// intro
Two weeks ago, I took my XNA dungeon crawler/tower defense hybrid to Newgrounds. The port was entirely the work of Kevin Gadd who stuck around during the first week to push no fewer than 8 patches. This was my first launch on a web portal, and this article is about what went right and wrong.
The main thing I did right was research what the Newgrounds community (and web game community in general) would be receptive to. I already have a web demo of Escape Goat, which is designed to feed sales of the digital download from my site. I learned early on that this type of demo/upsell wouldn’t go over well there, so I made the decision to offer the full game. (Thanks to Hyptosis for this bit of advice.)
Bottom line: If your computer is relatively fast and you use a modern browser, you’ll have an identical experience to the PC game I sell for $2.99. I also made sure to clearly label this as an Experimental Beta, given how unpredictable HTML5 support is with some browsers. This paid off, and some players even said they cut me some slack with the technical issues because it was marked as a beta. (Also big thanks to Lars Doucet for his wisdom after launching Defender’s Quest on Kongregate.)