So For Now Wave Goodbye

It seems that another era of Piron Games must come to an end, as much as I dislike to admit it. It’s been a productive one, reaching a milestone of 25 browser games developed, creating level packs for some of them, maintaining and improving others, learning a lot of Cocos Creator, Unity and other game development tools.

These were also hard times for myself, noticing waning interest in (non-social) browser games, Covid related lockdowns, but, most of all, the passing away of a family member.

One more game is currently in advanced development, but it’s unlikely I will release it anytime soon. Spare time is scarce. 6 more games are left in pre-production limbo – made complete art for them as well as design documents. 3 more games are left in initial planning phase. One from this latter bunch would have been placed in the Orbital Decay universe 😉

If my existing games would hit new game-plays milestones, I would love to do more level packs and game modes. Woobly Dot, I’m looking at you 🙂 Spare time allowing. Which it doesn’t.

I would definitely like to do an overhaul of Born Of Fire TD rendering code, as the game performance drops in the later levels.

I didn’t have high hopes for player supporting the site and for good reasons. Despite ditching ads, both on the site and in-game and opting for a clean gaming experience, this mostly went un-noticed. Players are busy playing mobile games chock-full of ads 😉

Providing exclusive in-game features (bonus avatars in Wobbly Dot, bonus levels for Dodge This, Wobbly Dot, Math Maze) for Web Monetization supporters only yielded something in the range of 30 XRP. Additional “support me” like Buy Me A Coffee had 0 (zero) effect. Not a single coffee offered. No matter. I grind my own beans 😀

Social media related, I’ve got 13 Facebook page likes, 3 Youtube followers, maybe 10 Twitter followers and a handful of Linkedin company page followers. In truth, I didn’t bother to advertise anywhere, but it’s highly unlikely that would have had any impact.

Oh yeah, and Cocos Creator video interviewed me, which was fun because nobody video-interviewed me before. Got some Cocos Creator branded swag – the t-shirt is cool looking – and was fun as hell to do it, but otherwise it had zero impact on anything.

My games did manage to attract the interest of a couple of companies wanting to buy non-exclusive licenses. Not on purpose, though. I just didn’t actively pursue this avenue of business – been there, done that with Flash games back in the day, had enough of it. Out of the 3 companies, one dropped due to bureaucratic complications, one (Clever/Get Clever, now part of Kahoot!) didn’t pay despite me providing the builds for Snake Island and Bumper To Bumper as they claimed to close down their game portal. Finally, the third one, CoolMathGames, paid 500GBP for a Wobbly Dot non-exclusive license.

So yeah, this sums it up. Maybe I’ll return to make browser games once more one day. Who knows?

Meanwhile, stick around, there are some games worth playing around here that you won’t find anywhere else.