I got Jarred (I hope that last word exists)

Hi, because of continious spam comments here I opened my blog at my website and there will things be going on from now. My blog is now called Janko in a Jar - I have boradened the topic to all the things I do in my little company - so I might talk about php, python... and such stuff (if there will be anything interesting to say)

So visit http://www.itmmetelko.com/blog ... this blog will be here for some more time and will then be erased. I will store and publish this as html for historicall reasons ... so don't panic ;)

See you there!

Janko M.

blog spammers

I am starting to continiously get more blog comment spammers here. I will move blog to my own server and use a blog that has prevention from bots built inthere, or are this not bots?? If you spammers are not bots, than ******** and leave me alone!

BKG report and... oh, stupid me

New report of http://www.bravekidgames.com downloads. Downloads from 2005-07-06 to now are in a table below.

Abracadabra	188
Androkids	172
BongoBoogie	169
Jr. Vet	167
Doulber Gold	135
	134
Jr. Doctor	129
Ignazio Fun House	113
Lua Lua	94
Garden golf	91
Argus Teaches Multiplication Facts	88
Yoodoo	66
Ignazio the frog	65
Sunny Ball	61
Minute match	45
Screens. Dory	41
Screens. ShootingStar	33
Screens. Shrek	31
Printables numbers 1-5	29
tRACER 0.3a	28
KUBI	20

Be aware that games are not on BKG the same time.

Sales = ZERO. And today I found out that I couldn't make any sales, because my super-tastic download logging script that I made removes affiliateId from request for download - so this means all these downloads were made without Plimus ever knowing that I produced them.

I don't know if I would make any sales otherway, but it would at least be possible. Oh..... well I fixed the script, we will see in about a mont if I missed anything with my mistake.

Plimus vs. Plimus

I use Plimus. I really like the service othervise, but latelly I was noticing nonresponsive website and slowdowns quite frequently. I was testing BUY NOW link from Kubi just before and I had waited for like 4 minutes and reload 3 times because website was not responding before the "Buy now" form finally loaded. I don't believe potential customer would wait and reload to buy it.

While I am at it. It would be really great if graphics (logo, links) on front page for example. would be more smooth (higher graphical quality). The texts are really aliased and give whole site very retro/old/unpro feel. That thing can be fixed by normal app like macromedia fireworks (which makes really smooth fonts) in less that 10 minutes and I am willing to make that top img for free for them if they wish.

And this is just humble wish. I would be very happy if Plimus would support PayPal.

I wish plimus team all the best.

BKG News August

I added our first mini sellable product "Printables: Numbers 1 to 5" to bravekidgames.com. Soon others will follow.

I just made report of downloads until now (see the table below). I must admit I didn't expect Jr. Vet and Jr. Doctor to be the most popular. I also didn't expect BongoBoogie to be the top and Androkids 3. amongst Phelios's games. I think Androkids is very interesting, but because they were $14 I thougth they don't sell well and people don't like gfx that is not "classic game type".

Of course downloads don't say much about the game itself - rather more about its theme, description and screenshots probbably.

Jr. Vet	75
	69
Jr. Doctor	57
BongoBoogie	51
Lua Lua	49
Androkids	45
Abracadabra	45
Garden golf	44
Doulber Gold	38
Ignazio Fun House	36
Argus Teaches Multiplication Facts	30
Yoodoo	23

The row without name shows downloads of free screensavers.

So you wanna know sales ? They are zero, which should not surprise you. Two main portions of visitors that came from site were
- Slovenia (my country): Where buying games over net is not so common, and $20 is a little expensive for us.
- other indiedevelopers

I got probbably just around 10 visitors from search engines untill now - but the frequency is growing. And just few days back I began advertising on Free Lunch Design . They just started advertising so they offered really affordable first month deal.

Bad days, bad days - what you'r gonna do...

..what you'r gonna do when they came to you. Ok, I said I am gonna write about life of me as an indie, so I should write this too.

I came from summer vacation 3 days ago. I am totally without money (again) and there are some big expencess coming really fast. Oil for heating the house $1000 - car regular servis (alreaddy too late anyway with this) $500 - and I even poured something like 2dl of water into my beloved KeyTronic keyboard and now all it does when plugged in is some beeping sound $30.

On the other hand I have KUBI rrrrrrrreeally almost finished, but drawing those pixelated images is a pain and that is all I have to do - I have this tRACER near first release - and only non interesting parts are now left to do - I have 1 set of printables finished and all I have to do is convert to PDF and JPG - which will be rather quick and am actually happy about.

Sooo... Being without money is very shity feeling - and days come when you would rather do anything than what you should do - and all your work seems like crap - and all secret plans you had seem pointless.

But maybe that's just me...

On vacation

For next 11 days I will be on vacation. Looking at the fish and trying to find out if they use openGL or DirectX to render themself, because sometimes they can have some interesting pixel shaders, uh and let's not even talk about path-finding.

My little gorilla tactics works

Ok, it is officiall - the gorilla tactics I mentioned before are not something worth throwing away. I know it seems stupid or kind of evil, but misspelling words can be your first resource to trafic from search engines.

I accidentally wrote pritables instead of printables and now I got 5 of totall 6 visitors from search engines on that word. What would happen if I would put some efford in it. If I find the most common keywords that fit my pages and find most common mispells of them and somehow incorporate them into w.s. . Ok, I am not ready to do this really, not yet... but I am intrigued, if not for something else - to see what would be the results. Because, like I said I am real good at mispelling, this could be my mission in life. ;)

RFC: some newish gameplay, please test

// I posted this Request For Comments on indiegamer.com forum, and I am posting it here too.

Hi! I had few intense sessions of programming this weekend and came up with this. Concept is very simple... it's you and 3 collored shapes (No, it's not another match-3 :) ) , and you race with time (for now) while evading those 3 shapes.

screens: menu, options, play

download (just 953kB): zip

known issues

It is minimall and very beta. I am very interested in your feedback about the core gameplay, concept, whole point - but generally I would by very glad of any feedback whatsoever. I haven't seen gameplay like this yet, and as I made this one it is hard for me to judge if it is any good objectivelly.

What are plans with this game... (1) first freeware that would hopefully spread around and help shine some light on bravekidgames. (2)Later (if the game raises some interest)with a lot of improvements and increase of content(tracks...), online (not-realtime) tournament thing going on, switch to cheap shareware ($4.95 or $9.95).

Rules.. you fly. The more to the right you are - the faster you go. There are 3 kinds of obstructions on your way. One you have to cross from above, one below and one where it doesn't matter. If you touch obstruction of pass it wrongly you get penalty time.

As you see, the game is very very simple.... but the interesting thing (IMHO) comes from speed at which things happen, so you can easily reach a limit where your brain just isn't fast enougth, or where just one thougth that breaks your concentration consumes too much time to respond to actions on the screen.

Tracks - t3 are these basic tracks, t3 takes around 50seconds, t3 dream takes twice as long and t3 coma (should it be comma maybe?) takes 4 times. You will probably figure other's by yourself. All tracks are created randomly.

I was experimenting with the whole style of the game "a little" :D, so if you have comments on that , tell them.

Uh, long post... good that the game itself is rather short :)

Thanks in advance!
Janko M.

Free tools for search engine optimisation

I was reading an article about so called SEO in a magazine (Moj mikro). There were links to some very helpfull free tools listed, so I will put them here.

Link popularity check, search engine saturation, keyword verification:
http://tools.marketleap.com/publinkpop/

Whole bunch of SEO tools:
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/
http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/
http://search-engine-rank.net/

I found this meta-tag analyzer interesting because it gave me
info that I could use right away and fix few things.
http://www.submitexpress.com/analyzer/

And here you can check how popular certain keywords are:
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
http://www.123promotion.co.uk/ppc/

HTML Code validation:
http://www.anybrowser.com/validateit.html
http://validator.w3.org/

Link popularity tells you how many externall pages, by search engines opinion, link to your website.
Search engine saturation tells you how many pages of your w.s. has certain search engine indexed.

Ok, that's it. Uh, and a nice news I just found out... my w.s. bravekidgames doesn't have pagerank 0 any more, but 2. Nice :).

Finishing first game

Ok, first real post...
KUBI
I am at the stage of work that I don't really like. I am finishing stuff. Finishing things has allways been very hard to me - I am not very proud of that, but I think many people are made this way. It is much more pleasant finding ideas or even making them work. All I did this whole week with KUBI was fix some things nobody would even notice. Who would enjoy on that little sense of accomplishment?

The game is in one way ready - so I could sell it to you right away, but on the other - I know it will not be released for at least 18 days. I have something like 50 "KUBI Images" to draw and I have to go to vacation for 12 days first wednesday (my wife innsists).

Some screens of KUBI are here. It is game for kids.

bravekidgames
One interesting thing happened today. My statCounter showed me someone actually came to website thru google search. This hasn't happened before because my google rank is still so low even I can't find myself thru google :). And then I noticed he misspelled the word. He probabbly ment "printables" but wrote "pritables" and so did I on my website (as I noticed now).

The big question now is? Should I repair the mistake, like a good citizen, or go and make some more as my new little gorilla tactics :) . Because I am very good at making these mistakes (as you probabbly noticed allready).

Ok, and his referrer: www.google.com/search?q=pritables


(Ok, because you don't know me much yet and can think I am stupid as a stone... I know is guerilla tactics not gorilla...)

About this blog

I don't think my thougths or me myself are worh writing/reading about. But I think it might be interesting to make some real-time log of what is happening to me as someone trying to make it as an indie in gamebiz. So, here I will try to describe my actions and results of them - my thougths, genious ideas and later the remains after big heavy reality falls on them.

This real-time thing in particularrly interesting to me. As most smart-assing books are written after someone has already succeded and his memmory cleans out all the bumps and holes that don't fit into the grand success story.

Why did I call it the experiment? Because I really don't know how this will end... will this be a log of failure, success, something in between, will I stray off? Ok... and to cach your attention.

I pardon you for all language mistakes I will make. One of the reasons I started writing this, was to improve my English writing skills.

So, welcome... I hope you like it... criticism or anything else is welcome! So, now I will stop writing about the blog and start writing blog hopefully.
Janko M.

History

I didn't start this blog at point zero... so this is what happened so far:

• Made few ultra smal games for kids in Game Maker.
• Found Phelios.
  
• Bougth PTK and started re-learning c++.
• Found Aljosa - great artist with too little time.
• Found indiegamer forum and the whole indie organism.
  
• Made playable version of some top down "move around - solve puzzless" game. Artist got some big job (for one year of work), so this project was put into deep freezer.
  
• Brainstorming for game that doesn't need artist. Seen a nice screenshot of BreakQuest (Nurium) that had cow and snail made of bricks and got idea for KUBI. Main media for game are these boxy images - that even I could draw. Thanks Nurium!
  
• Reading indiegamer forum a lot and learning how things really stand.
  
• Working on KUBI. Aljosa was making the gui art.
  
• While waiting for Aljosa - banged together bravekidgames.com (BRAVE KID GAMES)
  
• Adding games, screensavers, printables to BKG, exploring AdSense, Plimus, SEO... Found some new interesting people
• Finishing KUBI, found good musicmaker I can afford.
  
• Currently: Finding out how to get people to BKG. Finishing KUBI (Uh, I hate finding sfx on net).