The Tower of Babel

Ladies and Gentlemen!
Oldschool Infundibulum Software is proud to present the game with the proud title of Tower of Babel!
For those who are tired of working, or who want to immediately see what they ’re talking about, here is the link (works only in Chrome and FF) : elegar.ru/tower

For those who are not too lazy to read - the whole following text.

Introduction

It all started with the fact that the company "Oldschool Infundibulum Software" (that is, I) already made Alchemy more than a year ago. The one that is browser-based. This one: alchemygame.ru For a long time I wanted to write a post about it on Habré, but I did not intend to. However, here and without me several posts were written about her. It became quite popular, and I wanted to do something else, even more simple and addictive. Then I sat down and wrote another game. I spied the idea at the Stacker slot machine. For those who do not know: this is something like this: www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXYNte_QN8II liked this idea because my girlfriend liked it. After she slipped a certain amount of money into this thing and presented me with the won headphones, I thought: “Wow, since this garbage tightened it, 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 a notepad, jQuery documentation, and quickly wrote a prototype. Why js? Because I don’t know how to flash. The prototype was not very attractive in appearance, but it’s kind inside , but I played a little in it - and I was drawn. To celebrate, I wanted to immediately brag about my new craft on the Internet, but here in our story my girlfriend again appears, who said: “Making the game is, of course, cool, but it would be great to earn a little. Maybe we’ll go to Finland. And then it will be a shame if this toy also becomes popular, and those who make clones for phones earn it, ”I thought it really was a shame - and thought about monetization. From these mercantile thoughts I conceived, and at first I lost interest in the toy, and then completely forgot.

I forgot until then, when in the spring of this year, messages about CSS3 wonders began to flicker more often on Habré. Of course, I wanted to touch them. In order not to start from scratch, I took a file with the Tower from the far shelf, blew dust off it and began to change javascript animations to css-transitions. If initially the tower was just blocks going back and forth, the width of which decreased with each miss, then after a couple of evenings fuss with styles and scripts ... it was the same thing, only working on CSS. But it was clear where to move on. As a result, all the graphics in the game are made without a single image - only pure html. Of course, the users don’t care how it is done there, but I’m proud of it anyway. The cost of switching to CSS3 was the loss of functionality in Opera and IE.

Game for Android

So, by the end of spring, the Tower became more like a normal flash game than a homemade craft. Again I wanted to brag, but the girl recalled about monetization. As a result, I pulled myself together and decided simply: to make a paid application for the phone (after all, such one-clicked toys are 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 is 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 came up with it myself :) The first thought was to write for an iPhone, but this initiative almost immediately crashed into sharp cliffs of reality: the impossibility of developing on a PC, the complexity of installing a hackintosh, lack of poppy, and unwillingness to buy it only for the sake of this dubious undertaking. But there were no problems with Android,

... Summer has passed. Despite the simplicity of the game, development lasted for three months. First of all, because in summer there is very little time free from work and rest. Secondly, because I drew long and enthusiastically pictures for the telephone version. There are not so many sprites in the game, but each is painted with a soul :) As a result, it turned out not in a cartoon-vector style, like a browser, but in a more picturesque one.

Epilogue

So, instead of one game, I got two. This is where the story ends. Finally, you can brag :)

Actually, at the moment I can only brag about the fact of the completed work, because there are so 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. They bought the Android application 4 times (it seems that Finland will not be soon), 1 time they voted with five stars. My record in my own game (a tower with a height of 61) was not beaten yesterday, but today some Jedi did it :) Statistics AddThis shows about 50 shares per day and 150% virality (i.e. who came through likes and a half times more than those who liked). For comparison, Alchemy has a virality of more than 300%. At the moment, there are almost 15,000 towers.

The obvious problem with html games is open source. Anyone who is more or less familiar with js can read the source and either replace the data sent, or write a "bot" with the perfect reaction. I do not see opportunities to fight this. Obfuscation - complicates the task of the cracker, but not much. Running on the server is not an option. Yesterday I deleted 10 pieces of towers, built clearly dishonestly.

CSS3 problem - it has not yet become a standard, you have to write crutches, duplicate css properties with browser-specific prefixes, etc. I did not succeed in getting the game to work correctly in Opera. I did not try to get it to work in IE.

The problem of Android is that it’s completely unclear how to promote the application there. The categories “new” are no more, there are only “new popular”. But in order to become popular, someone needs to know about you first. I didn’t find any tools for paid promotion, such as “promoted apps”.