A java applet gaming portal

General Discussions
#21

Thanks for all the feedback.

First off, sorry I missed one “applet” in my first post. As I said, I am a bit burnt out after few hours of sleep last weeks trying to get this site into a state that I could show you. I most definitely meant that there is no java APPLET portal (name of the thread), in the same way that there are many, many flash portals. Basically I don’t know of any site such as games4j.com and I think there is a need for it. I just want java game applet indie devs to have the same options as flash devs do.

I really like Java Game Tome and the rest, and I think we can work well together. G4Js target-group is casual online gamers that fly around the usual flash sites. People wanting some good instant entertainment (probably not caring what platform that brings it) without hassle of downloading anything. JGT is maybe more towards java savvy less casual gamers, even though it is quite open to most anybody that wants’ to play java games. There is obviously some overlap between the sites, and one person can belong in both target groups, so I think a link exchange between the sites could work really well, and both sites could benefit from that.
I do recognize, respect and appreciate all the other java sites out there. The goal is not to compete with other java portals, but the goal is to have a great portal where I can deploy my applets in a similar way as flash devs can, and stand a chance of earning a few cents. I have noted that Gouessej thinks it is enough of java game portals as it is and I hope we can leave it at that.

Ehh… Didn‘t you abandon work on JGT? Anway the reason is above, and in my first post.

Any applet game with any license is welcome on the site. I am in fact using some framework that should make it easy to convert 4K type games to flashy(the good flashy) games fairly easy. I plan to release that to Open Source soon, as well as a fairly open game(-ish) thing that could work as a good starter for a community project. But before you get exited and submit a game I can also say that the site is profit driven, and the goal is to generate enough money to employ myself, quickly followed by world domination, getting richer than Mr Gates, buy MS and Oracle and make Java a gaming platform, and Xbox 720 to run on JVM and nothing else. Well, sort of, but in all honesty I think it will be good to have a commercial java game site, that could spend some money in marketing at some point. This is all very early, so I don’t know how realistic any of this is.

Good point, and I am thinking about it, but it is important that the site is very easily accessible to casual gamers (web 2.0-ish, rating, feedback and highscores are for them as well). A separate section could be a very good option if people want that, but that will come a little bit later (long todo-list and all that).

If anyone gets upset reading what I have written, then it is probably just me not being clear enough, because of lack of sleep, and there is no reason to get upset. I am only trying to create a site that will be a great site for indie casual game devs! 8)

#22

Ahhh, yes, exactly the kind of feedback I was fishing for. ;D I can sleep well tonight at least. Yes, I spent way too much time on that menu config.

Thanks, it was a hard decision to make, but if this works out it will still be worth it.

G4JWebAPI
I expect to see a few games submitted in the morning :wink:


import com.games4j.webAPI.Highscore;

		Highscore.save(applet, theScore);

v0.1, so improvements will probably be made, and documentation might improve.

Yes, the initial idea was to have it casual (= girl and mom) friendly. Well, that is kind of silly, since the games will be made by us and therefore the target-group will be more like us. I have been thinking about black, dark red and bright blue, but I am a coder, so I might need some good hints on that. Suggestions welcome. The most important thing is that the layout is OK. I have tried to make it fairly easy to change color schema, and there are very little images that needs to be changed.

#23

Off all the ranting I did, that was the only joke(?) I could muster. I really need some sleep! :stuck_out_tongue:

Bubble Trouble, Chip, Dessert Menu, RoadFourK, Starship Invaders (Incubator), and Drift (Incubator) are all Java games, but as bienator pointed out, the content is just placeholders, so that I could test out the site, and left it in, so that you could have something to test out.

Still, as I started off, I have been a bit unhappy with the java unfriendlyness of other sites. So should I then reject any non java games? Not really sure yet, but one selling point for many possible visitors are the web 2.0 feel and specifically the highscores, so until that is supported for flash, I will probably leave Flash games out. It also depends on how many java games that will be submitted. I do think that gamers don’t care that much about platform and if more visitors come if more games are added, then it could be a win - win. I don’t see java games being a minority anyway,

If you are asking how many applets the market can take per month, then I don’t think we have to worry. I don’t see myself rejecting games. On the other hand I am a bit worried of not getting enough good content to the site to get critical mass going (think that is what you are aiming at). Well, with the highscore lists and feedbacks and revenue sharing, I hope to get some of the good applets that already exist onto the site. It really is “nothing to loose” for devs. Then looking at the 4K compos I would say that at least 10 of those every year are better than 90% of all the flash games. So there are enough talent out there. The framework that I use for my games is very lightweight (~85K), and makes it very easy to create menus, help screens, key configs, sound on/off buttons and more, and also takes care of all applety specific stuff (Output can run both as applet and autostart jar). Have a look at “Chip” on the gamesj.com site, and you will see some of it. It should be quite easy to convert a 4K into a “full applet”. I have often said that “I’d like to see a full version of your 4K game” in this forum and when judging. Guess what? Now I REALLY mean it!

#24

Yeah I l like it… Thumbs up!
Have 7-8 applets coming in next 2 weeks and 3-4 unfinished ones so may be able to spare 1 or 2 if any take your fancy.

Same comments as above, background colours a little bright… Applets should be centered and it would be nice to surround them with a rounded border, other than that cool!!

#25

Nice job. A site like this was something I had thought to do, but really websites are not my strong point so I didn’t.
I think the colours are a little too light for my taste.
You might was to do a little quality control latter on. Though that will add extra work.
If you open it up to silverlight and flash you would get more games and therefore more traffic. But that’s up to you. But I think you should.

#26

Hi,

A couple of thoughts in random order. I haven’t finished my coffee so no idea if this post will make sense.

–Your site looks very nice.

–In the applet FAQ there are few listed to sell your game. I listed four sites that have a java games running. They do prefer the flash games though because they can redistribute. But I understand your point about being too few. Even javagames is all flash. Go figure. But here is a site with a list of java games. http://www.arcadepod.com/java/

–The nice thing about javagametome is that they don’t host but rather link to your website. Thus you don’t have to worry about the whole payment thing it is just a traffic generator. It is an okay traffic generator but we need more. It would be awesome if your site did something similar.

–What are your terms of payment?

–Game jolt has a bit of a jump on you; however they don’t support applets or demos. http://www.java-gaming.org/index.php/topic,20283.0.html I’m still trying to figure out how to get it to link to my applets but not sure it does. I also don’t like the fact you can’t do demos on them. Armored games does almost all demos yet their games are everywhere…

–My understand of the search engines is that the more sites that link to you the higher the rank you are, so having another site, even one that competes with Javagametome is a good thing for developers.

–The problem is not java v flash per se. It is content. In other words people are going to flock to whatever is cool. Right now miniclips and other flash portals have a huge amount of fun games. You might want to seriously consider not competing generally with a flash portal as you will not do that will but rather compete specifically. In other words, capture one style of game and build your audience. It is going to be better to have 1000 action gamers than have 20 people that play every genre.

Anyway, I hope that helps. I guess my main question is what are your terms and can you set up the site to actually link back to our pages as an alt to you hosting the game?

keep up the good work.

#27

Hey. Game Jolt actually does allow demos. The text you are referring to has been removed from the site. It was actually a miscommunication. It was meant to mean that no demos for shareware games could be uploaded. This is the reworded text.

“Game Jolt is currently only accepting free games. Only games with no requirement for payment. If you submit a game that requires some form of payment, it will be removed. Incomplete and Work-In-Progress games are fine and are actually encouraged to be uploaded.”

Many of the games on the site are demos of games being worked on. That’s why we have game blogs, screenshots, videos, etc. It allows developers to release information on the game as it becomes available.

Oh, and Java Applets are coming soon. Very soon. =]

#28

[quote]…I most definitely meant that there is no java APPLET portal (name of the thread), in the same way that there are many, many flash portal…
[/quote]
hey!! shttt… :wink:

nice site, I hope it will have a lot of success

an idea :

something I would have done for such website is to embed all applet in my own loader / booter (something like the boot loader I provided in the Shared Source thread)

why ?

1 - because doing that you can : try / catch init and start applet methods and do appropriate things if they crash

2 - provide a smooth & homogeneous start for applet

3 - verify requiered java version for each applet on the fly before starting it (the booter work everywhere java 1.1) and provide a nice java updgrade gui if java version is not ok.

4 - better handle memory usage / freeing between Applet (booter create/destroy applet => memory is better freed)

5 - update / improve all your applets start at once if a day it is requiered

finally, using it does not requiere applet modifications

#29

Thanks!

Why not send in all applets? You can still show them elsewhere, unless that “elsewhere” restricts you. You own and are still completely in charge of your applets (only thing I hope for is to not change gameplay on this site, after it has migrated from incubator if it uses highscore list, since it will upset the gamers).

You are very right about centering and borders. I let the submitters send in the html code that “specifies the applet/game” and it can be set there by the game dev. That way devs can do something like this: http://www.javaonthebrain.com/java/warp15/ (Way old site, but somehow that cool “framing” hasn’t caught on.

I should however center and create a border by default. However, rounded borders around a square applet often looks stange/edgy, Maybe just very subtly rounded border.

#30

I am surprised that nobody has really :slight_smile: Some obviously think this no good, but I really think this will be good for us java indies.

Quite clear that I have to change that before showing to anyone not game dev!

I might just create a poll on that between all devs that has sent in applets later on. I think that it actually can show how good java is for online game dev, even though I don’t think the site should be preaching about it toward the gamers that come to the site.

#31

[quote]Why not send in all applets?
[/quote]
Well… A few of them a bit crap to be honest… 2-3 night jobs…

[quote]I should however center and create a border by default. However, rounded borders around a square applet often looks stange/edgy, Maybe just very subtly rounded border.
[/quote]

Yeah, the cool framing thing hasnt really caught on… So many sites just have a rectangular ‘ugly’ game sitting in the website which cant understand why.
What I have done for my site is have a html table (3x3 cells)… Applet code in centre cell, corner cells for the 10 pixel image edges, and the rest for fillers (using css to repeat background image along x and y axis). Or if ur a CSS guru, no html tables needed… :slight_smile:
So, for example…
http://www.stephenoreilly.net/RevolvoMan4K.html
now looks like:
www.stephenoreilly.net/applet_border.jpg

Slightly better IMO (even with my limited artistic ability)… Of course you may have issues with the applet backgrounds having different colours, so may still need a inner rectangular border…

#32

I think that such a site can work if you can make the average player unaware of the underlying technology used by the game they are playing. They do not care, nor do they want to care whether it is flash or java, just that the game works, is smooth and not crappy :stuck_out_tongue:

Also I agree with DzzD in what he suggests as it would make the user experience MUCH better than the default applet loading behavior. Happy users tell other users about “awesome” sites that they find. Unhappy users do the opposite!

#33

True about the first part, and regarding arcadepod… All the java games are just links to other sites, and they don’t look like the accept any home made stuff in a hurry, so sorry it doesn’t look too promising. Also 3rd newest game was added 2006…

Well the plan is to let the dev display a link to it’s own site, and to also get profit sharing. The profit sharing is just that money generated from ads on games4j.com is shared with the developer. This is optional, so one can skip this and not worry about it. The money will be used to improve and promot games4j instead (to generate more traffic). Any profit the dev makes from it’s own site or other sites are still the developers, and no sharing is done there.

I have it fairly simple in the beginning. The dev gets 40% if just plain applet, and 50% if highscorelist api is implemented. This is done by displaying the ads with the devs google adsense key 40% or 50% of the time. The % can be changed in the future, but I really hope to be able to improve it (even thoug I don’t think you can find any better offer on any other portal). I will not decrease it for anybody after game is submitted. This arrangement should make it quite simple for everyone, but other options will be looked into later.

Yes I think this can be good news for other java sites as well!

Well, I as a gamer don’t like it when I am sent around to another site when I want to play a game, and that in turn migh send me further and so on… I want the game to be played on that site, so I imagine many others are the same. You have no benefit of this site if nobody want’s to come back. On the other hand you get to add a link to your site, get cred for the game, get text feedback and highscore list, and revenu share, and I doubt this site will steal traffic from your site, but rather add to it. Tell me what the downside is :smiley:

I will try

#34

Thanks for the offer and suggestion!

As you have seen before here at the forum, I have been quite interested in your loader, and this site was the main reason. I did even try to use it, but it just hung on the spinning loader image and not info on what was going on ??? I haven’t spent much time on it yet, and it should be easy to add it late without effort. I will maybe send you what I did and you can tell me where I screwed up?

#35

Hey, VERY effective! Maybe someone (hint) should make a tool to generate borders for different applet backgrounds :wink: This is great for any applet anywhere!

#36

[quote=“jojoh,post:30,topic:33583”]
Absolutely. Content first - if all the games are good (whatever the delivery method) people will come!

#37

I think it’s a really good idea, but you need to let a designer loose on your site. It’s a little ugly (sorry).

Really great idea thou, and I wish you the best of luck.

#38

It is off topic, please remove it (it is not an obligation, it is up to you). I have nothing against you. I think that Woogley should never have spoken about one of my projects that has nothing to do with Java gaming portals here and I encourage the moderators to practice what they preach before accusing me.

I still agree with CyanPrime.

I still say that there are already portals for Java games even though they are not specialized in applets. I have nothing to add here. Good luck with yours, jojoh.

Yes, please read the thread about it if you need other information, I don’t want to be accused to derivate this thread anew.

It is not the behavior I expect from a moderator and CyanPrime already wrote some games, he suggested the use of EasySound, he is prolific :slight_smile: We both gave arguments. Your remark is inappropriate.

#39

Please stop with the negative tone, gouessej. The purpose of this forum is not to just promote your stuff. Even if someone does the exact same thing as you are, you’re going to have to just deal with it.

I’ve gotten several complaints, and I’m starting to get annoyed.

Woogley: Please don’t refer to people as copulating nutjobs.

#40

‘Conduct unbecoming an (JGO Strike Force)officer and gentleman’

Perhaps I should start sending some pm’s

On topic:
Seems to work nicely, though avoid making the pictures too blurry. Colours are alright here but I would add a additional thin line here and there to the other lines.