mauticom Posted September 23, 2014 Share Posted September 23, 2014 Hi guys, this is my first(although not first that launched) Phaser project which just launched last week. The pure Phaser development time including getting started with the framework, was about 34 days. YOLO Train, http://www.yolotrain.at, is a serious game about the dangers you experience on train stations and tracks. The background behind the game ist that every year dozens of Austrian's teenager die on train stations and tracks due carelessness or stupid dares. The game doesn't try to stop the player from doing wrong things, instead the player can run wherever he wants and experience the consequences. Technically YOLO Train is an endless runner. It uses a set of predefined scenes that are placed behind each other randomly based on a scene tree. The object placements of dead players you can resurrect, powerups,goodies and some obstacles are placed depending on your rank, level progress and experience. For the dead sequence it uses the grayscale filter otherwise Canvas and WebGL versions are identical. You are required to login with facebook. Known bugs: on firefox the custom font gets cut off at the top and text placement is off. On Safari in Canvas the tiled graphic of the top down waggon gets mixed up, while in WebGL and other Chrome or Firefox everything seems alright. Safari desktop performance is much worse than Chrome and Firefox in both Canvas and WebGL. Even the perfomance seems to be better in iOS 7 Safari. Last but not least on Safari Desktop the graphic placements show often a 1px break between sprites. The game was released for mobile and desktop. Enjoy http://www.yolotrain.at, any feedback is welcome! Greetings from Vienna, Mauti Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rich Posted September 23, 2014 Share Posted September 23, 2014 My German isn't great, is there a way to play it without logging in with Facebook? re: the 1px texture issue in Safari, you can get around that by adding padding to your texture atlas when you create it. Texture Packer has an option for this - add in at least 2px. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mauticom Posted September 23, 2014 Author Share Posted September 23, 2014 Hi rich, no there is no possibility to login without facebook, at least as long as facebook doesn't introduce the new anonymous login feature for every facebook developer. However the data will only be collected to save your game progress and trade powerups. Otherwise the data will be completely deleted when the campaign ends. We only save your name, locale setting and app based facebook id. Otherwise no data will be collected and no data will be shared with other companies. Thanks for the hint. Unfortunately I don't use an atlas yet although I should for performance and loading reasons. At the beginning I didn't care because I had to learn Phaser and in the end there was no budget left to change everything using a texture atlas. So maybe with the next update I'll can add it. Regards, Mauti Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BdR Posted September 24, 2014 Share Posted September 24, 2014 Is this a game as part of a bigger awareness campaign? I also thought the facebook login is a threshold.. didn't play it, sorry Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mauticom Posted September 27, 2014 Author Share Posted September 27, 2014 Hi BdR, yes the game is part of bigger ÖBB, our national train service, campaign that includes posters about the game in every board bistro and some train stations. It also gets promoted in a safety highschool tour throughout the next weeks. There are some teaser links on the main website of the ÖBB. Beside that we don't have any ad budget. So far their previous attempts tried to the parental way with saying you aren't allowed, it's to dangerous,... However the impact was quite limited so my idea was to make a fun but still somehow educational social runner, where you at least talk how and where you died. We are using facebook, because It's the most convenient way to login, play together with your friends and also become viral. Of course some people are concerned about their data, that's the reason that we explain the usage of your data in the terms of use and an additional overlay if you cancel the facebook permission. So far between 88-90% give us the required permissions and also most of our target group, teens from 12 - 22, have an fb account.However as explained above if you have questions about what happens with your data, just ask. We don't get anything you can't see public on https://graph.facebook.com/YOURFBID. Even more with the new 2.0+ API your fb id gets hashed per app. Have a nice day, Mauti Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mauticom Posted November 16, 2015 Author Share Posted November 16, 2015 More than one year later I would like to give you a short update about the performance of my train safety game YOLO Train, renamed to Safety Train a few weeks ago by my former employer. I'm currently founding my own company, nevertheless I think this might be of interest for some of youl So far the game has reached over 125.000 registered players (only 2000 through ads at the start of the campaign in September 2014, the rest organically). It had a moderate start and was virtually dead after the 6 weeks long competition period. In June 2015 players from all over the world started to discover and play YOLO Train. Since than growth is incredible. 25.000 new players just in the last 2 weeks without any ads. So far we have players from 185 countries in the world, although the game is only in german and was targeted towards Austrian teenagers. Since the beginning the game engine has been upgraded from 2.1 -> 2.4.Mobile performance is still subpar, because the textures are too large in dimensions for WebGL. But there was no budget left for optimizations and also no interest from the client to fix it either. So do yourself a favour and play it with a desktop browser. Last but not least a new night mode(starting each day at 8pm CET) was added 2 weeks ago. It looks great. You should give it a try. Greetings, Mauti Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rich Posted November 16, 2015 Share Posted November 16, 2015 That's really interesting - so it's basically just growing via word of mouth (well, social word of mouth!) even though the client has pretty much forgotten about it? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mauticom Posted November 16, 2015 Author Share Posted November 16, 2015 Kinda, the client just rediscovered and "relaunched" it 2 weeks ago but at this point it already crossed 100.000 sign ups. I was totally surprised and first thought it was a bug in our stats tool because suddenly 1-2000 people signed up each day but the database as well as Google and fB Analytics confirmed that they were legit users. I'm still unsure why it suddenly become somehow "viral". One big source of new sign ups was the facebook games center, http://www.facebook.com/games, although the game entry has been there since the beginnning and as far as I can tell it has never been featured. But from there on it took off. Right now next to Austria it is very popular in Turkey, Egypt, Brazil, Romania, France and India. I like it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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