goal.

Brainstorm at least 3 game ideas and place them into my ideas vault
Status: Failed
I brainstormed a lot of ideas, how ever only two of these ideas made it to the ideas vault.
A lot of the ideas I have are way beyond my current Flash skill level and the amount of spare time I have to work with thus I am unsure about posting them up here as the chance of these massive game ideas ever becoming a reality is close to zero. On the other hand it would give me a large pool of ideas to trawl through later that I could try to pull smaller snippets of stuff from to make a game that is within reach of completion.

Find some good online game programming communities and tutorials
Status: Success
I have been trawling the internet and have found quite a few useful tid bits here and there.

Design and complete 1 Flash game
Status: Success
TankRush was my first complete Flash game. While it is technically a game with a start, middle and end it is very, very rough. Still it is a start

Earnings for September
For September I had one revenue stream for one Flash game.
Using Mochi Ads I managed to earn $0.27 USD
This is ~0.13% of the grand total of $200 a month I want to earn.
Once I get some more data I think I will build a graph to chart how my earnings are panning out versus the target I want to hit.

Conculsion
September was ok, I hit 3/5 goals, earnt a tiny amount of money and learnt some new things.
Time to review and build on this for October.

Notepad wars a sketch book themed, geometry wars style game.

After I released TankRush onto Newgrounds, I got a lot of constructive feedback about improving the level of polish for a game before releasing it.

So I have added a menu, instructions on how to play, highscore and several minor graphical effects to notepad wars. So with a bit of luck this game will rate a bit higher than my last one!

A game about the feeding a hungry skull god and exploration of a strange world. I had this idea while waiting for a train one day. It is not a complete game design but I felt the idea had enough merit to write up so I did not forget it.

The player controls a young tribes man who has bee newly appointed the duties of feeding the skull god. The skull god is a giant screaming skull that is embedded in the base of a mountain. The players task is to set out from the base of the mountain and hunt animals to bring back and throw into the mouth of the screaming skull god.

Each animal thrown into the skull gods mouth reduces the skull gods hunger level. As time goes on the skull god becomes hungrier and start to cry out for more. This will be visually displayed as a shaking of the screen and also a sound effect of the god cries played. As the god gets hungrier the screams become louder and more frequent. If the young hunter lets the god become too hungry he will be struck down by a bolt of lighting from the heavens and the game ends.

The further away from the mountain base the player gets the larger and more filling animals are found to hunt. By keeping the skull god topped up with some larger animals he will gain more time to explore the world around him.

Strange artifacts and tokens can be found around the world which when brought back and thrown into the skull gods mouth grant the warrior his favor. This gifts the young warrior with new skills and equipment to explore the further reaches of the world. Say a bow and arrow to hunt birds, the ability to breathe underwater and chase fish or the ability to see in the dark and access caves locations.

Well I have just finished my very first Flash game: Tank Rush and released it into the wild!

TankRush ScreenShot

While the core game it's self is pretty much what I had hoped for the rest of it seriously lacks any polish. Eg the spares title screen. The main reason for this is I have not been able to get Swish and FlashDevelop to talk to each other. I am sure this will be a temporary set back so I have gone and released my game with Mochiads and used their version control tools. This way when I figure out how to stick my more polished intro/outro screens into my game I can just upload it there and it will filter it's way out into the web by magic.

As for Mochiads, creating an account and integrating my game with their system was very easy probably took about an hour or so to get it all up and running from start to end.

Credit must also go out to the Flying Yogi for the awesome tank graphics I used from his SpriteLIB Check it out if you have not all ready seen it.