Adobe TV video about Packager for iPhone and Chroma Circuit
At the end of 2009, I released by my game Chroma Circuit for the iPhone. It was developed using early builds of the Packager for iPhone to be included with the upcoming Flash CS5. Adobe recently met with me to chat about my experience using this exciting new technology.
Watch the video above or over at Adobe TV. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a couple other mobile games to hurry up and finish.
by Josh Tynjala | Start the Discussion
Indie Flash Game Development: A 2009 Year-End Retrospective
In early 2009, I came up with an idea for a Flash game. At the time, I had enough saved up to take a short break from regular work, and I decided to try out game development on my own for a little while. That first idea eventually became Chroma Circuit, a cool little puzzler released by my new company, Bowler Hat Games. Since then, I’ve released two other free-to-play Flash games, one iPhone game using Adobe’s upcoming Packager for iPhone in Flash CS5, and I’m working on another iPhone game as I write this. The other day, I realized that I started creating games in January, right at the beginning of the year. With that in mind, I thought I’d take a look at how I did, financially speaking, in my first full year as an indie game developer. Get ready for some numbers!
Time Breakdown
To start, let’s look at the time I spent on various projects in 2009. Unfortunately, it wasn’t all fun and games. Though I had a decent savings to get me started, I needed to refill my treasure chests mid-year, and that meant time away from game development. Here’s a pie chart to visualize the breakdown:
As you can see above, I spent six months working exclusively on my own games full-time. For a month and a half, I worked on some contracts that involved developing games for other people (the next best thing to working on my own games, I suppose). In addition, I spent another four months on contracts building some Flex RIAs (non-game development, obviously). Finally, I took a couple weeks off in December to relax and enjoy the holidays.
As we take a look at my income next, please note that I will omit the amount I earned from things other than developing games. I want to focus more on what I earned specifically as a game developer rather than as an RIA developer. Regardless, I’ve mentioned this additional income because many game developers take the same approach: contract work funds the things we really want to do. Though I won’t give you specific numbers about the non-game income, I will note that well over half of my overall income this year falls into that bucket. In short, games did not pay the bills this year.
Quick Income Breakdown
In total, games earned me $29,413 USD in 2009. This year, I had five sources of income from games: primary sponsorships, non-exclusive licenses, advertising, iPhone game sales, and custom game development for clients. I’ll explain each of these below, for those who might not be familiar. However, let’s start with a simpler comparison to make one important point.
As you can see from the chart on the left, about 58% of my game-related income came from contract work. Once again, even focusing specifically on game development, we can see that contracting is still where the real money is. Big clients pay big money to bring in developers to get their projects done. For comparison, the chart on the right shows the amount of time I spent on each. As you can see, the majority of the income from games comes from only 20% of the time I spent on them. If I were only interested in the size of my paycheck, I think it should be obvious which type of work I’d want to choose.
Detailed Income Breakdown
Now, let’s go one level deeper. The games I built entirely under the Bowler Hat Games banner earned me $12,413 in 2009 with six months of work. Assuming I didn’t live in the San Francisco Bay Area, I might have been able to stick to games the whole year with only a small loss, hoping to make up for it as revenue continues to grow in 2010. However, my current location is pretty expensive, so focusing on my games exclusively is still not possible yet.
The majority of revenue comes from primary sponsorships, which are sold to game portals who want their branding and links to appear in any distributed version of a game. Sponsorships help them bring traffic back to their sites. They usually pay an author a lump sum for this privilege. Sometimes, sponsors offer performance incentives so that very popular games can earn more, but usually, a sponsored game only earns money from the sponsor once. I found this form of revenue useful to start out, but I’m not sure how often I will pursue it in the future. I’m starting to feel that they make it harder to build my own company’s brand because my games promote the brands of others so strongly.
Next in line is the non-exclusive, site-locked license, which allows game portals and virtual worlds to customize a game by adding their high score APIs, removing advertising, and making other small changes. By getting the game site-locked to one website (in other words, no distribution), they can offer a quality game directly on their portal for a lower price than sponsorship, but without the audience reach that a sponsorship offers. A non-exclusive license can earn as much or more than the primary sponsorship in the long run because you can sell as many licenses as you want. Generally, it only takes 2-3 hours for me to whip out a customized version of one of my games, and I earn more per hour for this work than what a primary sponsorship gets me for the original game.
By the way, FlashGameLicense.com provides an excellent service for Flash game developers to connect with publishers and sell sponsorships and licenses. I found primary sponsors for all three of my games there, and many of the portal owners that made non-exclusive deals with me initiated contact on FGL.
Often, advertising earnings can be a pretty low percentage of a game author’s revenue. However, my game Gridshock has found itself among the top games on the popular MindJolt portal (and Facebook app) for some time now, having received over 16 million plays overall as of the time of this writing. My all-time eCPM for all three games combined right now is $0.26 from MochiAds, though I’m showing a custom ad in Chroma Circuit right now to promote the iPhone version so that’s not earning anything at the moment. Gridshock alone is a tiny bit higher, at $0.28. I also use Google AdSense on the Bowler Hat Games website for some extra ad revenue, but their Terms of Service are mean, so I can’t really share anything about that.
Finally, there’s my iPhone game. I released it in October, and, as you can see, it hasn’t brought in much revenue, relatively speaking. The App Store isn’t an easy win these days, and that’s pretty much what I expected. However, Chroma Circuit has always done a little poorly compared to my other two games (other than the larger-than-average primary sponsorship), and that means I expect those to do better in the App Store once I finish polishing them up for the iPhone. If the iPhone version of Chroma Circuit had been released much earlier in the year, that percentage would have been higher overall, so I’m not ready to say that iPhone development isn’t worth the effort yet. Plus, it’s been a lot of fun learning to optimize for a mobile device and developing with a touch screen, so I’m happy to explore this area more in the coming year just because I enjoy it.
On to 2010!
As I noted above, my earnings as an indie game developer are pretty low in comparison to the salary I used to earn (and what I still earn as a part-time independent contractor). However, I’ve seen steady growth throughout the year from game-related revenue, and I’m expecting that growth to continue into my second year. I don’t know for sure how many months I’ll be able to focus on my own games exclusively in 2010, but it should be at least six again. Hopefully more!
My main goal for this coming year is to explore new sources of revenue. The mobile games space still deserves some of my time, and that will likely include more devices than the iPhone, if they don’t require too large a commitment. Should Adobe offer Flash Player 10 (I’m not interested in Flash Lite) on a device, I’m more likely to play with it. I’m also looking to explore micro-transactions. From what I’ve seen, games that use MochiCoins seem to do pretty well with players (though some portals seem to dislike them), and I definitely want to try adding them (or maybe another service, like GamerSafe or Heyzap) to some totally new games I have simmering in the back of my head. Desktop versions of my existing games are certainly a possibility too. Who knows if I’ll get around to all of that, but I will say that I definitely have a barrel full of ideas for the future of Bowler Hat Games.
by Josh Tynjala | 10 comments
Bowler Hat Games Phase Two Begins: Chroma Circuit for iPhone
Head on over to the iTunes App Store now, and support your favorite indie game developer! Chroma Circuit can now be purchased for the iPhone and iPod Touch. If you’ve played Chroma Circuit before, get ready to experience new touchscreen controls, slick new graphics, and a total of 30 puzzles to solve. That’s 12 more levels than the original web version, plus some remixed levels that better fit the iPhone’s screen.
Alright, with the sales pitch out of the way, let’s get into the nitty-gritty details. First of all, yes, Chroma Circuit is built with Adobe Flash. It’s not Flash Player, though. This is a native app with the ActionScript compiled down to ARM assembly. You can read more about the details in the press release, Adobe Opens iPhone to Flash Developers (which has a quote from me!), and on the Apps for iPhone section of Adobe Labs.
Of course, what everyone’s been waiting for is, what do I think about it? Personally, I absolutely love this technology. I spent a few weeks with Objective-C earlier this year, trying to do a port of Chroma Circuit. I started getting the hang of the language and tools pretty fast, but to be honest, I wasn’t a fan. Too much memory management. Drawing and animation APIs that were a pain. It just wasn’t for me. I kept an interactive prototype of Chroma Circuit sitting around for months without any updates. Then Adobe asked me to help them bring Flash to the iPhone, and I had a more complete prototype within a couple of hours because I could reuse my existing code from the web version with very minor tweaks.
Optimization
Currently, iPhone native apps built with Flash are obviously slower than typical native apps, especially on older phones. The bottleneck, much like in the browser, is the software renderer. I think I’ve seen some speculation that because ActionScript is traditionally an interpreted language that it’s probably very slow when pre-compiled. That’s simply not true, and unless you write crappy code, it won’t be your bottleneck. Adobe has said that they’re using the same software renderer as their browser and desktop runtimes because it keeps things visually consistent. I like that, and I’m excited to see optimization to make it run better on less-powerful devices. Hopefully, that optimization will make its way back to Flash Player itself—much like what’s already happened with Flash Player 10.1—and that it will help push the community to innovate more.
Of course, optimization is not all on Adobe’s side. The fact is, most of us write code that is “good enough” to run on modern desktops. For a mobile device, optimization is more important, and I’m working hard to ensure that future updates to Chroma Circuit run better. Though I haven’t started using the new hardware acceleration feature, cacheAsSurface, I have spent time simplifying some of my graphical effects (which don’t need to be so detailed on such a small screen), ensuring that vectors don’t get redrawn unnecessarily, and making some display list manipulations (like depth changes) more conditional. For the original version, I focused mainly on removing bitmap filters (either completely or replaced by PNGs) and turning static vector art like backgrounds into bitmaps. Both helped quite a bit, and that’s the best I could do with a looming deadline to get it into the App Store in time for Adobe MAX. Now that I have more time to focus on polishing, I can explore and discover new ways to make the game run faster. Again, while I want to see more performance coming from the renderer itself, I certainly am not denying the fact that part of the job is my own.
The Future
What’s coming next? More features and better performance in Chroma Circuit, of course. My other games, Gridshock and Qrossfire, will be getting the iPhone treatment too. Making iPhone games isn’t my sole focus, though. The App Store is not a gold mine, and probably hasn’t been since people started calling it that. Instead, iPhone apps will be just one part of my revenue. Licensing, advertising, iPhone apps, and probably more. Adobe’s Shibuya looked pretty cool. Maybe I’ll make some AIR desktop versions of my games too. Certainly, there are new games simmering in my brain, and I’m sure you’ll see those hitting portals and making their way to iPhones and desktops as well.
That’s the focus of what I call “phase two” of Bowler Hat Games. I want to explore more revenue sources and discover a good mix that will help me reach my financial goals for the business. With the retroactively named “phase one” coming to a close, I hope to share with you a blog post with some charts and analysis showing the breakdown of revenue so far. I haven’t compared all the numbers yet, except to ballpark it all in my head, so I’m pretty excited to get down and dirty with the data.
by Josh Tynjala | 1 comment
Make your company more fun: Start “back channel” conversations
Put up a whiteboard in your company’s office. Not a whiteboard for meetings, mind you. A whiteboard with a question. Then, drop a bunch of markers next to it and wait for answers. It doesn’t matter what you ask, but try to make it a question that requires more than a “yes” or “no” answer. It could be something fun, or maybe a wild idea that you want validated. Without a doubt, passersby will stop for a moment and start writing. Don’t get it? Here’s an example of a question to ask:
What do we need?
It’s a very straightforward question, but you might be surprised about the answers. You’ll get serious answers about things that slow people down and make it hard for them to do their job. You’ll get inspiring answers about features your products or services may benefit from in the future (maybe even things people might be too scared to suggest in real meetings). You’ll get funny answers about how someone wants “weapons-grade plutonium”. In all cases, you’ll get useful results and engage the people around you. You’ll probably get more than answers, though. The most fascinating phenomenon is that people will start having conversations. Bob will read another Alice’s answer, then comment on it with his own thoughts with a little arrow pointing to the original.
I’ve seen the happen at two companies at which I’ve worked. At one, I was a full-time employee, and at the other, I was a contractor. In both cases, the message board instantly caught on, without explanation. One day it appears, and people instantly get it. In one case, it wasn’t a whiteboard. Nothing was provided for writing an answer. It was just a big thing on the wall with a permanent question (I don’t remember what exactly, but basically, “what are you up to?”). By day two, a clever individual had figured it out, and his or her answer materialized on a post-it. A conversation thread on the board became a cascading line of yellow squares. A couple weeks in, pictures of team members doing fun stuff were taped up there, and it was a great success.
Many business focus engagement so strongly on customers, that a little extra effort to engage employees can be surprising and exciting. A whiteboard or something else that asks a simple question brings a light-hearted atmosphere to the office and it may give you some information about what’s happening behind the scenes that was otherwise hidden. As someone who has experienced this addition to an office environment twice in my career, I highly recommend it for every business.
by Josh Tynjala | 5 comments