Stencyl and Newgrounds

Since Mochi Media is winding down the services in the end of March, I started to look for alternatives for publishing and spreading my own flash games.

Previously, I have posted couple of games to Kongregate just to test the flow, but there has been only handful of players for each of them (with zero marketing). However, I also posted Explopool to kong for a week ago, and this time there has been enough players to get the ratings visible (2.7 / 5.0 stars at the moment). Clear progress, I would say. :)

I have heard stories about Newgrounds and how demanding the audience is there. So it has been bit frightening choice for the fledgling game developer who is unsure about his own skills. Nevertheless, I decided to make a Newgrounds version of Explopool (with scoreboard and ads), and test how game publishing flow works there.

Basically, integrating Newgrounds API to game made with Stencyl was very easy: Just create game project at Newgrounds and copy the API ID and encryption key to Stencyl advanced settings. After that ads and scoreboards are available with ready-made Stencyl building blocks. It is just as easy as integrating Mochi features to the Stencyl game.

After I was convinced that I had not broken anything in my game, I did the required setups and uploaded swf to Newgrounds. Then I performed final playtests in preview mode, did some sanity checks, and after pressing "submit" button game was available for audience in judgement mode. This means that players can vote whether new game is added to the collection, or if it is trashed and deleted forever from the system. But believe me, it is somehow exciting to follow how many stars your game will get from the first visitors. :)

In Explopool's case judgement phase went quite well. After some hours there had been couple of hundred players and rating was around 3 stars out of 5. Game was also added to the Newgrounds list, so I was very happy to the result.

One important thing to remember when converting a game for Newgrounds: Flash games are displayed in canvas with 16x9 aspect ratio ("widescreen"), so it may require some scaling or letterboxing to fit your game properly there. I had designed Explopool mochi and kongregate versions for 800x600px canvas, and I initially decided to shrink Explopool to 640x480px for Newgrounds. But that was a mistake: The quality of graphics was totally messed with this decision. After couple of days I figured out that it is possible to use vertical resolutions >480px, so I resized the canvas to 1066x600px. Now original Explopool grahics can be seen as originally planned. Learning the hard way.  :)

Edit: 25.3.2014: I noticed that there is also StencylJam2014 contest ongoing at Newgrounds until 28th March. What a coincidence! So I just added the "stencyljam2014" tag to my game and participated to the contest. I can hardly wait to see which games are selected to be the best ones, because there seems to be couple of high-quality one posted to the contest.

-Jussi

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Unity3D mirror using camera and RenderTexture

Image
There are several ways to create mirror in Unity3D. Some of them require more scripting than others, but I will now present an easy way using just one extra camera and RenderTexture.  In this solution you will use RenderTexture on an object and place camera behind that object. This is easy option that does not require scripting. Alternatively you can use reflective shader, but it requires some more work. Seven small steps to create object with mirror RenderTexture: Create new Unity project. It is recommended to use latest LTS version (Long Term Support).I was using Unity 2020.1.3f1 version for this example.   Create plane object for ground and Cube for the mirror object. Scale both objects to match your needs.  Create new camera for attaching the RenderTexture. Position it inside recently created cube and adjust direction so that it is pointing out to the direction where mirror should be reflecting the image.  Create RenderTexture. Name it as you wish. No need t...
Read more

Construct 2: if-then-elseif-else statement

Image
Do you have an idea how to implement IF-THEN-ELSEIF-ELSE statement with Construct 2? At least I had to think for a while how to do it. It seems that this basic structure is not so straightforward to implement in C2. I was creating a very simple game where boxes were moving from left to right. See example below: The color of each box is chosen randomly, so it required the usage of random() function and if-then-else statement. There are probably several ways to do this, but I wanted to make this as simple as possible inside one single event and action box.  Normally I would create a if-then-elseif-else structure like this to select color for the box (pseudo-code just for an example): if randomNumber == 0       set colorOfBox = "red" else if randomNumber == 1       set colorOfBox = "yellow" else if randomNumber == 2       set colorOfBox = "green" else       set colorOfBox = "blue" end if But ...
Read more

Unity3D: Convert Seconds to hh:mm:ss Format

Image
Update 17.8.2021: Replaced obsolete Monodevelop with Visual Studio where applicable.  I have gradually started to use Unity3D for game development. So far I have been doing very small and simple test codes just to learn how certain things should be done with Unity. But now I have an example that might be of interest for other wannabe-Unity3D users, at least those who are struggling with converting seconds to HH:MM:SS format. :) So lets begin with this example. First of all, start Unity3D and create new project. This example uses the console only for outputting result, so project can be either 2D or 3D. Whichever you prefer. Create empty object to your scene ( ctrl+shift+N ), or use pulldown menu ( GameObject->Create Empty ). Select empty object and rename it e.g. to " Timer ". Add new C# script component to empty object and name it as " TimerActions " ( Add Component->New Script->write name and select Csharp as script type ): Open TimerAction...
Read more