The Novel Concepts blog (where you are now) has served us well but we felt the Collective deserved it’s own place on the web, so head over to the Casual Collective Blog which we will be using from this point forward to chat about the new site and games!

We have moved over all the old posts & comments and will be adding plenty of new posts… so check it out and update your RSS feeds.

Work continues on the re-development of the CC site, we are aiming to go Alpha to a select few at the start of August and then public beta on the 17th August, EXACTLY one year on from when we first members were let into the current site, how time flies!

Paul and I are also going to be attending the Casual Connect event in Seattle 23 – 25th July. We will be stopping off in Toronto & Niagara falls on our way to join in with the first Casual Collective North America meet to say hi and thanks to some of our members, the main meet is on the 23rd but as we can not make it some of them are turning up early, awww bless :o)

We also have some pretty cool news about game releaces, the new site features and our more long term goals… but that can all wait for a future blog post >:)

We will be flying back home on the 19th, so if anyone would like to meet up you can find us at the Summit or contact us at blog@casualcollective.com

Right, now that’s been posted, we’re off to go find a nice place to have some dinner and eat our way through this jet lag (it’s 2am back home now) TTFN.

You can see all the stats here which includes a list of the 12,000+ sites that are currently hosting a copy of the game.

What I find amazing is that for the last 8 months the loads per month has gone up, last month saw 7.3m loads!

What I find annoying is that if I had only 1¢ for every time someone loaded the game I would be a millionaire by now :o(

But with the majority of loads taking place on sites other than my own and with early versions of the game not including any advertising (Mochiads was still in closed Beta when I launched), I am unable to do much about it.

So I have learned that it is important to build advertising into even the beta releases of your games (or URL lock them to prevent people from taking them until you have advertising in place) and to give yourself a way of tracking your game across multiple sites.

Some tools all independent flash developers should be using include:

Mochibot: Track your swf, find out who is hosing a copy of your game and with a list of the top 10 hosts you could maybe contact them to inform them of updates (though I have found most tend to ignore us developers, an attitude they will have to change if they want to continue to compete)

Mochiad: Plays a short ad while your game loads, you get money for clicks and views no matter where your game is loaded from.

SWF Encrypt™ 5.0: A tool that encodes your swf making it impossible (or at least very hard) for someone to use a swf decompiler to gain access to the source of your game. Without it someone could remove things like ads, tracking code and even change the graphics to make it look like a new game without having to do much work at all.

Any other tools you think we should be using or any questions you have, please leave a comment.

AotB’s average game time (that’s only counting the time you are in control of the Buggle, not the loading screen, countdown or game over screen) is 30.6 seconds, which is very short, even by casual game standards! However the average number of game plays per person is just over 66 which makes a more impressive average play time of 33.7 minutes, so it must be doing something right.

A few examples of how we made AotB stand out from the crowd can be found after the jump…

We added time pressure by making the points you get for touching a blue box count down, the rate at which they count down slows as the game progresses to make the late-game boxes worth as much as the early-game boxes. We also made your Buggle grow between collecting boxes which makes it harder to avoid others if you don’t rush.

We helped people get out of tight spots by adding bullet time which lets you slow the speed of the game down for a few seconds which gives you more time to think and move. We also gave the player a special “ROAR” ability which turns the tables, the hunted becomes the hunter as you eat your way through as many red Buggles as you can before returning to your vulnerable state. This can greatly extend the game time for an experienced player and is a fun thing to do for the more casual player.

We made it more fair for all players by removing any randomness in the speed the Buggles move and increasing the speed as the game progresses. Given the high replay rate we did not go as far as having the locations, and directions of travel the same each game. We also locked the distance the Buggles move every frame to the frame rate the game runs at, so those on slower PC’s running at a low FPS will not have an advantage over those running it on a faster PC.

A big thanks to Jay is Games for a great review of AotB and all the members of the CC who helped beta test the game before it launched. We are now working on improving the widget (the wrapper the game loads in) as well as producing more games, we also have a few small tweaks to make to AotB over the next few weeks… now go play AotB and spend a few 30 seconds avoiding work and touching those magical blue boxes!

After returning from San Fransisco we have been very busy planning out what we intend to do this year on the Casual Collective. We have also just moved into a nice new office, hired ourselves a full time PHP programmer, almost completed 2 Facebook applications and are currently producing an advergame for an upcoming film, so it has been quite a busy couple of months.

One of the first things we are going to do is put our new PHP guy to work on Casual Collective 2.0!

I know what you are thinking… “CC2.0? So you are going to round off some corners, add some gradients and make the font larger? Maybe add a reflection to the logo, sprinkle on even more AJAX and add a tag cloud?”

NO!

You should know us better by now, we are function-over-form people and here are some of the things we will be changing for the CC2.0 release:

• Site will be re-written from the ground up in PHP (ASP is a bit long in the tooth)
• Groups will have forums, tournaments, photo albums and better administrative tools for the group owners and designated admins.
• Live chat will be improved with rooms, new game / PM alerts and will be better integrated with the radio and groups.
• The slightly lame awards will be replaced with a more well thought out questing system, each quest completed gives you points and a trophy for your profile.
• Players who want to play MP games for points will be randomly matched with similar points players, all other MP games where you choose which game to join will be no-points / just for fun.
• When you finish MP game you will be able to stay in the game and replay it with the same people or open it up to get more people in, we may even let the host change the game or modes between plays!
• There are more cool things that we don’t want to give away at this stage, you know we love to innovate, so watch this space!

While all this is being done Paul and myself will be completing two new exclusive games:

The first is one is called “Buggle Stars” a platform based single player game where you play a bouncy Buggle over 20 levels that are both skill and puzzle based. The second game is a team based multi player game codenamed “Minions” where each player controls multiple units in a 2 team real-time battle. The first real time, team-based, RTS in flash?

We realize that there is only so much code two guys can write a day, this is why we are also in the process of working with 4 other developers to bring some very cool 3rd party games to the Collective. A match 3 with a twist, a 3rd Buggle themed game, a puzzle based pool game and a physics based puzzle game. I also plan to bring over a game from my past called Farragomate, a game where you compete with other players to make the most clever or funniest sentence from a set list of words.

And in case you are still thinking “they could be doing more, lazyness!” we are also in the process of invading Facebook! DTD Facebook edition (where you can compete with friends or the global Facebook community) is almost finished along with a drawing based personality test application. We also plan to bring ALL of our single player (and in time multi player) games to Facebook and other networks.

So I hope you thirst for an update is fully quenched, I promise not to leave it so long next time… maybe.

DTD was ‘launched’ by uploading the link to StumbleUpon.com on the 5th March 07. I was at a LAN party at the time and looking back at it now I really should have noticed that perhaps DTD was a little bit special because a lot of the gamers were playing it rather than blowing holes in each other at Counterstrike. Unfortunately they were still shouting and cursing but this time at the audacity of the flying creeps avoiding their mazes. :o)

At the time I was working for a small software company as a Visual Basic developer. I had watched my good friend Dave Scott code Flash Element TD during December and the massive popularity of it’s launch in January spurred me on to create my own TD. I spent February learning Flash 8 and, with a little help from Dave, coding DTD 1.0. The original name for game was actually going to be Paper TD. I had quickly decided on a hand drawn look for the towers and situating the game on paper or a notepad seemed a logical choice.

But I felt the game seemed quite flat so I decided to try a view that gave more depth:

Yuck. But fortunately serendipity stepped in and the next attempt produced not only the new background but also a new name, Desktop Tower Defense!

To complete the launch I created a simple website to provide instructions and scoreboards. It was later expanded to include a forum and group scoreboards. I launched DTD in the same way that Dave had which was to simply post the link up to StumbleUpon.com. That produced some small steady traffic over the first few hours but then a Scandinavian website linked to it (very quick to catch new games those guys) and by the end of the first day it had received 30,000 hits. At the time, it was an amazing thing and I remember spending most of the day (and then the week) F5′ing my stat pages! After a few days the site was dugg on Digg.com (killed the server) and was up to 40,000 hits per day. All the activity made it difficult to not improve the game so I started rolling out updates.

Version 1.02 was launched two weeks later which incorporated some new modes and started to fix holes that were being used for hacked/exploited scores. It was dugg again, and pushed above 60K per day.

Version 1.2 was launched two weeks after that and things went crazy for a while. I had upgraded my server from a celeron to a Pentium 4 HT (ooooh) but the 3rd digg killed it yet again, (Probably my poor database code) and the site peaked at over 200,000 pages per day. If you are interested in the stats for the year here they are:

At this point I started to get more serious about earning some money! I already had MochiAds running on the game so I added AdSense ads and a donation box. I tried an affliate program from a t-shirt website but it didn’t work out. Over the next couple of months I put out some more bug fixes and added the group & challenge scoreboards to the site. DTD remained at version 1.2. I expected the popularity of DTD to drop off but, after a pause, it carried on going up. It was mentioned on a few popular blogs/sites such as TechCrunch and GigaOm. I did an interview on how much the game was making (which was quoted wildly inaccurately by most other sites) and my work place found out about it. Oops. To cut a short story even shorter I looked at how much DTD was earning, thought ‘yeah I can mostly live on that’ and decided to quit.

All the activity around DTD spurred me on again to create a new version. Which, as I was depending on the earnings from the game and a games developer (chortle) full time, I thought I should make it look more professional. Version 1.5 was released at the end of June and was much faster, prettier and better all round. Unfortunately the keen DTD’ers hated it! For a month I received hundreds of mails and forum posts complaining about how I had ruined the game. They hated the new design, the new creeps, the new towers and the new modes. Even TechCrunch didn’t like it. Bah. In the end I made both the old and the new versions available to keep everybody happy. Most players are now playing 1.5 (and agree its the better version :o).

I had also agreed a sponsorship deal with Kongregate.com for 1.5 which brought in some welcome extra money. The revenue I received from DTD varied quite dramatically through out the year and has proven to be the most frustrating part of the whole experience. This is a graph showing how much was earned per load during the course of the year:

Aah yes half a cent per load, those were the good ol’ days. Those of you who run websites will probably have worked out that the current earnings of 0.2 cents per load is equivalent to a CPM of $2. Which I don’t think is bad for a single flash game. Imagine if I had two!

My total earnings from DTD for the year from MochiAds, on-site advertising, sponsorship and donations has amounted to just over $100K from 40M loads. Which is nice.

In part 2 I will talk about my dealings with game publishers, licensing headaches, going to the GDC and what is in store for 2008.

A friend of mine called Avi Muchnick (Creator of Worth1000 & Plime) has just opened up his latest and greatest site which lets artists of all genres to not only share their works but create and edit them! The site is called Aviary and it has a whole bunch of tools that will let you do everything from creating patterns, editing sound and video to desktop publishing and even modeling and animating in 3D! And the most amazing thing about these tools is that they don’t require you to download or install a thing, they work on all platforms and run right in your web browser!

The site is opening with its flagship application ‘Phoenix’, a bitmap based editor with many of the cool functions you can find in applications such as Photoshop and GIMP. But what makes Phoenix unique is that all your work is saved on the Aviary servers, so that photo of Britney Spears that you are detouching can be saved and opened up from any computer connected to the Internet, and here’s the kicker… as the application you are using to do the editing is also online you will be adding more wrinkles to the pop princess seconds after logging in!

Another cool feature Aviary brings to the table is collaborative creation. Any image you start editing can be passed on to another artist (or many other artists) for them to pick up where you left off. In this screenshot you can see that the same image has spawned several versions, any of which can be selected for more editing or export in whatever format tickles your fancy.

Could it be that not long from now having Aviary account will become the ONLY thing you will need as a digital artist to go about your business? And go about it without having to worry about backups, software updates, compatibility issues with whatever OS Microsoft produce next ;o)

See, flash is not JUST for games :o) So go check out Aviary and if it is your sort of thing be sure to make an account and bookmark the Aviary blog to keep up-to-date with their progress.

So first lets crunch some numbers.
FETD2 was launched on the 12th January @ 10:30pm GMT, we decided to launch at this time as we wanted a quiet few hours to make sure the process of making the game live didn’t introduce any new bugs and we tend to be at our most quiet late in the evening. We also decided to not publicize the launch to see what sort of numbers we could get from word of mouth alone, which makes the following an interesting look into the spread of a viral game.

We record 1 play when the player completes or loses the game, only when the game ends do we consider that 1 play. If they restart a level before it ends or just close the game we do not record a play. We felt this was the best measure of a games popularity and more real than loads or starts.

Now, on to our first graph which shows the number of plays each day in blue and the total number of plays in purple.

Half a million plays on the 4th day, 1 million on the 10th, an average of 2.3 plays a second on our best day.

Not too shabby I think you will agree :o) We are currently getting just over 100,000 plays a day, with a peak of just over 8,000 plays an hour. But where is this traffic coming from? If we take a look at our Google Analytics data we can find out the number of referring sites and the number of unique visitors from these sites (A referring site is any site that links to our site). Before FETD2 was launched we were hovering around 200 referrers giving us around 2,500 unique visitors each day. As you can see from the following graphs the number of referring sites and visitors has shot up.

The number of sites linking to the Casual Collective increased three fold in 4 days and peaked at 796 on the 22nd.

This increase in traffic has had a positive impact on almost all areas of the site. Accounts created are up from around 200 a day to 3,500, we are getting 100 more posts in our forum each day and plays of our multi player games (which we thought would go down as people switched over to the new game) have almost doubled!

Some mistakes made
Some silly things we overlooked when we went live that if we had sat back and thought about it we could have avoided.

Proving poor links back to our site: The FETD2 page was very boring with very few options and the only link back to our main site was a button saying “quit” Ideal for someone who knows the site well, useless for a new visitor who lands on this page. Of course this meant that very few people realized there was a whole site out there with more games and all the social goodness we have. We quickly re-designed the page to make it more exciting and provide a better link back to the main site.

Thinking people would play for a high score: We made the assumption that even though the first level was easy people would re-play it to try and get a better score, which is very true of our members, quite a few of which are already over 50 plays . However people vising the site for the first time didn’t care about scores and were only interested in beating the game, if you don’t care about your score and play to complete the game it is quite easy and most people would have managed this on their first or second go. We quickly added a 2nd map for them to play which was much harder and we feel it helped a great deal in raising the number of plays.

Been too clever for our own good: We were very proud of ourselves when we designed and created the ability to login or register a new account without the need to leave the game, much work was put into making it communicate with our server to check usernames were available, emails were valid etc… We even made it possible to create or join a group as part of the registration process, all within the games flash interface. The down side of this is we made it possible to do too much without visiting the site, basically we have no cross-selling of our other games and the many features of the site. As a result many of the new accounts been created never see the bigger picture. We plan to correct this over the next couple of days by redirecting people to a HTML version of the registration/score submit process that takes them to their profile or group page when completed.

Some things I think we did right:
We auto-grouped people: Using referral information we auto joined people to groups. If you were playing FETD2 as a result of clicking on a jayisgames.com link and then created an account we auto-joined you to the jayisgames group. This then lets you compare your score with all the other 1000′s of members from that site. We did this for our top 10 referrers and plan to better automate this in the future.

Saying hello: If we detect a player has come from a top 10 referrer we have a custom message above the game which notifies them of the existance of a group just for them. If you came from 123spill.no and you saw a link (in Norwegen) that mentioned the site you came from we think you would be more likely to click it than a generic “we have groups” link.

Custom games page: All of the other games on our site have a common template for the games page, we created a custom one for FETD2 which allowed us to brand it to the game as well as do some more clever ad placement. This bespoke template is getting a eCPM 3x that of the other games pages on the site. We plan to roll out custom templates to all our single player games in the near future.
And then what? Well we will add a new map to FETD2 at some point as well as some fun modes to play, we will try and keep the content in the game as fresh as possible to keep you coming back for more. If you have not already done so, go play FETD2 :o)

Now that FETD2 is live we have been planning out our game output for the next few months and we have some exciting games lined up. Well we would say that wouldn’t we :o)

I am working on a semi-real time, multiplayer strategy game – code named ‘Minions’. It is heavily team based with up to 10 players per side and features upgradeable units, a multi-screen map and deformable terrain! It has some cute AI features in it as well. Hopefully it will go to Alpha this week and after play testing we will decide what kind of graphical theme suits it, and maybe even give it a name.

There are pirates ahoy on the Collective! We are in collaboration with a very talented independent flash developer who is working on a sea-based mini-rpg with a great setting and a cool fighting mechanic. It is our largest project yet and is several months away from completion but we hope to show some screen shots in the next few weeks.

From the same developer we also have in the works a smaller death match multi player game based on the same engine as the rpg. For players who like to shoot first and ask questions later. Should be wood-splinteringly fun :o)

After ‘Minions’ is completed I will be “relaxing” by adding some more missions to Desktop Armada and making it more accessible to new players.

We have booked our flights, sorted a hotel and are looking forward to the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco in Feb, time to see how real people make games :o) If you are going keep an eye out for 2 blokes wondering around trying to look like we know what we are doing :o)