Board Horde Stats Update

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.

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.

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.

Dave Hailwood

Hi, you've been busy!''

thanks for the updates, its very useful information.. Good luck with your game. <img src="smileys/smiley1.gif" border="0" align="middle" />

Thanks for the update. Please continue to share your experiences with the different sites. I'm curious which one ends up giving your game the most exposure.

— —

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.

lol, thats a funny story..

you must be proud of yourself; achieving all this by yourself. I hope you continue to market your game and keep us up todate..

Thanks too for your support..

Hi folks,

I've just updated Board Horde, and added two new boards and two new game modes.

More importantly, I've finally managed to get audio working on Clay.io when using my ipad. After many hours of testing, I discovered the problem was the Clay.io tutorial asks you to export to Chrome rather than Html5, and for some reason when exported to Chrome the project doesn't export m4a audio files. The solution was to copy all the m4a files into the exported media folder manually (I'm not sure if this'll cause problems if I export the project to the actual chrome store, but at least its working for now).

Another iOS audio problem I encountered was whenever the page is refreshed on Safari or Chrome (no matter what game site I upload to) the audio would stop working on my ipad. The only way to prevent this was to remove all the m4a references from the 'Offline' document to be found in the export folder (even though Ashley advises against this as it will stop the game working offline on iOS, it seems a better alternative than no audio at all).

I still haven't managed to solve the Gamejolt touch not working problem, though I'm convinced it has something to do with their chat pop-up stealing the games focus. Annoyingly there doesn't seem to be a way to disable it. If I manage to solve the problem, I'll be sure to let folk know.

Anyway, please feel free to give the game a try or a rating, or some such. So far I've made 49 cents at Clay and 6 cents at Gamejolt. Fame and fortune beckons, I tells ya!

Dave Hailwood

congrats

like reading your progress

also game is great so makes following your progress all the better

keep it up :)

Dave Hailwood,

great to see this progressing, and beginning to make you filthy frugal.

made it to the top ten in my first try. but of course, that is not enough. "there can be only one."

i really love how balanced this game is. which actually translates into, 'i really hate how when i have a commanding lead and think i can phone in the victory, the board makes me pay for my arrogance with some enemy potion payback.'

keep going sir...and much success.

Nice work Dave Hailwood,

I gave it another try on the clay web site, and managed a score of 370 (not too bad!). I gave it 5 stars, and I'm gonna spread the word to as many other as I can. I'm also gonna tell all of my friends that I know the creator of board horde (cool)!

Good luck :)

DrGreenThumbCAN

Thanks for the kind words. I'm not really expecting to make much money from the game (since its the first I've made, and I've been making it up as I go along) though I'm learning lots from putting it up at different sites, and trying to overcome the various problems I encounter.

harrio

When I spotted 'Harrioz Hoez' on the Leaderboard this morning, I had a feeling you might be stopping by! Well done, and best of luck working your way to the top. I have some catching up to do myself, as I deleted all my test scores but accidentally left one of them. Typically it was the match in which I scored a truly astounding zero points!

Blacksmith

Thank you for the very generous rating. Very kind of you to spread the word - it really helps (especially since Indiedb keep archiving all my news announcements for some reason, which means no one can see them). All the positive feedback I've been getting has helped push Board Horde to a more prominent place on Clays 'popular' list, earning me another cent! Since I have officially earned Fiddy Cent on clay, I believe this now entitles me to wear a backward cap and say 'yo!' at passers by.

In other news, I'm giving up on Kongregate for now (the sun is shining and I want a lolly, dammit!). I've tried uploading my game there, and although it worked perfectly on Chrome and Firefox on my laptop, I had the good sense to test it on another identical laptop and discovered the sound was garbled on Firefox and it would occasionally crash. After updating to the latest Firefox, the game worked better though there was a bit of audio delay. Also the Leaderboard statistics and Achievement notification failed to show up anywhere (though this might be because I was in preview mode). There doesn't seem to be a way to properly upload the game for mobile, either (the options there, but it doesn't accept the file format).

More experimentation will follow next weekend.

Thanks once more for all your help and support folks!

Dave Hailwood

good luck; you deserve to do well..

mineet

Cheers! Good luck with your strategy game - I hope it comes together well.

By the way, for anyone who's a comic fan I keep forgetting to mention I have a strip appearing in SPOD! The Oddities from Space comic anthology originally conceived as part of Mark Millars Clint project. There's a Kickstarter running at the moment, and if you're generous enough to donate an entire tenner you also get a free 16 page digital comic made by myself and artist Dave Thomson.

Anyway, here's the link if you're interested (there's some pretty damned amazing comic artists and writers involved). Even if you can't contribute in a financial fashion, spreading the word is always appreciated.

Spod Kickstarter

<img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/ksr/assets/000/716/069/85b1b304a59a7c9b3cd9c847cb9eec45_large.jpg" border="0">

I finally got Board Horde up and running on Kongregate. It's taken me several weeks of testing and tweaking, so I thought it might be useful to share some tips (though my method might not work for everyone, or cause unforeseen side effects such as blindness or Cranial Explosions).

Firstly, getting a game to work on Kongregate isn't too much of a challenge unless you want to add in their score Api, or host the game on a different site and link to it in an iframe (like I ended up doing). I tried the 'hosting on Dropbox' method, but found that for some reason the Kongregate score api would only work once (or when the cache was cleared) which would've annoyed any players who came back for seconds. So I decided to try linking to the version on clay.io. I achieved this by putting the iframe URL on Kongregate as 'http://boardhorde.clay.io/index.html'. Of course, the problem with linking to Clay was I got all the ads that came with it (you can disable these on Clay from appearing on external sites, but I still wanted them to appear on all external sites other than Kongregate where ads are forbidden). In the end I came up with the following method:

Make a global variable named 'Kongregate' and set it to 0.

Add the Browser object.

Use the system 'regex' condition (i think thats what its called) to search for the word 'kongregate' in the browser.url, and if it finds it use an action to set the Kongregate variable to 1. Then use that variable to turn off/on the Kongregate specific parts of your project (such as ad visibility, Kongregate scores and clay.io achievements)

If anyone needs this explaining more clearly at some point then let me know. I don't have my desktop on for reference at the moment, so I'm blabbering all this from memory.

Regarding the Kongregate score Api; sometimes this may not show up instantly, though it will show up in your game before you hit the publish button. I added the Kongregate_shell from Cangame's Kongregate tutorial to the main export folder (not sure if this is still needed with the Export to Kongregate option in c2, but it did seem to bring my scoreboard to life), ensured the 'show up in Leaderboard' option was ticked on Kongregate and checked the Kongregate.api script was in the index file (which is automatically added if you use the export to Kongregate option, which I didn't as I was exporting to Chrome as that's what Clay.io ask for). I also added a link to the shell in Kongregates 'callback Api' box. My link was: boardhorde.clay.io/kongregate_shell

It can help if you do two test scores (they can always be disabled when you're done with them, by unchecking the 'show in Leaderboard' option) so that once they show up in the menu on the right side of the screen you'll be able to refresh the scores by switching between them. It's also a good idea to instantly add a score of zero when the game begins, so you can check its all working. Also if you use a Kongregate Shout Box Message from c2's Kongregate object and get it to pop up at the start of the game, then you'll know everything's working (as the shout box only seems to show when the score api's working, if you have one added). Just remember to use 'trigger once' on the shout box otherwise it will refuse to close.

Anyway, I hope my findings are of use to someone (you can probably also link to a game hosted on Newgrounds, just make sure you use their mobile link (i think it has something like 'ungrounded' in the url) or you'll get parts of the website that you don't want showing. There's probably a few vital things that I've neglected to mention, so if you're interested in trying any of this out and need more details just let me know.

Right, time I started making something new I reckon!