NEW GAME ALERT: POO CUBED
A challenge was recently set amongst a few developers to make a game for Halloween that would generate ad revenue. Getting noticed in today's world of indie games is becoming increasingly difficult, so to stand any chance of success my game would have to stand out in a quirky way.
I had a few ideas brewing and prototyped a couple of them to test out the basic concepts for each. The one that seemed to work best, and also the one that I think would gain the most traction involved clicking poop to earn points. Factoring this concept into a game proved harder than I thought but you can follow the development process of Poo Cubed in the video below:
Once you have the basic mechanics of your game in place, never underestimate the time it takes to polish. Poo Cubed with its simple hand-drawn assets and basic game play still required a great deal of time to polish. This goes for any site that you're building to host it on. Again, I wanted to keep this simple opting for an arcade surround allow space within the browser to display any ads. It was important to me that the ads weren't intrusive as to not distract the player. You can play Poo Cubed in the arcade here.
I had a few ideas brewing and prototyped a couple of them to test out the basic concepts for each. The one that seemed to work best, and also the one that I think would gain the most traction involved clicking poop to earn points. Factoring this concept into a game proved harder than I thought but you can follow the development process of Poo Cubed in the video below:
Once you have the basic mechanics of your game in place, never underestimate the time it takes to polish. Poo Cubed with its simple hand-drawn assets and basic game play still required a great deal of time to polish. This goes for any site that you're building to host it on. Again, I wanted to keep this simple opting for an arcade surround allow space within the browser to display any ads. It was important to me that the ads weren't intrusive as to not distract the player. You can play Poo Cubed in the arcade here.
I used a couple of different ad services and you can see the two different banners in the screenshot provided. The first banner located at the top is generated using the eBay Partner network: https://partnernetwork.ebay.co.uk/ and is free to subscribe to as long as you have an eBay account.
The second banner originating from the Amazon Affiliates Program: https://affiliate-program.amazon.co.uk/ and again it’s free to sign up with an existing Amazon account.
Both services provide you with options to cherry pick products to display in the banners but also offer an automatic selection if you wish. Both offer a certain percentage of any sales made as a result of the banners being clicked on. Personally I prefer the eBay service as it allows you to select bespoke items that could potentially attract more clicks.
This has been a great project to complete and whilst it was put together quickly, I still learnt a great deal from this experience especially when it came to working with the different ad platforms. If you're interested in starting out in game development, you can download my free game dev guide called Virtually Anything here.
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