Here we are again, way too long since my last post. As usual, My annual trip to California snuck up on me again this year, so I’m scrambling to get everything done before the festivities start. I’m writing this post at various points throughout my journey to the great city of San Francisco with my friend and former partner, Matt Porter. I’ll be in town for 2 weeks this year – twice as long as I’ve ever been here. Here are some things I’ll be doing:

Indie Giving

Indie Giving is a great event organized by the awesome people at FGL and sponsored by various other cool cats in the industry. Not only does it make the trip super affordable for broke indies like myself, but it also gives us a chance to give back by helping out at a local charity. Last time I went, we got to play Bingo with senior citizens, and I believe this time we’re going to be doing some gardening. This year is especially valuable, as they offered otherwise-sold-out Indie Games Summit passes for the Game Developers Conference (GDC) on top of the usual Flash Gaming Summit (FGS) pass. Indie Giving takes place on Saturday, March 23 – if you’re going, I’ll see you there!

Flash Gaming Summit

FGS is back for its 5th year this year, and what a year it’ll be. Flash seems to be on shaky ground as of late with Adobe’s recent decisions, so I’m interested to hear what everyone has to say about the future of Flash this year. Regardless, it should be a fantastic networking opportunity as it has proven to be years before. Last time I was here I got enough after-party invites to keep me busy for the entire week of my stay.

Game Developers Conference

While I’ve been to many GDC parties in years past, this will be my first year attending the event itself, thanks to Indie Giving. On the dates surrounding the event, the streets are crawling with people proudly wearing a GDC pass around their neck, and this year I am fortunate enough to join their ranks. GDC dwarfs its little sister, FGS – lasting five whole days compared to FGS’s single day. This time it won’t be just indies I’m meeting, but AAA developers as well.

Lindsey Stirling Concert

As if all this wasn’t enough, Porter and I decided to extend our stay to April 4th so that we could catch the Lindsey Stirling concert on April 3rd. If you haven’t heard of her, Lindsey Stirling is a hip-hop/dubstep violinist who went indie after America’s Got Talent turned her away saying she couldn’t do what she does without being part of a group. Now her videos get millions of views on YouTube and she’s touring all over. Indie up!

Much, Much More

I RSVP’d to a whole lot of other random events surrounding GDC and I’ll definitely be doing some impromptu exploration of San Francisco. If you’re in the area and want to meet up, leave a comment, send me an email, or use one of the social media buttons found on my contact page. See you on the other side!

The post San Francisco 2013 appeared first on The Village Blacksmith.

As very few of you may remember, I decided to start a web games portal as an experiment a very long time ago. 15 months later, it seems I only mentioned the portal in passing a few times, so I figured it’s about time I give it a proper post. Here is the story of NinjaDart.com.

A New Portal Approaches

I picked up NinjaDart.com along with a few other domains a few years back during a domain-buying binge, immediately following the sale of Pixel Purge, the arcade shooter I developed with Matt Porter. I had planned to make a portal on the domain for awhile, but for some reason never got around to it. A little more than a year ago, I decided to start a little monetization experiment – I would buy an arcade script, spend an hour or two setting it up on the domain, and see if I could make back my investment.

For this experiment, I decided to go with AV Arcade Pro from AV Scripts. I grabbed the Single License version which was $19.00 USD at the time, along with the 1250 Gamepack for $5.00 USD, and installed it in the Ninja Dart folder on my hosting plan. I’m not counting the hosting against this experiment, since it’s an expense I’m already paying out for this blog. By the way, if you’re looking for a reliable web host without losing an arm and a leg, you can do a lot worse than HostGator. I’ve been with them for years and have no complaints.

Once I ran the installation script (an incredibly painless process), I was looking at a fresh new portal, easy as that. I decided to give myself an hour to set everything up and leave it at that. I counted $7.25 as an expense for the hour spent, which is the minimum wage in Louisiana, or at least it was at the time. I didn’t want to bill what I would normally charge clients, as it was something I was doing mostly for fun, and billing that high would make the experiment a lot slower.

In my allotted hour, I managed to choose a theme, edit the default logo to include the site’s name, publish some games (with wreckless abandon) from the included game feeds, upload a few of my games and slap in some Google Adsense ad codes. Since then, I’ve only spent a few minutes here and there uploading my own games as I release them, which I’ve decided to count as marketing for the games themselves and not bill against the experiment.

The Results

Enough with the history lesson, let’s see some numbers! The following numbers are from November 11, 2011 to February 11, 2013 – exactly 15 months.

Traffic

Total Unique Visitors: 4916
Total Visits: 12510 (2.54 per Unique)
Total Page Views: 65293 (13.28 per Unique, 5.22 per Visit)

Uniques per…
Month: 321.40
Week: 75.14
Day: 10.73

Visits per…
Month: 803.60
Week: 191.20
Day: 27.31

Pages per…
Month: 5136.83
Week: 997.93
Day: 142.56

Revenue

Gross Total: $21.81
Gross per Year: $17.45
Gross per Month: $1.45
Gross per Week: $0.33
Gross per Day: $0.05

Expense Total: $31.50 ($19.00 Script, $5.00 Gamepack, $7.50 1x Hour Work)

Net Total: -$9.69*
Net per Year: -$7.75*
Net per Month: -$0.65*
Net per Week: -$0.15*
Net per Day: -$0.02*

Estimated days until I break even: 204

*Note – These are not recurring expenses, this is just the calculated earnings from this experiment since inception.

Accolades

Most Monthly Uniques:
1st Place: 562 (Jan 2013)
2nd Place: 555 (May 2012)
3rd Place: 494 (Dec 2012)

Most Monthly Visits:
1st Place: 1979 (Jan 2013)
2nd Place: 1483 (Dec 2012)
3rd Place: 1422 (Nov 2012)

Most Monthly Pages:
1st Place: 12106 (Nov 2012)
2nd Place: 10241 (Jan 2013)
3rd Place: 7075 (Dec 2012)

Most Monthly Pages:
1st Place: 12106 (Nov 2012)
2nd Place: 10241 (Jan 2013)
3rd Place: 7075 (Dec 2012)

Most Monthly Earnings:
1st Place: $7.40 (May 2012)
2nd Place: $2.55 (Mar 2012)
3rd Place: $1.92 (Dec 2012)

Most Weekly Earnings:
1st Place: $4.37 (May 27 – Jun 2, 2012)
2nd Place: $2.77 (May 20 – 26, 2012)
3rd Place: $1.36 (Dec 16 – 22, 2012)

Most Daily Earnings:
1st Place: $1.61 (May 29, 2012)
2nd Place: $1.54 (May 31, 2012)
3rd Place: $1.06 (May 23, 2012)

Parting Thoughts

So, will a “set it and forget it” flash games portal make you rich? Probably not, but it has the potential to be another long-tail passive income stream for your portfolio. We can see that just by having a link to the portal on my blog, it gets a surge of traffic anytime I do something noteworthy, such as releasing Recursion in May or increasing my posting frequency these last few months. I’m confident that its revenue will continue to grow slowly as I keep up with other aspects of my career.

I think that AV Arcade Pro is key to Ninja Dart‘s near-success. It won’t be long before I break even, and eventually start to profit from this portal. As you can see, the site has the potential to earn a few bucks a day with no direct effort. Once I reach break-even, I plan to invest another $50.00 into it to see if I can make that back as well. I’ll keep you guys posted on the experiment.

Are you trying to earn passive income? Want to see more posts like this? Leave me a message in the comments section below, I’d love to hear your thoughts. Thanks for reading!

The post NinjaDart.com, 15 Months Later – An Experiment in Portal Monetization appeared first on The Village Blacksmith.

Overview

Most of what I planned on doing last month didn’t get done, but at least I have a good excuse. Around the middle of January I got a decent contract job offer to work on a game with my good friend Andre Spierings, creator of Bunni: How We First Met, for which I wrote the server-side back-end. While this will help with some of my financial goals, it hasn’t been too kind on some of my other goals. I’m under NDA at the moment, so I can’t talk about what I’m actually doing, but I may write an article about it when I’m able to.

Two Games A Month

Progress on my two January games was going well until I was blindsided by the contract job. I ended up shelving those games and jamming out some 8-hour projects. I’ll probably finish the other 2 games for February, as there’s not much left to go on each. I’ll write about these first two games in the coming weeks.

Daily Art

My Daily Art 2013 exercise was going well for the first 2 weeks. Perhaps too well, in fact. I was getting 4 pieces of art done each day, but not much else. I planned to change up the format a bit, but with this new contract job I seem to have gotten a little behind. I plan to make up for the missed days this month and catch up to the stack before February ends. Look for the first new piece to go up tomorrow.

Weekly Blog Posts

Needless to say, I’ve fallen a little behind on the weekly post promise. I’ve found that it’s hard to find topics to discuss when most of your time is spent working on things under NDA. I’m finally getting the hang of scheduling my time better, so I’ve been working on a few things here and there. Hopefully this will provide me with enough interesting articles to write for February.

Traveling

The bright side of all of this contract job stuff is that my plans for traveling are now pretty much set in stone. This contract job will allow me to attend FGS and GDC in San Francisco in March (I’ve already bought my tickets) as well as hitting Japan hopefully later this year.

Language Study

Perhaps the only thing not effected by this contract job was my Japanese studies. I’ve been adamant about sticking to my daily lessons and have been making good progress. I’ve mapped out my goals and should finish the 2042 常用漢字 (general-use kanji) by the end of February. I’ve also been improving my vocabulary with the Core 2000 sentence pack, which I should be around 40% through after this month.

In Other News

I launched a few experimental game portals with MyArcadePlugin PRO which I’ll write about in a future article. For now, you can check them out at BlockyGames.com and TinyTurret.com.

I have an iPad now, and am surprised by the lack of quality Japanese study tools available for it. I plan to write a few study games for it when I find some free time. I may even port some of my old games to it if I can think of a control scheme that doesn’t make me want to break the damn thing.

Until next time, じゃね～

The post 2013 Goals – January Follow-Up appeared first on The Village Blacksmith.

Medium: Raster Art in Adobe Photoshop CS6

While this was technically made on Day 31, it’s the 19th art piece I’ve done, and I’d like to keep them in order.

The post Daily Art 2013 [Day 19] appeared first on The Village Blacksmith.

Medium: Vector Art in Adobe Flash Professional CS6 and ActionScript 3.0 written in FlashDevelop

While this was technically made on Day 30, it’s the 18th art piece I’ve done, and I’d like to keep them in order.

The post Daily Art 2013 [Day 18] appeared first on The Village Blacksmith.

Medium: Paint on painted wood.

Fireworks painting for the back of my mom’s Mardi Gras parade float.

The post Daily Art 2013 [Day 17] appeared first on The Village Blacksmith.

Medium: Chalk on painted wood.

Fireworks sketch for the back of my mom’s Mardi Gras parade float.

The post Daily Art 2013 [Day 16] appeared first on The Village Blacksmith.

Medium: Chalk on painted wood.

Character sketch for the side of my mom’s Mardi Gras parade float.

The post Daily Art 2013 [Day 15] appeared first on The Village Blacksmith.

(click the image to see it full-size)

The post Daily Art 2013 [Day 14] appeared first on The Village Blacksmith.

(click the image to see it full-size)

The post Daily Art 2013 [Day 13] appeared first on The Village Blacksmith.