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Showing posts from September, 2014

Turbomole statistics update (part 2)

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I am sharing one more chart showing the daily " Turbomole Trial Run " views over last 61 days. So it's about 2 months since we released this flash game to Newgrounds. Total number of views is at the moment 46082, so there has been in average 755 views per day (source of data: Newgrounds Statistics). The number of daily views has varied between 35 and 3620. I am pretty happy to these figures, because two months ago we were expecting no more than 5000 views in total. Ad revenue has been very modest for "Turbomole". There is just one ad shown before title screen, and that's all. I didn't want to irritate players with large number of ads, so there are no between-scenes ads at all in this game. Also, the eCPM seems to be quite low for flash ads. Pre-roll ads would provide better eCPM, but the number of those has been disappointingly low... What makes the chart interesting is the recovery that has happened couple of times: The number of daily view

"Dualball" the Game

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We have been working on two separate game projects in parallel. Now one of them is in quite mature condition and it is likely that it will be published in a couple of weeks. So it maybe is time to shortly introduce the game concept? Working title for the game is "Dualball". This is a platform game where player controls two balls at the same time with single click (or touch, depending on the device). The challenge comes from the parallel nature of this game: you must be able to do some multi-tasking and time your clicks correctly. Timely performance is rewarded with coins that are spread on the levels. Collecting all coins is not always straightforward, and you have to carefully think what kind of a sequence is required to clean up the level. We have been testing "Dualball" on flash and Android platforms, and it seems that the latter one is bit more convenient for this concept. However, game will be released in flash format first. Android version will follow

Creepy carrots for Mole (video)

I created today the following piece of art: As you can see, this is not a gameplay video at all. However, it is loosely related to our "Turbomole Trial Run" game (_very_ loosely!). Just look the clip and enjoy! And you can of course start following our Youtube channel  too. :) -Jussi

Debugging a Game

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No matter how simple your game is, or how well you plan it. In any case it is 110% sure that there are several bugs included in your masterpiece. And fledgling game developer surely has more bugs than the experienced ones. :) Here are my thoughts of this matter. Major and/or often occurring bugs are usually very easy to detect, and they are relatively easy to find from your code. You just need to find (or know) where certain functionality is located in your code and check the difference between desired and existing operation. Fixing the bug might not be so straightforward, but at least you know fairly well where the fault is. But then there can be very nasty bugs that occur rarely or even randomly. Sometimes it is very hard to understand if some behavior is really a bug, if it can't be easily reproduced. And locating these bugs from your code is very difficult if you don't have clear idea where to look for them. Luckily here are some ways to ease up bug hunting. I am us