August 31st, 2007 Luke
The Brick Game is nearly finished. I’m just doing some of the final copy writing and then I’ll be ready to release it to the public, take some screenshots, and update my portfolio with it.
It’s an experiment. Users get a single brick to contribute to building something. They can get more by either referring users, or buying them for $3 CAD each.
Once they contribute enough bricks, a building gets built. That building will unlock more gameplay for them. The first building that they get is a path - it will allow them to go adventuring and encounter monsters. I think that the second building will be a healer’s hut, so that they can recover from their adventuring.
But it’s an experiment. Right now all a user can do is contribute bricks, refer people, and buy bricks. It will take 100 bricks for them to make the Path available.
Will they make it? Who knows. But it will be interesting to watch.
Posted in Brick, contributions | No Comments »
August 22nd, 2007 Luke
I’ve been building the template for a new project lately, and it will have Adsense built into the sidebar for users who aren’t logged in. However, having the Adsense box aligned to the left side of the sidebar just looked…ugly. I wanted the Adsense box centered within the sidebar.
After googling, I was told to use absolute positioning to align my Adsense box. The only problem is, I couldn’t seem to actually center the box using absolute positioning.
Then I tried floating the box. That didn’t work either; how do you float something and center it?
Then I stumbled upon the ever-so-handy text-align attribute. I put my Adsense code inside a div:
<div id='ads'>
<!-- Adsense Code Here -->
</div>
And then put this inside my CSS:
div#ads {text-align:center}
And…voila! A centered google adsense box, with minimal extra markup.
Posted in adsense, css, design, monetizing | No Comments »
August 21st, 2007 Luke
Each time I finish a project, I sit back and pat myself on the back before moving on to the next project. And every second time or so that I finish a project, I wonder if there’s any money in this. Adsense, in my case, has had an absolutely dismal return: I’ve made about $4.50 since putting it onto my projects(and blog) in April.
But what about Paypal? I recently explained how to implement donation gifts using Paypal, and that’s something that I’m thinking of doing for my next couple of projects.
What about both?
Right now I’m working on another game that’s sort of an experiment; I want to see how many users will sign up and contribute, if that’s all they can do for now. I also want to try and make some money off of the game. One idea is to charge for extra contributables: something like $3 for another of the item, if a user has money to burn and really wants to contribute more. I could, alternatively, just put adsense into the sidebar. But what about both?
I could have Adsense in the sidebar when a user isn’t logged in. If a user is logged in though, they’d be able to support me through donating money. That means that random visitors might notice the adsense, but users who were constantly coming by wouldn’t be pestered by it - they’re usually not the ones who click on Adsense banners anyway.
I’m still designing the template for this new project, but a combination of Adsense/Paypal makes sense to me for the sake of monetizing.
Posted in Project, monetizing | No Comments »