IT’S aLIVE!

That’s right folks… It was 145 days ago we wrote our fist ever line of code and over 2,500 man hours of blood, sweat and temper tantrums later… The Collective is LIVE! The site is now free for all to use and register! So head on over to The Casual Collective and get your game on! (after you have read the rest of this blog post of course)

Casual gaming meats social networking, and gets jiggy with it!
We are not just another flash game portal that just lists games that it finds on the web.

9 days and 6,099 hours later…

That’s right, in the last 9 days the members of the Collective have racked up over 6,000 hours of game play, that’s over 254 days of killing creeps, capturing buggles and sinking ships! This does not include the time spent in the game lobby, the new LIVE chat room and surfing the 879 user created groups we now have!

Blogging milestone #1

It was created 2 months and 11 days ago
It has been in the top 100 WordPress blogs for 72 days straight. At it’s peak it had 4,877 hits in a single day.

And today ladies and gentlemen, our blog will get it’s 100,000th hit!

So thanks to all of you for reading!
More Casual Collective news following shortly :o)

Make us a spiffy logo!

OK, the Worth1000 contest to design a logo for our new site is up and running! And I guess this is the first time you will have heard that the site will be called the “Casual Collective”. Casual because all the games we make are considered to be “Casual games” for the “Casual gamer” and Collective because of the strong emphasis on friends and groups.

The contest is open for submissions for 6 days from now, after that the logos will the be voted on by the users of Worth1000 and then Paul and I will select a winner soon after to receive the prize of $200*

Just read the client and general rules and if you have an idea why not have a go and then submit it to the contest in the next 6 days. So what are you waiting for? Get going!

* Not only do you get $200 (USD) but you get to make a logo that will be seen by squillions of people, the design of the logo may also shape the design of the whole site! What more incentive do you need?

Week 1 Update

We made a good start on the new site this week. I’ve been working on the generic multiplayer lobby and Dave has been creating the account system. Of course, we couldn’t just do any old multiplayer lobby and account system so we threw in a few of our own improvements :o) The lobby widget itself works with the SmartFox comms server which has so far proven to be easy to set up and integrate. As well as handling the lobby the widget will also provide the multiplayer API for any games that are loaded into it. We are aiming to test the multiplayer version of DTD at the end of next week. We have also started to syncronise our vision of how the site is going to function and have worked on filling out the key features. Dave’s experience of building large account driven sites is going to come in very handy!

I have also been working on the ‘Deluxe’ version of DTD which will be in downloadable form only. Flash gains extra performance when run locally so it will allow me take advantage of better graphics and larger maps. It will also contain advanced features such as save/load, tower pre-setup and end of game tower stats.

Dave introduced me to Napster this week and now I am hooked! While I am not a fan of the low quality of MP3 audio, the ability to find pretty much any album you want and play it straight away is very very cool. Oh and I also came up with a new TD concept that will use the DTD engine but will be played in an entirely different way. All you people who wanted to manually target the towers will finally get your wish, kinda ;o)

And so it begins….

We started work in earnest on Monday (2nd July) Paul came over to my house and we sat down and started planning out what ‘the site’ will look like and do. We also ordered a new server to run it all on and started the process of creating a completion to design the sites logo on worth1000. We will be sure to post on here and in our forums when the comp is open so those of you who are a bit arty can enter and have a chance of winning the $200 top prize. EDIT: the comp to design a logo will start on the 7th, I will post a link when I have a URL.

I kicked Paul out early as I got a call over the weekend saying my new PC was ready for collection, superb! Bring on Crysis & Alen Wake. On Wednesday Paul came over to mine again, Paul started work on the first of our new games and I laid down the sites database and account creation system. I got all in a twist with Regular Expressions and Paul had a bit of a headache with some game code, but that’s the way it goes some days.

I think it is about time we told you what ‘the site’ will be. You all know it will be a place to host our games but that is only the tip of the iceberg. We want to bring the social side of gaming to the forefront of on-line Flash games with a site that has everything built around groups and friends. When the site is ready we will move Element TD and Desktop TD on to it so they benefit from the new features as well as helping to test it and iron out any kinks. We feel that both our TD’s and flash games in general would be so much better if they were multi player, with this in mind our first new game will be Multi Player Desktop TD! I don’t want to give away any details of MPDTD at this stage other than that it is ‘vs’ not ‘co-op’ play and will be real time multi player using only the Flash plugin, for the rest you can use your imagination :)

I leave you with a screen shot of our servers task manager, we went to town with the specs as we both hate sites that take ages to load and we want to give you the best experience possible. Sweet looking ain’t it ;) That’s 2x Quad Xeons sitting there waiting for you to all come and play!

Every Cloud

In Pauls ‘Flash Piracy’ post he talked about the problem all Flash game developers have who wish to control the distribution of their works, the flash Pirate. A term which describes someone who takes a copy of your .swf file and usually re-hosts it on their own site with the intention of increasing traffic and/or deriving an income from ads surrounding the game. Every cloud has a silver lining, and here are a few tricks and snippets of code that you could use to make the Flash Pirates work for you.

Treat the copied game as a way to drive new traffic to your site. Paul mentioned that players of DTD will be sent to his domain when they try and submit a score, he does this using the getURL() with the full path to the submit script. If you do this make sure there is a clear link on your scoreboard to “Play again” but this time on your site. If you do not have a scoreboard, or do not want to rely on people submitting to be taken to your site you can re-direct them. Flash has a property called _url which returns the full path the .swf is loaded from. So if this _url variable does not contain your domain name then it is hosted elsewhere, you can then use getURL() to redirect back to your site. I would not do this when the game loads, I think it is best to let the player have a few games on the other host, then when it is gameOver do the redirect. This way the person who copies your game will see that it works fine on their site, if it redirects off-the-bat they won’t pirate it and you will have lost a stream of traffic from them.

Here is a sample block of code that will check to see if the .swf is on your site, and if it is not it will re-direct to your domain. You could put this in an if() statement to only do it when the player has finished their 2nd or 3rd game:

// We first make the URL upper case as people may be using “yourdomain.com” or “yourDomain.com”
domain = _root._url.toUpperCase();
// Check to see if the variable “domain” contains the string “YOURDOMAIN.COM”
if (domain.indexOf(“YOURDOMAIN.COM”) == -1) {
        // This .swf is NOT on your domain, send them to your domain.
getURL(“http://www.yourdomain.com”);
} else {
        // All is OK, do whatever you would do.
}

If you wanted to take this to the next level, instead of redirecting you could set a variable which you could use throughout your game to remove certain functionality. In the case of a TD game you could remove certain towers, limit the creep waves and say “This is a demo, go to <link to your domain> to play the full version”.

There are a couple of problems with all of the above. 1/ The dedicated and skilled Pirate will decompile your game to remove this code. Fortunately in my experience 99.9% of people who copy a .swf just re-host it as-is with no modifications. You could use a swf encryptor to make their job harder, but as with all software it it only a matter of time before this too is circumvented. 2/ There is a switch in the flash embed code which prevents the getURL() from working, myspace.com adds this when you try and embed a .swf. A workaround would to simply have the game display the URL it is trying to redirect to in a text field that has the “selectable” box ticked and instructions so the user can copy+paste the link “if you are not redirected in 10 seconds”

Of course this is only really an issue for those who are relying on on-site advertising for revenue (adSense / text links). If your game has built in means of raising revenue then you will want to encourage the distribution which you could do be providing a the embed code for a version with no domain checking or posting it on sites like New Grounds. I have encouraged the Piracy of Flash Element TD for these very reasons, and yesterday 50,148 of the games 121,161 loads took place on other peoples servers which accounts for over 40% of the revenue from in-game advertising. Yes if they had all taken place on my site there would be increased revenue from the ads outside the game, but I do not think my traffic would be as high if it was not for 4,917 hosts that currently have a copy running on their sites, redirecting to me when a score is submitted.

So like it or not, Flash Piracy is something that will happen to a game, you can treat it as a problem or a solution, but either way you can make it work for, and not against you.

Flash Piracy

One of the problems of delivering copy protected content via Flash is that it is a semi-open platform and has no built-in copy protection mechanism. Flash game files (or SWFs) are just like any other file that can be copied from machine to machine. In fact when you play a flash game your PC has already downloaded the SWF file to your hard drive and is running it from there. Copying the SWF file back onto a different web server and adding it to another website is straight forward. 99% of the websites that have Desktop TD simply took a copy of the SWF file and rehosted it on their own site without asking permission. It’s technically theft but is tolerated in the flash community as a form of advertising for the developer, especially if the developer wants to promote their flash portal website. This process has worked very well for DTD due to the fact that the game redirect players back to my site when the game ends and they then tend to stay there. Most games are a little more polite and do not redirect, so maybe they are missing a trick there!

There are various things that can be done in code to lock the compiled game (or SWF) to your own domain but it is relatively straight forward to use a decompiler to turn your compiled game back into source code and the unscrupulous can simply remove any locking code and recompile. However software that encrypts the SWF file can be effective at stopping decompilers. DTD used such protection from version 1.21 onwards but the lack of protection for the earlier versions has turned out to be a problem as I will discuss below. Another problem is ‘hotlinking’ where a site is linking directly to the SWF file on your own server thereby using your bandwidth instead of theirs. Serving the SWF file dynamically and authorizing it via keys and the like is a good response to hotlinking. The multiplayer version of DTD will be domain locked and will use such a technology to ensure that it remains there!

Unfortunately both Desktop TD and Dave’s Element TD have been victim of a more serious type of flash piracy, reskinning. Reskinning is where the game is decompiled and the graphics and/or sound replaced with different versions. The game is then distributed as someone else’s work. A real slap in the face to the original developer I can tell you. Element TD was stolen by shockarcade.com (compare with the original Element TD). And in the last week Desktop TD has been stolen by onlinegamesquad.com (compare with original Desktop TD). Admittedly they have put some effort into the DTD reskin but it doesn’t have a single feature in it that wasn’t already in the code they pinched from DTD. If anyone knows a good way to deal with this type of piracy please get in touch!

Piracy and hacking prevention are now taking up a significant portion of my development time at the moment and I am learning as I go. It would be easy to blame Flash for these problems but they are really caused by success and human nature. I bet even Valve’s Steam protection gets hacked occasionally!

First things first.

Both Paul and I have things in progress we need to complete before we can stat collaborating on projects. Paul is working on some cool updates for DTD and I have to complete VectorTD for Wrigleys, but once we have done these 2 things it’s full steam ahead!

Our goal is to create an awesome casual gaming site with a social networking twist which we will use to host all our future games as well as some we have made already. The first step is selecting a name for this site, which is easy compared to finding a domain name which is not taken by a scraper site or similar!

It has been in the last 4 or 5 years that buying domain names has become a pain in the ass, everything you type in has already gone (.com mostly) The annoying thing is that these domains are been purchased in bulk by companies who’s only intention is to slap on a generic page with ads and leave it running for 2-5 years. Paul told me that these companies buy all expired domains on a trial basis, if they find they have reasonable traffic they buy them for a discounted price, if they do not they let them expire at no cost. So I think the people who sell domain names are to blame, and there should be laws preventing the bulk sale of domain names.

Rant over, so the only way to get a reasonably relevant .com name which is short and does not contain “-” or numbers is to make up a new word. My friend Avi did this with his site plime.com a word made up by combining plum and lime. Sites like digg.com and kongregate.com have miss-spelt words to secure a name on the web. So maybe this is the way we will be forced to go when it comes to naming our site.

Paul came over to my house a few days ago and we were chucking around words like “hive” and “collective”. We need something that means gaming, community, group and casual, but we are still stuck. Any suggestions welcome, please post your list of possible names as a comment :)

I quit!

Following the success of Desktop TD and Dave’s promise, nay blood oath, that we can make a living from making games, I have decided to quit my job. I handed in my notice on Monday and they decided to let me go there and then! Fair nuff.

I am currently working on the latest version of DTD but once that is complete it will be full steam ahead with Novel Concepts. We have a lot of ideas, plans & schemes and first up is too find a good domain name to hang them all off…