Tower of Babel
Ladies and Gentlemen!
The company "Oldschool Infundibulum Software" presents to your attention the game with the proud name "Tower of Babel"!
For those who are tired of working, or who want to immediately see what they are talking about, here is a link (works only in Chrome and FF) : elegar.ru/tower
For those who are not too lazy to read - all the following text.
It all started with the fact that the company Oldschool Infundibulum Software (that is, I) already did Alchemy over a year ago. The one that is browser based. This one: alchemygame.ru I have long wanted to write a post about her on Habré, but I didn’t get going. However, here and without me several posts have written about her. It became quite popular, and I wanted to do something else, even simpler and more addictive. Then I sat down and wrote another game. The idea I spied at the slot machine Stacker. For those who do not know: this is about this: www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXYNte_QN8I I liked this idea because she liked my girlfriend. After she squandered a certain amount of money into this thing and gave me the won headphones, I thought: “Wow, since this stuff dragged her, then others will probably like it. This is exactly what you need! ”And promised her to write a game that will work for free.
The next day I opened the notepad, jQuery documentation, and quickly wrote a prototype. Why js? Because I do not know how to flash. The prototype was not very attractive in appearance,but good inside , but I played a little bit in it - and I was drawn out. To celebrate, I wanted to immediately brag about my new handicraft on the Internet, but here in our story my girlfriend reappears, who said: “Making this game is, of course, cool, but it would be great to earn some money too. Maybe even go to Finland. And then it will be a shame if this toy also becomes popular, and those who make clones for telephones will earn it. ”I thought that it was really a shame - and I thought about monetization. From these mercantile thoughts, I withered, and at first I lost interest in the toy, and then completely forgot.
I forgot until this spring, on Habré, messages about the wonders of CSS3 began to flicker. Of course, I wanted to touch them. In order not to start from scratch, I took a file from the Tower from a long shelf, blew the dust off it, and began to change Java animation to css-transitions. If initially the tower was just blocks going back and forth, the width of which decreased with every miss, then after a couple of evenings there was a mess with styles and scripts ... it was the same thing, only working on CSS. But it was clear where to go next. As a result, all the graphics in the game are made without a single picture - only pure html. Users of course do not care how it is done there, but I'm still proud of it. The cost of switching to CSS3 was the loss of performance in Opera and IE.
')
So, by the end of spring, the Tower became more like a normal flash game than a home-made hack. I wanted to brag again, but the girl reminded me of monetization. As a result, I took myself in hand and decided simply: to make a paid application for a phone (after all, there are such single-click toys — exactly what everyone dreams of) and add a link to it from the free browser version. Those. so that instead of the Donate button there was a link to the Android market, maybe someone will buy it. As far as I know, now this is a fairly common scheme, but then I did not know it and honestly invented it myself :) The first thought was to write for an iPhone, but this undertaking almost immediately broke on the sharp rocks of reality: the inability to develop on a PC, the complexity of installing hackintosh, the lack of poppy, and the reluctance to buy it only for the sake of this dubious undertaking. But there was no problem with Android, I downloaded Eclipse, the SDK, added a link to the documentation in the bookmarks and ...
... Summer has passed. Despite the simplicity of the game, the development was stretched for three months. First of all, because in summer there is very little time free from work and rest. Secondarily, because I long and enthusiastically drew pictures for the telephone version. There are not so many sprites in the game, but everyone is drawn with a soul :) As a result, it turned out not in a cartoon-vector style, like a browser one, but in a more picturesque one.
So, instead of one game, I got two. The story ends here. Finally you can brag :)
Actually, I can brag at the moment only by the fact of the completed work, for so far there are few statistics.
Yesterday I showed the game to Lepre and on the site of my Alchemy, it gave about a thousand visitors per day and 11 thousand towers built. Android application bought 4 times (it seems, Finland will not be soon), 1 time voted five stars. My own record (61 tower) was not broken yesterday, but today a Jedi did it :) The AddThis statistics show about 50 shares per day and 150% virality (i.e., those who came through likes and a half times more than those who liked). For comparison, Alchemy has a virality greater than 300%. At the moment, almost 15,000 towers.
The obvious problem of html games is open source. Anyone who is more or less familiar with js can read the source and either replace the data being sent, or write a “bot” with the perfect response. Opportunities to fight this, I do not see. Obfuscation - will complicate the task of the hacker, but not much. Running on the server is not an option. Yesterday I deleted 10 pieces of towers, built in an obviously unfair way.
The CSS3 problem is that it has not yet become a standard, you have to write crutches, duplicate css properties with browser-specific prefixes, etc. I didn't manage to make the game work correctly in Opera. I did not even try to make it work in IE.
The Android problem is completely incomprehensible how to promote the application there. The category “new” is no more, there is only “new popular”. But in order to become popular, it is necessary that someone learns about you to begin with. I did not find any tools for paid promotion, like “promoted apps” there either.
The company "Oldschool Infundibulum Software" presents to your attention the game with the proud name "Tower of Babel"!
For those who are tired of working, or who want to immediately see what they are talking about, here is a link (works only in Chrome and FF) : elegar.ru/tower
For those who are not too lazy to read - all the following text.
Introduction
It all started with the fact that the company Oldschool Infundibulum Software (that is, I) already did Alchemy over a year ago. The one that is browser based. This one: alchemygame.ru I have long wanted to write a post about her on Habré, but I didn’t get going. However, here and without me several posts have written about her. It became quite popular, and I wanted to do something else, even simpler and more addictive. Then I sat down and wrote another game. The idea I spied at the slot machine Stacker. For those who do not know: this is about this: www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXYNte_QN8I I liked this idea because she liked my girlfriend. After she squandered a certain amount of money into this thing and gave me the won headphones, I thought: “Wow, since this stuff dragged her, then others will probably like it. This is exactly what you need! ”And promised her to write a game that will work for free.
JS game
The next day I opened the notepad, jQuery documentation, and quickly wrote a prototype. Why js? Because I do not know how to flash. The prototype was not very attractive in appearance,
I forgot until this spring, on Habré, messages about the wonders of CSS3 began to flicker. Of course, I wanted to touch them. In order not to start from scratch, I took a file from the Tower from a long shelf, blew the dust off it, and began to change Java animation to css-transitions. If initially the tower was just blocks going back and forth, the width of which decreased with every miss, then after a couple of evenings there was a mess with styles and scripts ... it was the same thing, only working on CSS. But it was clear where to go next. As a result, all the graphics in the game are made without a single picture - only pure html. Users of course do not care how it is done there, but I'm still proud of it. The cost of switching to CSS3 was the loss of performance in Opera and IE.
')
Android game
So, by the end of spring, the Tower became more like a normal flash game than a home-made hack. I wanted to brag again, but the girl reminded me of monetization. As a result, I took myself in hand and decided simply: to make a paid application for a phone (after all, there are such single-click toys — exactly what everyone dreams of) and add a link to it from the free browser version. Those. so that instead of the Donate button there was a link to the Android market, maybe someone will buy it. As far as I know, now this is a fairly common scheme, but then I did not know it and honestly invented it myself :) The first thought was to write for an iPhone, but this undertaking almost immediately broke on the sharp rocks of reality: the inability to develop on a PC, the complexity of installing hackintosh, the lack of poppy, and the reluctance to buy it only for the sake of this dubious undertaking. But there was no problem with Android, I downloaded Eclipse, the SDK, added a link to the documentation in the bookmarks and ...
... Summer has passed. Despite the simplicity of the game, the development was stretched for three months. First of all, because in summer there is very little time free from work and rest. Secondarily, because I long and enthusiastically drew pictures for the telephone version. There are not so many sprites in the game, but everyone is drawn with a soul :) As a result, it turned out not in a cartoon-vector style, like a browser one, but in a more picturesque one.
Epilogue
So, instead of one game, I got two. The story ends here. Finally you can brag :)
Actually, I can brag at the moment only by the fact of the completed work, for so far there are few statistics.
Yesterday I showed the game to Lepre and on the site of my Alchemy, it gave about a thousand visitors per day and 11 thousand towers built. Android application bought 4 times (it seems, Finland will not be soon), 1 time voted five stars. My own record (61 tower) was not broken yesterday, but today a Jedi did it :) The AddThis statistics show about 50 shares per day and 150% virality (i.e., those who came through likes and a half times more than those who liked). For comparison, Alchemy has a virality greater than 300%. At the moment, almost 15,000 towers.
The obvious problem of html games is open source. Anyone who is more or less familiar with js can read the source and either replace the data being sent, or write a “bot” with the perfect response. Opportunities to fight this, I do not see. Obfuscation - will complicate the task of the hacker, but not much. Running on the server is not an option. Yesterday I deleted 10 pieces of towers, built in an obviously unfair way.
The CSS3 problem is that it has not yet become a standard, you have to write crutches, duplicate css properties with browser-specific prefixes, etc. I didn't manage to make the game work correctly in Opera. I did not even try to make it work in IE.
The Android problem is completely incomprehensible how to promote the application there. The category “new” is no more, there is only “new popular”. But in order to become popular, it is necessary that someone learns about you to begin with. I did not find any tools for paid promotion, like “promoted apps” there either.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/129033/
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