NEaB Today

8 Sep, 2009

Finally after a long time of "shall I do it, or shall I wait" I decided it was again time to invest some money on advertisement. Advertisement is expensive and doesn't always have the return to investment you would want. However there is so far nothing which can completely replace it and is free.

So, we put some money to https://www.game-advertising-online.com/ which basically yet another advertisement network for games, and started the campaign. Hopefully we will have like 1 new player for each 50 cents invested or even more, but nobody really is able to answer this question. Also, how many of those players will actually donate? Well if every 1/10th of the new players donate 5$ then we would basically be flat and didn't loose any money. Again something really difficult to check as we don't have yet the tools to track those kind of "registered from where -> pay". This is also difficult as you may not know when / if a player gives some money. It could be 1 week after starting as well as 1 year. So you would have to monitor your campaigns for over a year after you stop them.

In any case we would indeed be very lucky if this advertisement would be self payed in some way, as it's as expensive that I doubt we would be able to sustain it for even a week. But to give you some sort of overview of the effect in about 6 hours we got 180 new players coming from this advertisement where our normal day would be about 100 new players a day. So it does have an impact.

4 Sep, 2009

This week I worked hard even if nearly nobody saw it beside a "small thing". Why? First because I was working on a long wished feature: TAGGED CLANS ITEMS.
Even if this seems at first a simply feature, it was actually more complex than the players could think of. Why? Because I had to dig into the code and change all the parts which allowed players to go drop their items, sells them or what ever else. Now as our items are do not get an unique ID, we store instead who owns some tagged items, and then control that this person still have enough of them inside his/her inventory before doing any other actions which would decrease the number of items. Of course all that will need to be carefully tested before releasing it.

The second feature I was working on this week is even more hidden (hopefully), was a rewrite of some code for the loading of the map. Those of you more skilled in computer science do know what database queries are, and can skip this explanation, however for the others, the database is like a area where programs can read and write (more) easily to, and data can be ordered, summarized or re-organized doing "queries". Now NEaB as many many other web applications do rely heavy on a database to keep all the game information, and loading a map was requiring about 250-300 queries. Each query is a slow down for the game and a server resources consumer. With some good effort I was able to reduce this number to 70-110 queries... so like 1/3 of what was before and the speed (on the server side) is now about 3x as fast as before. For the players I doubt it will change much YET, but should provide us more room for handling more players at the same time.

And the last feature, which had also quiet some impact on the code, and yet added just a little thing was the "help search" box found in the left menu. Why it was difficult? Due my laziness I didn't gave a name to some page elements called "forms" which groups input boxes or others under a cap. Well, I was simply referring to the first form of the page, however after introducing something which was before every other forms, the numbers changed, and many pages needed a rework. Beside 1 open issue all this should be now running, and yet we do offer a quick way to browse our nice wiki manual.

31 Aug, 2009

The portal is going forward, and I started to re-link myself with other game owners to have more than simply 2 games on it. We will also quiet certainly work with somebody for the community forums, and therefore have yet a bigger community of players. However everything have a cost (some times it's hidden, some times it's a direct cost), in this case I will have to act as a MOD of some other forums to be able to have this collaboration. I hope it will pay off, and in any case I doubt it will cost me so much time. Actually my first job as mod there is to write down behavior rules for the users for the forum. Not a difficult task, as most of the rules can be taken from our own!

For the portal, the HTML / Image splitting work is completed, even if some people complains it leave too much empty space on the sides. We may need to find some sort of re-sizable design or, make it larger.

28 Aug, 2009

Advertisement is something important, but to drive new people and keep them, you need to offer some services. In order to do that, I was in discussion since a few month with other game owners, and we discussed about creating a portal site which will promote our games and propose them to the visitors of the portal.

Promotion will be done for the portal instead of the individual games, and then cross links the games to the portal such that the visitors can go from one game to the other, without actually leaving our "network" of games.

The goal? Increase the visitors and keeps them "trapped" inside one or more of our games.

The portal could then contain like an e-zine or other facilities. Maybe an online chat, forums and such. We shall see. At first, setup the server, and setup some good looking page with NEaB and Baneworld, and then re-invite the other owners to join the adventure.

Once the portal will be ready and will contain some more (than 2) games, I will start some good advertisement for it.

27 Aug, 2009

Some more side work continue, the forums have been moved to a cleaner URL (http://forums.nodalideas.com) and even started to change the code of those forums. Why? Because we was needing some more separation between the different categories, or at least make a visible separation, and the soft wasn't able to do it. So... A bit more work for me.

Map editor has been yet a bit more tweaked, remains only 2 things left: smart house draw, and hot keys.

The full screen GUI has been updated to make it a bit nicer, and prepare the road of multiple GUI (selectable by the player).

And the never ending work of the wiki continued...

Not bad from a "slow" week, isn't it? Well I find it not too bad. It's never enough of course but still going forward.

22 Aug, 2009

How odd, you spent a lot of time trying to improves things, thinking how things could be nicer, easier to use, and faster. Spent a lot of time writing the code to support all that, make it work on IE as well as FF, and yet try to improve the speed a bit more, and once you finished all, what you get as result? Can't we have an option to use the old editor instead as the new one is not as nice. Why? Because someone don't like to work with a large map, the other one is rendering 3D worlds in background and his computer is a slug or the 3rd one like empty spaces and not when all the real estate of the browser page is used.

I would say, again, that not everybody can be pleased, but what those people simply don't understand is that keeping old version online means we also need to maintain them. And of course, when we add a new feature, they will want it on the old editor as well. Or yet, if we discover a bug we need to fix 2 codes instead of 1. Basically a nightmare. Specially if you are alone to program.

Yet better, the same guy tells you, well I don't use anyhow this full screen feature in the game (not only in the editor) because I don't like the GUI. Did this guy ever thought he could actually contribute? Produce himself something which looks better instead of plainly complain without providing you any mean to improve something?

Well those kind of players are simply the worse you could have. You may answer them (but I doubt they will answer in any constructive way), or you can simply forget it and work for the majority which is happy when you try to improve things.

On another note, this week was mainly a conflict solving week, so trying to discover why some people act oddly and try to destroy the good feeling of your community. As your game get bigger the more time you will invest in such time wasting and consuming tasks. Maybe I should take it from the positive side and think this means simply the game is growing.