Tag Archive for development

| April 5, 2010
39 comments

Class 3 Outbreak, Released! Buh-rrRaaAaAiiiinNZ!

All Saxon and I can say is, “finally!”. After many delays with things like sponsorship, flash game portal versions, and ZOS itself, we are super happy happy, joy joy to announce that Class 3 Outbreak is sitting on our server now, ready for you to engage the zombies on their terms (you’re going to lose, its just a matter of how badly!). So after around 14 months, the first version of our baby (think the zombie baby from Dawn of the Dead, ok?) is out! It’s amazing it’s taken us this long for a game which appears quite simple on the surface, but being part time indie-ers, thems the breaks! Feel free to crush our spirits or pat us on the back for a job well done, as long as its constructive then we are happy. We also welcome the inevitable comments like “FAIL” and “this is such win-ness”.

For the first week or so the game will be site locked to class3outbreak.com, but then we will remove that and let it spread to the games portals that support 800×600 games.

From here on, now that much of the ground work has been laid, we look forward to putting in some of the really fun stuff. Feel free to head over to our forums and chat with us, we are always watching!

We look forward to following the response over the coming weeks. Thanks for supporting and following our game!
Jay and Saxon

Category: Binary Blog, Development Journal, Games | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
| February 12, 2010
12 comments

Zombie Outbreak Simulator Earnings Report

Greetings readers, I thought tonight I would contribute to the number of flash game earnings reports circulating on the www.

Since release on November 23rd we’ve had roughly 520,000 plays of Zombie Outbreak Simulator on the Class 3 Outbreak website. Today is Feb 24th, so that’s over the course of 3 months, with a good 200,000 plays being in the first few days, petering out to between 5-10k hits a day for the next month, finally settling down to around 1,000 plays a day now. Since we didn’t expect anywhere near the traffic we got, we probably missed out on around 100,000 hits worth of revenue in the first day, since we had no adsense or mochi ads ready.

As I just said, we decided to go with primarily Mochi Ads and Google Adsense, and according to most people you’d have to say we spammed our visitors with mochiads while they ‘played’ (watched) ZOS. We figured that since there was no way we could interrupt the game, we would opt for an ‘ad heavy experience’. We copped a bit of flak for it, and reduced the number slightly, but still not enough for some people as we continued to get some flames. Our feelings weren’t too badly hurt though so we continued on!

We placed google adsense adverts above and below the game in the common format you see most portals using, and adsense has earned us about double what mochi has. I have to mention and remind readers that this is from having the game played only on our website. Those figures would likely be far different if we had spread the game across the internet via portals. It’s hard to know how our adsense profits might have suffered, but I’m sure we would have made a lot more in total if we spread the game.

We released on Kongregate 6 weeks ago too, to see how traffic would go and also see what their revenue sharing was like. We’ve had 43k plays and earned $55, not a bad CPM at all.

After a couple months we also gave CPMStar a go, to compare it with Mochi.

So the totals so far have been:
Mochi: $373 @ 40c CPM
Adsense: $754 @ ~ not allowed to say, but “good”
Donations: $2…
Kongregate: $55 @ $1.1 CPM
CPM Star: $166 @ 27c CPM
Total: $1350

This is all on paper, since (and this could be important if you plan to make a living from flash games) payments are delayed usually by one month.

Why were donations so low? Perhaps because we were ‘ad whoring’ in the game? Hard to say.

We have spent probably 90% of that on various things, we weren’t exactly spend thrifts… we spent money on hosting, a copy of FLStudio, domain names, and a business name. We opted for the best host we could find, which certainly costs us too, but we didn’t want to have everything break down at the most opportune time. Goes to show that even a successful game can’t make much from ads (at least if only released on your own site). Still, we consider ZOS to have been a big success, and have high hopes for C3O when we do release it on portals.

It’s hard to know what sorts of play numbers we may have reached had we spread the game to portals, but due to the google maps API, the game is domain locked, which means great difficulty for portals getting a copy of ZOS working quickly and easily.

We will continue to post, next time on C3O’s financial status, a few months after that is released. C3O is currently being shopped around to sponsors and will be released very shortly. Stay tuned!

Category: Binary Blog, Development Journal | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
| February 1, 2010
10 comments

Zombie Outbreak Sim Wrap Up

Well its been around 10 weeks now since we released Zombie Outbreak Simulator (ZOS). I’d like to share some of the experiences we had, and since I have learned so much from other similar articles, I’d like to give something back.

Our plan with ZOS was always to make it just a bit of a tech preview or teaser for Class 3 Outbreak (the RTS), something that’s just a bit of fun to watch and whet your appetite for the ‘real thing’. Having developed the game for so long, and testing/balancing Class 3 Outbreak for a while, I thought that ZOS would get some “oh, that’s kinda interesting” remarks and we’d get a little bit of traffic from some zombie or google maps sites. Funnily enough, I started to see some traffic coming from Digg via google analytics. I went to their website and found that we had been Dugg 30-40 times, which I thought was pretty good. A moment later I was about to head off to sleep for the night and I thought I’d check the site again, and lo’, we had just reached the front page! To our great astonishment and excitement, we eventually shot up to the third most dugg site of the day, getting over 1700 diggs. Our server went down perhaps a dozen times or more but luckily it never stayed down, it would just restart and keep on trucking. rorr.im also mirrored us which helped a little. We ended up having to put up static html files for all of our pages on class3outbreak.com, and that plus some help from our host finally got traffic moving smoothly. Saxon and I definitely enjoyed watching ZOS climb though, it was quite unreal.

I loved reading all of the comments people were leaving at Digg as well, and I made some comments/replies myself. Its great to interact with fans! We were amazed to see that not only would people post what settings they were using for the outbreak, they would even make up entire stories about the little 20 pixel people running around – extensive stories! It seemed to really capture peoples imagination, and I think running the game on google maps played a part in that, because we are using actual imagery. It’d be nice if the people looked a little more realistic but I’m not sure if I can improve them much with only 20 or so pixels.

We weren’t entirely prepared for the traffic when it hit, so we didn’t have mochi ads running, and our adsense banners weren’t really optimized either. It’s funny that after getting played 250,000 times and dugg 1700 times (I’d call that a huge success) we made around $300 in 2-3 days. As traffic levels out it looks like we might make 5-10k by the end of the year at this rate. That’s a pretty good sign to me that making money from advertising in flash games is incredibly hard. Sure, if we had mochi running from the start, we probably would have made a bit over double in the first 2 days, but that’s still peanuts for something that was so popular. I’d imagine getting the game to spread successfully over portals and get 10’s of millions of plays could start bringing in some half decent money too, but we are in the middle of seeing what we can do in this department.

When you consider the super great article: “You should be making a premium flash game” and games like Fantastic Contraption, we are very keen to try selling our game at some point, ie when there’s enough game there to charge for. If we punched in the Fantastic Contraption sales numbers with our current traffic levels we would be making over $90k a year, not too shabby. And yes, the games are both extremely different, and its impossible to know whether we would reach the same level of success as Colin did, but it is interesting to guesstimate these things…

Since ZOS has gone online we’ve also put up a facebook page that has reached over 1700 fans, and a forum which is already producing a lot of conversation. Feel free to join either!

You might be wondering how C3O is coming along… we hit a slight snag which requires another 2-4 weeks work, so I’m afraid you’ll have to wait a little longer. Ah games and their so called release dates… :)

Thanks for reading!
Jay

Category: Binary Blog, Development Journal, Games | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
| January 13, 2010
No comments

MechWarrior: Living Legends, the power of mods

My PC died the other day (don’t worry, its just the video card!), so I ended up discovering and playing Mechwarrior: Living Legends for about the entire day at my brother’s place. I loved it so much and was so impressed I felt the need to write a short post here.

MWLL is a total conversion of Crysis, so if you own Crysis, you can download and play MWLL for free. I can’t say I get into FPSs much these days, and so I don’t own it, but as soon as my PC returns, I’ll be getting it just to play the mod. MWLL has such high production values and is so well designed you will swear you are playing the next retail MechWarrior title. I haven’t been so pumped about a game in a very long time. The mix of spectacular Crysis graphics, professional, super high quality artwork, equally good sound and a brilliant mix of Mech’s, tanks, planes and battle armor (little dudes) makes for a highly entertaining and epic experience! It is quite like Battlefield 2, but it has a very real feel to it, like a Flight sim but for Mechs.

On the business side of things, I think this game is a great example of how powerful mods are for extending the life of a game, and even bringing in new customers. I would have never bought Crysis, even for $5, but after seeing a few youtube videos I was sold for $30.

Give it a go, there’s even full servers of people playing in Australia. It’s a little painful to get the game running but its so worth it! MechWarrior: Living Legends.

If any of the team is reading this, I’d just like to say a big congratulations and thanks, I’m a huge MechWarrior fan, and a fairly jaded gamer for the most part, and its great to get this excited about a game again!

Jay

Category: Binary Blog, Games | Tags: , , , , ,
| January 12, 2010
34 comments

Class 3 Outbreak V1, what to expect!

Hello eager brainz hungry zombie fans. The first release of Binary Space’s zombie RTS, Class 3 Outbreak is not far off now. We have been following fan feedback all over the internet and are keeping a close eye on feature requests on the forums.

We realised that people have little idea of what to expect from the first release, so we thought we’d share with you a bit of a feature breakdown, so that your hopes and dreams of some infinitely complex zombie RPGTSMMORPG aren’t horribly crushed!

The first free game to be released in (very) approximately 3-4 weeks will be a fairly simple flash game, much like a playable Zombie Outbreak Simulator, called “Class 3 Outbreak” (C3O). We will be distributing it across flash games portals, which we hope to make ourselves some decent money from sponsorships and advertising to fund the sequel.

C3O will be an RTS with 1-2 maps, 1 unit type (police) and your basic terrifying zombies. We hope to give you a fun game in which players are tasked mainly with crushing outbreaks as they occur across the map. The challenge lies with quickly reaching outbreak sites and efficiently taking out all zombies before they can spread out of control. There will also be an escort part of the game which was featured in the trailer. We wont give away everything that happens though! If you’d like to get yourself tactically acquainted with the next outbreak locale, we have chosen Leicester, England in a classic suburban area that we feel that many people will be able to relate to. The Washington DC map will probably return as well.


View Larger Map

To create some competition (against yourself and other players) we will be tracking the players score, which is affected by the amount of outbreaks you control, how many zombies you take out, how many people you escort to safety and so on.

What lies ahead after this first iteration of Class 3 Outbreak? That all depends on how the first one goes! It will almost certainly be a premium, pay version of C3O, probably with a free demo version. The only things we can guarantee at this point are lots of fun unit types, new maps and zombies :) There is a certain feature that has been requested many times that we are very excited about, but in game development you never know what will happen, we make no promises! When will it come out? For now its probably safest to say “sometime in 2010”!

Saxon and I look forward to bringing you the first version of C3O soon-ish!

Thanks to all the fans for following us, and I’ll see you on the forums, and facebook, etc!

Jay

Category: Binary Blog | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
| January 4, 2010
One comment

Zombie Outbreak Simulator now on Kongregate

Saxon just finished making a version of the game to be accessible on Kongregate. Should be interesting to see how its received there. Check it out: http://www.kongregate.com/games/BinarySpace/zombie-outbreak-simulator

This version has no mochi ads, and we receive 35% of ad income from Kongregate’s ads. Will soon find out what the difference is! If you yearn to play the game ad free then go forth and play there :)

Category: Binary Blog, Development Journal | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
| August 27, 2009
46 comments

Zombie Game Announcement

We have decided to release the first meaningful teaser for Binary Space’s upcoming game! While we are still giving away very little at this point, we can divulge that the game will be about those rather popular brain hungry zombies. I can hear you groan all the way from Australia, “another zombie game?”. How dare you! …I mean, yes another zombie game! However being a huge zombie movie and game fan I can tell you it will be completely unlike any zombie game before it.

I must have wanted to do a zombie game ever since I first saw Dawn of the Dead who knows how many years ago. Then when the new version of that movie came out, shortly followed by 28 days later and others, I developed a bit of an interest in all things zombie and survivalist. I’ve wasted many an hour and much of my own precious brainz playing Left 4 Dead, The Last Stand 1 and 2, and also tried out Pop Caps latest game Plants Vs Zombies, however I can’t understand all the hype surrounding it. I’ve also devoured World War Z (did you know the movie is coming out end of this year?), The Zombie Survival Guide and numerous other zombie novels. The only thing remaining is to go on one of those zombie walks…hmmm.

When compared to existing zombie games, ours will be in an untried and untested genre, with different game play, and quite different graphics. The game has just reached its first playable state, which is quite exciting, and the scariest thing about it is that the game play will present a lot of new challenges that haven’t really been tackled before. Well I can’t say much more but I’m confident we will soon be bringing you zombie madness in a way that should get you pretty excited.

Concept art from Binary Space's upcoming Flash Zombie Game

Concept art from Binary Space's upcoming Flash Zombie Game

The concept art you are looking at here was illustrated by myself (Jay) and it’s one of my first few attempts at any sort of “real art”, drawn using Photoshop CS2 and a Wacom. This particular image was copied from a photograph of a foggy street in the US, where I could envisage people leaning from windows and firing out. So I copied the street and then added in the people and zombies afterwards, keeping their forms extremely simple to hide my lack of skills in that department! I feel it works well for the subject matter though, luckily for me! It could probably use another zombie up closer so you really know what they are, but I’m on a bit of a schedule and my skills possibly aren’t developed enough to tackle a highly detailed rotting corpse close up!

Finally try not to read into the image too much, its much like the box art from old Amiga games – it certainly doesn’t represent the game play, genre or POV at all! Well, it does a little…

If you’d like to be notified when major updates are announced or when the game itself comes out, make sure you sign up to the newsletter on the right hand side of the page.

Until next time!

Category: Binary Blog, Development Journal, Featured | Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
| June 21, 2009
No comments

Pre Release Hype for Flash Games

Aside from popular sequels, I don’t think I’ve ever received or read any form of pre release marketing for a flash game. It may have something to do with the size of the games, or the general idea that flash games are quick, disposable and not really worth doing much marketing of any kind. Or perhaps people are afraid that they will tip off ‘the competition’ to the kind of revolutionary game they are developing? That’s quite certainly the case for us!!

So for the last couple of months I’ve been mulling over exactly what to release about our supercalifragilistic game, which will both interest gamers but dissuade developers from making a clone before we do. As it stands, even though our programmer, Saxon is coding his first ever game in flex to what I think is a very high standard, I’m still concerned that someone with more time or a bigger team could see what we are making and do it before us. Whether this is a valid concern or not, I’m not sure, but to be safe we are going to start hyping the game around 1 month before release so that there is almost no way we can be cloned.

In an attempt to build hype for our game, and reach as many people as possible, I am planning on releasing a range of teasers, newsletters, videos, development journals and press releases in around 1-2 months time. In the beginning I expect we may only attract the attention of other game developers via the development journals, and then once we’ve announced the genre and general premise of the game, hopefully we can start to build a sizeable subscriber base to our newsletters, twitter followers and rss feeds. I’d imagine we will announce the game’s big ‘hook’ or selling point only 1-2 weeks before release.

I’m planning on trying some “War of the Worlds” kind of press releases, which are written as if the game’s events are actually occurring, except of course they are so absurd that the reader hopefully has their interest piqued and goes on to watch a posted youtube clip, screen shots or something similar. With any luck these might be successful enough to gain preview write ups in online mags or get dugg, and further build our subscriber base.

I’d also like to think that this game is kind of a “casual game for hardcore gamers”. I know many hardcore gamers play casual games (I’m one of them), but I’m still going to try pitching our game in this manner to try and bring more attention to the fact that flash games can be enjoyed by more hardcore gamers, and that they can have some level of depth.

Well that’s about enough rambling for now… I’ll have to try and get some links coming in now for this development journal, perhaps Emanuele Feronato will link to this or my other articles? If you are coming from his site, then huzzah!

Thanks for following, and sign up for our newsletter on the right, or follow me on twitter to receive more updates in the future.

If you have anything to contribute I’d love to hear from you. Have you tried your own form of pre release marketing for flash games before? Do I not know what I’m on about? Set me straight or give me your opinion!

Category: Binary Blog, Development Journal | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
| June 2, 2009
No comments

MochiAds Free Hosting

I got a reply back from Mochi saying there are indeed “no strings attached” to their free hosting service for flash games. I was impressed by their reply speed too, it gives me confidence that if there’s any problems in the future I’ll be able to get in contact with someone. So we will continue to host our site, but the game is hosted on their servers, and they handle the huge flood of gamers foaming at the mouth to play our awesome games!

I was initially concerned with the price of hosting a large-ish flash game, since if you get a successful game on your hands, your bandwidth fees go through the roof. It also seems quite hard to find a host that is “digg proof”. I’ve read articles where people have gone with one of the big name hosts, even ones which advertise being digg proof, and they still go down. Part of the problem may be poorly optimized websites, but it seemed like a big price tag attached to something that isn’t guaranteed to stay online.

Anyway I think we will be trying out Mochis free hosting option and see how it holds up. Hopefully we get some big social media/digg/stumbleupon traffic and can report back on how it goes. I think we will still have to invest in a modest/high end hosting solution like a VPS or basic dedicated option, but at least I won’t have to fear big ‘bandwidth exceeded’ fees.

I’m pretty confident we can make a reasonable profit with advertising on our homepage now as well, whereas before it looked like either a tiny profit, or at worst, a small loss.

If anyone else has used MochiAds free hosting I’d like to hear what your experience has been.

Thanks for reading!

Category: Binary Blog, Development Journal | Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
| May 29, 2009
No comments

The BS Team

I’d like to share a brief history on Binary Space’s dynamic duo. Ok so we are yet to prove our dynamicness but our first game hopefully will! BS is coded and creativized by Saxon Druce and Jay Weston, both of us PC game developers from way back. We worked together at Ratbag Games on games such as PowerSlide and Dirt Track Racing from the late 90’s until the early naughties, myself doing art and game design for 5 years, Saxon coding until the coke ran out (a few years).

Saxon left Ratbag and continued coding away as a contractor for the intervening years at various places including the defense department and big name mining companies. I started a texture library company, Hyperfocal Design with another Ratbag employee. It took a few years to get going (because I was incredibly slack and poor at motivating myself) but is now a decent earner. Through Saxon’s contracting and my own business experience we luckily have some business sense and legal experience, which will always come in very handy.

During the last few years I certainly started feeling the creative itch coming back after being pretty burnt out and disenchanted you might say with AAA class games development. Plus while I’m quite happy with Hyperfocal, there is little in the way of creativity – its almost purely a business exercise. I actually made one possibly foolish attempt at starting a PC title, which I’m quite glad didn’t work out now, because I’m not sure I’ll ever be keen to lead a large company with many people’s jobs in my hands! That attempt got as far as getting funding for the concept phase but not much further.

At this time I increasingly found ideas for game concepts popping into my head, so I’d share them with friends between breaks in front of the 360, and thought how cool it’d be if someone made it. Yeah, the same old story with many gamers I guess. I’m not sure what actually changed to make me decide to give it a go for real, perhaps because the latest idea I had I felt would be so much fun… I’d also recently been forwarded or somehow came across a few flash games that really surprised me with their game play, graphics and cool factor. Two of those games were definitely “The Last Stand” and “Dino Run”. One of the best things about making small scale games like this is that you can make lots of them in a short time, and you aren’t constrained by publishers, deadlines, execs or existing IP/licenses. While I was a game designer at Ratbag, I realized that I wasn’t ever going to have the sort of creative control I wanted. Its just the nature of the beast. Now if my game design’s fail I have no one else to blame, however!

I had a pretty good look at various articles on the biz side of flash games (man’s gotta make a living somehow) and it seemed to be becoming reasonably profitable. So I thought to myself “I can’t code to save myself, making games is no fun on your own, and that Saxon dude could really code!”, so I emailed Saxon and asked if he ever considered making games again. The short version is he did, so we are. It’s good for me, because I’ll read the comments in his code (and even the actual code, which makes my brain bleed) and realize that few other flash developers would be so lucky to have someone with so much experience and coding skillz. And lucky for Saxon too I spose, cos programmer art is ugly!

So I think we have a pretty dang good team, and I can’t wait to show you our first game…

Category: Binary Blog, Development Journal | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
« Older Entries   Recent Entries »