(It took a lot of drafts to get the “2″ just right. I think if I had asked for one more revision, Randy would have hired a band of assassins to take me away during the night.)

1. Randy drew some decorative background gears, and I hooked them up to operate alongside other machinery in the level. When a block moves forward, the gears turn clockwise, and when the block moves back, they turn counterclockwise again. Looks great in motion and has given my test levels a Metal Man vibe.
2. Prototype gadget: Bone Block. Works like a bone wall (collapses when stepped on) but drops a full size stone block from its position. It also sets off neighboring bone blocks, creating a domino effect.
3. Prototyped gadget: Valve Trap Door. Touched from one side, it springs open, then closes immediately after, trapping you or anything else on the other side. Can be used in all four directions to create one-way gates.
4. Prototyped gadget: Mega Fan.  Creates gusts of wind that blow any creatures in specified direction. Will take some tuning, in first tests has ultra comical results, especially when used to launch the mouse.
5. Switch and decoration fastening: Floor switches (and some decorations) are automatically fastened to moving blocks in the editor. This way, switches can be placed on gear blocks and elevators. Lots of new machinery possibilities with this.

Tomorrow I’ll put together a few more gadgets and build some test levels around them.

1. Transition animations for goat (turning from side to side, jump to fall, fall to land, etc.). Randy has done drafts of some of these, I just need to add the logic to smoothly transition between them.
2. Squish tolerance fix: creatures are still getting squished unexpectedly, the most problematic situation being coming out of a Magic Hat teleport. Since most teleports end with the goat intersecting with walls near the mouse’s original position, the game needs to resolve to a “safe spot” near the teleport destination. As any Escape Goat veteran knows, it’s possible to get crushed from teleporting into a narrow passage, but that should only happen when there are really no safe alternative spots nearby.
3. New gadgets. I’ve got tons of ideas cooking, and hope to get some prototypes together starting tomorrow.
4. New levels. They need to showcase the newest gadgets and visuals (such as lighting) but also provide player training. I have a new device for text-free tutorials I’ll be experimenting with.

The GDC demo should offer a solid 15 minute experience, tuned for showcasing rather than difficulty. The puzzles won’t be brain benders. They should be pretty similar to the first few worlds of Escape Goat 1.

For the most part, the new systems are in place. We’re running in high resolution, lighting and shadow casting is working, even the new world layout is implemented. One major remaining bug is the squish detection, something that has plagued me since the start of the project. I changed enough of the physics system in the upgrade from EG1 to EG2 that squish tolerance isn’t working properly. This means the goat gets squished in places he shouldn’t–such as after a teleport into a corner, or from getting grazed by a falling block. Definitely something that needs to be fixed before GDC.

Last Monday I decided to dedicate two days to implementing a new method of collision detection that would ideally solve this (and a few other very minor issues that have been with the game forever). I knew it would break some things to install it, and there was a 25% chance it would break so many things that it wouldn’t be worth pursuing.

So I created a new branch in SVN and got to work. Monday and Tuesday went fine, and I was confident I could have it all in place end of Wednesday.

Nope. Testing on Wednesday revealed lots of new crashes and unpredictable behavior in the new system. Fixing squish detection broken about ten other things. I spent Wednesday working it out, then Thursday, and by Thursday night I was positively fried from the code work, not to mention scared that it wouldn’t be fixed in time for GDC.

Thursday night was a meetup with some other local indie devs, and this event saved me. Talking to other indies, forced to explain what I was working on and why I would take such a big risk this close to GDC, I realized I was going further and further down the rabbit hole of programming. If you code, you know what I’m talking about: the pursuit of that perfect system that’s going to solve everything, but requires a substantial rewrite of existing “mostly working” code.

Friday morning, I switched back to Monday’s code branch, undoing four days of work (saved for a rainy day in source control, of course). I had been afraid of rolling back because of the pain of losing four days, but after I did, I was relieved that it didn’t consume even more days. Before Thursday night, I was prepared to spend the whole weekend trying to fix it. Instead, I can take care of more important stuff (like level design).

The lesson I’m taking from this is to stay connected to other devs, and keep an eye on where time goes.

See you at GDC!

The main thing I did right was research what the Newgrounds community (and web game community in general) would be receptive to. I already have a web demo of Escape Goat, which is designed to feed sales of the digital download from my site. I learned early on  that this type of demo/upsell wouldn’t go over well there, so I made the decision to offer the full game. (Thanks to Hyptosis for this bit of advice.)

Bottom line: If your computer is relatively fast and you use a modern browser, you’ll have an identical experience to the PC game I sell for $2.99.  I also made sure to clearly label this as an Experimental Beta, given how unpredictable HTML5 support is with some browsers. This paid off, and some players even said they cut me some slack with the technical issues because it was marked as a beta. (Also big thanks to Lars Doucet for his wisdom after launching Defender’s Quest on Kongregate.)

It’s been two weeks… Let’s see the numbers

My ideal outcome would have been for players to follow the link to my website, discover that there is a Soulcaster II available (bundled with Soulcaster) for $4.99, and that some of them would pick it up. The first part of my dream came true: web traffic exploded. Sales, however, didn’t go up very much. Part of it might be the layout of my site and the lack of a really powerful dedicated “BUY” page for the games. It could also be that players didn’t want to spend money on a bundle that includes a game they just played for free, regardless of how much they would like to play Soulcaster II. I wish I had more data to know what’s holding back the purchases! I’m open to suggestions if anyone has any ideas…

Lack of direct revenue aside, the exposure was magnificent, as was traffic fed to my site:

Site Visitors for November 2012 (Newgrounds debut: Nov 14)

This traffic spike led to the only direct sales of Soulcaster I & II all month. With my 11 copies sold, this gives me roughly a 0.16% attach rate.  I didn’t go to marketing school, but that’s awesome, right?

About 1 in 600 site visitors decided to go home with a copy of Soulcaster I & II.

OK, so maybe my site’s salesmanship needs to be taken up a notch if I’m going to capitalize on traffic bursts like this.

Data from Newgrounds:

Views: 98,350
User rating: 3.99, with 2091 reviews
Ranking for month of November: #4 (by score), #8 (by views)
comments posted: 100+

One of the coolest things about the comments on Newgrounds is how much constructive feedback I got on my game. Players had all kinds of suggestions about things I could change for future games, which has given me a bunch of ideas for stuff I’ll be prototyping when I get around to working on Soulcaster III.  Playtesting feedback! Really cool side benefit.  Also, a near-4-star rating is pretty respectable, especially considering the number of 0-star reviews I got from people who, because of browser issues, only got a black screen.

Conclusion: Reminds me of Greenlight!

Soulcaster on Newgrounds has been similar to my experience putting Escape Goat on Steam Greenlight. Both have been amazing for publicity, but haven’t translated into immediate revenue.  I guess I can call this playing the long game, or at least I would if I could claim burgeoning ranks of dedicated fans. I suppose I have gained a few Twitter followers in the last two weeks, and I did get some really nice fan mail (you guys rock!).  I’m frequently reminded that building a fan base is its own full time job in itself, and I’ve got to set aside time during the week for it.  For example, here it is 4pm on Thursday afternoon, and I’m writing this post when I could be out partying, or refactoring the Escape Goat code base.

Moving forward, I’m definitely going to keep Soulcaster fully free on Newgrounds.  I haven’t decided what to do with Soulcaster II yet, but for the time being I’m not willing to sacrifice my second of three games for another burst of web hits.  Maybe when my next game hits and I have something to really ensare customers with…

XNA Developers! If you have a game you want to see on the web, be sure to drop me or Kevin a line, and feel free to hit me up for any questions you have.

Verdict: highly recommended.

www.magicaltimebean.com/forum/

Grand Prize Winner: @17wizards

Congratulations! You’ve won an Escape Goat T-Shirt and the Indie Royale June Bug Bundle.

By Eric (@17wizards)

Runners-Up: @theonlyadze and @sobou

will each receive a copy of the Indie Royale June Bug bundle!

By Alex da Stehmdawg (@theonlyadze)

By Bear (@sobou)

Honorable Mentions (still pretty epic)

By Ahmed Abdel Samea (@Amidos2006)

By Ahmed Abdel Samea (@Amidos2006)

By CaveBo (@cave_bo)

It’s kind of too bad that I had to pick winners, because for me it’s cool beyond words to have created the subject matter that yielded these works of awesomeness.  But ultimately it is a contest, and that means ranking, and that means I’ve got to man up and pick the winners.

Thank you all for submitting these!  I’ll be proudly displaying them in the Fan Art showcase.

Before I even had time to write this post, the bundle has already sold 2,200 copies (in under two hours) and even most astonishingly, Escape Goat is trending on Twitter.  Some friends (@DaveVoyles, @MasterBlud and @jmpaul) sent proof of this:

John Walker of Rock, Paper, Shotgun wrote a pretty positive review:  http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/06/14/wot-i-think-escape-goat/

More to come!