WW-Mile 1 - Patch 1.2

So after almost a week of feedback and play I've released patch 1.2 on Kongregate (mainly from the donate button not working)

Donate button

This totally caught me by surprise. I was expecting virtually no one to donate, and I've had a bunch of people asking me why the button isn't working (on kongregate) as well or why it only allows you to donate $1.00.

The patch includes a quick fix to clean this up on all sites, but I obviously have to revamp the button a lot more. Donations in this case are often from well-wishers (which is fine by me!) But I've always been for providing easy ways for people to donate or get something of value from something I provide.

Forcing stuff down people's throats, baiting and switching, and anything else that destroys goodwill is bad. And thats always the stuff I want to avoid like the plague.

Moving ahead I will have to implement some of Moochi Ads on the game as well. I'm not exactly a fan of this idea. But I do have to make moves to ensure I can pay the most basic of my living expenses while I work on games. This is also a requirement to post on Moochi Games site.

Quality and Numbers


The number of plays for Weirding Wood 1st mile were very low. I was expecting very low but this was even a bit those expectations. I was hoping the game would rate 3/5 stars on Kong. Instead it's sitting around 2.6. I think the length of the game fed this as well. There's a huge difference going up one star on Kongregate. From 2-3 is the difference between hundreds of plays and thousands. From 3-4 goes from thousands and tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands. And the closer you get to 5 the more in the millions you get.

In other words higher quality exponentially makes you more money.

Higher quality also takes exponentially more work to do. So I'm getting there.

Week of Feedback

I put this out early and as a demo to test the waters and get these kind of numbers. In other words, the feedback was far more important than the numbers.

Speaking of feedback, it has been great! There's been a lot of great feedback on the art, unfortunately my artist has some new time commitments and won't be able to do any work for me for some time at least. I have to start scouting for a new artist. It's a shame, but these things do happen. Fortunately for me, there's a lot of coding work ahead for me to to.

I'm just finishing up project planning to push for a release by late December. The one thing I won't be able to handle in a patch is getting the large boss creatures to properly navigate the rocks at the end of the game. It's unfortunate but this is a larger problem for me, as I'm new to pathfinding and collision. I will have it fixed for 2nd mile, there's just no easy patch for me to fix this first version unfortunately. :-(