Recent posts by FliplineStudios on Kongregate

Topic: Kongregate / Kongregate Premium Games

Hey everyone,

We’ve just launched a development blog for Remnants of Skystone, joining the ranks of Creatrix and Intuition already in the Premium Games blogosphere. Here’s the link if anyone wants to take a peek:

http://www.remnantsofskystone.com/blog/

Feel free to drop us a line in the comments!

Topic: Kongregate / Kongregate's Premium Games Announced

Kannushi: We’ll have an extensive single-player campaign in Skystone, so it’s not exclusively MMO gameplay. Between single-player, co-op, and community aspects, you can decide to play the game differently each time depending on what you feel like doing. And we’ll try to keep replayability up in all three aspects, so there’s a reason to go back to the single-player after you clear all the stages :)

Topic: Kongregate / Kongregate's Premium Games Announced

Darn! Ah, well, that’s true Chris :)

Topic: Kongregate / Kongregate's Premium Games Announced

Wan2Play, that may be true with programmers getting high salaries after college—but those salaries wouldn’t necessarily be the case for programmers creating their own indie game development startup :)

Topic: Kongregate / Kongregate's Premium Games Announced

Hey everyone! Thanks again Chris for all the great press on the premium games, the separate blurbs and pics for each were great—and now I’m really excited to see all of them come to life!

Wan2Play, I think your facts are a little off: The premium games are getting their development funded, we don’t need to wait to see how well it does before we get paid.. so we’re only getting “ripped off” if we’ve been terribly awful at our own budgeting :) They’re not keeping the money for a year, we’re getting paid as we go. And Kongregate is being more than generous with micro-transaction share both during and after recoup, a lot more fair than what you’d be getting with a typical game publisher. OK, back to the actual topic!

It really is amazing to be working on a large-scale project with Kongregate—we’ve been excited about Kong since before the closed beta launched, and it’s awesome to be working on an exclusive title that we can tie in with all of the community aspects we’ve loved from the get-go. And hey, do we get first dibs on beta-testing the other premium games? :)

Topic: Kongregate / Updated Games

Just updated Papa’s Pizzeria with some bug fixes (pause button killing the waiting time, ‘erase save data’ button being screwy), and also nerfed the tips so Star Customers will pay out higher tips when they’re bronze/silver/gold.

Topic: Kongregate / Two badges I won't be getting: A look on Papa's Pizzeria

I see what you’re saying, there definitely is a ceiling to how well you can do in a day – as long as you’re earning stars for each customer (average of 80%+), there’s not a huge difference between that and a max tip for that person. The main slowness factor would be if players weren’t earning stars for customers – they could still level up without the stars, it would just be that much more of a pain trying to unlock that last customer at the end then.

Next time, we throw in upgrades! Urchin, probably not planning to do any big changes, I actually wouldn’t mind expanding on the game based on a lot of the feedback we’ve gotten, but our development schedule is pretty full right now… so if it happens, it wouldn’t be for a while :)

Topic: Games / Is there a tutorial or strategy for Papa's Pizzeria?

Hey guys, here are a couple tips:

1. Customers are cool with waiting in line for a little bit, but after 30 seconds or so they’ll start deducting “waiting” percentage points. Once you take their order, they’re cool with waiting for the oven cooking time, plus a little extra for topping and cutting. Also, if there are other customers waiting for pizzas already, they’ll tack on even more extra time before they start deducting percentage points.

2. Always keep the oven stocked to four pizzas at once (if you have that many orders). If you don’t, your “waiting” accuracy is going to drop percentage points really fast.

3. Roy can’t stop time at his leisure, so taking orders and presenting pizzas doesn’t stop the clock. Always be aware of what’s in the oven before taking/presenting, and learn to gauge how long those processes take so you’re not letting pizzas burn while you’re working on customer service.

4. New customers are unlocked when you level up—and leveling up is based on tips. If you’re getting less than 80% accuracies on orders, then you’ll be getting lower tips and will take you even longer to level up / unlock new customers. If you’re keeping up with orders, you should level up every 2-3 days.

Sure, it’s a bit of a grind, but if you’re keeping up with orders and getting high accuracies on all your stations on each order, then you’ll unlock everything a lot quicker. If you’re just taking one order at a time, or not filling the oven at every chance, it’s going to take you longer to level up and unlock customers. Also, check the in-game help for scoring and other gameplay tips.

Good luck! Ask away on any other gameplay questions and I’ll try to answer.

Topic: Kongregate / Two badges I won't be getting: A look on Papa's Pizzeria

Sounds like a lot of people don’t enjoy click-management games :) Guilden: it absolutely does matter how good you’re doing with pizzas. Customer unlocking is entirely based on your level/rank, which is entirely based on tips. If you’re keeping the oven constantly stocked with four pizzas at a time, and getting 80%+ on all stations per order, then you’ll likely unlock everything before 100 days. If you’re only cooking a pizza or two at a time, and/or getting lousy tips, then you’re kinda shooting yourself in the foot, and it’ll take you a lot longer before you level up (to unlock another customer). Check out the in-game help for scoring tips if you’re getting less than 80% on your accuracies, it’s crucial to master the click-management and timing otherwise it really will be more of a grind. Good luck everyone!

Topic: Kongregate / Tomorrow's likely challenge

Very cool! You’re right Greg, there’s not much that really sets you back in the game. Worse case, if you make an awful pizza for a customer, they remove all their stars leading up to a new “Star Customer” seal.

FYI, the stats currently track the Bronze, Silver, and Gold customers separately, but we could change each to track “Bronze or higher”, “Silver or higher”, etc. if that helps—otherwise, if someone has all Gold customers, they’ll have zero Bronze ones..

Topic: Kongregate / Kongregate is full of Game-Hating Whiners.

Rating comments could be helpful, I’ve seen that system on various blog sites—people can rate individual comments as being nonconstructive, and after a handful of those flags the comment is grayed out and eventually removed after so many negative votes. Of course, people can abuse this “anti-abuse” feature as well if they wanted to, but you’ll always be stuck with some troublemakers here and there.

I understand developers getting upset or discouraged by negative comments, but it’s just something you have to get used to—you can’t please all of the people all of the time, and I don’t think censoring negative comments or votes is a great idea. As far as ratings, I guess it boils down to how players view the rating system: Are they voting on how much time they think the developer put into the game, or are they voting on the quality and production values despite how much they enjoyed it, or are they voting on how much they personally enjoyed playing the game? I’d expect the latter..

Topic: Programming / ACK! What do I need to have to do AS3?

Both Flex and Flash CS3 support AS3, but if you’re just looking for syntax highlighting and completion you might be better off with something like FlashDevelop (www.flashdevelop.org)—it’s a code editor program, and also has a SWF compiler add-on so you don’t even need Flash technically. It’s leaps and bounds beyond Flash’s built-in code editor, though I don’t think it has any AS3 documentation. You can always use Adobe’s LiveDocs online to get the documentation though.

If you’re only using FlashDevelop and not actually using Flash, though, you’d either have to rely completely on external bitmaps or draw vectors programmatically since it’s also purely code based.

Topic: Programming / Making Money From Your Game

Hey guys,

Sorry to bump this up to the top again, but thought I’d throw in my two cents with our experiences with Papa Louie. We just did a talk about the game and a bit about our distribution and revenue, so I thought I’d share in case anyone was interested.

First of all, we had to take into account the length of development time and what we thought the game was worth—for us, it didn’t make sense to go with a sponsorship because the earnings were low and a one-time affair, and once certain sponsors distribute the game around the web for free it’s a bit tough to get any other income from the game. So we went with a couple approaches all at once:

1. Release on our own website with MochiAds and Google AdSense surrounding. For this, we did a “media blitz” where we sent out a mini press release / link to a ton of blogs, portals, review sites, news aggregators, etc. As the link spread around, many sites and portals would frame our game page, which would increase our earnings on the Google Adsense in the surrounding pages (but killed us on bandwidth for awhile). Because of all this linking and framing, we managed to drive an average of 50,000 hits per day to the game page over the first few months. The MochiAds also performed very well, especially that first week when we had a spike in traffic.

2. License to Miniclip for non-exclusive license with flat fee. We emailed Miniclip directly and asked if they would be interested in the game, and mentioned up-front that we needed it to be non-exclusive as we were releasing elsewhere as well. They’ll negotiate flat fees for games if they’re interested, and the fee is greater than you would get with a sponsorship (plus, you’ve still got control to take it elsewhere!)

3. License to Shockwave for non-exclusive ad-revenue share. We also contacted Shockwave to see if they would be interested in a non-exclusive license. With Shockwave, they offer ad revenue share rather than flat fees. It brings in some decent continuing income, especially with their volume of traffic.

4. License/submit to Kongregate for ad-revenue share. We also submitted the game to Kongregate for ad-revenue share, and obviously went with the non-exclusive settings since we were already spreading the game around.

For our next game, we’re planning to do the same, but will also at a certain point release the game into the wild with MochiAds interstitials to see how that will compare to keeping it stuck on our own site.

Hope this is helpful!

Topic: Programming / Putting external files in .swf files

You can load images and sounds into a Flash swf, but you can’t load other programs or anything like that into it. I actually have heard of HyperStudio! (I used to use HyperCard back in the day, which was similar but only B&W graphics) If you want to make web games though, your best bet is Flash or Director. And those are the only two things Kongregate supports anyway :)

Topic: Off-topic / Newgrounds

Indie, the comments aren’t just for you, they’re for everyone playing the game to read and contribute to as well.. I’d be pretty annoyed (or confused at the least) if comments were disabled on select games, especially if it was a game I wanted to comment on.

And you just gotta roll with the punches with the comments :) Retaliating with not-so-nice replies isn’t going to stop the rude comments from coming, it’s just egging them on. You’ll get some good and some bad, it just comes with the territory of uploading your game to a community site. Sometimes the positive comments and the constructive suggestions here and there are well worth having to deal with the negative ones :)

Topic: Programming / Alternative to Import for Classes?

You can also write your import statements before the Class definition in the .as file at the top. You can also do multiple import statements there too—so you can import bitmap, geom, and point if you need them all in that class.

Topic: Kongregate / Ad Revenue Report problem

No big deal, didn’t realize you had to enter it in manually!

Topic: Kongregate / Ad Revenue Report problem

Hey guys,

I’ve noticed that when I go to the ad rev report in our profile, nothing shows up for earnings for “Yesterday” or “Last 7 Days”. When I first noticed it I just figured nobody was playing our games, but I’m pretty sure people have played Papa Louie in the last week :)

Anyone else having the same issue? Any ideas?

Topic: Programming / I can't Use Adobe Flash are there alternative animators?

Are you looking for alternative animation software, or alternative game-development software?

Topic: Programming / Flash Player Performance

Hey everyone – thought I’d throw my two cents in about bitmaps. We’re having some good luck with blitting graphics from a sprite sheet onto a screen-sized bitmapdata object, and not using any movieclips at all. It runs loads better than with movie clips, with or without CacheAsBitmap. It’s way more abstract with no movie clips or frame-based animation though—but that performance boost is worth it! Runs great in a browser too, though you have to be clever with dumping the bitmaps because they eat up loads of RAM.

Topic: Kongregate / Updated Games

Just updated “Papa Louie” with a new and improved Kongregate Version—there are 36 bonus Kongregate Coins scattered throughout the levels. Ties in with the new challenge this week.

Topic: Kongregate / Multiplayer?

I was wondering if Kongregate had any plans to offer any sort of Multiplayer API / socket-server for developers to make multiplayer games for the site. It’s not really something I’ve seen too often—the only times I have, it’s when the site developers are creating their own multiplayer games for the site rather than it being a community / user-generated setup. It might be more trouble than it’s worth for Kong, but was thinking it could be interesting to have some sort of multiplayer integrated with the chat / user-accounts, etc. that developers could use for some Kongregate-exclusive multiplayer games.

Any thoughts on the subject?

Topic: Kongregate / How'd you find Kongregate?

I met Jim and Emily at the Casuality Game Conference last June as they were looking to spread the word about Kongregate to Flash game developers. We were instantly excited about the plans for this site and jumped on board when the private alpha hit. Looking forward to the meta-game and game challenges that are planned for the future!