Game Sponsorship

04 Aug 2006 12:28 pm
So, my main hobby nowadays is making flash video games. I do all the art and often all of the programming (except when Jon gets involved to do really complex stuff).

I recently discovered a website that showcases flash artists and gets them exposure. It's called "Newgrounds.com" and has a daily contest in which hundreds of flash animations and flash games are submitted. I've been submitting our stuff over the past few months and gaining some recognition as a talented artist. Just to give an idea of how big Newgrounds is: It receives approximately 500,000 unique visitors every day and ranks in the top 600 websites on the internet.

A few weeks ago, I decided to submit one of our best games to see how it would do (Brother Nephi's Ultra-funtastic Point-and-click Adventure). The only problem is that the game is about 6.5 MB (due to the size of all the sound files wrapped into it) and Newgrounds has an upload limit of 5 MB. I emailed the site creator, Tom Fulp, and gave him a link to the game and requested an increase in my upload limit.

To my surprise he wrote back and said, "Yeah, your upload limit is now increased and I was wondering if you want a sponsorship for your game." I wasn't sure what this entailed so I emailed him back and asked. He wrote back and said "Basically, you put our logo in the intro to the game and I give you 1,000 bucks." Now, a grand isn't necessarily enough to cover the amount of talented man hours that went into it, but it's a heck of a lot to get for a flash game. (sponsorships normally run around 250 bucks).

I quickly threw his logo into the game's intro and linked him back to it. Literally, 3 minutes later I had 1,000 bucks deposited into my paypal account. Now that's service! Class act all the way.

Here's a link to the sponsored version (the art in it is some of my older stuff when I was still learning flash, but the gameplay is quite LucasArts-esque):

Brother Nephi's Ultra-funtastic Point-and-click Adventure

Notice it's been played over 127,000 times as I'm writing this.

We're currently working on a remake of "The Oregon Trail" (but with Mormon Pioneers) and a large-scale zelda-like RPG.