Sounds great Nigel, congratulations on finishing your game, and looking forward to seeing your results with different advertising models!

Gave the game a very quick try in the browser, and it seems fun, I'll have to give the Android version a go.

Funny that I should come across a post from you just now after remembering your old comic and sharing it to our Facebook just a short time ago. :)

Good luck with the advertising! :)

Oh, when (or if) you try contacting press you might read some of the tips in this guide. :)

@Shane C - GDnet definitely seems like it should be the first port of call. Apart from the announcements forum I'm not sure how else to advertise it to GDnet. I figure my forum signature is the best bet right now.

@jbadams: Cheers mate, that's cool you found it fun :D

Thanks for the link - that's probably going to come in real handy when I attempt to send off press releases in the name of science (whether it ends in flames and misery at the end we'll see).

Heads up: On mac java doesn't work in chrome (and currently is disabled in safari), and the page fails silently (and there is no way to get help or contact you). In firefox it took almost 2 minutes before java started, so I actually thought there was nothing but a link to play store... In other words: feedback from the get go that things are loading (and nice error messages when things go wrong).

You may want to test things out in an unused, basic install of a few systems. For windows use a vm from http://www.modern.ie/en-us/virtualization-tools

Game is fun, though!

PS! "A new spin on an old game" is not really saying anything. "Tetris with Monsters!" on the other hand, says it all!

@staunsholm: Thanks for the feedback mate :)

On mac java doesn't work in chrome (and currently is disabled in safari), and the page fails silently (and there is no way to get help or contact you).

So the game itself runs on javascript (in HTML5), so there shouldn't be any dependencies on Java. I tried Chrome on mac the other day and it seemed to work ok. One problem I found was that there's a been a bug in Mac Chrome since 2012 where if Chrome auto-updates, i think it breaks anything that has been compiled with GWT (which I'm using). In that case I found restarting Chrome seemed to fix it.

As for the game silently failing, your right it is a bit confusing. I'll see if I can add something to the site so it's more clear what's going on.

In firefox it took almost 2 minutes before java started,

I did a quick test in Firefox and it seemed to load up pretty fast (maybe 5-6 seconds) - I'm wondering that if there was a problem loading the game in both Chrome and Firefox, it may have just been my webhost having a hiccup. If you try it again now in either of those browsers is it working ok now?

(and there is no way to get help or contact you).

Ah, very good point, I didn't think of that. I'll add a link to the facebook page I setup and a link to my email address to the demo site.

You may want to test things out in an unused, basic install of a few systems. For windows use a vm from http://www.modern.ie/en-us/virtualization-tools

Game is fun, though!

Thanks for the link and thanks for trying the game. Glad you liked it :)

PS! "A new spin on an old game" is not really saying anything. "Tetris with Monsters!" on the other hand, says it all!

Very good point!

When I started posting the link around I was a bit worried about using any reference to Tetris. I've made sure the game itself makes zero references to it, just because a lot of tetris clones were pulled from the market place a while back (although that was because they were 1:1 clones). However, now I'm pretty sure it's fine to advertise the game as a variation of Tetris. I tried posting a link on reddit with a more descriptive title and it seemed to do much better :D

Ok here's a metric - you have 231 views at the time I've made this post featured on 10/22 2:22am GMT, so see how many you get in as much time now.

BTW the 22222 was purely coincidental

Good luck!! I know how hard it'll be and it's stubborness and beliving in your game that will be a huge part of the visibility.

Ok here's a metric - you have 231 views at the time I've made this post featured on 10/22 2:22am GMT, so see how many you get in as much time now.

BTW the 22222 was purely coincidental

Ha ha, thanks Drew. Let us be mad scientists together!

Good luck!! I know how hard it'll be and it's stubborness and beliving in your game that will be a huge part of the visibility.

Thanks mate - hopefully the data I get out of this helps us all

If possible you really should put some loading... info up front. It took two minutes for the libGDX frame to even appear and start its own progress bar (Win 7, 64 bit, IE10)

And currently the progress bar seems stuck after the first update.

If possible you really should put some loading... info up front. It took two minutes for the libGDX frame to even appear and start its own progress bar (Win 7, 64 bit, IE10)

And currently the progress bar seems stuck after the first update.

That's the second report of the game downloading a bit weird. I've tried to replicate this on every computer I can get my hands on but just can't get it to happen.

I was looking at how many files the game downloads at the start and it's getting about 15MB worth of stuff. That seems really high, but most GWT projects seem to be around a 10MB baseline. I think that between the 15MB worth of files and the 85 requests, one of them is failing (I think I might know which one too). It could be Chrome or firefox timing out on that request and re-downloading the file which finally kicks off the game.

I can't be 100% sure, but that's my best guess so far. I'm going to add some text tomorrow that gives some more info before the loader starts. If someone who is finding this issue could try the game again, it would be interesting to see if the problem clears up.

Ah wait, is it using Java under the hood, not HTML5? In that case that's probably the cause, I don't have Java installed on my PC.

Ah wait, is it using Java under the hood, not HTML5? In that case that's probably the cause, I don't have Java installed on my PC.

GWT is written in Java to start, but once you run it through the GWT compiler it spits out pure javascript that runs in a HTML5 canvas. So if you don't have Java installed that should be fine - as long as you have javascript enabled it should be good to go.

OK, so. After fiddling about for most of last night, I got the game down from 15MB to 7MB. I think there was something wrong with the GWT exporter because even after I deleted all my code as an experiment, it was still spitting out a 5MB .js file.

I reckon I could still get the size down further to 3-4MB, but it's tricky with the way the asset exporters work. Anyway, point being if you were having trouble before it should be less likely now to happen due to the smaller size and the .js files not being clogged with garbage code that the exporter was generating.

I love this idea. Can't wait to read the results.

But how are you testing so many variables with so few websites in such a short time? If you actually want to test the effectiveness of tags like [Android][Java], and call to action titles vs descriptive titles, you're going to have to make one default format, and then change one single variable on each site to see which performs better. Even that's shaky evidence. I'm not even talking about for being scientifically thorough--just for proving to yourself that your findings are accurate.

I guess the best middle ground is to make a big list of forums, and break the most similar in terms of community size, activity and attitude toward advertisement into pairs. Then name the pairs based on what variable you're testing and call each website in the pair A or B. On website A of the Title Pair, make a call-to-action-titled post, and then on website B make the same exact post, but make the title descriptive. The results, theoretically, should only differ as the effectiveness of the titles do. This isn't very scientifically sound, but it's good enough for practicality.

I'd be more patient. I mean, if you're serious about this. I'd just do whatever stupid little requirements I have to fill out for each forum, and make a nice big list so the dataset is large enough. Actually, I'll do this myself just for the info. It'll be cool to see how our data stacks up.

Good luck with this. I'll be following your journal. It's a very cool idea.

Looks better now with the info. It does start up faster now.

Anyhow, it still borks out with a java script error in IE10:

SCRIPT5009: "Peb" is undefined

B037C7D018FEE5461B41EC1B67686495.cache.html, Zeile 3097 Zeichen 4031