chrome web store

Player Spotlight: Mohit

Another nomination from the community, this month we get to know Mohit! We received SO many nominations for him, probably breaking all previous records. Learn more about the Player Spotlight program at our website and nominate players by sending an email to community@illyriad.co.uk. The player who gets the nomination can choose between a t-shirt from our shop or from 1200 Prestige! So, to the interview!

So, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Hello, My name is Mohit and I am glad to be given an opportunity to be in the Spotlight. I really appreciate the efforts of all those who voted for me, thank you all!

What brought you to Illyriad and how long have you been playing?

One day I was looking for an online strategy game, and then I found this. It has been a nice experience to play the game since then. I have been playing Illy for more than 2 years now and hope to play it till I finish the game (like Urp! did!)

Have you played many other online games or been active in other online communities?

Well to be honest I have played many, many other games where I play maximum for a week and then leave the game. So I have not been as active in any other online community, nothing else gives that Illy-like feel! 😉

Any hidden talents or interesting hobbies outside of gaming?

Oh yes ! Well, I don’t know if that is to be discussed here! But I like to go out with friends, enjoy the moment of laughter with them but most of my time is taken by gaming, work or sleep.

What keeps you playing Illyriad?

As many have said, I also feel the same: it’s the Community. It keeps you glued to the game. General chat can do wonders for you if you are having an off day. Then I have the amazing members in my alliance who make me feel like being in their shoes and doing things like they do ( not talking about you Hoover 😛 lol! ) That is an amazing factor if you realize they have become a family in another world, even if you don’t want to achieve something in the game you want to come online to meet them or chat with them. I love that aspect of the game. I believe through this game that I have made friends all over the world, with whom I may or may not meet in my real life but will be sharing a beer or coffee with them online here in Illy.

What’s your favorite aspect of the game?

The community is of course one of my favorite aspect of the game. I also love the fact that this game continues to bring something new to the table every now and then. True, this process has slowed down, but heh, this is the favorite and most awaited aspect of the game: something new and awesome from the developer team !

What’s your proudest achievement in game so far?

Being in the spotlight is the proudest of them all, for the very simple reason is that many people voted for it. It was truly an amazing surprise and I want to send thanks to you guys again! 🙂 The second-best moment was when I was given an opportunity to share in leading Bane. It was an honor and really made me feel proud.

What are you most looking forward to for the future of Illyriad?

First I would like to thank the devs for creating a vision of what we can expect, without it I couldn’t answer this question. I am looking forward to the new schools of magic and hope that it gives a new dimension to the game. Then I am waiting for the use of all the extra t3 resources (advanced herbs, anatomies and rare gems) that do not have any use at the moment, and I wonder how their use will affect the game. The Live Factions are always a thing that intrigues me. They could give alliances and their diplomatic work a new dimension and hopefully will make quests more interesting.

What area of the game do you think needs the most improvement?

In my view, the defense mechanism needs some improvement. The game supports the attackers too much. Then I would love to see a draft option in the mailing system. Next, an option to make our own chat room would be great! Many times two group of people tend to love or fight each other so much that other people tend not to interfere. Having an option to create a chat room for them would spare GC from the assault and those who want to be part of the chat could be invited in it.

What advice would you give a new player in Illyriad?

Play as you wish! This is a sandbox game. You can be anything you like! Just make sure you make friends on the way to the top — and not enemies. And, of course, in case you guys need anything there are awesome people in GC waiting to help you guys! (Rillbot is 24×7 available 😛 ) At the end of this I just want to thank you all, and I feel lucky to be part of such a great community.

Thanks to Mohit for accepting the nomination and for taking the time to answer our questions!

When you’re a small indie game developer and you’ve just released your very first game, “getting the word out” is just about the most important thing left to do.

It’s also typically the biggest budget expense item via the traditional method of online advertising.

You can have all the upgrades and expansion packs in the pipeline that you like, but if no one is playing the game – or if the cost per acquisition of new players via advertising is astronomical and ever increasing due to the number of competitors vying for the same keywords – then you’re in no small amount of trouble.

Sometimes, however, you get lucky (or make your own luck!) – and an influential big brother steps onto the scene to champion your efforts. We’ve been very lucky with massively.com’s coverage of Illyriad, and now we have our second champion!

Largely, we think, thanks to our move to an HTML5 Canvas environment on the World Map, Illyriad came to the attention of those mighty, mighty fine people at the Google Chrome Web Store (CWS) at the end of last week; and they’ve been helping to promote Illyriad since.

The first we knew about our presence on the CWS homepage was when the ‘new player has joined’ “bing” noise (yes, I have a desktop dashboard that goes “bing”… I know, I know. Don’t say anything) changed from a “bing” into a continuous drone.

Not only are CWS promoting us on the homepage, but we’re also in the rotation for the Games and Entertainment categories.

Since we’ve been this visible on the CWS platform, new player acquisitions have increased 412%. No, that’s not a typo. That’s four hundred and twelve percent.

As if that wasn’t enough, the icing on the proverbial cake is that the Chrome browser itself runs HTML5 and the Canvas technology very fast and very smoothly (in our opinion, Chrome is far-and-away the best browser out there for developing and rendering HTML5 technologies). Whilst we do, and will, continue to support earlier, non-HTML5 browser versions of all the major browsers, it’s been fantastic knowing that the huge new influx of users coming to Illyriad from the CWS are getting the best possible HTML5 experience once they log in.

Since we integrated OpenID over the last weekend, CWS users are also getting a streamlined one-click login experience using their Google credentials. Now we’re moving onto Google pay integration, and can’t wait to see what the Google plus platform can do for us in the future.

In short: if you write any kind of app then getting it onto the Google Chrome Web Store is an absolute “must-do” when it comes to promoting your game, and (especially compared to some of the other app platforms) it’s remarkably easy to do.

As you can imagine, we’re over the moon about this!

Integration: Chrome Web Store

Publishing your web app on the Chrome Web Store is so straight forward, not doing so almost seems foolish!

Create a zip file containing a folder “chrome_app” and inside that two files:

The manifest we use for Illyriad looks similar to this (make sure the icon field matches the name and case of the icon in the zip):

[code lang=”javascript” title=”manifest.json”]
{
"name": "Illyriad Test",
"description": "Real-time massively-multiplayer…",
"version": "1.0",
"app": {
"urls": [
"https://www.illyriad.co.uk/",
"https://uk1.illyriad.co.uk/",
"https://img3.illyriad.co.uk/",
"https://img4.illyriad.co.uk/",
"https://img5.illyriad.co.uk/",
"https://img6.illyriad.co.uk/"
],
"launch": {
"web_url": "https://www.illyriad.co.uk/loginOAuth.asp"
}
},
"icons": {
"128": "Logo-128.png"
},
"permissions": [
"unlimitedStorage",
"notifications"
]
}
[/code]

Your launch web_url should be either your login page, or if not required the main app page. If you do require a login page it’s also advisable to accept Google OpenId, at which point you can bypass the login page for CWS users who have a Google account and have approved you; but more on this in a later post.

To publish your app and access the developer dashboard a one-off developer registration fee of US$5.00 is required to verify your account, and presumably to cut down on spammers.

In the CWS developer dashboard click the Add new item button, which will take you to the upload app page:

Choose the zip file you created earlier and upload it:

Once you have uploaded your zip you will be taken to the Edit item page. First thing to do is upload the Icon you used in the zip file (unless you want a different icon in the Web Store to the one to be displayed in Chrome)

Now you’ll want to marketing materials. You can choose at the bottom of the page “Save draft and return to dashboard” if you don’t have these ready yet, so you can return to editing later. The items you’ll want are:

A detailed description (Focus on explaining what the item does and why users should install it)
Some screenshots (400 x 275 pixels or proportionally larger)
(Optional) A YouTube video
(Optional) A background image to show on your app page
(Optional) 2 promotional images

After adding these on the edit item page, choose a category to publish in and then click “Preview changes” to see what your item will look like. If you like it hit publish, else return to editing. At this point you are published! Easy!

There is lots more you can do, of course, you can publish to test users first, use a verified website, change your pricing – your apps don’t have to be free, you can change the pricing and also sell apps from the Web Store – it is a store after all! But this should get you on your way…