Jovian War

Jovian War

Just a quick shoot-em-up I threw together over the past couple of weeks, mostly as a test for mobile phones and to test out some Clay.io features. Ship is controlled with the mouse or touch and firing is automatic. Collect coins to upgrade at the end of each level.

Any thoughts or ideas would be welcome.

A competently put together shooter. Good to see you back on the scene, dear chap!

It didn't work for me on Internet Explorer (struggled to load the ads, and then just stopped completely) but was nice and smooth on Chrome. Good to see you experimenting with all sorts of advertising techniques. I'll admit, it felt a bit like overkill as there was so many of them, but I can see what you're trying to do; test them for placement and see what works best (the one on the far left of the screen seemed the least invasive).

I've also been having a bit more of a play on your other games on Kongregate. When I eventually sign up to Kongregate and upload my game I'll be sure to stop by and give you some good ratings as they really don't deserve the low ones that they've got so far.

I'll have a bit of a go on my ipad either tonight or tomorrow, and let you know how smoothly it runs.

Got to level three by the way, and was so dented up that I never managed to get a single upgrade! I really need to improve my game playing skills...

Lol, thanks man. It wasn't an uber-serious project, more an experiment that I ended up finishing, just because I hate leaving games unfinished. I was initially just playing around with the smoke from Korelos and thinking of ways I could reinvent that game, or my first game, Outworld (the first version of which was written in Blitz Monkey here - Outworld

Another game which I quite liked, but was much too complicated and the arcade section was poor - so very similar to Korelos. If I mix the arcade section from this game with the management section of Outworld, maybe I'd be onto something, but I still think you lose too many ratings for a complicated game.

One thing I was interested to see is whether this gets as high a rating as Korelos, which it doesn't deserve, but it's about to get the same (just below 3 out of 5). My theory here being, you're as wise to write a simple game in 1 month than a complicated game in 6 months, since the complicated game will receive far too many hate votes... unless it's spot on I guess.

Still, I can't help myself, I prefer complicated games so I'll probably end up doing another mad project next <img src="smileys/smiley36.gif" border="0" align="middle">

farflamex

Just tested the game on my ipad3 (in Safari). It works really well; resizes properly to fit the screen, adverts all display correctly (did you ever get ads working on Newgrounds? If not, you can enable their own ads from the settings option in your account) and aren't too much of a hindrance (I get the ad that flashes up at the start, and the advert bar down the bottom which disappears once the game starts, but comes back at the end as its supposed to).

I did encounter a lot of frame rate stutter, especially at the start and end of every level web the base ship thingie is on the screen. This might be caused by the size of the sprite.

Anyway, I can see why it's doing well as its good fun and nicely put together (just enough enemy and level variety to keep the player interested).

Thanks Dave. For a quick and simple game it did the trick. A good learning experience and I don't mind the lowish ratings on Newgrounds because it got what it deserved. Looking at the 'Greatest' games, the highest rating is 4 out of 5 anyway, so a 3 for Korelos probably wasn't as bad as I thought.

Speaking of that, some guy asked me to put up the full version without the demo limits because he's been playing it to death, so it's good that someone is seeing all the detail :)

I've been looking for Newground ads for ages, but could never get them working. There's no money in it right now I think, but it would be nice to see if you can generate a trickle. Can you tell me how to activate their ads? I've looked before and just took another look but I can't work it out :(

Oh and no joy getting the Clay.io ads to show on Newgrounds. Not quite sure why because the leaderboards work. Not sure if the achievements are working though, although I think they only show for people who are logged in. Since it's had about 2000 plays and you instantly get the 'Jupiter' achievement just for starting, the stream should be flooded with it, but it's not, so I think the achievements only work for people playing directly from Clay.io.

I think that to get to the Newgrounds ads you first sign in, and then select the fifth symbol along (looks like a cog). This brings up some finance options (can't find the one I selected, but that's probably because I already selected them). What it's showing me currently to the right is earnings of �0 (so I'm not sure if this works properly or not), and there's payment history, address etc.

If you press the fourth symbol that looks like a p, and choose the Api option from inside your project you can also attempt to enable flash ads inside your game, though I doubt that will work as they're not flash games. I clicked it anyway to see if anything happens, and it currently says 'pending'.

Glad to hear someone else sees the hidden depth within Korelos. Now if you can just convince them to buy the full game off you for a million pounds, you're laughing.

Looks like at some point I managed to fathom it out after all cuz they're activated for Korelos. Made a whopping 2 cents so far from about 3000 plays. So it's no biggie really. I got about 4 dollars off Clay.io but that's because when I first released it, the ad was half-covering up a button and people were hitting the ads accidentally. Once I moved it, I've made about 10 cents. I don't think ads really work right now.

As I said to the guy who plays Korelos, even if only 1 guy likes it out of the 3000 who've played it, that'd still be a lot of people if you could get everybody on the internet to see it. Problem is, getting them to see it. Everywhere I've put it, it instantly fades off the front page and disappears. Never had a single hit on Chrome or Firefox stores.

farflamex

So basically for about every 200,000 plays at Newground we get a dollar? This time next year we'll be millionaires, I tells ya!

Just tested the Newgrounds version on ipad (safari). As you mentioned, the ads don't show (just an invisible box at the bottom) though you do get the Suggested Games feature from Clay.io after it registers your score.

Another thing I noticed is that when you press start, for a second before the game starts you get a flash of all the games art assets in the top left corner (about a quarter screen size). I've recently noticed this on Board Horde in Chrome; for me, it turned out to be caused by the transition between loader screen and first layout (to get rid of it, I masked it with an All Black tile layer which is destroyed once the main layers have loaded in. You might be able to use a similar masking technique.)

Yes I've also noticed that. It's particularly bad on mobile where you see the assets all jumbled up in the corner for 2 or 3 seconds. Thanks for the tip, I'm not too fussed about this game but for my next project(s) that's something I won't want to see.

Yep, advertising revenues don't seem to achieve anything. It's the same on every site, around 1 cent for 1000 plays. I think the only real money comes from unlocking and upgrading stuff, or getting involved in a commercial product.