Janko in a Jar

Image via WikipediaIt is quite common that an Economist/Marketing/Managing person gets a concept, then finds programmer(s) to build it and pays them per share or hour/project.

Well I will try to do it the other way around. I will build the thing and try to find Economists/Marketers/Managers to sell and manage it. I am prepared to pay in profit share or per hour/project (it depends on what we come up with).

I value marketing and managing efforts a lot and know that making the thing is only one part of the process. But where do I try to find such people/companies?? Any ideas?

Anyone interested? If you thing you could be in general interested in such deal let me know, I will show you the projects and you can see if you see any good chances in any of them.

After some kicking and biting FotoLOAD - midi finally works nicely and stable on all 5 test servers. It was tested with photos up to 6MB and with 100 pics to upload at once and it finally works as it should. And even if server fails on some image or you internet connection blinks you can nicely continue where you dropped off. This week it will be used for real at first photo studio.

The last problem was that resampling of >3MB photo to a thumbnail crossed the RAM usage limit at some shared hosting providers but after we found out what was the problem for upload failing at the end quite simple solution was found. In short.. now we do imagecopyresized from (for example) 2000 X 2000 px to 350 X 350 px and then do imagecopyresampled to 100 X 100 px . If you look at the docs you will see why this uses A LOT less resources and gives the same quality at the end.

Finally, I am about to release FotoLOAD mini. I had the app almost ready for months, my sister made the website design now and it looks that the thing will get out of the house in the next week or so. Website is still not totally finished but here it is..

The page and app is in Slovene language for now, but it is already being translated to English and some other languages. It’s an application that photo-studios can use to offer their customers fast and simple way to upload photos for printing. I made such web-app for one studio like 7 years ago (with PHP and REBOL), I later made better one for another studio few years back, but this solution is made for “them all” and brings big improvements to the previous two. FotoLOAD mini is a mini and is somewhat limited but also free. There is also a non-mini which won’t be free , but I think it will still be very accessible.

So if you have (or know anyone who has) a photo studio, test it out and tell me what you think. English version will be out before fifth may also.

At the first post on this topic I wrote a list of known vulnerabilities of a typical LAMP web-app. Plan is to investigate where exactly does each of them apply to the web-app I am making more secure and patch them.

In the process I realized that there is another perspective/question here that is also very important. One is to fix “all” the holes, but you also have to ask yourself.

“What am I really trying to prevent here?”

In our case. We need to prevent anyone getting to (identifying) personal information of the users. That is the most important thing and all others are magnitudes of less important. Every other data we hold, if it gets “stolen”, meh.. if they delete, change it, we have the backups. But the privacy of the users is sacred. Too bad I can’t say what exactly we did now in this regard.

The analogy is this. You have area of people infected with some virus X. You can put roadblocks, test and disinfect all outgoing people, spray their cars, forbid mail communication, put fences to prevent wild animals to spread it but sooner or later something will get through. Or you can focus on a virus and find a way to prevent itself from spreading.

You can try to prevent the problem to get “out” , or you can try to remove the problem in the first place

Well, nothing is as perfect as theory so we do both.

I decided to post a short demonstration video of that cad I made a while back. The reason is also to show what can be achieved quite nicely with Java & Swing, Piccolo 2D Scene-graph and Synthetica LAF and some SwingLabs components (TreeTable).

Maybe interesting to someone.. this app. saves and loads drawings and symbols (roughly) as SVG files which you can open directly in Ink-scape or even FireFox. Because of request of the user it also creates a full scale (with styles, embedded images and more) MS Excel files via Apache POI-HSSF project (HSSF means Horrible Spreadsheet Format )

This was basically my first application made in Java. I always thought before that Java is a clunky old language but I was and remain impressed by it. I like that although Java/JVM/JDK is HUGE it still remains pure and minimal in another aspect. For example I made whole application (which took several months and thousands lines of code) using a normal (but cool) text editor JEdit and few .bat files to compile and run it.

I really suck at doing bureaucracy stuff even in my home country. Now I am signing a contract with a games portal from US but before I can do it, I must fill in the W8BEN (Certificate of Foreign Status of Beneficial Owner for United States Tax Withholding) form… but the catch is that to fill out W8BEN I must first fill out another form to apply for TIN (Taxpayer Identification Numbers) send it to IRS in US and wait X weeks to get a TIN assigned… uh.. I’m loving it…

Qubidraw got the first game.. It’s called swap and it was the most popular at old KUBI. “Slide” will come next.

The visitor behavior shows me we are stepping in the right direction.
(this below is playable so press the buttons)

I post stats of www.bravekidgames.com from time to time… so here are some for september..

website (sept.)
Daily unique visits: 941
Daily pages/hits: 1516/35876

main referers for sept. (so the number below won’t cause confusion)
direct reqest –> 164807
that pirate portal(hotlink to kubi) –> 1565
google.com –> 1125
…

KUBI (sept.)
Kubi was downloaded: 1516 times
Biggest referal - some pirate site: 1565 requests
So you see why 1.5k downloads

sales from start to now:
sold printables: 1
sold affiliate games: 19 (best are: Ladybugs, Jr.Vet and Super Gerbal)
sold KUBI-s: 23

we got from advetisments (adSense + TLA):
aprox $100/month

some downloads from start to now:
Few most downloaded are:
Ladybugs: 6360
Jr. Vet: 1412
Abracadabra: 1107
Androkids: 874
Charlie II: 867

some other news

• One user of our printables made a very nice video where he uses our sudoku printables http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZzJL-6ufeU
• Ladybugs, made by Midori who I ported to flash brought us a lot of traffic
• I have added a Brave Kid Blog which I think will be great (not ussual blabla)
• I should make a new KUBI or any other game but have allmost no time for many months now due to few bigger php contract works
• I sold for small bucks 9 games alltogether (smaller games I made) to quite big slovene magazine for kids BIM-BAM

Ok… that’s it… have fun. So, we are not there yet, but we are moving forward step by step.
Janko M.

Recently there was a mini-riot towards Gameproducer.NET because he posted quite few posts about Text-Link-Ads with the affiliate link to them. My guess is he earned quite some money that way, yes… but I don’t see anything wrong with that. He doesn’t claim he is virgin Mary or something. I would probably do it too if I had his quantities of visitors.

I signed up with text link ads too after reading his post and what can I say 1 month after it.. Thanks Juuso! I earned you $25 but you earned me $76 in this month alone . And it really is more than AdSense in same time so I am very happy.

There was also other mini riot towards him on indiegamer forums… that by reading his blog newbies can think making a living by making indie games is easier that it really is. With this I partially agree.

There are all sorts of SEO gurus and stuff levitating around. But from what I saw by simple observation it’s no magic in it… just some common sense that can be pointed out in 4 words.

• links
• titles
• urls
• content

links: yes you want links to your web-pages, more the merier

titles: html title, especially first words are very important… don’t make your whole site have 1 title (as I did for long). Let each page have an appropriate title for it’s contents and try to cover as much ground as possible

urls: use urls to your own good. tell what’s there with them… like http://www.bravekidgames.com/online_flash_games.php

content: make good content… this is no SEO trick. Do you think you will gain anything if you manage to bring tons of people to your page with some SEO tricks which then gives them nothing worthwile and not what they were searching for?

An interesting observation (Google bots download many many times) that lead to some more observations (after looking at the logs many people noticed that too) was posted on indie gamer forum today and revealed some facts (about how Google really indexes internals of various binary (exe) files on net too) and lead to some speculations (that these bots must be really stupid (unoptimised) to download one file that hasn’t changed so many times) . Read all about it here

You can see how many downloads can pirate users produce here and number continued to february (5714 downloads) and still not even 1 sale more than other months with 10x less downloads. On the other hand downloads do me no harm other than 6GB of transfers which is still survivable. But if one has a much more popular and bigger game this can be very expensive joke. It happened to Motorama which recieved 60GB/day transfer after it got cracked.

You can’t really prevent them from downloading without affecting the normal demo downloaders, but you can do a soft redirection and use those downloads to your own good.

Read the rest of this entry »

Judging by downloads of Kubi demo we are sailing straight towards sunny days, aint that right Captain? ….. “Well… let me see, boy.”
Downloads of Kubi for Windows per month

This week few things finaly clicked in my brain… I was noticing some strange number at logs for kubi download (win) hits… but I thougth it was mistake and didn’t bother much. Kubi for Windows was finally getting some buy-page views (as I saw on plimus monitor) too, but in 95% the currency was PLN and CNY. I didn’t think of it much but my brain concluded by itself… ok, game is getting popular in Polland and Canada. Referrers showed me allmost the same number of hits from some pirate pages as I got downloads…..

Then one day I was looking at Plimus monitor… thinking something like ( I just will citate my thougths) … “What the hell is wrong with you canadians.. I get 50 buy-now pageviews a day and noone buys it in whole week!?!…… And what is that Y doing in that CNY…. don’t they have canadian dollars or something…………………Jackie Chan is cool…. uh, I have to stop thinking about him……….Jackie Chan……. China Yen…… Uh……….this is China?!”

So I realized 95% of my buy-now (for windows) version are from Polland and China. And coincidence coincidence… those pirate websites that I get tons of referers from are Polland and China too. And Kubi was downloaded 10 times more this month than the last - and I didn’t get even 1 sale more.

I wanted to name this post “Life is nice if you are modest” because “worth” is very relative term and some successful gamedev will laugh at my standard for worthy….but anyway…

Work: I made little game Winter Break & Catch around 18. December. It was simple breakout with some changes. I made in 5 working days. I used demo version of Xara Xtreme to draw everything, PTK for game, irrXML for loading levels and that was it. Game had no real menu or other options you would expect from real game. I also bought 1 copy of OSAKit, so game could be played in IE browsers.

Promo: I made simple web-page and page for playing it in a browser. I made PAD file and my wife took some time and manually added game to shareware/freeware portals that took PADs (I am too cashless to buy Promosoft ATTM). I put a link on Otroski.net and mentioned game on few forums.

Results: Unique visitor number at bravekidgames almost doubled and still hasn’t fallen down (in a month) which is big deal, because it then improves everything else we do there. AdSense revenue on BKG doubled also and is now 0.95 per day on average (it was 0.4 before). And last week I was able to sell rights to publish this game on CD of Slovenian magazine for kids (BIM-BAM) for $80. I know, it’s small money but I wanted it to get published so I gave them the offer I knew they will accept. So all in all I am happy I made WB&C. Oh and I got really great feedback (that feed my ego for a month) and great ideas for serious version on some Slo. gaming forum.

Uh, and just for info 960 people played it online in a browser in this time.

Ok, I have to do something to keep you on this website, so I will post some stats. People (at least judging by myself) are allways hungry for some raw numbers, so they can compare.

Brave Kid Games is website where i try to collect, show off and sell indie games for kids. It is online for 7 months now. It is not very actively worked on, because I have so much other projects and websites besides that, but it hasn’t been left alone either, and is constantly growing or improving. So numbers…
- google PR 4 (PR predictor showed that we will have PR5 on next update)
- 24 games, 3 screensavers, 3 online activities, 1 set of printables

- visits are growing like this :