Entries Tagged 'Game Design' ↓

Finally I have launched my own games site, Clockwork Monster I want to test if publishing my own games is really worth it, or if it is better to look for sponsors.

At least I can always publish my own games if I feel that sponsors are not paying enough for my work.

Apart from my own games, You can play a nice selection of flash games there.  Check it out!

I´ll get some cash from Adsense and from MochiAds. I highly recomend MochiAds if You are a game developer or publisher.

Feedback is invaluable for a game designer. It helps to know if the game is good or bad, what features rock and what needs to be improved. But, in most cases, those that provide feedback are people close to us (friends, family, or those we know from forums). That can affect feedback. Friends or family won´t probably tell You that your game sucks.

Now, how to get true and unforgiving feedback?

FlashGameLicense has a very interesting feature: It tracks the time people spend playing your game. You can clearly see if your game is good or bad, depending on that time: The more time, the better your game is. If nobody plays your game for one single minute, you´ll have to reconsider the quality of your work.

Apart from that, it has helped me to detect a serious flaw in my game. This is from my first game “Siris” :

Eight persons didn´t even play the game… Worst of all, four of them were sponsors!

Obviously, my splash screen sucks.

I have obtained a lot of feedback about the game, about its graphics, playability, bugs… but nobody has told me about the splash screen. I was proud of it, it was balanced and had a good design in terms of usability, but now I see that it was boring. A splash screen must attract players, and mine is repelling them.

All this invaluable feedback thanks to FlashGameLicense´s Game Views feature. It could be perfect if they provided the average time played for each game, it could be a good game quality thermometer.

(For those that don´t know about FlashGameLicense, it is a website to buy and sell flash games. Worth a try if You are a game developer or You want to sponsor games)