Rabid Robots (web) - (Released)

Dev diaries
#41

Hahaha. Thanks for being in my bandwagon. :smiley:

I don’t think I will ever be willing to put ads in a game. Ads should not exist in software or the internet period (except where they’re the sole purpose of course). Fortunately I’m not desperate for money. Steam is a definite possibility. My general plan was to try a couple games on Kongregate and then move up to something bigger for Steam/desktop in general. I’m too obsessively honest to try to sell a game that I’ve already released for free, but I might make a sequel/upgraded version for desktop.

Umm…no? What would I contact Kongregate about? I don’t think they give any special treatment, except for making badges for game that have already proven their popularity. I think they make most of their money from IAPs anyway.

Ah, no, I’m not listening for window events and pausing. I should add that. I think I had some vague idea that Defold would do it automatically, but didn’t think about it. It should be easy enough to do.

4 Likes
#42

Have you looked at poki.com ?

2 Likes
#43

Whoa, that’s a bit of an overwhelming “interface”! No, I haven’t heard of this one, interesting. Hm, it’s a bit weird that they don’t have any real info for developers on there.

Honestly I spent all my effort making the game and never thought much about afterwards, besides “put it on Kongregate and see how well it does”! I used to play stupid web games quite a bit and Kongregate was one of the nicer sites. I released a game on their as part of a team years ago, so I have some first-hand experience with it. They have actual documentation, really easy leaderboards API, seemingly pretty generous terms, etc.

I just did a little research about ad revenue rates for mobile. Now I see why people bother going through the hassle to release on iOS—they pay twice as much! :smiley: It looks like it’s around $1.50 to maybe $6 per 1000 times an ad is shown, so that could be decent if you’ve got the player numbers. Kongregate gives $1-2 per 1000 plays, so you’d have to make games fast and get a few million plays each to actually get a decent wage.

Ehhh, I really don’t think I could live with myself just making money from ads. I feel like a bit of a scumbag just reading about it. :stuck_out_tongue:

For desktop games, $10 is still reasonably cheap, and it’s more of an “honest” transaction: they give you money, you give them a product, they own it forever (at least they should), everyone’s happy. The game’s design isn’t compromised to force people to watch ads, it only needs to be fun. I like that.

1 Like
#44

If you released on Steam and mobile as a $1.99 game you would still make sales on mobile but you will also have to struggle like me. :slight_smile: F2P is the way to make money it seems but it has to be done right still which means having an ad budget yourself or waiting to be lucky for a streamer or youtuber to play it. $9.99 would work for your game but if you go that high people will expect more content. I can give you suggestions for your game that could add value. $1.99 I think as is would be an easy sell on Steam and you would sell tons of copies on 50% off sales with that price.

I don’t like ads either. But it’s still the way the world is now and mobile gamers expect it. One of my next games I’m going to test releasing as free game and including ads but allowing people to turn them off for free on the options screen. :slight_smile:

2 Likes
#45

Right click would be a good option for opening the buy window.

2 Likes
#46

If I ever become content with how the world is, please remind me so I can perform seppuku. I’m pretty sure Defold wouldn’t exist if everyone thought like that.

Anyway, I’ve been periodically tweaking the game over the last couple days. Here’s the changelog:

Version 1.0.3

  • Added fullscreen button.
  • Added a big message to remind you to open the shop at a certain point.
  • Added notifications when you pick up money.
  • Added “loading” to loading screen so it’s not just blank.
  • Fixed a typo that messed up some spawning in stage 7.
  • Bound right-click input to open shop.
  • Renamed “armor” upgrade to “health”.
  • Added descriptions for all upgrades.

I’d say my effort to make things work without a tutorial failed (no surprise there). Multiple people did not realize that you could open the shop again at any time during the game. I thought making it bold and the first line of the instructions would work, haha, yeah right. One of my friends played it for an hour without realizing where money came from! He also said he died because he had to look down to find his space bar, so the right-click to open the shop is a good idea. :slight_smile:

3 Likes
#47

You probably need to add an on-screen button, text or some other reminder about the shop. Or open it between every stage.

Can you add a subtle go.animate() loop on the y-axis to make the coins float and attract the eyes of the player?

Maybe accept any key on the keyboard? And right-click.

2 Likes
#48

I made it show some pretty big text over the screen if you get to 120 money (and after 30 seconds, so the initial money can’t mess it up), hopefully that solves it for most people. I’ve had a few people suggest automatically opening it after each stage, I just don’t want people to think that it only opens at the end of the stage. I like that you can shop whenever.

OK, I just tried animating them with quick-and-dirty Bounce easing (forgetting the “subtle” part of your suggestion :P). That’s pretty entertaining and definitely visible!
rabid-robots_bouncing-coins
They get a bit messed up since I’m sometimes setting their position every frame. They normally have some momentum when they’re spawned, and then your magnet sucks them in. I guess I could double up the game objects to fix that. I’m a little bit hesitant to tax performance any more. Even though game objects and go.animate are light, there can be 100+ coins on the screen later on. Hmm, maybe I would only need to animate some of them…

Right…I don’t have any other inputs…that’s probably a good idea! :smiley:

2 Likes
#49

Another tiny update based on user feedback on Kongregate.

Version 1.0.4

  • When buying/equipping upgrades, if there are no empty slots, higher-level upgrades replace matching lower-level ones.
  • Increased the duration of shop messages by a lot.

It’s doing pretty well so far, about as well as it can be expected to. It finally made its way into the “Top games this month” list, which must be partly based on number of plays or number of ratings. Now that people can actually find it, the number of plays is going up much faster. It was at only ~200 plays yesterday (after about 5 days), and right now it’s up to almost 550. Most of the games near it in age and rating have 10000+.

The rating is pretty respectable. With more people playing it’s see-sawing quickly, but staying between 3.42 and 3.49 (what an emotional roller coaster! :smiley: ). That probably sounds pretty bad, but really, on Kongregate, anything over 3.0 is pretty decent. Over 4.0 is awesome. Their top rated game of all time is 4.64. Of the games posted in September so far, Rabid Robots is essentially tied for 4th place.

3 Likes
#50

I love how harsh people are in “the real world”. :slight_smile: A few good comments:

I made the mistake of comparing it to Frantic Frigates in the basic description…really stupid. I moved that to the bottom of the instructions, where no one will ever see it :stuck_out_tongue: (but also no one can criticize me for not giving credit where it’s due).

Even without that, apparently a lot of people expected it to be like an RPG, where you keep playing after you die with only a little penalty. I guess that’s how most little web games with upgrades work. I wonder how little “persistent progression” I would need to mitigate that, or how I could present it differently.

3 Likes
#51

i have played this every day for a few days :slight_smile:

2 Likes