Indie Developer seeks world domination
After seeing five google searches come into my blog yesterday for the phrase ‘obsessed with green slime’ I decided to google it, and shockingly was only on the third page. So in a bid to rectify this shocking situation, I present to you my current favorite pair of socks :
Green Slime Socks
I’ve just released live one of my latest experiments – SoulHunter. It is a very simple game created using Drupal and harnessing the power of twitter ( allegedly ). Recently, I’ve started using Drupal a lot within my everyday job and so I thought the best thing to do was to also use it for my personal projects to aide in lowering the learning curve. Drupal is an incredibly robust system, and the beauty of using a pre-existing CMS is that 99% of the work has already been done for you ( I will admit, I’ve always been in favour of rolling your own, but now with Drupal, I think I have seen the light ).
The total development of SoulHunter has been around eight hours spread over the last couple of weeks, most of which was spent tinkering with OAuth and getting Drupal to play nicely with twitter. A lot of the current functionality has simply been implemented by using the vast number of Drupal modules to solve problems that I come across. In addition to those I have around seven custom modules which implement the ‘core’ of the game.
The game itself is simple enough, and is designed with viral growth in mind. You start with an empty screen and go around collecting the souls of twitter users. On successful capture of a soul, you automatically tweet your victory, which is intended to encourage spreading the word of the game. There is actually quite a complex system of spells working in the back end, which I have simplified by employing an automatic system for picking the best spells for capturing a certain soul – I’ve done this to keep the game as simple as possible with the current trend of one click wonders being employed as core game mechanics.
Every user starts with access to two core spells. A direct damage spell and a confusion spell. As a users ‘soul power’ ( the experience points of the game ) increases, so does the complexity of available spells. As different souls have very different attributes ( using a system based upon creating a seed from twitter user name ) different spells will effect users in very different ways. If the game does gain some interest then I will be sure to expand the back bone system with some more verbose information about what is going on – perhaps even making the collect souls page more of a game rather than a one click wonder.
I must admit, most of the spells are quite Lovecraftian in nature. Even when trying not to mention the Elder Ones, C’thulhu etc; I find his ideas and concepts creeping into my work. Ah well, if you have access to that sort of eldritch thinking, why change your thins? 🙂
SoulHunter is one of three personal Drupal projects I’m working on at the moment and the only one which is near a fully finished state. It is great being able to code a module for one project, knowing that it will plug and play with my others – saves quite a bit of time, and re-usable code is always the best path to go down!
So feel free to give SoulHunter a go. If you don’t have a twitter account, then for shame on you! It is much less evil than facebook and I’m guessing most of you have accounts with that evil empire! Once signed into twitter, you can easily log into the game by click on the ‘Sign in with Twitter’ button on the front page – everything is automatically handled, so you don’t need to do anything before you can start collecting souls 🙂
Once again, my regular ending, if you find any bugs, or have feedback or even future suggestions, please either comment, email or tweet me!
The Hunt for Souls has begun …
lamentconfigI just had a skype conversation with my good friend Inko – who absolutely loves BannerMetaGame and recently discovered an EPIC cup of tea. To celebrate this, he sent me the following bit of fan art :
An Epic Cup of Tea!
I love it 🙂
lamentconfigAs you can probably see, I’ve moved the BannerMetaGame into a more ad like position on the blog. Hopefully it will get a bit more visibility – I’ll be adding it to additional pages on the site over the week, and have a plan to make it look a bit nicer than it’s current mishmash of colours and default gdlib font 🙂
Now you can click on the banner and it will take you to a page that not only has global stats for the game, but also stats about your current ip. You will notice than rather than linking to lots of different ips, instead a player name is generated. These are unique for every possible ip and means that your ip won’t be spidered when visiting the site 🙂
I’ve got a long list of items I want to add to it, along with actually getting some item images on the banner, will make it somewhat more interesting methinks. The current ‘rareness’ system doesn’t seem to be working to well either, so I’ll need to look into that as well. But quite happy with the way it is going – it would be really nice to implement on a community site to see how it effects things – I’ve already noticed an increase in page requests on certain pages of the blog ( mostly from what I can tell, people spamming the F5 key ( which won’t work btw 😛 )).
I’m also debating adding some javascript to the banner itself with live feed info – i.e. it telling you that visitor Tovyuyea has just found an EPIC cup of tea. That could be quite cool.
As with most of my stat related pages – the actual page has a lot of info but is as ugly as hell. I’m sure I will get round to updating it to something a bit better looking once I get some time. I tend to be a lot more interested in the back-end stuff than making a pretty front-end. I really should stop that, I think it is a pretty bad habit as most people judge by looks alas.
As ever, feel free to comment and let me know what you think. I always love getting comments, makes me feel special 🙂
lamentconfigI was reading something a few days ago that you were more likely to survive an airplane crash than click on a banner. There are several reasons for this I feel. But rather than doing a long essay type post about what is wrong with the banner business ( I’m sure I can spam about that one for hours ), I’ll just get straight to the point.
An ever increasing number of people are using things such as adblock plus to remove banners completely. Some sites, such as reddit, reward users who don’t use adblock by serving funny images and flash games in banner positions – a great idea. So I’ve taken this idea and quickly coded up an extension to it – you can see it on the right hand side column of the blog menu, at the bottom. That is the start of my BannerMetaGame 🙂 It is pretty ugly at the moment, but the base functionality is complete. Once it is a bit more complete and there is a stats screen, I’ll bump it up to a more advert like placement.
The idea is to reward a user for viewing the site – and indirectly to draw attention to the adverts. Every impression on the page gives a chance of an event occurring. Currently there are three events – finding a small amount of gold, finding a large amount of gold and finding an item. All of these events are linked to a hash of an IP – meaning it is a far from perfect system. A cookie or even better a log in would be the ideal solution – however, for a quick demo, IP works fine 🙂
Obviously, to stop abuse, there is a built in delay, so spamming F5 over and over again won’t get you hundreds of items and a tonne o’ gold 🙂
At the top of the banner you will see a made up advert – there are currently four pretty unfunny ones in there. However, with the information about the BannerMetaGame so close to the advert, the traditional ad blindness that a lot of people attribute for failing click rates becomes much less of an issue. Though this is a very low traffic blog, bigger community sites could easily implement something like this for rewarding users viewing content. And the great thing is – it is pretty much automatic and optional. If you don’t care, there is no interaction needed, it just runs happily in the background.
The next task is to build a stat screen around the information generated by the banner – creating total gold in the system, showing the [hashed] ips that have collected the most items and gold. All pretty simple stuff, but should be interesting to see what happens with it.
The next logical step in evolving this idea is to add community features. Letting people associate a log in with this data and then maybe allowing user badges, along with letting people ‘buy’ things with the gold they have accumulated.  The currently implementation records the page that called it, so additionally it can be used as a pretty simple stats mechanism.
It is a pretty simple concept, and with gamification being such a buzz word at the moment, I’m surprised I haven’t seen anything like this implemented yet. If you have seen it, let me know, there could be ideas I could ‘liberate’ from different implementations 😉 More to follow at some point 🙂
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