Dave Hailwood's Forum Posts

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    I'll be sure to keep updating my forum entry with any other useful findings. I'm hoping to tackle Kongregate and Market Js at the weekend, and also approach a few review sites to see if that helps push the viewing figures up a bit.

    So far, according to the Clay.io viewing figures, Board Horde has had 1,200 views (many of which were probably from me as I tested the game out) and has made a whole 49 cents from advertising! Now, I'm no expert on the exchange rate, but I reckon that translates into about three and a half billion pounds.

    More updates soon.

  • mineet

    Thanks for sharing this devlog. I was wondering what you've been busy cooking up.

    Although its not an easy choice of genre to start with (lots of statistics likely to be involved, and not so many preset behaviours, etc) sometimes you just have to go with the idea you're most passionate about. I knew absolutely nothing when I started my board horde game, and just tackled it one problem at a time.

    I would highly recommend getting to grips with Functions, Families and Groups as these will cut your events down massively and keep your project easy to manage. Also try to set aside a group/function for Debugging and cheats as it will save you a lot of time in the long run (I wasted many an hour testing my own game and hoping the heroes would eventually collect the latest potion I was trying to test, when if I'd just put a key press in from an early stage that would instantly changed it to the right potion it would've been so much quicker!).

    It's also a good idea to decide what screen size your going to go for quite early on (something fairly universal) and whether you're building the the game for desktop, or mobile as well.

    Anyway, you were very supportive of my project and many other people's projects, so I'm sure there will be plenty of people happy to help out if the need arises. Just give me a yell if you get stuck.

  • seothen

    Best of luck with your comic project. I come from a comic art/writing background myself, so I'll be watching how it develops with interest.

    The biggest problem you're likely to run into is memory issues, as lots of full sized images can cause slowdown and other problems. Do plenty of tests, experiment with compression techniques and reuse images in a creative way when possible.

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  • Now that I've uploaded Board Horde to various sites, I thought it might be useful to others if I share a few findings.

    So, Newgrounds was the first place I uploaded to. I was quite surprised to see the Clay.io ads worked here, as I'd heard that many people had struggled to get results. Although its playable on my ipad, occasionally I find it freezes on the loading screen (I put in a fallback to try help with this; if the preloader reaches 100% and 30 seconds have passed it will move straight to the next layout rather than waiting for touch input). Also on some occasions the audio sounds slow and echoing for an unknown reason.

    Clay.io was the next place I uploaded to. I'd advise everyone to give clay.io a try as it allows you to put in useful analytics (such as tracking amount of users, how long people spend on each level, how many view the ads etc). I did have problems getting the uploaded game to work on my ipad (even though the only difference between it and the Newgrounds one was it was exported for Chrome instead of html5). On ipad the game would reach 100%, then begin the countdown again and freeze on 30%. After a full day and about 15 upload experiments which included removing the preloader and all audio completely, I finally got it to work by having it skip the audio preload if its on a mobile device (as a result, there's no sound on the clay.io version, on my ipad at least. Works fine on desktop).

    Using clay.io I pushed the game out to Facebook. If you plan to take the Facebook route then have some adaptable headers and icons at hand, as they ask for tonnes of them! Also, try not to get discouraged by it asking for your Terms Of Service and Privacy Policy; your game can still be played on Facebook without these, though if you do them it gives the game a chance of being added to their main App Store (otherwise you can spread it through invites etc). If you want people to play your game on mobile, you need to add a Facebook login. Haven't worked out how to do so yet, but I'll be sure to let you know if I figure it out.

    Finally I uploaded the game to Gamejolt. Again, I had problems on ipad/mobile (even though it was the same file). This time it couldn't get past the loading screen as it was only recognising touch in the top half of the screen. I'd heard on the forum that retina devices sometimes detect double the screen width (which might be an old problem) so tried turning retina off, but that failed to solve the problem. I updated to the most recent construct version incase it was a bug, but that seemed to stop any touch from registering at all. Since after 8 hours I couldn't solve the problem, I made that version Desktop only and moved swiftly on.

    Another place worth checking out in the lead up to game release is Indiedb. Within an hour of putting up a news article about Board Hordes release, the article got 1,500 views (not so many for the game, though).

    Anyway, I hope some of this info is of use to people. Please let me know if you'd like me to share more in future.

  • Right, my brain has officially melted. But on the plus side, the final (for now) version of Board Horde is up at Newgrounds (link is on the front page). I'm sure there's bound to be a few bugs and setbacks, but at least its as complete as I can get it for the time being.

    The scoreboard is currently clear, so if anyone fancies skilfully weaving their way to the top now is the time to do so!

    Anyway, more online releases will follow in the coming weeks. The next major update (once I've had a jolly good sleep) will include a three player mode, special hero powers and various other features, so stay tuned!

    Cheers.

  • Wotcher, folks!

    The Board Horde revamp is progressing well. I've managed to integrate plenty of Clay.io features (such as Leaderboards, Achievements and Ads) quite easily, have added a new board and tidied up a few things. All being well, I should have the game ready to put online at the weekend (I'll probably start small to begin with, then branch out to Kongregate if the feedback has been positive enough).

    In preparation I've just set up an account at IndieDB, which can be reached by clicking that little game pad icon in my signature.

    Anyway, thanks for all the support so far and do feel free to let me know any suggestions for improvements, or irritating bugs that you spot.

  • Sollaano

    Thanks for the kind words.

    I'm hoping to one day release the game on mobile, though as I haven't got a mac yet or any money for a developer licence it might be a while!

    My current plans are to put out an online version supported by ads, but I've got a bit of debugging to do first. Once its up and running, I'm hoping to keep adding boards to the game, and various other game modes if I get the chance (such as Arena and Rogue).

    If you can think of any ideas for improvements or features you'd like to see, I'm always interested to hear them.

    Cheers.

  • Blacksmith

    I am also highly suspicious of the amount of sixes the a.i. seems to roll. I'm pretty sure I didn't put the option for the a.i. to cheat anywhere in my events, but I will double check!

    Just updated the link on the front page to include all the workings out on the scoreboard, and also pinned a kill streak multiplier above the heroes heads which shows up when making more than one kill (probably need to put an outline round it at some point, as it can be hard to see at times).

    I still need to work on the text placement/timing, and getting rid of the bugs but I'm quite happy with the way its coming together.

    Thanks for giving it another shot, and lets hope you score higher on my game than I did on yours!

  • Hullo chaps,

    I'm getting closer to completion and have just updated the link on the front page to the newest version. This contains a new scoring system, cheats, debug mode and various other improvements.

    After I've sorted out a bit of my dodgy programming and removed all the bugs I will tie the scoring system into Clay.io's Leaderboards and Achievements (so please let me know if you think any other score bonuses should be included)

    A few helpful pointers about the scores:

    Mages get 20 points for every kill, Rogues get 15 and Warriors get 10. Every time you get a kill without dying it adds to your kill streak bonus (so if a Mage kills two enemies, he will get 2x20 points).

    There are bonus points for making the first kill, being the first hero to make it to the exit, getting all three heroes to the exit, killing a hero that killed you, getting to the exit without dying, killing a hero that's close to the exit. Points are also given for dodging a trap or drinking a potion, and deducted for setting off a trap, dying on the Entrance Square, being killed elsewhere.

    I will be adding various ways to keep track of important stats into the game soon (such as what kill streak multiplier you're on, who to get revenge on, if your hero is still up for an Untouchable bonus) and also put more of the workings out on the scoreboard.

    Anyway, hope to have something nearing completion (for the time being) in the next week or so, depending on how the bug hunt goes.

    Thanks for your support!

    Ps, my highest score so far is 750 without cheating...beat that, Mr Harrio!

  • InvaderX

    Well done, guys! Looks like that article has given your game the publicity it needs (and with time to spare). Good luck to you.

  • Sulli

    Yep, you're quite right, the websites down. At least there's nothing wrong with your connection.

  • SecondDimension

    I'll give your method a test on Friday; I'm still experimenting with methods, as what I've found so far is although some attempts work fine in the preview mode on all browsers and on my ipad, as soon as I export to Dropbox I get some pop in on some browsers. I've also been experimenting with setting the colour of the font to same as background colour and having it visible (so it still can't be seen, but has time to get past the pop in without anyone seeing it) and then setting it to a visible colour after half a second.

    We'll find a good workaround eventually!

  • farflamex

    So basically for about every 200,000 plays at Newground we get a dollar? This time next year we'll be millionaires, I tells ya!

    Just tested the Newgrounds version on ipad (safari). As you mentioned, the ads don't show (just an invisible box at the bottom) though you do get the Suggested Games feature from Clay.io after it registers your score.

    Another thing I noticed is that when you press start, for a second before the game starts you get a flash of all the games art assets in the top left corner (about a quarter screen size). I've recently noticed this on Board Horde in Chrome; for me, it turned out to be caused by the transition between loader screen and first layout (to get rid of it, I masked it with an All Black tile layer which is destroyed once the main layers have loaded in. You might be able to use a similar masking technique.)

  • Hi Patrick,

    I reckon it would be a great deal of interest to many folk, and a lot more relevant than many of the tutorials I've seen of late. Since without sprites our games would be rather empty looking, I think its still very relevant to Construct 2 (and you did a great job with that soldier sprite you made for Daniel).

    There are already many tutorials on Theory which have nothing to do with c2 directly, so one on sprite creation shouldn't cause any problems.

    I look forward to seeing what you come up with.

  • I think that to get to the Newgrounds ads you first sign in, and then select the fifth symbol along (looks like a cog). This brings up some finance options (can't find the one I selected, but that's probably because I already selected them). What it's showing me currently to the right is earnings of �0 (so I'm not sure if this works properly or not), and there's payment history, address etc.

    If you press the fourth symbol that looks like a p, and choose the Api option from inside your project you can also attempt to enable flash ads inside your game, though I doubt that will work as they're not flash games. I clicked it anyway to see if anything happens, and it currently says 'pending'.

    Glad to hear someone else sees the hidden depth within Korelos. Now if you can just convince them to buy the full game off you for a million pounds, you're laughing.