Paper Dragon Games - Board games designed for the computer

Constellation wins an Ernie Award: “Best Coffee Break Game”

Tue, 6 Apr 2010 18:02:30 -0400

I was very pleased to find out today that Constellation has won Best Coffee Break Game in the 2010 Bytten Ernie awards.

Bytten is a terrific blog dedicated to reviewing independent computer games. They were one of the first sites to post a review of Constellation. Every year, around Easter, they award Ernies in a variety of categories to the best games they have reviewed over the past year. Here is what they say about Constellation:

“Best Coffee Break Game - Constellation by Paper Dragon Games
The classic example of a game that's easy to learn but boasts a great deal of thoughtful gameplay and diverse strategy. One game can last as little as a few minutes, and an entire series can be played in the time it takes for you to finish your sandwich at lunch.
Make no mistake though that the game is addictive and the AI is competent enough to stretch those coffee breaks out to a lot longer than you might have planned. A simple and attractive looking game that can be played entirely with the mouse. Arm yourself with a hot beverage in the non-mouse hand and you're set to go!”

You can see the other winners, and read some other excellent reviews here:
http://www.bytten.com/article.php?id=16&page=1

Thank you to Steve Blanch, Mark Sheeky, and Andrew Williams at Bytten for the reward, and their excellent reviews.

- The Paper Dragon

First referral sale

Sun, 7 Feb 2010 16:09:45 -0500

Looking over sales for the month of January, I see I finally had a referral sale. Thank you to Travis Boudreaux for referring his friend to Constellation. I will be adding your name to the credits when I next update the game.

I’m still thinking about removing the credits/incentive “refer a friend” feature because it hasn’t worked out as I hoped. If you want to get your name listed in the credits in this fashion, do so soon.

Cheers,

- The Paper Dragon

Feedback from IGF

Sun, 7 Feb 2010 15:57:15 -0500

Its taken me awhile to post about this, but I didn’t make the finals in the IGF. There were over 300 entries this year, so I was up against some stiff competition, and the games that did make the finals look great. I did however get some really positive feedback from the judges, and a number of web hits because every contest entry was posted. I had a really positive experience with the IGF contest and would urge anyone on the fence about entering a game to enter. For the interested, here are the comments I received from the IGF judges.

Constellation scored best in: Game Design
And scored worst in: Audio

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This is a nice little strategy game. It's deceptively simple, but a great example of gameplay that is easy to learn, but hard to master. Really enjoy playing it.

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Nice little game! Easy to understand (Tutorial a little lengthy), fun to play, visuals support its concept, sound can't keep up with graphics. Lacking long term motivation (is there a campaign or levels to solve? Anyone found that?), depth and real innovation.
I think you made a really great little game there, but its lacking innovation (even though some of the mechanics and ideas are great) and especially some kind of campaign or online multiplayer. Overall its fun playing anf kept me busy for a while but can't keep up with some of the better competitors. I understand your intention is to make a board game for the computer. I love board games and ports of board games so I highly recommend you to make the experience deeper and richer by adding more production value to the game. I can see this being a very good online multiplayer flash game and I like how you try to make the mechanics work and have the player discover different strategies.

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Bravo - I had a lot of fun with this game. It's a neat little puzzle game. (I would think that you would want to make this as a Flash game, though, to broaden its reach... also, it would be nice for multi-player Internet play) I think the different sized planets should be more distinct (perhaps different shapes?) as I had a hard time telling them apart. I also think the Double Boom mechanic is potentially a problem as it seems to be an exploit, not a natural extension of the game design. Just food for thought...

I would also remove the "Influence" value from the UI as it doesn't really tell me anything important, and I got it mixed up with the Planets value a few times. (which is the only value that ultimately matters)

The UI in general could use a little cleaning up (the planet pop-up, in particular, is a too basic - looks like debug info), but the important thing is I had fun! Thanks...

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Beautiful, simple game. Very easy to play with deep strategy. The only criticism I can give is that the tooltip might be too slow a way to quickly access information regarding the status of a planet - I wonder if there might be a more visible way. Perhaps moons? ;) Your game is quite lovely!

Advertising

Sat, 19 Dec 2009 11:25:14 -0500

Things have been pretty busy for me with the holidays coming up. Unfortunately, I haven’t had much time to add new features to Constellation or work on the iPhone version lately. Things are still progressing, but slowly. I have spent a little time experimenting with advertising though.

Its been tough to get the word out there with Constellation. Its a bit of a niche game that is very different from a lot of the game market, so while I get some great emails from fans of the game, its been tough to get reviewer/press notice. I had also hoped to spread the word about the game by word of mouth, and created my “Refer a Friend” program, to try to facilitate that. Unfortunately in the 6 months I’ve been selling the game, I have not had a single refer a friend order. Worse, I may even be scaring the people away from purchasing the game with the pre-order referral survey. Google analytics suggests that many more people visit the that pre-order page than actually finish purchasing the game. Ah well. Failed experiment. I will probably scrap the program in the next version.

Instead, I have recently been doing some advertising. I’ve tried advertising both through Google, and a service called Project Wonderful. So far, I much prefer Project Wonderful’s system. Its easier to use, and I can choose to advertise on and support some of the webcomics I enjoy. I also seem to be getting a better average cost per click from Project Wonderful. About 3 cents a click vs google’s 7 cents a click. Keeping the cost per click down is really important, as I am still trying to sell the game for $6. I may have to raise the price if advertising cost vs sales revenue isn’t working out.

It would also help if I had a second game to sell. I’ve got a great idea for one, I just need more time.

Happy Holidays to all!

- The Paper Dragon