Defining Awesome

If you have experience with online ads please read.
Just for fun, I tried advertising Soldat online for money. This is my second attempt after getting nothing from Google’s Adsense. This time I tried Facebook. It seems like a decent platform. You can advertise to people selecting them by age, maritial status, sex, language etc. In addition to that you can show your ads to already established fans of your products or friends of your fans which are not yet fans. Seems like a pretty good idea. I setup an ad selecting exactly those people from english speaking countries and Germany (cause fans from those countries buy Soldat Registered most frequently). The profile of the person is of course male 16-29 yrs old, not married. This is how my Facebook ad for Soldat looks like this. (I tried several variations and this one got most clicks).

Results:
After 2 months of this there were 600,046 views with 154 clicks. 1-5-4 CLICKS! That’s 0,0002% if my math is correct. This is astonishingly shameful. Bad, bad, bad. The only good part is that I spent only 35$ on this. But still it wouldn’t get me anything. My well-estimated guess would be that every 100th person buys Soldat Registered so I lost 10$ on this deal. Of course assuming that at least a 100 people from those clicks actually played the game.

Now my question goes to people that used online advertising successfuly: how do you do it? I agree I didn’t spend much. I set the CPC lower than expected. Yet I got a lot of views. In my opinion people just didn’t click it when they viewed it. It’s no wonder Facebook can’t pay for its bills and the only reason Google is rich is because it has billions of worthless sites with ads on them. Am I doing something wrong?

Today I’m making inventory serializing. In human this means you can save your inventory to a file. Also it will allow to send the entire inventory with slots arrangement through network. So server can create its own inventory slots, force the players to use specific weapons or change item/weapon variables.

Quick look at a draft of the LD inventory. Shows also the gameplay possibilities it can generate.

Writing inventory code. During gameplay soldiers will change inventory using key shortcuts and quick-access menus.

When I first saw a grid-based inventory system in Diablo I thought it was a pretty clever idea. It was fairly realistic and fun – something which I always aim for. Nowadays I see a lot of bad opinions about it. Somebody even making a parody called “Inventory Tetris” – http://ping.fm/t7KYb Out of all the make-fun comments on that site one of them states: “… we are falling for the PR people’s “less is more” trap. Basically, mainstream game design in the 21st century consists of eliminating anything that could confuse a stupid person. And it’s good because, that way the audience is expanded significantly.”. I have to agree with this. Players are made dumber and dumber. You can’t make hints or walk-throughs or make a cut-scene out of a grid-inventory system so the only solution for AAA games is to eliminate the system and introduce something simpler than simple. Grid-systems are simple and work well in my opinion. I’m going with my intuition here and will take ideas from X-Com, Hidden & Dangerous 2 and Jagged Alliance 2 inventory systems.

Made a quick slot-based GUI. That was easy but now I have to make that inventory work with the soldiers one which will be a pain in the ass.

I started thinking about inventory management for LD. Even before thinking of it as an RTS I thought a RPG slot-based system would be best. I don’t know for sure yet. I would be happy to read different views on the subject. Here is a nice discussion about different kinds of inventories.

Split-screen rendering works! It still needs a lot of tweaking but I’m pretty excited. It’ll be the 1st good game since Liero to allow this.

Tried to do splitscreen but ran into a problem. 2 can play on 1 computer but the split view doesnt work. Hope guys on Irrlicht forum help me

Woo! I added joystick support for Link-Dead and it works with my XBox controller! That was easy and it feels really good. You probably know what’s coming next?