As we’ve mentioned before at http://www.indiegogo.com/Class-3-Outbreak, we’ve recently been awarded $60k in grants to further develop Class 3 Outbreak. This is going to make a huge difference to how quickly we can develop new features. We’re looking forward to starting on that – we’re currently aiming for the middle of June.
To speed up development even further, we’ve decided to pitch in some of our own cash, to hire some extra people to help us out.
We’re looking for one or two additional programmers, to work part-time for up to a couple of months, starting from mid-June / July. This will most likely suit university / college / tafe students. We’ll be flexible around your studies / exams / mid-year vacation / etc. Depending on how it works out, we may be able to extend the work longer-term as well.
The key attributes we are looking for are someone who:
Is smart
Gets things done
Has initiative
Is enthusiastic
Below is a list of technologies / areas which we currently use. If you already know some of these, then great! If not, then we will expect you to be able to learn them quickly, based on your coding experience.
ActionScript 3
Flex
FlashDevelop
Python
Google App Engine
HTML
JavaScript
CSS
jQuery
AJAX
Game Development
2D Graphics
Although optional, we would also be interested if you have experience developing for iOS.
We are primarily looking for people either in Western Australia or South Australia (where we live – about 2500km apart from each other). However given that we work with each other online, we’re also open to receiving applications from other states of Australia, or other countries. You will also be working remotely, and so you will need to be able to supply your own computer / internet connection / etc.
A demo of something you have created. Preferably something you have worked on in your own time, rather than a study project. Instead of sending an attachment, please send a link where we can download it from. Note that we have Windows machines (so won’t be able to run a demo on other platforms), even though most of the technologies we use for Class 3 Outbreak are platform independent. You might also want to include a link to screenshots / videos.
A sample of your source code. There’s no need to send a whole working project, just send an extract such as a single class or function – enough for us to get a sense of your ‘programming style’.
For visitors not familiar with us: Binary Space was formed in February 2009 by Jay Weston and Saxon Druce, who worked together developing PC racing games at Ratbag Games back in the late 90s. We are currently developing Class 3 Outbreak (www.class3outbreak.com), a zombie real time strategy game based on Google Maps. Since the first release in November 2009 it has been played over 2 million times, and we have lots more features planned!
There’s still lots more to go, but this is a ‘first cut’, which we thought we’d put out there so that you can start to play around with it.
When you load a map, it will initially start the Zombie Outbreak Simulator as before. Click ‘Play a Game’ on the left, and it will reload and start a game. In this version you have three controllable civs who you can move around, and order to shoot the zombies.
Now that you are controlling civs instead of police, the game is more about survival than about attacking zombies. We’ve therefore changed the behaviour so that when you click to move a civ, they will no longer stop to shoot at zombies – they will just keep running. In the classic C3O you had to double-click to get that to happen. Your civs will however still auto-fire at zombies when the civ is standing idle. For the same reason, by default the game now starts already overrun by a map-wide outbreak of zombies (but you can still change that in the options).
In our crowd-funding campaign at http://www.indiegogo.com/Class-3-Outbreak, all perks for contributions of $100 or more include “Your name/character appears in the game world. Choose to be a zombie or civilian!”. Our plan for this is that your will appear as a non-playable civ or zombie roaming the map, which the player might be able to recruit later in the game. Our plan for the original civs that you start the game with is that they will be yourself, plus friends you’ve imported from Facebook (or just typed in). However we haven’t implemented any of that yet, so for now I just inserted three fixed names. As a temporary bonus for our two top contributors Ethan and Emil, we’ve included them as the first two controllable civs (and Jay rounds out the third). Also Ethan and Emil have been added to the credits page at http://www.class3outbreak.com/credits. Thanks Ethan and Emil for your support, and also to everyone else who has made a contribution! :)
As of this release, we’ve also decided to remove all of the ads from the site, as they just made it look bad, and they weren’t earning much anyway.
The next feature I’m planning to work on is the ability to group civs together, so you can move them as a group, instead of having to do it individually as they are now. And then of course we’ll move on to all of the other features we have planned, as described at http://www.indiegogo.com/Class-3-Outbreak.
We hope you enjoy the new release! Let us know what you think :)
So far we’ve been developing Class 3 Outbreak in our spare time, with over 2000 hours spent during the last 2 years. Our goal is to turn Binary Space into a business. We love making games, and want to be able to work on games like Class 3 Outbreak full-time. To that end we are looking to raise funding in several ways, one is through government grant funding, another is through crowd funding.
We’ve recently been awarded a couple of grants by South Australian government funding groups, which we are of course pretty stoked about!:
– $50k from the South Australian Film Corporation – $10k from the South Australian Creative Industries Program
We’re in the final contracting phases on these, and expect to be able to switch into full-time development of Class 3 Outbreak from around June.
This will keep us going for a couple of months, but what then?
We’re using the IndieGoGo crowd funding website to raise money to keep us working full-time for as long as possible. So we are asking for your help to support us in our indie endeavors! If we reach our target of $50k, that will allow us to keep working for several more months, and put us on the path to being profitable and self-sustaining. But any amount would still be a big help – we’ll work for as long as we can afford, or work part-time.
IndieGoGo allows us to give away pre-orders for our game, along with perks if you spend a certain amount. All of the perks include free access to all of the paid features, as they are developed. So when we start charging our other players for those, pre-order customers get them for free. When we introduce virtual currency, we’ll also give you some for free. And of course, whatever amount you give us, you’ll receive our undying gratitude, for helping us make Class 3 Outbreak a reality!
Our primary plan to become profitable is to make Class 3 Outbreak “freemium”. It will always be free to play, but players will have the opportunity to purchase additional features if they wish. We’ll have a virtual currency via which you will be able to buy extra items such as weapons, and we will offer exclusive paid features as well.
To kick off our crowd funding efforts, we’ve just released a Royal Wedding map for the game. Saxon quickly coded in Prince William and Kate Middleton and some onlooking crowd members, and I drew up the Westminster Abbey map. Of course, zombies descend and make a mess of their wedding. We think it’s pretty funny, and so hopefully a lot of other people think so too. If it picks up steam and spreads then we will be very happy!
We have outlined a feature set for Class 3 Outbreak on the IndieGoGo website, head on over, check it out and please support our game. Thanks!
The Tomorrow Start Grant is a competitive grant to assist South Australia’s emerging digital media industry and ends in June 2012.
The purpose of the Tomorrow Start Grant is to:
Assist start-up South Australian digital media businesses to become better established and overcome significant and immediate barriers to the growth of commercial revenues
Target innovative start-up companies with a clearly identified business opportunity, that need some external financial support to capitalise on that commercial opportunity
Support the development of new technologies, products and services involving the commercialisation of digital media and, in particular, embedded digital media
Enhance the economic growth of South Australia
We’ve been approved for a grant of approximately $10,000, which will allow us to buy development equipment, pay for legal advice, and cover our hosting costs.
We are happy to announce that the open beta version of Class 3 Outbreak’s Editor is out now! Saxon has been working hard on this over the last year, and in the mean time C3O is closing in on 1 million plays. With the new editor, you can now paint down maps in your local area, then unleash the zombie hordes upon your street, workplace or school. Map creation is achieved by painting down colors over the top of the satellite imagery – red for walls, green for trees and grey for flat ground. There are a few basic tools such as a line tool, free hand tool and fill, with the ability to change brush size as well. Once you’ve finished, you can publish your map and share it with friends or fellow gamers.
The game has also been moved to www.class3outbreak.com, where you’ll see that we have a world map showing the location of outbreaks across the globe. Maps that are published are moderated by myself, and if they’re of high enough quality, they go on the home page as one of the red markers. Even if you don’t get featured, you can still play and share your map.
So now that our most important feature is out the door, we will be moving back to gameplay, so that players can load up their neighborhood map, then begin the task of surviving the outbreak. Unlike any other game, you will walk the streets and be familiar with your own surroundings. Very first on the agenda is controllable units, I believe we will be starting with just one controllable civilian, then we will go from there.
We look forward to seeing what maps you come up with. So far I’ve been deluged with about 60-70 map moderation requests in 2 days, which is a good sign. Tell us what you think, constructive good or bad criticisms are welcome. If you’d like to follow development as we get back into the fun stuff, you can follow me on Twitter @JayWeston or Saxon @SaxonDruce. Then there’s our Facebook page at www.facebook.com/Class3Outbreak and the forums.
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.
I had the pleasure of attending my first ever zombie walk on the weekend, and if you’ve never been I highly recommend it! We had (I think) around 3000 people turn out and fill the streets with zombies – everything from your classic blood covered shamblers to nazi zombies, Pop Cap’s ‘Plants VS Zombies’ game characters, and even zombie dogs, children and babies (!) It was hilarious.
While walking along I must say, it made me think, “how on earth did this event get organised?”. I could picture the conversation between the council and some zombie geeks:
Zombie geeks: “Can we cordon off 4-5 city blocks with some police for an hour or so on a busy Saturday night just so that we can pretend that we are all zombies?”
Council: “Sure why not”
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!
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.
