And only one of them actually played the game - and they never beat (or lost) a level. I have no feedback and no other indication of any slight interest whatsoever. FGL even lists some viewing stats - two of the 6 visitors looked at my page for a total of 4 seconds.
One publisher - AddictingGames - viewed my game for 6 hours but never ended up clicking the play button. I think that's a telling tale - they just left the browser window open and FGL claims it as "interest." Very disappointing.
I'm really really happy I set up my own database so I could track what kind of gameplay exposure my potential buyers are seeing - because now I can see that FlashGameLicense might not be the be-all solution I hoped it would.
However, I'm not completely giving up on them. It might be because my game is listed (as of today) at "97% complete" - maybe some publishers only view 100% complete games? Maybe my thumbnail image isn't the best (it was from v.30 something), or maybe my description could use more marketing magic?
The primary turn-off point for Space Squid might be the Menu. It looks ugly and cluttered. The only thing I like about it is the title, and even then the red underline doesn't quite fit. And a bad impression right from the menu might turn some people right off.
So here's the plan for the last 4 days of this project:
- Redesigning the menu from scratch with better readable fonts.
- Make or find new vector keyboard icons - the current ones are crap.
- Add spacebar to the controls list.
- Take a suite of screenshots and work on a solid game description.
- Return the destroy-menu code and implement the new focus code (stage.focus=this; - argh I wish I knew it was this simple! I think everyone that was trying to help me with the two-clicks-required-bug were overlooking the obvious and trying to think of what the larger problem was)
- Redesign or recolor the cyan bounding box for the fishtank
- Change the color of the boost bar - because yellow doesn't appear anywhere else in the game
- Try a few color changes for the "Level/Score" display on the Hud.
- Get stroke working on the countdown timer and score results so they better stand out from the background.
- Fix the text input boxes on the main menu so they don't act and look retarded
- "Anonymous" shouldn't get the score details in the victory/gameover boxes.
- Put a border on the game so the squid doesn't fly off the screen and clip mysteriously
- Finalize the highscore display and get it formatted nicely on the page
- The victory/gameover boxes should appear on top of the obstacles and water, for clarity
- Add descriptions for all the play modes (maybe popup?)
- Make the website not scroll on a standard resolution such as my laptop
- Shop the game around in a mass-email spam
- Throw a launch party. Considering it's 4 days away that's probably not going to end up being too big. I really should plan it out better.
Ryan Madsen, who has been making several awesome suggestions for the game since I started writing about it here, just finished a Magic 8Ball responder for Twitter. If you ask a standard 8ball question he'll randomly pick it up and respond to you! Check him out:
or his responses:
(good for some random fun)
Posts
In case you want to check out the FlashGameLicense.com server stats from the high score view,
ReplyDeletehttp://www.space-squid.com/highscores.php?name=Anonymous&world=flashgamelicense.com&submit=search