Flash Element is about to hit 40

40 million loads that is! I was checkin out my mochibot stats and Flash Element TD is about to hit the big four zero. With 160,000+ loads a day it will not be long now.

40,000,000. That’s like everyone in California building some towers, or the combined population of New York, Washington, Ohio, Colorado, AND Kentucky wondering if they should go for fire or earth upgrades. Or if you are a Brit like me that is 79% of the UK population! Pretty amazing. [data from here]

Interestingly (well for me as I love stats) the majority of traffic is not people playing it on my site. I worked out that only 27.2% of loads take place on my domain, leaving a whopping 72.8% of plays taking place on other peoples sites.

In the past this sort of “Flash Piracy” would have been a big worry to game developers like myself who rely on in-site advertising such as Googles AdSense, but with in-game advertising provided by mochiads it is possible to keep earning revenue even when the game is hosted elsewhere. Without this I would be trying my hardest to prevent people from re-hosting the game, but now I can let it run free which “feels” better to me, the whole point of making a game is to have people playing it right?!

Thanks to all who played and are still playing, Quantast tells me that 44% of players are “regulars” and 2% are “addicted” maybe we need to start a program for DTD and ELE TD addicts.

Hello, my name is Dave and I enjoy killing sheep.

DTD Update

Work on version 1.5 continues… broke out my marker pen and the scanner to produce some more leet artwork for the new towers:

Ink / Blob Tower

Boost Tower

Finally plumbed in the Boost tower so it now err boosts. My request for translations on the HDG forum has gotten a good response – someone even posted Chinese. Apparently is ‘Creep’… but it looks more like someone bending down to insert a dvd into a dvd player to me! The problem with asking for translations is that I actually have to put the text into the game. Meh. French and Spanish have been completed after a marathon copy & paste session.

This is all a big experiment (and not a small amount of effort) to see whether an independant game can generate significant extra plays when translated into other major languages. I’m hoping yes, or oui, or ja, or hai.

On a side note the site’s eCPM has doubled since the start of the week. Result.