Kongregate Premium Games

The guidelines for submitting premium games are up, and can be found here:

Kongregate Premium Games Submission Guidelines.

This thread is for developers to ask questions about the program and for me to answer those questions—with great vengeance and furious anger. (Or general politeness. Probably politeness.)

Thanks!

Chris Pasley
Director of Games
Kongregate

Hi Chris, thanks for posting the submission guidelines – interesting read.

Could you give on overview of what the community/multiplayer API will be capable off?

Will it be possible to use the multiplayer API for games with a high “actions-per-frame” ratio or will it be more suitable for turn-based games?

Will you provide any tools or tutorials how to test a multiplayer game and how to keep it in sync?

Will it be possible to save and share game data (e.g. for a user generated levels) on your servers through the API?

Sorry if my questions are maybe a bit too technical for this thread – but I think a good understanding of your APIs is necessary to come up with good game ideas/prototypes that fit your Community-Centric focus.

Thanks, Andreas

$20,000 to $100,000 in funding? How many casual games on the internet cost that much to develop? And how can you guys afford to lose the investment if the game sinks?

Yea.. I emailed you guys about this sort of thing, never got a response.

We fund your development anywhere from $20,000 to $100,000.

How does it include? (ex : software,license music,or something else?)

$20,000 to $100,000 in funding? How many casual games on the internet cost that much to develop?

You’d be surprised.

@Pixelate: We’re not 100% on what the multiplayer API will be capable of yet, but one of my big goals with it is to have “Real-time” multiplayer games.

I will be working closely with the premium game developers and will put them in touch with the technical people making the API to figure out syncing and any other issues. I imagine certain tools and guides will come out of our first efforts with it, but they don’t exist yet.

I think we will provide for some sort of save data. I’m not sure about the sharing; I know that’s on the list of things to do, but I don’t know when that will be ready.

If you need more details I can find them out, but we’re still in the early stages of most of this stuff.

Edit: I should also say that if your game calls for something we don’t have, but it’s so awesome we just have to do it anyway, we’ll likely try to get that other thing made to accommodate it.

@Lapper: Quite a few, actually—at least among those with really good production values. As to how we could afford to lose the money, well—every game represents a risk, sure, but we hope to pick games good enough that the risk is minimal. Sometimes you succeed, sometimes you don’t, but you have to try. (Besides, none of these games will sink us or anything if they’re not roaring successes.)

@Shinki: I’m sorry, I probably didn’t see your email. I just moved to San Francisco and I wouldn’t be surprised if some emails got lost in the shuffle. Sorry about that.

@Kannushi_Link: It includes everything. Whatever you need to get the game made.

I’m very interested in the capabilites of your multiplayer API, however (from my experimenting) I don’t think true real-time is possible in Flash, since Flash can only use TCP sockets. Also would there be the possibilty of server-side calculations?

Having a game link in with people’s kongregate accounts, and use the kongregate chat (instead of an in-game chat) would take a huge load off for developing a multiplayer game too. Is that what you have/had in mind?

When do you expect the multiplayer API to be ready?

Are you planning to make some sort of multiplayer API availible for those of us who can’t make premium games (In other words, like the HighScore API is availible now)

@Shinki: I think it depends on what you call “true real-time.” Games with server-side scripting can get to real-time, though it’s probably not as fast as peer-to-peer connections would be. For our Premium Games we would allow server-side scripting.

Yes, you would be able to link into Kongregate chat and accounts.

When, I don’t know. We will likely be developing it in conjunction with our first premium game, so I would say a few months at least for an official API.

@yrudoy: Eventually, yes. But we’re not sure when.

Server side logic might be allowed for non-premium games eventually. For obvious reasons (security, stability) we’re a little leery of running unknown code on our servers. But both for deeper games and anti-cheating we’d like to eventually allow it, once we’ve figured out some good protections so malignant code or just a coding error can’t crash our servers.

Can I just safely say that the games can bypass the 10MB limit?

are you planning to use any of the well known servers already available like Twisted, Electroserver, etc… or it will be home made? Because they already have server scripting, some even have Client APIs.

@Sylicas: Yes, they can. But the initial load should stay below 2MB if possible.

@ekagauranga: We’re looking at different ones, so maybe. Smartfox seems like a good candidate, but we still need to evaluate it more to say for sure.

Is the multiplayer API still going to be available to non-premium games (when it comes out)? And does what you’ve just said mean that we will have to pay to play some games on Kongregate?

The multiplayer API will be available to non-premium games.

Some premium games will likely have some microtransaction elements, but they will all still be free to play.

If you’re thinking of using Smartfox, you might be interested to know that the online game Stick Arena had to have it’s own server developed with a streamlined protocol (much less overhead than XML) to get the speeds it runs at. If you want to have good performing multiplayer games XML might become a burden.

These are the guys that made it:

http://www.mmocha.com/

About the load limit, does it mean all games are to be played on the website, no downloads or stand-alones?

Yes, this is for browser-based games oddgoo.

@Shinki – we looked at MMocha – our main issue with it is that it doesn’t have any support for server-side game logic, which is really important for larger scale games.

I believe MMocha is being expanded to support some manner of server side logic. I’m not aware of all the details at this point.

I am pretty sure I don’t even have to ask if it would be possible for me, a guy with barely enough flash experience to get text to print where I want on screen, to make a premium game….. Even if I do happen to have some ideas, but they are not well thought out enough.

If only there were a way to get a really obssessivly good coder who needs an idea to partner with me(although I am already working with the guy who made orb avoidance on a game, or at least hoping too).

Have you guys invested in any Premium games yet?

Will microtransactions function be able to use in non-premium games?

i realize that everyone is asking questions and whatnot, which makes this thread look more like an faq in progress… but i wanna applaud Kongregate on such a bold step in building/supporting quality games… so as a gamer.. thank you!.. and the read on the rules makes me quite hopeful of your future events.. (ps.. didnt read the rules, so if i just violated them by not asking a question, or something of that nature… oops.. and sorry ;p )