2012: Review of the Year Part 1: My Android Games

This year I finished my first games and published them on the Google Play Store for android mobiles.  Although, I don't actually rate any of them as being any good (except for hangman for educational purposes), they have given me a useful introduction into the commercial side of game making and have allowed me to feel more confident for the future (as before 2012, I had NEVER finished a game).  They've also allowed me to pay the rent and buy a few beers.

Below, I have given the games that are available in the Android store my personal rating and then I'll show their total downloads for 2012.

My Scores
Hangman 6/10
Zombie Hell 4/10
Pixeloids   3/10
Zombie Infection Defender  2/10
PixelStrip 2/10
Don't Cry Ronaldo 1/10
Abramovich's Job 1/10
Stop Santa 1/10

The Penalty of Ramos  0/10
The Penalty of Messi 0/10


Free Downloads  (Total = 484,632)
The Penalty of Ramos:    238,965  :  (Released May 2012)

The Penalty of Messi 85,252  :  (Released May 2012)

Don't Cry Ronaldo:    59,980  :  (Released June 2012)

Zombie Infection Defender:    31,186  :  (Released March 2012)

Hangman:    27,636 :   (Released February 2012)

PixelStrip:    21,105  :  (Released February 2012)

Zombie Hell:    13,214 :  :  (Released May 2012)
Abramovich's Job:    3,804  :  (Released May 2012)
Stop Santa:    1,863  :  (Released December 2012)
Pixeloids:    1,627  :  (Released March 2012)

Obviously from the free downloads stats, you could probably imagine that the ones at the top made the most money from adverts and the ones at the bottom made only a little. Also, Santa was released on the 7th of December and was downloaded more times in December than Pixeloids was in 9 months, which shows that if your game doesn't look attractive, get any exposure or isn't relevant to any current subject it will probably die.



Total Downloads (Each Month of 2012)
February.  Downloads = 11,251
March.  Downloads = 19,889
April.  Downloads = 28,599
May.  Downloads = 225,884
June.   Downloads = 118,233
July.  Downloads = 60,420
August.  Downloads = 14,416
September.  Downloads = 15083
October.  Downloads = 14,350
November.  Downloads = 12,501
December.  Downloads = 23,745

Conclusion
From these stats, we can see that my worst apps made the most money by far.  So, even if you (like me with The Penalty of Ramos) make the worst game imaginable and only spend an hour on it, if you aim it at the right audience (in this case Spain) or target a popular subject at the right time, you can be relatively successful for a short period of time, such as The two 'Penalty of..' games where very successful for two months, and they quietened down.

110mb.com website hosting review: 1/10

110mb.com is a free website hosting service.
I don't have a lot of money so can't afford to pay for my website to be hosted at the moment.   I first found out about 110mb.com a few years ago and had my first website hosted with them until I realised that the 'box' on which my website was couldn't be accessed from Spain (to where I had just moved)  great! How many other countries can't access my website!

However, I setup a new account on another one of their hosts or 'boxes' and that was okay for a while.  But frequent failures and downtime on their part, gave me great doubts and annoyance.  (I also read on their forums that many other people have also experienced lots of problems).  How can you have a web hosting service if most of the time, your servers and hard drives don't work!

The final straw with the awful 110mb.com came recently, when I tried to access my website and got a page that said my 110mb account has been suspended, followed by some amateurish adverts.  Great! Thanks!  No warning, no messages!   Also, they are impossible to contact, no email address shown, and just a FAQ style help page with no means for me to find out why the account is suspended.

Looking at the reviews of 110mb.com on this page, it looks like I'm not the only one.

 So I've decided to make a website using weebly.com, which so far looks a much better service, and with my lack of web development skills has made it easy to update and edit the website pages.

So, 110mb.com is definitely a webhosting service to AVOID.

One year on: Developing a Commercial Educational Computer Game.

It was just over a year ago that I came up with my initial designs to create a computer game to help non-English speakers learn English, and what are my thoughts about the last year? Well to be honest, mostly negative.

What have I got to show for a year of work, well not a lot really. A semi functional program with only about five or six working games out of the twenty (or even more) that I had hoped to do. To me it will be a year of wasted opportunity, with extremely sporadic bursts of work and enthusiasm for the project.

But, I guess everything hasn't been bad. I do actually have a good framework of the game, where pieces and games can easily be inserted into it. and the framework could be used for future projects too. One of the card games from the project is complete and it could easily be taken out and made into it's own separate game, which I am seriously considering.

Secondly, I now can actually program well in a language (blitz, pure basic and some others) and even enjoy it, something which I was nowhere even close to last year.

I also have done extensive research of other so called bedroom programmers who have sold their games, whether they have been successful or failed. And from this I also have an idea of how I will market and sell my game, whether online or in person.

So overall, I guess even though in terms of progress on the programming side, I have achieved no where near what I wanted to, there are some really good positives to come out.