Newgrounds
Last week saw the release of Super Endless Kingdom on Newgrounds. This is the second of the well known portals I've released to now after Kongregate at the start of March. The Kongregate release was pretty disappointing, the rating is currently only 2.2 out of 5 and the game has been played less than 300 times. Kongregate's reviews system has it's problems but I don't want to make excuses, it just didn't do very well and the platform was probably the wrong choice to release on first. However one plus point was that I got some good (and bad) feedback, enough to make 3 decent sized updates prior to getting the game ready for Newgrounds.
The Newgrounds release went much better, the game was rated a much more satisfying 3 out of 5 and all the feedback I received was very positive. Whether the difference was down to the changes I made or the sites themselves I'll never know, but from a developer point of view the Newgrounds approach to new releases is much better. After a week the game had received nearly 1500 plays and 80 or so ratings and I can now be reasonably confident the rating is an accurate reflection of the game's appeal. I released one more post-release update and I'm now planning to hold off until I have enough ideas to take the game out of beta.
As far as monetization goes, I can see that an online, ad-supported model just isn't going to make any money for Super Endless Kingdom. As a game that only really works well on a desktop I should probably be looking to sell the finished game as a download. It's something I'll be looking into more after I've taken a few weeks away from the project. It might seem strange to be coming to this conclusion so late in the development stage but it's in keeping with the way the project has evolved as I've learned more.
New Project
In the meantime I'm pretty happy with how my new project is progressing. It's been designed to be mobile friendly and much more accessible as well as much more limited in scope - a fun timewaster instead of a game that provides hours of content. The basic premise is that you help a Mad Scientist turn humanity into a rampaging zombie horde because <reasons>. I'll be posting more in the coming weeks but here's a quick gif of the villain for now.
New Stats (for March)
I've been keeping track of a few stats since I launched this blog and my Twitter account in early February as a way to help me monitor my progress (or lack of). There isn't a great deal to compare with yet but March seemed to go pretty well. It was a difficult month in many ways which is reflected in my hours worked but otherwise there was decent growth:
Twitter followers: 551 (+241)
March blog views: 321
Blog views/day: 10.35 (Feb was 7.5)
Hours worked 125.5 (4/day) (Feb was 4.4/day)
It's nice to see these stats keep going up but I'm not going to read too much into them. I'd like to get the hours worked back to February's level or a little higher provided I'm doing good work.
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