Having analytics is awesome! Here’s Vigilance’s play graph since it went out on Newgrounds:

It’s really nice to be able to keep track of something after it’s out in the wild. Play count is only half the story though! Here are a few other stats and things:

• Average playtime is about 15 minutes
• 15% of players quit during day 1
• 18% of remaining players quit during night 1
• 30% of players completed the game and reached the ending
• The most difficult level was night 1, with slightly more deaths per play than every other night. Guess my difficulty curve was off!
• The ice rink got over half of all arcade mode plays, probably because of the achievement 😀
• And: 20% of people who started the game finished it!

I have no idea if this is good or not but I feel SUPER PROUD. It’s pretty great seeing literally tens of thousands of people enjoying something I’ve made. Vigilance is now the most widely played game I’ve ever made by a factor of ten or so and it’s just going to keep getting new players now ’cause it’s up on the internet forever. That’s the power of Flash!

Oh, there’s a little side project I’ve been gradually adding to over the past few months – a simple Starcraft 2 mod for friendly 1v1s, practice and coaching. I did a little work on it over the weekend and now it’s collecting stats on things like how much time you’ve spent supply blocked in the game and how good you are at spending resources. The stat tracking’s really simple but already I’ve noticed holes in my game from it, so it’s a useful tool. 😀 I think it’ll have to get its own page soon!

I met my goal for this week. Vigilance is now out in the wild, this time as a sponsored viral Flash game. Best of luck to it!

And, well, that’s all I’ve got. I’ve had a cold for the past few days. It hasn’t been so bad, but late in the evening I’m finding it hard to focus on a computer monitor! So good night for now, enjoy your weekend and I’ll be back on Monday trying to figure out what the heck I do next.

Sam HaXe work’s all done! Well, apart from tidying up loose ends and submitting a patch to Sam HaXe-Open project, but that can wait. The result:

Yup! It now supports enough of the SWF format to import the Newgrounds API. I have the achievement system hooked up and everything.

It’s been weirdly nice doing something so technical. It feels like I’ve spent most of my work time this week tabbing between a hex editor, an SWF decompiler and the SWF specification PDF, manually decoding the bytestream in Notepad to sniff out I/O bugs… but it was fun, in a way. I’ll have to do a game project soon which is super complex to program and scratch that tech itch 😀

Getting that API to link properly was the hard part, so I’m already halfway through implementing it in Vigilance. Onward to next week, getting back to games development, and hopefully shipping this portals build!

Oof. I was hoping to get some serious work done on the new build of Vigilance on Monday, but it turns out Sam HaXe – which I use to link my SWFs – doesn’t properly import a bunch of things from SWF files, like morph shapes or button objects. That means I plain can’t use my sponsor’s API just yet.

So I’ve downloaded the source and I’m fixing Sam HaXe. 😀 It’ll probably take a few days, as I’ve got to extend how much of the SWF format it understands, and I guess I’ll be writing another technical Flash-games-in-HaXe post after that. There are some pretty good arguments for not using HaXe. I’m really looking forward to Fight Back and getting to actually use HaXe’s strengths!

Man! It’s often helpful keeping a three-posts-a-week schedule, but sometimes I just don’t have anything to post. Today is one of those days. However, the reason for it is a good one: Vigilance now has a sponsor!

I’ve spent the past two days working on the necessary changes for the sponsored version. It’ll be out shortly once those are done, hopefully next week. Then I’ll finally get to close the door on Vigilance and get on with overhauling Fight Back, which should let me post a ton of new pictures and music tracks and videos with new cool stuff for months. 😀 Sit tight!

Fear Is Vigilance went up a week ago. It’s now been played over 6,000 times, which is more downloads than Beacon got in that time! It’s shown up on RPS, in a PC Gamer roundup, on Reddit (hi Reddit!)…

Well, the real traffic to Flash games comes from people hitting Flash portals. I’m putting together a portal-friendly version of the game to send out shortly. It’ll have prominent links back to my site here, no sitelock, and I’ll probably put together a 10MB version as well for those portals who object to a larger file.

However you look at it, Vigilance is a commercial failure. I’m going to make a few hundred dollars from MochiAds, but that’s terrible money for a few months’ work. Still, it was a lot of fun to do, it was a valuable experiment, and seeing people enjoy it really does make it feel worthwhile. Thanks for playing and commenting – it makes all the difference 🙂