Decision 2011

For the first few days of April I am having a poll on my Blazing Games site to determine the future of the site. Right now the ad revenue on the site covers the costs of running the site but does not earn enough to actually pay me for my time or effort. For that reason I am trying to focus on some larger projects which can either be put on other portal sites or possibly sold commercially as indie titles. Phone platforms are definitely being considered. This leads to the question of what should be done with the Blazing Games site. I was thinking of returning to a weekly format, with sneak previews, betas, and incremental upgrades to existing games on the site being the focus. Alternatively, remaining monthly puts a bit less pressure on me so I can focus on my larger scale games. Perhaps the best choice, however, would be to go quarterly with the site updates and just focus on the larger scale games.

I was originally planning on posting the results of the poll today, but so few people have voted. Worse, half the votes have been for the non-committal whatever choice. For that reason I am going to leave the vote up for a few more days before making my decision. If you are reading this before April 7th, 2011 and haven't voted yet, please do so.

Making Coffee chapters 4 and 5 released

The making of Coffee Quest eBook has finally been updated after a few years hiatus. I have added chapters 4 and 5 which finishes the creation of Coffee Quest 1 and the Coffee Quest GL experiment. I am deeply considering doing another 3D experiment using a new web technology that Google is testing. This would be done by porting Coffee Quest 2 to the javascript-based technology.

I was also hoping to have a pull down menu based poll for selecting which game my visitors most wanted to see enhanced. I never got around to writing the code earlier and as it is getting late I figured I would hold off on the official pull-down version of the poll (which I may make a permanent part of the home page) in the future. Still, email opinions are welcome.

poll results

I have finished analyzing the results from last week's poll. Less than two dozen people bothered to vote but those who did varied fairly wildly in how they ranked the five projects. To figure out how people rated the projects, I used a fairly simple technique of averaging the scores. The scores were simply the ranks assigned to the projects. This means that the project with the lowest average would be the most popular. When these numbers were rounded off, I ended up with a five way tie.

This is actually quite significant, in that it means that the difference between the most popular to least popular project is not very high. That being said, I wanted to have a rank of projects so I changed the rounding to 2 decimal places and ended up with the following ranking. 2.62 Ultimate Retro Project. 2.95 Coffee Quest and One of those Weeks. 3.05 Dozen Days Pentalogy 3.43 Books and Articles.

Due to the small sample size, I can't say with certainty how accurately the poll reflects the wishes of my visitors. Likewise, when looking at individual votes, I am fairly certain that a few of the people voting never read my instructions and ranked the projects in the wrong order. While this would not have a huge impact on the results if hundreds of people voted, with only 21 votes this probably has a big impact. Still, after looking over things with the knowledge that I will soon be between paid projects I have some interesting decisions to make.

Three goals of the poll

The poll on the Blazing Games site is now over. I was quite surprised at how varied the results were. Going by the few emails that I do get, I had expected the results to be fairly consistent along the lines of 1 Coffee Quest, 2 One of those Weeks, 3 Dozen Days, 4 Ultimate Retro Project and 5 Articles. This was not the case. I haven't decided if I will tell you the outcome, but I will now tell you the reason for this poll. In fact, there were three goals for this poll.

First thing that I wanted to do was see how many people would actually bother filling out the form. I wanted the poll emphasized, so I even went as far as postponing the planned release for that day. Sadly, I did not get as many votes as I had hoped. This should probably not come as much of a surprise as the vast majority of the people who visit my site never actually go to the home page. In fact, I suspect that I could stop updating the site and most visitors wouldn't even know. I am not going to do that, at least not intentionally.

Second thing I wanted to see is if my gauge of what my visitors wanted was accurate. By seeing how they ranked projects relative to how I rank them is always useful. The large variety of rankings tells me that my visitors are a lot more varied than I thought. Not sure if this is a good thing or not.

The third goal, which happens to be very similar to the second goal, was the obvious get the projects listed into a rank of highest priority to lowest priority as I am going to finish off these projects, if I can make sure that the most popular projects are getting the most attention then my visitors should be happy. As I have already repeatedly mentioned, this did not work out as I had expected. Interest in all projects tend to be a lot closer than I had honestly expected.

Revenge 3D plans

Last week's vote on Blazing Games was about posting my PaperVision 3D tests to the coming soon area of Blazing Games. The coming soon area is a page where I post the current build of the site selected project. Currently this page has a pre-alpha build of Coffee Quest Revenge on it, but with 100% of the few people who voted wanting to see my Paper vision tests you can expect to see spinning cubes soon.

Some regular visitors to Blazing Games may remember what I did with Coffee Quest GL. This was my attempt at using JOGL and required that I spent time re-learning Open GL. In fact, had there not been a lot of people who for some reason or another had problems running Coffee Quest GL, I would have stuck with Java for my Coffee Quest development instead of switching to Flash.

What I am going to do is follow the same basic steps used for Coffee Quest GL. I am going to start with a spinning cube. Figure out how to texture the cube. Turn the single cube into the basic structure of the level. Add doors to the mix at which point the 3D code can be incorporated into Coffee Quest Revenge and game development for that game can continue.

The current Blazing Games poll is about the movement speed already in the game. With the poll being out less than 24 hours, I have already received an email pointing out that 2D movement doesn't reflect what 3D movement is like. I suppose that is a valid criticism, but once the game is further along I can always revisit the issue.

Game page look results

Regular visitors to the Blazing Games site will know that I had a poll about the new look of game pages. A couple of weeks ago I posted an updated version of the 13 Spikes game that had a tabbed format breaking different parts of the old game page into separate pages. There is an overview page, an instructions page, a game page, a downloads page, and an articles page. I was thinking about slowly transitioning all the game pages to the new format. Still, being the way I am, I figured that I would ask the site visitors for their opinions. I got very little feedback, so figuring that people don't like emailing me they might respond better to a very convenient poll. I was right.

There were a lot of votes, with most of the votes being the neutral "either" choice. In fact, only three votes were for something other than either. Two of those votes were for the new format. Certainly, the voting results explain why no one emailed me. I suppose this means the change isn't as drastic as I thought it was.

In the future, all the game posts will be using the new format. It will take quite a while for this transition to be completed, though I don't think the transition will be that noticeable as all the more popular projects will transition fairly quickly. I should have started the transition tonight with One of those Weeks tonight, but was already really late posting the site so didn't have the necessary time.

Feedback

The site poll on the new look of the game pages has actually provided quite a few responses. This could be because people don't like emailing strangers, but in this particular case I think it may have been something else. I don't want to skew the results of the poll so I will not speak of the current results, though will do so this Friday.

The more interesting response I got today was an email from Adobe. I am apparently an important customer, but they could find no tracking information for my order. What does this mean? I can think of three interpretations. The first is that they are trying to tell me that they simply have not shipped the order yet. Second, they are saying that my order should have been shipped, but they can't find the shipping information and have no clue as to why it is still marked as pending. Third, they are saying that they are support people in a different country and can only tell me things that have been entered into their system so I am S#$@ out of luck.

As it clearly isn't going to arrive this weekend, so I am going to be focusing on finishing the rest of Day four of One of those Weeks using Flash 8.