Urban dead is four years old now

[Callan S.]

Wow, urban dead's been going for awhile - I tried it around the time he started it up. He's added alot more since then (I like that he tries to give some story reason for updates, rather than just saying mechanics just changed). The advertising scheme is interesting as well - I was thinking showing an ad at the end of a players points for the day was a good idea, but he'd already thought of it (or copied someone else who already did).

It's an interesting model of design - I was wondering if you guys knew about it and what you thought?

And if you have a game map, what's the best way to show people in a grid position? Just keep coordinate info in each player entry, then look through the whole player database for matching coordinates when looking in a grid position? Or have a DB entry for each grid where it stores players present (their id numbers)?

[Jackolantern]

He only shows one ad at the end of a player's points? You mean an ad for another site or service? While I am not for bombarding players with ads, I would think you would need a bit more than just one a day if you want to show ads to try to at least cover server costs.

[hallsofvallhalla]

fun game, i hate that he thought of it first....

[Callan S.]

Well, he doesn't own the idea of grid mechanics, or the word 'zombie'. It's not like you can't make your own - just need to add your own intellectual property, which is usually fun to do anyway. I don't think he's 'nailed' the idea or anything, there are other interesting ways the zombies vs humans idea could be explored.


Hi Jackolantern,

Well, if you look at his stats page he gets around 10k people visiting a day, and his advertising page says it's $10 per thousand impressions. If he were entirely filling his advertising schedule, that's $100 a day. Even if he isn't, he's using google adverts in between and as he notes, once someones run out of action points and have no more use for the site for the day, they are quite likely to click (some of the $10 ones got a 45% click through rate). Also he's coded it that each IP address can only access the main script 160 times per day, to lower server loads.

That said I don't know much about server costs - planning on using 000webhost myself, but my project obviously won't have 10k of people visiting a day!

It seems to work for him, but that doesn't mean that it's the only method to use.