Chris Benjaminsen

During the initial on-boarding of the first apprentice Sebastian it became apparent that supporting and making sure apprentices are successful is quite a lot more work than I initially anticipated.

This is not a new theme, I notoriously underestimate the amount of time it takes to work with other people, especially in the startup phase where a lot of knowledge needs to change hands.

While I could see myself working with 2-3 apprentices, it was obvious that I would never be able to scale the company to the new grand aspirations and that I needed help. Especially as I fully plan on teaming up with one more apprentice every month from the 1st of January and forward.

So I hired a CEO.

Everyone go say hi to Brian Meidell who has a long history of successfully running big happy game developer companies. 

Brian actually joined FRVR in May and has been instrumental in the development of the much improved FRVR platform and our new apprentice on-boarding program, which has the goal of getting developers up and running as fast as possible.

I will still be in charge of strategy, game production, marketing and distribution while Brian will make sure that FRVR runs smoothly and that all apprentices are happy and getting the most out of joining FRVR.

As you might have noticed we recently released Lines FRVR a casual line drawing games where the goal is to connect lines while covering all dots on the board. While not incredibly unique we think this is a great implementation of the genere.

Lines FRVR is the first game developed by Sebastian under the FRVR Apprentice program. Note that this is a FRVR Core game, fully owned by FRVR and not one of Sebastians 50/50 game.

Lines FRVR is also the first game to showcase a few new and improved FRVR subsystems and shared components. 

Localisation

The localisation system has been improved to now also include overlay icons and all sidebar items.

At the same time we expanded the amount of languages we translate to to cover all iTunes app store languages, here is the full list: 

Arabic (ar), Danish (da), German (de), English (en-US), Spanish (es),  Spanish (Mexico) (es-MX), Finnish (fi), French (fr), Hindi (hi), Italian (it), Japanese (ja), Korean (ko), Norsk (Bokmål) (nb-NO), Dutch (nl), Polish (pl), Portuguese (Brazil) (pt-BR), Russian (ru), Swedish (se), Turkish (tr), Chinese (Simplified) (zh-Hans), Chinese (Traditional) (zh-Hant), Malay (ms), Portuguese (Portugal) (pt), Greek (el), Indonesian (id), Thai (th), Vietnamese (vi)

The new system now also makes it really easy to build localised screenshots and other assets for app stores.

Calendar

Lines FRVR also introduces a rewritten and re-worked calendar selector for choosing selecting the daily games. (A common feature of many FRVR games)

First and foremost the calendar was updated to use iPad pro sized graphics, allowing for an easy to to navigate high resolution experience on all devices.

Additionally the calendar now supports multiple complexity levels for each day, allowing us to target a broader audience with our games.

In my last apprentice program update, I revealed that I have actually been working with the first Apprentice since mid March and it’s past due that I officially introduce Sebastian A. M.

Sebastian is 22 years old, and has had the misfortune to be the guinea pig for both the FRVR apprentice program and technology platform. However, it’s only fair to say that he has excelled!

Since Sebastian joined FRVR in March, he has built 8 game prototypes, three of those being FRVR core games and 5 being 50/50 revenue share games. All under the FRVR publishing agreement. While not all prototypes have worked out, I expect we will have at-least five games built by Sebastian live on the FRVR platform by end of this year.

Even more impressive: Sebastian has, similarly to me, been traveling around the world while building these games. Since joining FRVR, his travels have taken him to Japan, China, Hong Kong, Japan and Thailand. I believe he is currently in Chiang Mai, but I am not entirely sure.

Sebastian in China, where he spent his days learning kung fu and writing games at night – I am envious of his work-life balance so early in life!

For anyone wondering, Sebastian receives a baseline of $4670 / month for the work he does for FRVR 24 hours a week - but if Sebastian keeps the direction he is currently moving in, I am confident that he will substantially supplement that income with revenue from his own FRVR games.

Sebastian can be reached at [email protected] or twitter @sebcph and he’s free to talk openly about his experience joining FRVR.

Let’s finish this post with more pictures Sebastian has shared in our Slack channel the past months.

I finally got around to returning to Hex FRVR updating the game to implement some of the new platform features I have been working on for the FRVR Apprentice program.

From a technical and pipeline perspective the most complex feature is the new fully integrated localisation flow which means that Hex FRVR is now live in 26 languages such as Korean, Hindi, Spanish, Norwegian and many more. Use this link to be send the version for your browser language.

As an experiment I also introduced a new token system, where players are awarded tokens when getting 2+ line combos. These tokens can in turn be used to unlock themes that visually changes the look of the game drastically.

Alternatively the themes can be unlocked on mobile with in app purchases ranging from $0.99 to $24.99 as yet another experiment.

It’s going to be interesting to see if these more complex features are worth the extra effort they require to make.

About a month ago, I announced the FRVR Apprintice program and the response has been amazing. More than 50 developers have contacted me, even more impressive is that they are pretty much all amazing developers easily able to fill the role.

As such, I feel I need to give a followup on the process.

As some of you might know, the idea of the Apprentice program is not new, and I have actually been working with the first Apprentice since mid Marts. More on that in a separate blog post very shortly. 

I was 100% sure I was ready to rumble when I announced the program publicly, however as part of getting the first apprentice developed game live, quite a few technical issues has appeared, and it’s clear I need a bit more time to clean up the platform before it’s reasonable having 3rd party developers building on the platform. 

Likewise, I made assumptions about cashflow per game that might turn out to be a bit to optimistic, limiting how fast I can safely onboard the next developers and be sure to be able to cover all associated costs.

Lastly, I need some better processes in place to manage developers as I seem to be the bottleneck in how fast the current Apprentice is able to work.

To date I have had 153 developers ask me if they can partner with, or come work for FRVR. Initially I blankly refused the idea as I had a had time seeing how 3rd party developers could fit into my erratic work schedule, or be happy working with the FRVR toolchain. 

However after being offered a 7 digit USD number for the company and platform in January, I started seriously working on models, and improvements to the FRVR platform, that would allow me to expand FRVR beyond a one man, for fun, company.

I am therefore happy to announce the FRVR Apprentice program!

TL;DR of below Get paid enough to live comfortably for creating FRVR games, 24 hours / week. In your free time create your own games under the FRVR brand with a 50/50% unlimited revenue share.

My major goals for the program are

Little to no risk for developers

I have now worked in the games industry for more than 15 years. During that time I have build multiple successful business and as a result hereof I am quite economically secure. This allows me to do crazy things such as build FRVR while traveling the world.

I like when people do crazy things, so I want to extend the same level of security to people who join FRVR.

Learning the FRVR toolchain will take time and I think believe should pay for that, rather than you taking that risk.

Unlimited passive income opportunity.

Little to no risk opportunities are not hard to come by - it’s called getting a job.

I want to program to give developers the opportunity to establish passive income without putting an upper limit on how much success you can have. 

Pass on knowledge

Creating successful games takes a lot more than simply making the game. I want the FRVR Apprentices to actually participate and get an understanding off what makes FRVR games successful.

The program details

FRVR will pay you enough to live comfortably

To be truly productive and creative you need to have basic economic security. Therefore FRVR will pay you enough to live comfortably whatever that means for you.

Clarification: FRVR will pay you the amount you need to live comfortably whatever that is. For someone living in in a major US city that would naturally be significantly more than someone living in a small village in Thailand.

The Apprentice runs for 6 months

Similar to pay, long term stability is important to be truly productive and creative. So the FRVR Apprentice program runs for 6 months, and can be extended indefinitely in 6 months periods.

You will build at-least one FRVR games every second month.

The FRVR platform makes it really easy to create a game as most of the heavy lifting, such as menu systems, social integrations and mobile build process, are already taken care off. You should therefor be able to fairly easily create a new game every two months.

You are expected to work 24 hours a week

I don’t really want to work more than 24 hours a week, so really can’t expect you to. Yes it’s still reasonable to do a game in two months while working ~24 hours / week.

You will be building games using the FRVR toolchain.

The success of FRVR is based on the ability to distribute games everywhere, which the FRVR toolchain makes easy to do. The toolchain is however not as great, polished, feature rich as many game engines. You will be locked into this toolchain, but you are free to come help make it better!

FRVR has full control and rights over all content!

I decide what games you work on and own all rights hereto. That’s evil, but keep reading, I hope it’s still a good deal.

You can make your own FRVR games in your own time

When not working 24 hours / week for FRVR you are free to make and publish your own games under the FRVR brand. 

You will receive 50% of the profit from such games forever. 

Yes even if you decide to stop working for FRVR.

You own the right to those 50% and can even sell it to someone else. 

Cost is defined as costs directly related to operating the games (Think hosting and app store fees). Things such as my hours worked on distributing the game is not a cost in this context.

Making your own games are fully optional, there is no requirement that you do any other work for FRVR than the ~24 hours / week.

After the first 6 months and learning the FRVR platform there is no requirement of working 24 hours for FRVR / week to be allowed to continue to create and publish your own FRVR revenue share games.

The games still have to be approved by me, as it needs to fit into the FRVR brand and product portfolio. Likewise I have a list of games that are already planned for FRVR. Your game cannot be on said list.

FRVR will publish your games with exactly the same amount of effort as any other FRVR game.

FRVR will pay for the production of art and music for your games.

You will get full access to all details about your games. How was it distributed, where did it make money, what worked - what did not.

Work from anywhere

FRVR does not have an office from where you can work, so you are free to work from pretty much anywhere.

No competitive agreement

Should you decide to leave FRVR you free to go do pretty much whatever you want afterwards, assuming you are not doing so based on assets you stole from FRVR. E.g. our platform code, distribution lists, game engine, etc.

About you

You are a software developer

I designed the program for individual software developers and have no idea how to make it work for anyone else. Including groups of people.

You have self published 2-3 games on iOS and Android.

The FRVR apprentice program is a partnership not employment. It’s therefore important that you are self motivating and able to take a project from idea to release pretty much on your own. Having released a few games yourself, is definite proof that you can do this.

You have experience writing games in HTML5, Unity or Flash. 

Developers familiar with either of these platforms will feel right at home in the XS game engine. Making getting started smooth and streamlined. This is not a hard requirement, if you write your game in java, swift or anything similar you are more than welcome to reach out as well.

You are able to travel for 2-4 weeks when first joining FRVR as an Apprentice.

Nothing beats being in the same room when getting started with a new platform. So FRVR will fly you out to get you started.

You like playing and making puzzle games.

You should never work on a game you don’t find fun, doing so is the quickest way to become demotivated. So if you really want to make endless runners or battle combat games the FRVR Apprentice Program is properly not the right match for you.

A few weeks ago Solitaire FRVR crossed 100 Million games completed, and I totally missed it! As of right now the numbers are as follows:

Total games completed: 118,142,423

Flip 1 games played: 66,667,505 (56.43%)

Flip 3 games played: 51,474,918 (43.57%)

Total games won: 45,304,873 (44.94%)

Flip 1 games won: 32,392,164 (48.59% of flip 1 played)

Flip 3 games won: 12,912,709 (25.09% of flip 3 played)

Total games lost:

Flip 1 games lost: 34,275,341 (51.41% of flip 1 played)

Flip 3 games lost: 38,562,209 (74.91% of flip 3 played)

Notice that this is games completed, and not just started!

Once again, I have been really bad at keeping up with the KPI updates. I honestly think that it’s because it’s not going as well as I would like, and I therefore dislike writing them.

Revenue

Anyway since the last KPI update on November 9th, which is 7 months ago, I still managed to make $142 551 USD broken down as follows:

Hex FRVR - $112 626 USD

Solitaire FRVR - $29 811 USD 

Mahjong FRVR - $114 USD

GO MAHJONG!

That’s $609 USD per day since the last update. Somewhat below my original goal of $822 USD per day and a far cry from my new $4109.60 USD per day goal.

It’s pretty clear that I am a hopeless optimist. Which is great motivation when making companies -- not so much when budgeting.

Plotting the lifetime 10 day running average of revenue we get the following graph:

It’s pretty clear that Hex FRVR is still dominating revenue. The large spike around the 1st of April 2016 is Hex going crazy on social media in Taiwan. However seeing as the revenue has dropped again it was sadly just a fad.

It was however the indicator that promoted me to start translating my games.

Total Revenue:  $142 551

Hours worked

Remember I value my work at $200 hour but do not actually pay myself as I would rather keep the capital in the company. The savings from my last job I set aside for traveling the world and building FRVR will run out in about 4 months. Forcing me to start paying myself salary soon.

I worked 394.04 hours, on FRVR, since the last KPI update. 

On average that’s 11 hours and 46 minutes per week on average. Which also helps to explain why FRVR has not moved forward faster. My goal here was 24 hours / week. More than twice what I actually worked.

Hours where used as follows:

Development > 241.89 Hours > ~$48 378

Improvements to the FRVR Platform

Updated XS render engine

Improvement to standard components

Improvements to application store wrappers

Mahjong FRVR

I build the entire game in this timeframe

Work on four yet to be released games

This should be interesting!

Administration >  27.97 Hours > ~$5 595

Accounting work related to year end review

Contract work for professional services

Marketing > 67.46 Hours > ~$13 492

Release of Mahjong FRVR

Activities associated with Hex FRVR’s success in Taiwan

Preparing yet to be announced game for release.

Mangement > 56.71 Hours > ~$11 343 This is a new category, introduced as I find myself spending an increasing amount of time working with other people as FRVR grows. This covers everything from 99Designs, hired consultants, musician and translators.

Music, Art and Translations for Mahjong FRVR

Music, Art and Translations for yet to be announced games

Overseeing consultants working on core components 

Total man hour cost: $78 088

Expenses

While I did not have a huge amount of costs from man hours, I fully make up for this in real world expenses, which has increased explosively as the company grew. All in all, I have had expenses for $68 353 since the last KPI update. 

As something new, I am pulling costs directly from the company bank account to ensure I give a 100% true image of expenses associated with FRVR.

Costs breaks down as follows:

Professional Services > $49 383.63 USD This is clearly the biggest post in the FRVR books, accounting for a whopping 72% of expenses. Even crazier is that no value has been had from this investment yet, as all of it has to do with future projects. Much much more on that over the next few weeks ;)

Sadly I already wrote off $20 000 USD as lost cost. I attempted to hire a 3rd party developer (which shall remain nameless) to clean up the FRVR render engine and improve our mobile export flow. Sadly the developer turned out to be, to put it mildly, less competent than expected and after 5 months -- 3 months over the deadline -- I basically had to throw away everything they created.

I really did have high hopes for the co-operation which would have been a $100k+ for them, if they had worked out.

It’s partially my own fault as I am bad at management and did not do weekly code reviews as I initially planned. 

As for getting my money back, I am confident that I could sue and win the case, but I am convinced that they do not have the money, so it would just cost me more money in lawyers that I would never recoup.

Hard lessons learned: 

Be 100% sure that the people you work with are competent

Pay less up-front 

Do frequent code reviews of 3rd party developers work.

Music & Sounds > $3,412.23 USD

Music and Sound for Mahjong FRVR

Music and Sound for one yet to be announced game

 Administration > $6,270.00

Certified accountants for completing 2015 books

Banking fees

Lawyers

Translations > $1,890.45

Translating Mahjong FRVR to 19 languages

Translation of a yet to be announced game to 21 languages

 Software & Services > $1,940.59

Google for Domains (Email, Calendar, Docs, etc)

Adobe CC 1 year subscription

crossbrowsertesting.com monthly membership x 4

 99Designs as separate line item > $2,816.64

Mahjong FRVR Design

Mahjong FRVR Logo Design

Mahjong FRVR App Icon Design

#1 unannounced game design

#1 unannounced logo design

#2 unannounced game design

#2 unannounced logo design

 Video production > $845.66

Yet to be completed video for Mahjong FRVR

Co-Working space rent > $948.46

2.5 months of co-working space in Sydney Australia when I was there earlier this year.

Hosting + Domains > $686.39

Securing a bunch of frvr.* domains for 3+ years.

CloudFlare

DigitalOcean

Misc minor testing with advertisement > $159.44  I am still occasionally testing if I can get cash flow positive acquisition flows to work. So far no such luck, but more on that later.

Total expenses: $68,353.49

Result since last KPI Update

All in all this brings the total result since the last KPI update to:

Revenue: $142 551 Expenses: -$68,352 My salary at $200/h: -$78 088

Result after expenses: $74 109 Result after my salary at $200/h: -$4 610

Effective hourly salary: $188.3

Lifetime numbers for FRVR

Revenue: $179 095 Expenses:  -$78 552 My salary at $200/h: -$242 281

Result after expenses: $95 372 Result after my salary at $200/h: -$146 909

Effective hourly salary: $78.72

Conclusion

While I have been incredibly bad at updating the blog over the past 5 months things are still moving forward with FRVR. I earned a bunch of money, did a big restructuring of the company, made new agressive growth plan and much much more. However I will leave that for future blog posts. Today we are talking about Mahjong FRVR

Play now

Mahjong FRVR is a move towards the more classical game direction FRVR was originally designed for. While Hex FRVR has been a huge success, I still think it’s to risky for FRVR to build that type of unique puzzle games. That’s something better left for later, when FRVR has 10+ games in the market.

As is the goal with all FRVR games, Mahjong FRVR has beautiful high DPI graphics, great sounds and music and can be played on pretty much any device.

For now, the game only has one visual look, but I expect to update the game with a system where they can unlock other visual looks fairly soon.

Self publishing & initial analytics

While it’s incredibly unlikely that Mahjong FRVR will be as big of a social hit as Hex FRVR. I do believe I have a much better understanding of how to release and grow the games than when I started FRVR -- I will be back in a few weeks to talk more about that and comparing it to the initial release of Solitaire FRVR. 

Here is a sneak preview of how the game is performing it’s first week after release.

Note here that I updated how I report page-views in the analytics integration. Therefore page-views now represent people navigating the game between the calendar view and playing levels.

This update was made mostly to allow me to use Google Analytics flow diagrams to analyse how users interact with the game. Here is how new users playing Mahjong flow through the game.

Technology

The game also marks multiple major milestones towards the reusability and maturity of the FRVR tool chain. A casual list of places where a lot of time was saved would be:

Standard UI components

Calendar view allowing you to play one new game per day.

Dialogue system

Menu sidebar

Integrations

Facebook Integration

Twitter integration

Backend storage integration

Social buttons in bottom of page integration (Now with localised social networks for China).

Kik messenger integration

Hidden technology

FRVR Render engine, now named XS

Sound and music subsystem

Wrapper for Android publishing

Wrapper for iOS publishing

Wrapper for Facebook App publishing

Wrapper for Google Chrome App publishing

Shared analytics integration

A cool result of this technology platform is that Mahjong FRVR was released almost simultaneously on all our major platforms. 

Play Mahjong FRVR online

Play Mahjong FRVR on iOS

Play Mahjong FRVR on Android

Play Mahjong FRVR on Facebook

Play Mahjong FRVR as Google Chrome App

Likewise platform wide optimisations now means that future releases of FRVR games will be even smaller. Mahjong is playable after only 380kb of gzipped download in the browser. 

Mahjong FRVR is also translated into 17 languages both on web and app stores. However rather than going for a solution where users have to select their language, this feature is so far hidden and language is automatically selected for the user based on operative system or browser language.

First, I think it’s very important to note here that almost all of the heavily lifting in the XS game engine is currently being provided by Pixi.js. Likewise I would not recommend others to write their own game engine unless they have very long term plans for it.

While it’s now a competitive advantage for FRVR to have a game engine that is deeply integrated with mobile wrappers, it has been a lot of work, which had likely been better spend on actually making games. 

When that is said, the XS game engine is now solid to the point where I am fairly confident that I am able to build 12 new games on-top of it in 2016 without working to much.

As for open sourcing the engine, I don’t see that happening as it turned out to be the most valuable piece of software FRVR owns. Likewise making it available for licensing to 3rd party’s would require me to spend a lot of efforts building up that business, something I don’t see as the best use of my time.

By far the best thing I ever did for FRVR was to set, what was then, almost impossible goals for FRVR. By publicly declaring that I was going to make a company that would earn me $250000 / year in profit while only working a maximum of 24hours / week I forced myself to focus on what was actually important to grow the company. 

While I have yet to actually reach my revenue goal I am getting pretty close. Even better I have done so while working substantially less than 24 hours / week on average so far. 

However, I noticed that I spend the past months focusing on small improvements to the distribution of Solitaire and Hex, with the aim of simply bumping my revenue above the $821.92 average daily revenue I need to be able to declare that FRVR is a success. While distribution and tweaks of existing titles can be fun, it’s not the best use of my time, and definitely goes against the $200 work hour goal

With that in mind, it’s therefore time to redefine the FRVR goals as follows:

Create $1Million / year profit run rate

Create at-least 12 new games before the end of 2016.

Work a maximum of 24 hours a week (3 days)

Continue to manage FRVR such that it can be run from anywhere in the world.

Just getting to a million dollars in revenue is going to be hard and getting a million in profit without a lot of overhead expenses is going to be impossible. I have therefore adjusted my daily revenue goal to $821.92 x 5 = $4109.60/day (1.5M/Year). 

Likewise building 12 games is not a small feat, it’s a new game on average per month. But I expect to be able to complete this by focusing on similar games and flavours of existing games. Think other solitaire flavours such as Spider Solitaire.

As for working a maximum of 24 hours a week I have that down to an art! 

The problem with the a post named How I Distribute My Games To Make Lots Of Mula is that what works for one game is not necessarily what works well for another. In the end it’s all down to how many users you can get to play your game and good distribution is more about throwing everything on the wall and see what sticks than it is a recipe that can be followed step by step.

Overall the most powerful thing that can happen to you is getting featured, either organically, by being in the download top-lists or inorganically, by interacting with each app stores review team.

I have yet to actually make the second happen, but have been lucky to have Hex FRVR have enough organic downloads to reach the top lists. So how did I get these organic downloads? By having games that are easy to share on social networks. 

This is why I make HTML5 games with a huge focus on cross browser device support and total download size. Looking at Hex FRVR, the game playable after only about 250kb of download via 9 HTTP requests. The result is an average time from clicking a link to actually playing in less than 3 seconds for pretty much anywhere in the world.

(The lighter the color, the faster the game load time)

The secound most important source of traffic is organic discovery via search or app store recommendation (E.g. related games in the iTunes App Store). Here pretty much all the stores work the same, you proportionally get as much promotion as how well your game performed compared to other games in your category or search term. Some platforms are simplistic, looking at only your average rating from users. Others such as the Facebook web platform also look at average session time and recency. 

In short, unless you have a game that is actually pretty good compared to the games in your category, you won’t get a lot of traffic this way. (This is where it actually matters if you make a good game, you wanna be at-least in top 10%). Note here that what you might deem as quality typically has less to do with what the users actually want to play. The users won’t care much about the depth of your gameplay if your game is very hard to get started on initially. 

The 3rd most important source of traffic, in my opinion is your ability to be on multiple platforms. It’s not that hard making $5/day on one platform, and so far I found it easier to make $5/day more by adding one more platform than it is to grow the game with the same amount on one platform. (This at-least holds true as until you covered all the obvious major platforms).

And now I am pretty sure your thinking Dude I already know this, whats wrong with you, just giving a wage answer when I ask or specifics? To which I can only reply, there is no magic bullet. It’s very much down to every individual game.

Essentially you have to:

Identify the user who are likely to play your game

Figure out where those users go on the internet

Figure out how get those places to promote your game.

I find that step #3 to be the hardest, at-least when working with games that does create enough revenue to allow for a paid user acquisition flow.

For Hex FRVR I was super lucky, a Reddit post was enough to kickstart the social distribution to the point where the game entered into the download top-lists on the iTunes App Store. Much more information. For Solitaire FRVR I was not that lucky and all traffic was fairly painstakingly build by releasing on as many platforms I could, then write literally hundreds of emails to people with traffic that might show it to their users. 

The only big exception to the above is traffic you control yourself. For instance, imagine you have 25 medium sized games live across 5 platforms each. Now you are at a size where you can redirect users, already playing your games, to your new games. Thereby pushing your games into the top-lists inorganically yourself. (This is where the publishers have the advantage, and why it’s fairly easy for King.com to get into into the top-lists). Similarly it’s beneficial to make sure you have as many ways of talking to your previous users as possible. Think Facebook Pages, Email newsletters etc.

Quite a few people have asked what tools, software, and online services I use to build FRVR, so here is the comprehensive annotated list:

3rd party software

In this section I purposefully neglected to add simple applications that I deem obvious. Think; twitter app, Skype, etc.

Sublime Text 2 My default editor for HTML, JavaScript, Bash, and any other language that does not come with a dedicated tool chain.

Xcode Used for building the iOS mobile wrapper.

Android Studio used for building the Android mobile wrapper, including flavours (Amazon, etc)

Adobe Photoshop Used for creation of in-game/app store assets, banners, etc.

Adobe Illustrator I pretty much only use this when receiving assets from other artists.

Excel I currently use this to create my time tracking XLS documents. I guess I should be using Google Docs, but old habits die hard.

FileZilla While I have automated build and release scripts, I fall back on FileZilla when I need to access the server for less automated tasks. A good example would be, when setting up a new game that requires me to setup a new sub domain name on frvr.com.

Tools

Httpd (Apache Webserver) used to run a local web server, such that I can test the games as if they where online (Helps prevent domain security issues etc)

Node.js My build scripts that create unique flavours of the game for each platform is written in Node.js

pngquant Used to compress PNG images of my games to make the download size smaller.

UglifyJS Currently used to compress my JS source. I am however looking to switch to google closure compiler.

ADB I find myself using ADB directly quite often to debug issues, look at Android logs.

Safari / Chrome Mentioned here as I use their remote debugging capabilities to debug the games, when they run in a WebView on iOS and Android respectively.

SSH Yep I once in a while SSH to the server to do apache restarts, etc.

Services

FRVR would be completely impossible without the huge amount of online services that exist on todays internet. As I access these quite frequently, I have them nicely linked up on a local Dashboard which is also my browser start page.

Here is a screenshot

Let’s take them from the top. (Order does not signify importance... I ordered them mostly to be visually pleasing.)

Revenue - Ads

Facebook Audience Network On both iOS and Android my first choice of advertisement provider is Facebook Audience Network. For now they give the highest eCPM, so they are staying. (Except in China, where I default to Google AdMob)

LifeStreet My advertisement provider for Facebook and Google Chrome Apps. So far they have been a great partner and I can highly recommend them.

Google AdSense Used for monetisation in a few of my user acquisition experiments on web. As I am currently not running such experiments, it represent neglectable revenue.

Google AdMob My fallback ad provider for mobile advertisement. surprisingly where I make most of my money as Hex FRVR is huge in China.

Ad4Game ad provider used for Facebook ads before I switched to LifeStreet Media.

Revenue - Ads

iTunes Connect Micropayment revenue dashboard for my iTunes Connect account. Currently representing neglectable revenue from “disable ads” in Hex FRVR.

Google Play Micropayment revenue dashboard for my Goole Play account. Currently representing neglectable revenue from “disable ads” in Hex FRVR.

Advertisement - While currently not running, I have done quite a lot of experiments in user acquisition. They should be self explanatory.

Google Adwords

Facebook Ads

Yahoo Gemini

Bing Ads

StartApp

SEO - While not yet a major source of traffic to me, SEO is very important for the long term goals of FRVR.

Yandex webmaster Webmaster tools for the Yandex search engine.

Google webmaster Webmaster tools for the Google search engine

Bing webmaster Webmaster tools for the Bing/Yahoo search engine.

Analytics - Generalised analytics overview. Each individual game also contains this section for per game specific analytics links.

Google Analytics All of FRVR is hooked up to the same Google Analytics tracking ID (Including the mobile games). This is personal preference that allows me to get a view of the total size of FRVR at a glance. So far I have been really happy with this decision. Live is simply a quick link to the Google Analytics lice section.

Cloud Flare Link to the analytics section of cloud flare.

Youtube Link to the analytics section for the FRVR YouTube channel.

Services - It basically covers all productivity services that I make use off.

Use Response Customer feedback tool allowing users to give feedback, submit bugs etc for FRVR games

Google Docs I have a fair amount of company information stored in Google Docs. More on that later, as the dashboard has a dedicated Google Documents section.

Dropbox Pretty much all of FRVR is in Dropbox. Allows for easy backup, sharing and much more.

Asana I keep everything from overall goals, future plans and simple todos in Asana.

Slack Relatively new addition to the dashboard. Allows for team communication for when I work with 3rd party developers.  

Engineering - Stuff related to hosting and running the service itself.

Digital Ocean FRVR is basically hosted on a small Digital Ocean droplet.

Cloud Flare CDN caching of FRVR website. Handles 99% of the traffic, allowing me to use a small droplet on Digital Ocean.

Parse Highscores and progress are stored using the Parse API for the Facebook versions of my games.

Social

Tumbler news Official FRVR news page (Settings icon links to settings)

Facebook Page Official FRVR Facebook page (Analytics icons is a quick link to analytics for this page)

Google+ Official FRVR Google+ page

Twitter Official Twitter page

3rd Party Services

99designs Design service I used for logo and Hex FRVR icon design.

Upwork (Formerly oDesk) Classical outsourcing service. I have made fairly heavy use of this for collecting information such top websites that will accept HTML5 games and similar.

Google Documents - I use Google Docs mostly for shared spreadsheets and occasionally for specification documents. The four on this list are just the ones I use the most.

FRVR FB Ad Tracking Resulting tracking of my FB advertisement experimentation

Distribution Overview Huge document with progress and status of my distribution efforts for all my games.

5k Games Websites As the name implies, a list of about 5k games websites that accept 3rd party developed games.

FRVR Tracking Generalised advertisement result tracking.

Other

Youtube channel Direct link to the FRVR Youtube channel.

FRVR Website Take a guess?

Per game Dashboard Besides the generalised services, each game also have it’s own section on the Dashboard. This mostly represents a full list of app store listings and distribution channels where I can actually change things. However one service which deserves to be mentioned here is App Annie which I use for analytics on how well the Android and iOS versions of my game does globally.

Services I no longer use - Bonus section! Stuff I tried that did not work for me.

Hootsuite Here I got really sucked into the hype. Branded as a social media management system, I was sure this was exactly what I needed to manage the social channels I have. Turns out it’s pretty much completely useless. Not something I would every recommend to anyone. (No link, as they do not deserve the SEO) 

Uservoice before Use Response, I used Uservoice. While a great service it’s ridiculously expensive for what it is. Prompting me to switch.

1st party software & Tools

During the time FRVR has been operating, a reasonable big amount of internal software has been developed to make it easier to build more games or run the company.

XS game engine Custom FRVR game engine, specifically engineered to have a build once, run everywhere model that only require one set of assets regardless of screen size and resolution. The engine currently uses a fork of version 2.2.3 of Pixi.js as the underlaying render layer. (Something I am actively working on replacing, more on that later).

XGame wrappers Application wrappers for the games, allowing the games to be released on platforms such as iOS, Android, Google Chrome, etc. Today these wrappers tie into the XS game engine to provide improved performance and a more native feel on their respective platforms.

Build script Small software package that builds slightly diffrent flavours of the game for each specific platform and compresses and combine assets and code. 

Release script Automated release script to push the online hosted versions of the game to the live environment.

Custom modules To some extend FRVR games are based on the same structural template. Allowing me to skip a lot of work when developing a new game. Examples include but are not limited to:

Sidebar which I will be using as the primary navigation model in all the games.

Menu system for overlays, popups, etc.

Social sharing Unified custom API for using the best social sharing in each territory.

Open Source Libraries

Today I filed a complaint with apple for 8 clones of Hex FRVR. While I am fundamentally ok with someone re-implementing the game, it’s really sad to see that most of the clones straight up steal assets from the original game, including but not limited to App Icon, Sounds and Graphics.

Out of the 11 clones I was able to find with casual searching, only 3 of them did not seem to have stolen any assets from the original game.

While I have handled these initial 8 on my own, it’s clear I need some form of more formal process and professional help to keep the pirated asset clones down.

I am ridiculously bad at writing KPI updates! I think it’s because it’s really boring and feels like propper work. It’s been three months since the Last KPI Update and FRVR as a company has moved significantly since then. 

Let’s dive in, staring with revenue. 

Since the last update on on July 23, Solitaire FRVR has made $16,626.87 and Hex FRVR has made $14,745.45 for a total of $31,372.33 worth of revenue. Out of that $19,244.27 was generated the past 30 days. Let’s graph the daily revenue:

The green parts of the graph represents Solitaire FRVR with minimal fluctuations and stable revenue since July. More impressive is the blue parts representing Hex FRVR which has been an instant success since day one of distribution.

The daily revenue is quite noisy, so let’s do a one week running average to get a better sense of how it’s going:

Doing so it’s becomes clear that the original release of Hex FRVR had already peaked and was slowly declining. This is quite diffrent from the release of Solitaire FRVR which have had a more stable revenue curve after it’s release. The small jump in revenue the past few days is a result of me re-releasing Hex FRVR as 2.0.0, an effort that was sadly nowhere near as successful as the original release and intended. I am however negotiating with major publishers in South America and Asia to release Hex FRVR, so there is still some future growth potential. Oh, there will also be a version 3.0.0 with many new cool features!

In the end I am crossing my fingers that I can keep daily revenue above $600, which is not unreasonably far from my $822/day goal.

Breaking down the mobile revenue per platform we get:

Android: $4547.68 at $0.36 RPM

iOS $16389.44 at $0.94 RPM

While the total revenue has increased the RPM is dropped significantly. Compared to the previous KPI, I only make 20% of the RPM on Android and 16% on iOS. This is mainly due to Asia driving the majority of the Hex FRVR traffic.

Total revenue: -$31372

Now let’s have a look at expenses

Since the previous update I have spend 228.40 hours working on FRVR. Or about 14.5 on average per week. While still not 24 hours per week, I have most definitely broken my upper limit rule the past month, where I worked at-least 35 hours / week to replace Cordova from my pipeline. The goal being to get the most out of the current success of Hex FRVR. Going forward, it looks like I have a minimum of 2-3 more hard weeks before I will be able to slow down and really enjoy the world travels again. The plan is to use this winter skiing in Canada and France!

Administrative > 3.72 Hours > -$743

Misc paperwork including NDA’s, contracts and tax documents. 

Marketing > 75.55 Hours > -$15110

SEO and ASO updates for both Solitaire FRVR and Hex FRVR

Wrote 17 updates on this blog, including this one.

Hex FRVR release of 1.0.0 and 2.0.0

PR outreach with the aim of having articles written on Hex FRVR with some succes

VentureBeat - PCGamer - CNET - The Maine Edge - Yahoo Tech - The Independent + Quite a lot of asian publications.

Research >  0.5 Hours > -$100

Limited research into better analytics solution. For now I have given up on this.

Development > 148.63 Hours > -$29727

Created Hex FRVR

Cleanup of framework part one, including full rewrite of the following components:

Sidebar

Cross promotion

Mobile integrations

Misc updates to frvr.com

Replaced my manual release system with a release script.

Improved my CDN hosting solution.

Cleanup of framework part two. (Replacing Cordova)

Expenses > $1995

$169 - Hex FRVR Icon Design from 99designs at discounted rate.

$1000 - Sound and Music design for Hex FRVR

$100 - Voices for bonuses in Hex FRVR

$ 726 - Misc professional services to help fix or improve the FRVR toolchains.

Total expenses: -$47675