Chibi Heroes Part 2

2 Months working on Chibi Heroes, a facebook game, and I am 8 bugs away from Open Beta! So how long is that anyway? Hmm, about a week or so. That means that on the 5th of December Chibi Heroes is open for everyone to beta test it.

Those pesky bugs can be fixed well enough; the main problem that I will face after this is getting people to play it.. as well as pay for it. Well, mainly getting enough people to know and play it. The first part of this problem is marketing.

Next up is monetization. Setting up a paypal business account as well as google adsense to make money seems like a no brainer. I'll be looking into other ways of monetization as soon as I reach this stage.

For now though, on with fixing the bugs! 8 of them no less gah...

*Chibi Heroes is a Facebook game built using ASP.NET. Check it out on Facebook on 5th of December 2009!

3 New Facebook Projects

I started 3 new projects! One is a medieval town building game, another is dark fantasy mythical game, and the last one is a story building game.

The first one is kinda inspired by simcity. Imagine playing simcity on Facebook! Imagine trading goods and services between you and your friends! The more friends you have the more prosperous you become due to increase trade. All this leads to an increase in city size. But wait! What is that in the distance... a tornado is coming this way?! The power plant is overused and the possibility of a meltdown is imminent? Ai Carumba!

Ever read Ravenloft? Imagine choosing an anti-hero from horror movies! Vampires, Werewolves, and Mummies are passé. Now it's all about Flesh Golem, Lich, and Death Knights from beyond! The stronger the dark lord, the bigger the army of darkness, the more mayhem they will inflict on the world!

Have you and you friends ever made up a never-ending story that each keep adding to over a campfire? Now you can play this game online!

MySQL limitation...

Well I have been working on ChibiHeroes for a while and the database I'm using is MySQL. I've been abusing the poor little sucker is more likely hah hah hah. I've been doing stuff with it that people will shake their heads and cry if they knew about it.

One of the things that I found out was you cannot set the current date/time aka NOW() as a default for a datetime field! What the heck? Oracle can do it. I have been doing it in PostGres SQL Database for quite a while now. So why can't MySQL do it?

What kind of a limitation is that? So I went back to check their forums/listing/documentations and guess what they recommend. They advise their users to use the timestamp. Huh? What the hell? It is like telling a user to stop driving a Ferrari because the clutch is broken and start driving the Ford Ranger. Gimme a break man! Fix the damn clutch.. err I mean limitation now!

Come on you guys, stop being lazy! This ability has already been used in Oracle and PostGres way back during MySQL 3.51. Numerous updates and improvements later we're still stuck with this limitation?

High Road or Go for Broke?

A week ago I came across this article in TechCrunch :
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/31/scamville-the-social-gaming-ecosystem-of-hell/

What happens is that one of the big three of Facebook Game developers are using offers that borders on scam. You know, the hidden download toolbar from internet and automatic signup on premium sms texting services.

I never knew a part of the 200 mil revenue per year that Zynga has comes from scam offers!

Indeed, this has got me thinking on they way to monetize from ChibiHeroes. Taking offers out of the picture, I guess I would have to make do with paypal and credit card payments only so that my players don't get scammed.

How much will this decision affect my profitability? Probably a lot. But then I guess I can sleep much better since my players don't feel cheated and will buy more directly as an added incentive.