I'm writing this postmortem prior to the launch of Balls in Space, so I can't speak to it's success, but I would like to talk a bit about the process that went into it's creation. Where I surprised myself with positive outcomes, and where I think it's shortcomings are.
This was my first solo game ever. Prior to Balls, I'd worked on and released three widely distributed flash games, and two or three others that were small games that only were released on Kongregate. The most successful of those games by far has been Pyro and Pyro II, which have combined total of over 10 million plays (and earned over $10,000 each).
While successful, my games prior to Stencyl have been released few and far between, largely because I've relied on outside coders to get the games done. This would be somewhat feasible in an office environment or if we had regular paychecks, but flash developers rarely have those things. Instead, we have people wondering where their next college loan payment is coming from, and having no idea whether players will like the next game or if it will make any money. It's a bad situation for efficient game making.
Stencyl has been a massive change to how I do things. The first things I did in Stencyl were horribly broken. I tried to make a little platformer, but my collision box was off by a bit or something and my player kept falling through the floor tiles. It was a little daunting. After revising it's size I managed to get things working as intended. I looked through the demos and kits built into Stencyl and began to play with the Balloons game, since it's a similar mechanic to that of Bloons or Pyro. Soon I had made a little demo with some bouncing balls that were entering and exiting the screen through a little door that the player could control with the arrow keys.
I hatched a design at some point, a game that would show off a bunch of different gameplay mechanics, all based around the idea of balls being central to each game. For instance, you might have pinball, breakout, pong, basketball shooting... each level could be different. I even figured you could have little platforming levels where you directly control the ball and jump on enemies. So I started with that, using the Jump and Run kit, and I added a little Breakout level that you could get into through a secret door. It was around this point that I began to forget what my original design had been. Probably because I never wrote it down, as I have a terrible habit of not always sticking to a plan.
I began to become enamored by the platforming mechanics. I'd never worked on a platformer before, and they have always been my favorite genre of games. Unfortunately, I began to lose sight of my overall picture, and just worked on making a bunch of fun platforming levels, and then tweaking those levels to death. I suspect this may have been the gravest error in the development. While platforming is really interesting to me, particularly because I've never made one before... the players are unlikely to see it the same way. They've played 10,000 platformers, and unless mine has something special, why should they care? It would have had something special in all those alternate game modes, but they got lost in the fray -- leaving me with a platformer, but without any sort of gimmick or unique principle to grab the player's attention and drive those 5 star clicks.
Even with this in mind, the game will very likely meet the financial goals I have set for it. Being my first solo game, and being a HUGE learning experience (with LOTS of really poorly written behaviors), I had hoped to earn $1,000 from it. I happily was able to secure an $800 primary license through FlashGameLicense.com, and that license will still allow me to sell additional non-exclusive licenses to hopefully raise the other $200 or so. I also will be able to collect any advertising revenue available on portals like Kongregate or Newgrounds who share their ad revenue with developers. In previous projects, $1,000 would seem like a very weak payday, but that's because I'd been splitting 50/50 with a partner, so getting $1,000 this time is more like having made $2,000 if this had been a joint effort. My sincere belief is that Stencyl's ability to lower that bar for me will be the catalyst in making Flash game development a much more comfortable and sustainable way to earn a living.
I'll update this if the game does really awesome or completely bombs, because the information could be useful to one of you out there.
Otherwise, until next time!
Cheers,
Mike
