It’s been nearly a year since the release of the original Zombie Outbreak Simulator in late November last year, and about 7 months since we released Class 3 Outbreak (C3O) in April this year.
The original version of C3O included two maps, in Washington DC and Leicester England, covering a total area of around 1.25 square kilometres. We figured that the other 150 million square kilometres of land on Earth deserved to experience a zombie apocalypse too!
So since the last release we’ve started work on a new version of C3O. This version includes an editor, which lets you choose anywhere in the world (where the Google Maps® image quality is good enough), draw in the locations of walls, buildings, trees etc, and then send in the zombies. So you can watch as zombies take over your house, work, school, wherever!
Here is what the editor currently looks like:
Once you’ve edited a map, you can click Publish and your map becomes available as a marker on the home page, for anyone to play:
Click a marker, and you’ve got instant zombie mayhem:
After several months of development we’re now at the stage where we are ready to start closed beta testing. So we’re putting out a call for beta testers!
The current version is a very early release – there’s still plenty more for us to do during the beta testing phase, before we’re ready for a public release. Also, this version can currently only play the Zombie Outbreak Simulator on custom maps. We will be adding the ability to play games like C3O, and lots more game features, soon.
If you would like to be part of the beta, send us your email address via our contact page, and we’ll send you details on how to log in. You can also keep an eye on our forums, for updates on our progress.
Jay and I are looking forward to seeing what kinds of maps you build!
It looks like it will be an interesting show – it features Max Brooks, the author of The Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z. So if you live in the US and have access to the National Geographic Channel, you might want to check it out!
A couple of months ago, Nick Lowe from Let’s Make Games asked me to present a talk on Flash game publishing, at an event they were organising with talks from a few local game developers.
There are many ways to publish Flash games, and I’m no expert in any of them. So I decided to present a ‘history of Class 3 Outbreak’, including details of how we published C3O, and some other miscellaneous info about Flash game development.
Here is the video of my talk (in two parts – total approx 25 minutes):
Thanks to Richard and Ben from Let’s Make Games for preparing the videos.
For those of you who don’t want to watch a video or read slides, below are some of the highlights of the talk.
Jay and I started development on C3O in March 2009. In November 2009 we released Zombie Outbreak Simulator (which has been played over 800,000 times since), and in April 2010 we released Class 3 Outbreak (which has been played over 650,000 times since).
One of the background themes of my talk was to cover some of the mistakes we made during development of C3O, and what we learned from those mistakes. Here’s a summary of them:
Mistake 1 – When sponsors want Flash games
We first released the Zombie Outbreak Simulator (ZOS) on our own website. We weren’t sure how it would go, but a few days after it was released it appeared on the front page of Digg. For the next two days it received 90,000 hits per day (about once per second).
We thought that a Flash portal might want to put ZOS on their own site, to get that traffic for themselves. So we asked some portals if they would be interested in sponsoring ZOS.
What we learnt was that most Flash games receive an initial spike of plays, and then die off very quickly. Therefore sponsors are only interested in games before they’ve been publicly released. It was therefore too late for us to try to get sponsorship for ZOS.
Our traffic confirmed this – within a week it was down to 10,000 plays per day, and then soon settled at around 1000 plays per day.
Mistake 2 – Why sponsors want Flash games
We originally thought that sponsors wanted to sponsor games so that people would go to the sponsor’s site to play them. It turns out that sponsors actually want the game to spread virally to hundreds and thousands of other portals. A sponsored game will include links back to the sponsor’s site, which will drive traffic back to the sponsor.
Our game is built on Google maps, which uses a key that locks the game to a single website. This meant that it was impossible for ZOS to spread to other portals, and therefore no sponsor would want it.
Mistake 3 – Back to back releases
We initially planned to release ZOS as a preview for C3O, to help build interest. We could have released ZOS earlier, but we waited until we had almost finished C3O, with the plan being to release C3O one week after ZOS.
In hindsight that was a crazy idea. We got caught up in the excitement surrounding ZOS, which consumed all of the free time we had planned to use to finish and release C3O. Then we went into the Christmas period, where spending time with family left little time spare for development of C3O.
In the end it took us about 4 months to release C3O after ZOS. Part of the reason was that we modified C3O so that we’d be able to sell it to sponsors. We bought the imagery for a region of Leicester in the UK and embedded it into the game. This made it possible for the game to spread to portals, because the Leicester map could be played anywhere. The original Google-based Washington map would still be locked to a single site – so we planned to link it back to the sponsor’s site.
Mistake 4 – Too boring
When C3O was ready to release we started to see if any sponsors would be interested in it. We didn’t get as good a response as we were hoping for.
The average Flash gamer has a very short attention span. They need to be hooked within the first minute or two of play, or else they will just go and play any of the other hundreds of games which are constantly released. C3O takes around 15 to 30 minutes to play, and starts slowly. Also we had cut so many features from our original plans in order to finally release something, that the game had little replay value. The end result was a game which wasn’t very attractive to sponsors.
This chart shows how long people were playing our game for, during the first few weeks after release. A large proportion didn’t make it to the 15 minutes required to play a full game.
Our best sponsorship offer was for $4500, but in the end we decided not to accept it, and instead we released C3O ourselves on our own site. We thought we might be able to do better than that with our own ads.
Mistake 5 – Too big
When we developed C3O we decided to make it 800×600 pixels in size. It turns out that many portals can only handle games up to a maximum of 650 or 700 pixels wide. Therefore some sponsors won’t accept games wider than that, since it reduces the number of portals the game can spread to.
Our first and third top sponsor offers couldn’t accept an 800 pixel wide game, and asked if we could make it narrower. We tried reducing the size but didn’t like how it looked. So this was another reason why we decided to release the game ourselves.
So in the end we self-published both ZOS and C3O, earning revenue solely from the many ads we placed in and around the games. Below is the chart from the most interesting slide in the talk – how much money we’ve made. This shows our cumulative revenue, expenses and profit. We’ve made about $3000, spent about $2000 and so have a profit of about $1000.
This chart is the breakdown of where we made our revenue. Our biggest earner is our Google ads, even though only around two thirds of our plays have been on our own website where the Google ads are displayed.
Note these charts are in Australian Dollars, which are currently worth about the same as US dollars.
It’s been a while since we’ve posted any game updates to our blog. What we’re working on at the moment is a new version of Class 3 Outbreak with an editor. This will make it possible for anyone to choose anywhere in the world (where the Google maps image quality is good enough), draw in the locations of the walls, trees etc, and then send in the zombie apocalypse.
ZOS was released about 6 months ago, and is now at 665,000 plays, and C3O was released about 7 weeks ago and is now at 335,000 plays.
It’s been about 4 months since I posted that ZOS reached half a million plays. Since that time ZOS has settled at around 1000 plays per day.
Like ZOS, C3O has now been played by most of the world (yellow means no plays from that country).
The top ten countries are:
Brazil – 18.2%
United States – 14.0%
China – 12.2%
Norway – 11.7%
Poland – 9.5%
Japan – 4.8%
United Kingdom – 3.3%
Germany – 2.9%
Denmark – 2.3%
Canada – 1.8%
Building our game on top of Google Maps requires us to lock our game to specific websites. That is why ZOS only appeared on our site and later Kongregate. However the standard approach for Flash games is for them to spread virally over numerous portals.
Therefore, our plan for C3O included buying the imagery for Leicester and embedding it directly into the game. This allows that map to be played from any website, and C3O then links back to our site to play the original Google Maps based Washington map. So far C3O has spread to just under 600 websites. The large numbers for countries like Brazil, Norway and Poland have been due to the game featuring on a few large gaming sites in those countries.
We initially released the game on our site only, and promoted it on our forum, Facebook page, and mailing list, to see whether we would get a similar response to ZOS. Not much happened :)
So a week later we created a new version for general distribution to portals. We uploaded it to Kongregate, Newgrounds, Flash Game Distribution, and Jay submitted our site to numerous other websites, all of which produced a good initial spike of traffic. Since then C3O has settled at around 4000 plays per day, with a few occasional spikes.
A few weeks ago we also submitted the site to Mochi Distribution. This seemed to have very little effect on the traffic, although it has had an obvious effect on the number of sites at which C3O is played each day:
The 335,000 “plays” are actually counting the number of times which the game has been loaded. We also track the number of games played within a single session:
No plays at all (!): 22.3%
1 play: 64.4%
2 plays: 8.7%
3 plays: 2.7%
4 plays: 1.0%
5 or more plays: 0.9%
Who are all these people who don’t like the look of the main menu enough to even play a single game? :)
At first glance these numbers seem pretty bad. However around 50% of our plays are from repeat visitors to our game. So a large percentage of those single plays (and maybe even some of the zero plays) are actually people who like the game enough to come back again another day.
Overall we’re quite happy with the reception to C3O so far, and we’re now busy working on even more features to make the next version of the game even better!
A couple of days ago Zombie Outbreak Simulator reached the milestone of half a million views, around 10 weeks since it was released.
I thought it might be interesting to post where all those views came from.
According to Google analytics, around 25% of the hits were from returning visitors. So that makes around 375,000 unique people who’ve played Zombie Outbreak Simulator.
Almost every country in the world has had a play (yellow means no plays from that country):
The top ten countries are:
United States – 44.0%
Japan – 18.7%
Canada – 6.4%
South Korea – 6.2%
United Kingdom – 4.9%
Germany – 2.2%
Australia – 2.1%
France – 2.0%
Spain – 1.9%
China – 1.6%
Over 2700 sites have now linked to us, with most of our traffic coming in bursts as popular sites link to us:
ZOS has been successful way beyond our expectations – considering we just thought it would be an interesting preview for our real game, Class 3 Outbreak. We hope C3O will do even better – now we just have to finish it…!
Binary Space is the developer of the games Zombie Outbreak Simulator and Class 3 Outbreak, which feature a zombie apocalypse played out in real locations on maps.
