The more I look back at it, the more I realize that 2009 was really a pretty bad year for me. I saw huge business growth from 2004-2007, and 2008 was a decent year overall, But in 2009 things really slowed down.

While part of this was due to things beyond my control, such as the effects of UEGIA creeping in and the economic recession, the fact is that I had forgotten about my goals in the first place, which did not help me to focus my efforts.

I know that everybody always thinks that the next year will be better, but in this case I think it really is true. As I wrote in my previous post: “If 2009 was my development year, then 2010 will be my marketing and traffic year”.

Tyler’s Work Goal List for 2010

Here are the 5 goals I would like to achieve by the end of 2010. If I can meet 3 of them, I’ll be very happy and 2010 will have been a great year. I have listed them in order of ascending difficulty (not in the order of which I would like to achieve most):

1. Revitalize PokerForums

Poker Forums had been my biggest money maker since its genesis in 2004. 2009 was the first year in which it slid down to #2 (narrowly). Similar to Movie-Vault, I have neglected the site for too long, and need to give much need attention again.

I did work very hard on it for about 5 weeks around April, but that didn’t help things all that much.

In 2010 I hope to bring the energy back into the forums and bring it back into the quality poker forum it once was, in both activity and poker-related discussion.

I want to port the current setup and design to the brand new vBulletin Suite 4.0, streamline the advertisements for better advertiser exposure, clean-up dead areas of the site and/or port them over to the new custom pages within vBulletin Suite, and really encourage members to take advantage of the brand new blogging feature.

I also hope to get grow the content and activity on the site, perhaps by setting up weekly poker tournaments and bringing back news to the site, hiring freelance writers.

For comparison reasons when I will reflect on this goal in 1-year’s time, the site is currently getting 13,000 unique hits a month and has 250 active members. 

2. Grow Movie-Vault to 100k Unique Hits Per Month

While I’m adding and implementing a few new improvements and features to Movie-Vault, the revamp development is pretty much done and working well. With all the technical and development issues taken care of, the site now needs content and traffic.

Movie-Vault is currently receiving around 20,000 unique hits a month, and so my goal for 2010 is to reach 100,000 unique hits per month which is a 5x increase in traffic.

This works out to 3,333 a day, which is really quite a lot, even for a movie review site, so it won’t be the easiest goal to meet, but I certainly think it’s attainable.

My plan of attack is to first contact all the previous staff writers that have since vacated the site and see if any are willing to come back to contribute to the site. I will also then invite some of the seasoned forum members to come on board as movie reviewers and/or news posters.

If I struggle with finding enough staff through those two ways, then I will hire some freelance writers to post reviews and news (mainly news) on the site. For any hired staff, I will have them submit their posts to various social media sites such as Digg, Reedit, etc. and also require them to add photos, wallpaper, trailer links, etc. to their reviews, and have them submit their reviews as external link content to sites such as IMDb.

I will encourage link-bait type posts, such as top-10 movie-related lists and Hollywood gossip.

For traffic, I will be sending out a newsletter to all the existing members of the site, notifying them of the brand new revamp, and simply reminding them about us since many would have long forgotten.

I also plan on doing some PPC marketing, using an affiliate offer landing page to help offset the advertising costs. I did this on another site before, and it’s actually a fantastic little trick if you have a quality website. For those who aren’t interested in the affiliate offer, many will stick around and register on your website.

I may also invest in some SEO backlinking and directory packages.

3. Hit Average of $100+/day Profit from PPC Affiliate Marketing

A “leftover” goal from 2009, my PPC affiliate marketing goal in 2010 is still to average a profit of $100 a day.

While it sounds relatively easy, it has been a constant struggle for me. I have certainly put a lot of time into my efforts thus far, so it’s not a lack of discipline.

I plan to keep cracking at it in 2010. I may try some new traffic sources that I hadn’t before, and may try another tracking tool, but my main plan of attack is to simply not give up. We’ll see if that’s enough to crack the $100 barrier.

4. Finish RobotWarz and Average $500/month Income

While this may sound pretty easy to achieve, I listed it as the 2nd hardest goal for good reason.

RobotWarz is already way behind schedule. We were off to a great start, but lost a ton of time while looking for the designer. We now have the designer, but things are still progressing very slowly. Game development is sure expensive and timely.

After finishing the game and getting it launched out into the gaming webosphere, it’s going to need to start bringing in the bucks to help me recoup the investment and then hopefully profit thereafter.

I know I have a full year to finish the site and then grow it to generate $500 a month, but this will be no easy task. I plan for the monthly subscription price points to be very low, ranging from $3-$25. If we assume a median subscription price of $10, I’d still need 50 subscribers to hit the $500 mark.

If 5% of the active members/players convert to a paid membership, it would require 1,000 active members a month to reach my goal. That’s quite a bit, which is why this goal will require a lot of focus and savvy marketing if I am to make it.

5. Earn $150,000+ in 2010

This is also another “leftover” goal from 2009. My goal is to generate $150,000 gross in 2010. I’m making the number gross and not profit because I wouldn’t be able to get that number until I do my taxes in the spring (making my results post ineffective).

The only thing that may skew this number is my PPC Affiliate Marketing, since I’m only making a tiny margin at the moment. This month I’ve spent $5,000 on my campaigns which works out to $60,000 a year, effectively meaning that I would only need to generate $90,000 to achieve this goal.

Heh… this is why it’s never good to use the gross amount… but as I mentioned above, I won’t be able to find my net income until my taxes are done due to just how many income sources and business expenses I have.

Although, I just took a look, and I only brought in $26,000 from my PPC affiliate marketing campaigns in 2009, so I think the $150,000 goal is still a tangible goal to use.

No More Set and Forget

As unveiled in my previous post, I didn’t meet a single goal from my 2009 list. This was largely due to simply forgetting all about them.

Dictionary.com defines goal as: “the result or achievement toward which effort is directed; aim; end.”. Therefore, my goals were really “desires” or “wishes” rather than actual goals.

I plan to change that for 2010 by actively reminding myself of my goals and their current status.

David Pagotto and Josef, two of the commentors in my previous post, reminded me to how important and effective it is to constantly remind yourself of your goals. Simply setting them and then forgetting them makes them pretty much pointless, as you’re not doing anything to “direct the effort”.

So, the next day I went out to Staples and bought a whiteboard (well, actually mine’s gray/metallic) and placed it in my office next to my computer and right below my calendar. I was contemplating placing it right above my monitors so that I would constantly see it, but it’s a bit of an awkward spot, and I like where it is now so I can make little notes and updates while still sitting in my chair.

Here are some photos of my new whiteboard in my office with my 2010 goals listed on it:

It’s a magnetic board too (those two round things in the bottom right corner are magnets), so I may print out a couple small photos of homes that are outside my price range, just to provide added incentive and drive.

I know that’s there’s a lot more I could be doing for goal setting, such as breaking up goals into smaller steps or timelines, but I don’t want to go “overboard”. I think this whiteboard with my goals will be a constant reminder of them, so at least I can’t say I forgot about them in one year’s time.

Well, here’s hoping to a good year in 2010. I’m curious what I’ll be writing when I revisit them in a results post a year from now.

I have set a list of yearly work-related goals for myself for several years now. In my Goals for 2009 post, I set 4 very specific goals I hoped to achieve in 2009. This post will revisit those goals in detail to see which of them I met and of which I fell short.

To be honest, I usually forget about these main work goals I set for myself all throughout the year usually until when it’s time to write another of these posts. While this can be self-defeating and rather pointless in some ways as it’s important to constantly remind yourself of your goals if you intend to conquer them, it’s also simply a great way to measure your successes throughout the year as well as to remind yourself what you still need to work on, even if that’s only once or twice a year

If you haven’t set any long-term goals for yourself (I consider 1-2 years long term when it comes to the Internet) I highly recommend you do. Most successfully ambitious people (in any industry) recommend it for a multitude of reasons; whether it be a subconscious effect or a daily motivating reminder, simply setting goals for yourself will bring you one step closer to actually achieving them.

Before I start on the actual list, I wanted to reflect on one goal that actually didn’t make the list, but only because I had procrastinated about this particular goal for so many years that I ultimately decided that it would never get done. In fact, this goal was on my previous list from other years.

That goal was to completely revamp Movie-Vault.com, which I actually managed to do just before the year came to a close. This was a big undertaking in expenditure, complexity, and scope, which is why I had always brushed it off as just too onerous a project to take on. But, I did get it done, but it feels good because it came out as well as I ever could have imagine, if not better.

I only now have to market and drive traffic to it again, which will probably be one of my goals for 2010.

With that being said, here are the official 4 goals I set for 2009:

1. Reach 4,000+ RSS Readers on my Blog

Result: Fail

My RSS is currently 2,313 as I write this, so this was an obvious failure.

Looking back at my original post, I said: “Now that I am at 2,000 RSS readers, my goal for 2009 is to double that and hit 4,000.” which means that I actually only gained 300 new RSS subscribers during the whole year. This is a radically slow growth, but I’m honestly not too perturbed by it.

I purposely stopped focusing on monetizing and growing my blog in 2009 so that I could focus on other projects. I honestly think that I could have met this goal if I had wanted to, but the truth is that I really don’t care about RSS numbers nearly as much as I used to. For one thing, RSS seemed to be much more of a growing trend in 2007-2008. I think now that everybody uses Twitter, RSS has been overshadowed.

Now, that doesn’t mean that RSS isn’t still a pretty good indicator of popularity, as most of my colleagues have seen a great growth in RSS during 2009, just not me

2. Hit $100+/day Profit from PPC Affiliate Marketing

Result: Fail

In my my original post, I wrote: “I consider this to be my hardest goal for 2009” which ended up being all too true.

I restarted my foray into affiliate marketing when I returned from my trip to the Philippines during the last week of July and actually did work very hard at it. But no matter how much I work on it, I just can’t seem to pull in those hundreds of thousands of dollars that so many super affiliates seem to be able to blind-folded.

The challenge of it all is probably what keeps me going. I’ve yet to make anything note-worthy from affiliate marketing, but that only agitates me to persevere, even though I don’t really seem to be going anywhere.

While I didn’t make this goal, I did come close. A month ago I netted $233.39 which was the most I’ve ever made from affiliate marketing in a single day.

And last month in November I profited $1,000 which was my best month ever:

In fact, it was twice as good as my previous best month, so at least I’m showing some level of progress, even if minimal.

But my goal was to average $100 a day in profit, not just hit $100, so ultimately I didn’t achieve this goal.

3. Hit $10,000+/month Profit from my New Project

Result: Fail

When I made this goal, PublisherChallenge was still being developed which is why the goal says “New Project”. I had incredible ambition and high hopes for this project which explains the bold goal.

I failed this goal too, but I didn’t too too terribly. In February, PublisherChallenge made around $9,000+ profit, the majority of which was from MarketLeverage.

I just did a quick audit, and PublisherChallenge brought in approximately $35,000 profit for the year which works out to just shy of $3,000 a month on average. So, just like the goal above, I only managed to reach a third way to my goal.

Also, PublisherChallenge did its best during the beginning of the year. It has slowed down a lot during the past few months, and January will be the first month when there will be no competition running at all (unless I manage to scrape something together at the last minute).

4. Earn $150,000+ in 2009

Result: Fail

Yes, yet another fail.

My last goal for 2009 was to make $150,000+. I have so many different income sources so I never really know how much I made for the year until I do my taxes, but I know that I didn’t make $150,000, not even gross.

$150,000+ works out to $12,500 a month or $410 per day, so I was largely betting that I was going to make the above goal in order to achieve this one.

2009 = Epic Fail

Overall, I believe that 2009 was my worst year in terms of income. My best were between 2005-2008, with 2007 probably being my best.

I just didn’t have a very good 2009 year. I’m not afraid to admit when things don’t go well or as planned. There’s no point in hiding it. In fact by addressing it, it helps me to focus better.

I don’t blame the economy, as it only had a very small very impact on my business. And I actually don’t blame myself either, as I did work pretty hard during most of the year. I think it was just a number of factors. My poker site really started to slow down in terms of advertiser demand, my PPC affiliate marketing efforts never took off, I spent a ton of time and money on the development of Movie-Vault.com, PublisherChallenge, and my most recent endeavour, RobotWarz.

I therefore think that 2010 will be a much better year than 2009, since the development of those projects have been paid for and are complete. If 2009 was my development year, then 2010 will be my marketing and traffic year, especially for Movie-Vault.

I’m very curious how RobotWarz will fare as well. It is a big gamble I’m taking, and it’s one of those things that will most likely either fall flat as a failure, or should do quite well.

Stay tuned soon for my upcoming post where I’ll announce my goals for 2010. Hopefully I’ll be able to achieve them next time!

My previous post update unveiled what RobotWarz was all about and included a video giving a good glimpse into how the game will function. It proved to be a popular post, garnering 65 comments. People seem to be really interested in the process of developing a game.

For about a week-and-a-half thereafter, the programmer added some new features to the game including the Capacity system (roughly equivalent to “Mana” in other games such as World of Warcraft), a sample Special Ability (Self-Repair), a visual auto-targeting system, and the ability to destroy weapons, add-on’s, and helper bots.

Since then, we spent roughly the past 3 weeks or so looking for a competent designer that could deliver what we wanted and needed. We were originally going to go with a company called NixSolutions, but their quote ended up being much larger than they had originally told us.

We scoured the net looking for other sources, which proved to be a very tiring ordeal. There is certainly no shortage of designers out there, but we needed a very specific style of design. It was a very tiring process and in the end we probably ended up “almost hiring” a dozen different sources.

Fortunately, I finally managed to find the right man for the job after finding a Russian freelance site. It had no English on it, but had an easy way to search and look through providers’ portfolios.

After roughly 3-weeks of searching for an artist that would suit the style of this game, I finally understood why games are always having their release dates extended!

Concept Art for RobotWarz

Here are the three main robot core design concepts for the game. The Android below is meant to be the weakest out of the three, but has a higher Intelligence attribute (making his Special Abilities more effective, among other perks):

Below is the “Industrial Robot”. He is designed to be well-balanced and therefore fairly versatile:

The third main core robot design is the “Tank Bot”. It’s designed to be very strong in terms of defence but will have a lower Intelligence attribute:

Customization

One of the biggest features and draws to RobotWarz is its level of customization.

Apart from being able to choose and manage your robot type, weapons, add-on’s, attributes, special abilities, and helper bots, there is also a lot of visual customization you can make as well.

After selecting a robot type, players can then chose and customize the following:

• Head
• Arms
• Feet/Tracks
• Body
• Texture (Ex. bullet holes, rivets, knicks, etc.)
• Colour (255 colours with primary, secondary, and tertiary colors)

16 Billion Unique Robot Designs

This isn’t hyperbole. There are actually over 16 billion unique robot designs that can be created with RobotWarz.

The programmer for this project actually happens to have a Masters in Mathematics from Johns Hopkins University, so I took the opportunity of asking him what the actual number was for unique robot design possibilities.

As the game currently stands, there are 972 (324 per robot type) possible robot designs [4*(3*3*3*3)*3], and when you factor in the colour options, it works out to a staggering 16,307,453,952 [4*(3*3*3*3)*3*256*256*256]!

As a result, it will be extremely rare and almost impossible to ever find 2 robots that look exactly the same.

Next Update

If things go well, I think I may be able to give you guys another update in a week from now, with a video clip of the finalized robots in the game.

What do you guys think?

RobotWarz is an online robot fighting game in an arena-style environment. The best way to describe it would be as a combination of the old 1995 PC game One Must Fall 2097 and the recent Flash game MyBrute. However, we actually borrowed elements and play design ideas from several games including World of Warcraft (respecing) and Fallout 3 (Attribute upgrading).

Only two-and-a-half weeks in, we’re obviously still in the very early stages of development. So far, work has focused mainly on the actual fighting mechanics of the game. It turned out to be much more complicated than originally anticipated as we had to factor in a plethora of different variables such as the physical size of objects for ranging calculations and accuracy attributes of robots in order to determine trajectories.

Summary of the Game

First, let’s keep in mind that this is an online Flash game and not something produced by a multi-million dollar game studio, so don’t go about comparing it to Half-Life or anything .

Here’s how the game works:

Players create a free account and then proceed by building their own robot which is highly customizable. They begin by choosing between one of 3 possible robot ‘core’ designs: Android, Industrial, Tank (we need a better name for this one). Each core has a distinctly different look and has different starting attributes and strengths. For example, the Android has a higher Intelligence attribute but lower Armor.

New robots are given 10 Attribute Points (APs) in which they can distribute between 7 different attributes. Players can also use credits, the game’s currency, to purchase weapons and add-on’s for their robot. These choices of customizations not only allows for a unique character, but also provides a strong strategical factor to the game.

Credits can be earned by winning fights and referring other members. Experience points (XP) are earned solely through combat, in both winning and fighting (obviously winning fights will yield more XP).

The actual fights are not controllable by the user but are predetermined based on how the opposing robots are built. Each fight result between the same opposing robots is different since there is still a small element of probability and chance based on various variables that is factored into the game engine.

While many people may be put off by the fact that you cannot directly control the robot, we chose to make this gameplay decision as it instead forces players to make strong decisions on how they build their robot as opposed to how fast they can move their fingers. In that sense, RobotWarz is more of a strategical game than anything else.

Game Features

Here is a very summarized feature list that RobotWarz will have upon launch. More will come in the future:

• 3 Robot “Cores” to choose from. These can then be customized by each robotic part, colours, textures, etc. Each robot core has its own special bonuses.
• 20+ Different Weapons and Add-On’s that can be purchased with credits earned from the game and physically added to the robots. (Ex. Laser Gun, Plasma Shield, Laser-Targeting System, etc.)
• 20+ Special Abilities (available from the in-game store with credits). A special ability is used in lieu of a normal attack with a weapon and costs Capacity (or energy). (Ex Reflect: Reflect portion of the damage, Self-Repair: Repairs portion of the Condition etc.)
• 8 Attributes that are upgradeable with Attribute Points (APs): Condition, Armor, Power, Mobility, Agility, Accuracy, Intelligence, Capacity.
• Store Credit System that allows players to purchase/upgrade their weapons and add-on’s and special abilities among other things. Players earn credits through winning fights and sending in referrals.
• Helper Bots – Players can purchase small ‘Helper Bots" which will aid them in their battles.
• Respecing – For those familiar with World of Warcraft, RobotWarz will offer a rebuilding option, which will cost 1 credit and increment by 1 for each time it is used thereafter, which allows users to effectively start from scratch, regaining all of their credits to rebuild their robot. This is similar to how players can "re-spec" their characters in World of Warcraft.
• Replays – Players can watch their past battles and share them with friends via a simple link.

Future Features:

• Team Play – While not planned for the initial release of the game, this will probably be available in the future, allowing for 2v2 and possibly 3v3 or 4v4 teamplay.
• Tournaments – Again, not scheduled for the initial release, tournaments will be done in a single or double elimination ladder-type style with the winners possibly receiving credits and/or actual prizes.
• Dynamic Maps – Maps that have dynamic objects that can influence the fight (Ex. walls, traps, etc.)
• More Weapons, Add-On’s, Special Abilities, and Helper Bots
• More Robot Core Designs
• More Visual Customization
• Possible Turn-Based Feature

Early Preview

Below is a screenshot and video of a very early preview of RobotWarz. I want to emphasize that this is an extremely early version of the game and isn’t even remotely close to being finished. If I had to guess, I’d say that the game is currently about 6-7% done.

All the graphics are temporary placeholder graphics that are being used until the graphic team is brought in, which should be tomorrow. In fact, the temporary background was Photoshopped from One Must Fall.

While the game is currently playable at a very basic level, it’s nowhere near ready for a public beta version yet. We hope to offer a public playable beta version sometime in December, and the game should probably be ready before 2010.

Here’s a screenshot:

And here’s a short 3-minute video demonstration:

I will probably have another update for you in about a week’s time, and will probably post another updated video. We should also have the real graphics starting to get developed by then, so I may be able to show you something at that time.

What do you think so far? Outrageously disappointed? Optimistic? Undecided?

First, I’ll reveal a bit more about the actual game. The game is called RobotWarz, located at RobotWarz.com, and is an online multiplayer flash-based game where players can quickly sign-up for a free account. They they build their own custom robot, which has many customizable options, and then proceed to fight other robots in an arena-style environment.

Only a couple of weeks in, we’re obviously still only in the very early development stage, but currently have a good underlying programming core developed. Basically, the main fighting engine has its framework laid out and now work is starting to focus on other elements of the site such as the user registration, control panel, etc. The graphics will be amongst the last things that get developed.

While the game is currently playable at an extremely basic level, it’s constantly being modified and improved so it’s still in early alpha stages. We hope to offer a public playable beta version sometime in December, possibly a private beta version before then.

Initial Site Up

I put up a basic splash page at RobotWarz.com in order to start building up a mailing list and to provide any news and updates for those interested. I created a Twitter account (@robotwarz), an AWeber mailing list, and put up a forum.

The splash page was just made by me so it’s not a hint of what the actual site or in-game graphics will look like, but I’m actually pretty proud of how decent I made the temporary textual logo look!

It will most likely be very difficult to gain an early following to the game before it’s released since I have no prior games to leverage any traffic from. We will probably just have to wait until the game is released before word starts to spread.

Monetization Plan

RobotWarz will be free to everyone, with the option of upgrading your account to a Bronze, Silver, Gold, or Platinum account on a monthly subscription basis. The price ranges for the paid accounts will be approximately $2, $5, $10, and $25 respectively.

There is a great blog post written by Colm Larkin in which he compares how much money flash game developers can make by offering the game for free with the upsell of purchasing the entire game or upgrading the account in some way, to simply slapping ads in-and-or-around the flash game.

“Luckily there’s a better way to fund game development than scrounging for ad-pennies. It’s been proven in almost every form of consumer entertainment ever made, from theatre to music to cinema and yes, even games: ask the consumer of the entertainment to pay you for providing it. That’s it. Asking the players to fund game development takes away the dilution effect of trying to get ads to pay everyone’s cut, and directly rewards the developer regardless of the size of their ‘aggregated traffic-power’. It works for all those other kinds of entertainment, and it certainly works for the rest of the gaming industry.

And it can work for flash games too. Several developers have been successfully charging players for full versions of their free flash games, by integrating a payment processor such as PayPal. This method (often called a “demo”, write that down) is so proven that almost no console or PC game doesn’t use it.

Others have tried splitting out the purchase into smaller bundles using a microtransaction/virtual currency provider, and are charging for decorative things like a fancy hat or small upgrades like level packs and new weapons instead of selling the whole game in one go. In fact recently launched providers such as MochiCoins, GamerSafe and Heyzap have made it easier than ever for flash developers to take payments from players.

One advantage of the idea of using virtual items, temporary powerups, or other small purchases is that you aren’t putting a cap on how much your biggest fans are able to spend on your game. Generally speaking selling virtual items works best in a persistant-world / MMO style of game, where you can put all kinds of social and economic effects into play to really leverage the idea…”

He provides a number of examples. I will post just two of each method below:

Flash Games Supported by Ads:

Desktop Tower Defense

One of the original ‘break out hits’ of modern free flash games, created by a single developer, and supported by ads inside & around the game:

Total Plays: 15 million in the first few months
Gross Revenue: ~$12,000 in that same time frame
Gross eCPM: ~$0.80

Mytheria

A fairly typical successful flash game, though not a massive hit in terms of plays:

Total Plays: 3.7 million plays to date
Gross Revenue: ~$8,200 to date
Gross eCPM: ~$2.22

Flash Games Supported by Sales/Memberships:

Fantastic Contraption

A free-to-play flash game, hosted on it’s own site plus some portals, with a premium unlock for $10 that let you make your own levels and play other people’s custom levels. Included solution-sharing via unique URL that helped it spread virally:

Total Plays: Over 3.5M unique users in the first 3 or so months
Gross Revenue: For every unique site visitor, he converts 0.5% to a paid version [at $10] = ~$175,000
Gross eCPM: ~$50.00

Now Boarding

A free-to-play flash game hosted on various portals that had an upsell to a downloadable for-sale version (at ~$15):

Total Plays: 4.2M – 6.2M plays (some portals made it impossible to track this, hence the range) over the last year
Gross Revenue: 10,500 sales so far x $15 = ~$155,000
Gross eCPM: ~$25.00-36.90, depending on above

Early Signs Show Positive

In the Fantastic Contraption example above, it shows the game converting to sales at 0.5%. I had a friend create a poll on a flash game related-site which has an audience which will also be RobotWarz’s target audience, asking them if they would purchase a monthly subscription to RobotWarz, without giving them any details of the game, just that it’d be better than the game they’re currently playing.

So far, 13% of them said that they would purchase a monthly subscription and 8.7% said maybe. That is a lot higher than I was expecting, as I would have been quite happy with 5%.

Now, this is of course only a poll and there were around 30 votes so it’s not the most accurate thing in the world, but it does help to give a rough idea of what can be expected.

I am quite confident that the game will take off and be pretty popular, so the fact that 13% have said that they would purchase a monthly subscription is very encouraging.

Porting to Facebook and iPhone

If the online version of RobotWarz proves to be popular, I will be porting the game to Facebook and the iPhone. This type of game should work very well on both platforms.

More to Come Soon

I will try to give you guys more details on the game as things progress. I’ll try to give another update in a couple weeks – by then I may even be able to show you some early screenshots of the game.

We tested the new site on the development server over and over again, but it seems that no matter how much you prepare for a massive revamp on an existing site, there will always be issues.

It is always much easier launching a brand new site from scratch that it is revamping an existing site because you don’t have to worry about content migration and conflict with existing site mechanisms.

Five Years in the Making

While the launch of Movie-Vault.com’s massive revamp was delayed briefly, it finally got launched. This was something that I had been planning on doing for literally years – roughly 4-5 years in fact.

I just kept putting it off because I knew just how big and expensive a project it would be (the revamp cost me close to $10,000).

Check out the new and improved Movie-Vault.com for yourself and let me know what you think.

Bugs

As mentioned in my introduction, there were a number of bugs that plagued the relaunch. Most of these have been squashed and attended to, but there are still a few more scattering around in there.

The lead developer for this project is away until Monday so I’ll have to wait until next week for the rest of the bugs to be fixed. But again, most of the remaining ones are very minor.

The biggest issue was the bridged integration of the main members system with the vBulletin forum’s member system. It appears to work fine with new users, but it created quite the issue with existing forum members. The forum is currently functioning fine right now, but the integration is disabled until a better solution can be worked out.

We’re Not Done Yet!

While the new site looks complete, there is still more work to do in addition to fixing any bugs that remain.

For one, I need to update the content on the site to reflect the revamp. For example, our advertising page is out of date and I am not going to accept paid text links on the site anymore in order to aid in getting our PageRank returned (even though I don’t believe in PageRank as a useful metric) and increase the overall quality of the site.

I also need to send out a newsletter to site members to let older members who haven’t visited the site recently know about our revamp. I am waiting for all the bugs to be finished before I do this, however.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, I need to round up staff again to help contribute reviews and news to the site. We once had a very active and fairly large staff which did a superb job, but after years of my neglecting the site and not giving it the attention and TLC it deserved, most of the staff moved on.

Fortunately, we have a bustling forum which will be the first source I look to. There are already members there who post their own movie reviews, so it should prove to be a good resource.

Win An Official 2-Disc Pirate Radio Soundtrack!

In part to help celebrate our relaunch, Movie Vault has partnered with Focus Features to give away 5 official 2-disc soundtracks from the upcoming film PIRATE RADIO which will be coming to theaters across the US on November 13th, 2009.

How to Enter:

To enter to win one of 5 official 2-disc soundtracks from Pirate Radio, all you have to do is:

1. Follow @movievaultnews on Twitter
2. Tweet the message: "I entered to win a Pirate Radio soundtrack at Movie-Vault.com"

That’s it! On November 30th, 2009 we will award 5 random winners and contact them by a private Tweet. Be sure that you stay followed to @movievaultnews and have tweeted the message above in order to be eligible.

This contest is open to US residents only, however feel free to follow us on Twitter and tweet about this contest anyways!

The Movie Vault twitter account is brand new and currently nobody has entered the contest so your chances of winning are currently 100%…

Movie Vault Interviews the Goat in The Men Who Stare at Goats

One of our staff news posters conducted an online interview with the goat in the new film The Men Who Stare at Goats.

This will be posted on the site within the next day or two.

As Movie Vault begins to grow again, so will our opportunities to deliver high quality unique content. We’ve already interviewed celebrities and film producers, etc. in the past, so it’s exciting to have a nice revamped site to feel confident to represent again.

Growth will Take Time

Movie Vault had fallen into such a downward spiral over the past 2-3 years that I know it’s going to take time to grow it into the site I know it can be. I first have to convince past staff members that it’s a site worth contributing to, in order to give the site quality and timely content again.

It will then also take time to get our site mentioned, known, and reintroduced to the film industry again and to return to the authority status we once were fortunate to have.

Anyhow, be sure to check out the new and improved Movie-Vault.com and let me know what you think.

There’s simply so much work to be done. I plan on relaunching Movie-Vault.com on November 1st, PublisherChallenge launches a new competition set up for November 1st as well, and I’ve been extremely busy working on the very early stages of my upcoming game.

I’m looking very forward for when Mass Effect 2 and then Starcraft 2 are released so that I can take a real break from work and immerse myself into some nice relaxing gaming. I’ll save the vacations for next summer.

Game Development Updates

As mentioned in a comment I left on my blog yesterday, I decided to forgo the investing idea and just fund the whole thing myself.

I received a lot of criticism for the investment opportunity I put forward, but I still stand behind it. In fact, I think it was actually a very generous opportunity. But I’m fine with how things turned out, as now I can now reap all the rewards (if any) myself.

There is a lot of risk though – I’ve never developed a game before, so this is a completely new venture for me. Together with Movie-Vault, this will have been $20,000 that I’ve invested into my projects during the past 6-8 weeks, which is the most I’ve ever invested at once before.

I still have a mortgage to pay, so this really is quite a risk for me. But few people get anywhere by always playing it safe.

The game I’m developing (or am getting developed, rather) is an online multiplayer robot-themed game. I am currently going through various early mock-up designs (seen below) for the robots that will dictate the look and feel of the whole game, so this is an important stage of development.

The game will take between 2-3 months to develop… probably about 6 weeks to get a beta version out there with several follow-up weeks to tweak and polish it.

I am extremely excited about this game. It’s so different from anything I’ve ever done before that it’s a wonderful and refreshing new thing to get into. I love games, anybody who knows me can attest to that, so this could be the start of something beautiful.

New PublisherChallenge Competition

It’s been a slow time in the affiliate marketing industry due to a number of factors including the economy, FTC rulings, and flog and rebill slapping. As a result, PeerFly’s Awesome Autumn contest had a very poor turnout.

But they’re back with yet another contest (their 6th in a row) for the winter, aptly titled PeerFly’s Wonderful Winter. The winter season usually picks up for most affiliates due to the Christmas shoppers, so here’s your chance to start with a fresh new competition.

Like its previous competition held between September and October, this winter competition is a bit different from many of the prior ones held on PublisherChallenge in that it is strictly tier-based. While there is still a separate category for New Signups, there is no Main Category in this competition.

Instead, everybody competes against himself to make as much as possible. Anybody who makes it to a tier will win the corresponding prize, regardless of how many people are eligible.

Some of the prizes of this contest include digital cameras, Macbooks, VIP Las Vegas trips, a 2009 Honda Accord Coupe, 2010 Honda Acura TSX, and a top grand prize of a 2009 Lexus GS 460!

Movie-Vault.com Revamp Updates

I was really hoping to relaunch Movie-Vault.com on November 1st, but now I’m not so sure it will happen. There’s still a number of things to do on the site, and tonight is the last day the programmers work before the weekend.

If I can get them to go into the office and work on Saturday then we might be able to make it. Worst case scenario is we launch on November 2nd or 3rd though so it’s not the end of the world.

I also have a giveaway contest I need to set up and launch once the new site is up, so I really have a lot of work on my plate.

Now I’m starting to realize how those 2 badminton racquet strings broke…

Work has mostly focused on fixing small bugs and making small changes here and there, although there were a number of larger new features implemented.

It looks as though we might be able to relaunch on November 1st, but a lot of it will depend on how smooth the forum bridge and integration goes, as that could potentially be a bit difficult to implement.

Here’s another screencast video I made showing what new progress has been made on the site. This time I made notes beforehand in order to make the screencast a bit more organized, which also helped reduce the length of this video to 13 minutes (as opposed to 28 minutes for the last one):

As you can see, the site is really coming along now and looks just about to be complete, but there’s still a number of more things to be done. At its present stage, I’d say it’s around 90% complete.

I contacted one of my old contacts at one of the marketing firms that does work for film studios, and already have a little contest lined up for when the site launches next week. We’ll be giving out five official 2-disc soundtracks for the upcoming film by Focus Features, Pirate Radio, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman.

I haven’t decided what type of contest I’m going to run, but I’ll probably make it pretty simple such as some type of Twitter follow or re-tweet contest.

I had kept procrastinating and putting off this much-needed revamp to Movie-Vault.com for about 5-years now, so it feels good to have finally done it.