Forums » Everything else » What I'm doing and what I should do?

OK, have previously published a couple games in Flash and RenPy, and looking to move to HTML5/JS since I agree that mobile (whether app or online) is where we're all going. I did just buy an impact license by the way.

Figured my reasonable first step would be to port my Flash game, and include the voice files that I ended up leaving out due to size. But then I realized there would probably be the same issue in HTML5 - that adding close to 100 megs for voices would mean folks would tend to give up well before it finished downloading. Any way to "chunk it up" so that there isn't such a long initial wait?

Also, for Flash I was able to integrate MochiAds to make a little income - basically just enough to pay back the cost of buying Adobe's Flash Authoring tool. Is there an HTML5 equivalent service? If not, is everyone just providing either free or... ?

Thanks again!

Web support for audio is pretty limited, chunking the sound isn't going to work on the web. Plus, as you suspected, there's still the same problem with respect to downloading.

The main solution for that is to not have downloads, e.g. mobile apps where it's already on-device. Or if you do do downloads, don't push them all at the start and only serve them when needed.

There's no such service but remember that a Flash game is essentially compiled into a single "module" whereas an HTML5 game isn't set up the same way, you can embed ads relatively easily into the page, even as a popup.

Appreciate the feedback. Sounds like I'll be leaving out the voices again :-)

For the ads - just put in my normal AdSense codes, or is there another service that might be more tailored to gaming? I'm thinking I would only want to add them at the end of cutscenes - IOW where I would normally fade to black to indicate a time skip anyway - to minimize user frustration.

It's not quite as simple as that. AdSense loads in normal HTML, while your game exists in a canvas. The AdSense could be loaded into a div that sat above the canvas, I guess, and loaded as needed but AdSense is likely going to suck because it uses the rest of the page contents to figure out what ads are best to be served - and the vast bulk of content is in the canvas (and untouchable by AdSense in any meaningful way)

In that case, what do you use or recommend? Or is ad-supported just not a good model for this?

Someone will probably make a truckload of money when the "MochiAds for HTML5" comes out but for now you just need to stick with the countless web-based ad services out there. You will need to either present them around the canvas element or overlay them on top of the canvas with some css positioning. You could easily control when they appear from your game source if you wish.

Arantor is correct about AdSense though. You'd be better off using a service that lets you choose the type of ads being served rather than a context based service.

I guess the question is - what is everyone else doing about this? I suppose I could run Project Wonderful Ads? Or should I just focus on making sure that the game can be put in the wrapper for an iOS or Android app? Or are most folks just not worrying about making some money?

Well, my plans don't involve ads but working between iOS apps (no plans to support Android at all, the benefit vs cost analysis doesn't stack up for us) and web based as a service, i.e. paying for access to extra features and extra content.

@Arantor,

I'm curious about the direction you are going with "paying for access to extra features and extra content".

Those pesky people at Apple are really bent on making sure that all extras are purchased through the apple store.

We've been thinking about various ways of sneaking downloaded content into the app. But so far, we haven't found a way that feels right to us.

Or, were you thinking along a different direction?

""Quote from NaweG
Appreciate the feedback. Sounds like I'll be leaving out the voices again :-)

When I include "music" in my games, Impactjs does not wait for the whole music file to download before it starts playing.

Are the "voices" in your game such that you could treat them like music?

Those pesky people at Apple are really bent on making sure that all extras are purchased through the apple store.

Sure they are. I never said that I was planning on doing the exact same model on both.

OK, so the plan is to go with a shareware type model for this one project, 1/3 the content is free, the rest paid. The app can be free/paid and represent the same split of content, but won't tie into the forum that's attached to the game I have in development.

The web version can then be a bit different and have other things to contend with (like the forum) and stuff related to that.

Alternatively, I could just do the whole thing as a web app and be done with it since then it doesn't have to go through the Apple store at all ;) That's the thing, it's a work in progress and is subject to fluctuations.

Are the "voices" in your game such that you could treat them like music?

Usually not, I'd imagine. The context implied that they were voice files that relate to game content, rather than in a music fashion - and I've seen what happens if you have a system trying to play at using a bare music file as dialogue. (LOOM does this, using the one audio CD track. It's... messy. All the other systems I've seen doing voices either use discrete files or a single file with proper internal indexing.)