Games by Andrex

4kg: Prototype enhancements and a rant on the Chrome Web Store

This is just a notice to say that I am going to be supporting and enhancing the 4kg demo/beta, 4kg: Prototype, going forward. In addition to a couple small patches, usually of the 1.0.x variety, I will be pushing a large “2.0” update in the near-future. It will contain the following enhancements:

• Ladder fixes (aka “ladder locking.”)
• Percentages on the main menu actually reflecting the state of the save file.
• World and level select menus. Well, only one world will be selectable and the rest will be grayed out (just like the levels you haven’t beaten.) This will allow you to jump in and out of levels to hunt for any orbs you’ve missed.
• Speaking of, the floating white orbs will actually do something: unlock the first cutscene of the game.
• Pause menu fix, allowing you to go back to the main menu by pressing the Esc key.
• Fixes for game objects being in front of the player and HUD, maybe.
• Cloud game saves, maybe. An extension sync API is currently a priority level 1 feature and is likely to make it into Chrome 13 or 14, so I’m considering just waiting for that.

Now this isn’t really “special attention” just for 4kg: Prototype, as it’s what will be yielded from working on the real 4kg. I just think it would be good to roll these changes into Prototype, so that it more accurately reflects what the final version will be like.

As for 4kg: Prototype right now, it’s doing somewhat decently on the Chrome Web Store. I didn’t expect it to set the charts on fire overnight, so I’ve been pleasantly surprised so far. It’s currently sitting at 49 users, 63 weekly installs, 10 ratings (4.5-star average), and 7 reviews (all of them short, but positive.) I’m recording this data daily for personal reasons and will probably do a thorough review of it in the future.

Still, I can’t help but feel it could be doing better. I really think there’s demand there for a packaged app and HTML5 game in one, as I’ve read comments on all the top games and most of the complaints arise from either Flash or the fact it’s “just a bookmark.” I hope there is demand. I’m not staking my well-being on 4kg’s performance (it is free and open source, after all), but its popularity could be used as a gauge for other game developers considering HTML5 or the Chrome Web Store. (Although I could be suffering from delusions of grandeur.)

I have some grievances against the Chrome Web Store (believe it or not), and one of the bigger ones is exposure of new apps. There’s no real “what’s new” section for any of the app types, which is a big issue. It basically means your app will only be discovered by people you point to its link, until it’s been approved by the Google brain trust to enter the inner sanctum of the “Featured” section. At that point, an app’s user count is multiplied by tens of thousands. There’s too large a disparity between featured and non-featured apps, I think.

Still the Chrome Web Store is new and there’s a lot of reasons to hope it gets better as time goes on. It took two and a half years for the Android Market to really start taking care of business, too. Although I hope it doesn’t take the Chrome Web Store that long.

-Andrex