With the bear market looming in both cryptocurrency and many other aspects. Enjar Games had an interesting year with some successes and a lot of failures. As always a wide range of interests is involved that requires a forever need to learn every day or suffer the consequences.
Interactive Fictions
One major thing for me this year wanting to release interactive fictions that could be played from Hive blogs. In essence, you just click through with the choice you have selected to the next URL to progress along in the story or not depending on what you picked.
There was a plan to release two of these. One was called @forbiddenlockbox which was released on June 23rd, 2022. You find yourself stranded in the middle of nowhere after failing to get to a vacation retreat you had booked.
The other interactive fiction was based around leaving the planet in search of an object. I won’t be giving any further details on that since it ended up getting postponed quite a few times. The plan was to get it out by the end of the year but it’s nowhere near being done.
As far as @Forbiddenlockbox is concerned it was one of my highest non-gaming viewed fiction content that I’ve created within the Hive ecosystem. While it earned very little it still gets views months after its release as people stumble onto it.
While I was hoping it would have had greater success. I’ve been wanting to further play around with the interactive fiction format in this manner. Hopefully, in 2023 I’ll make ample enough time to finish the other one I’d like to release on Hive.
Lost Fighter
Back on January 31st of 2022 @Lostfighter, a 2D hack and slash RPG was released playable from a web browser over on Itch.Io. The bulk of the work for this project was done in 2021.
Other than the planned release in 2022. If things had gone better I was considering adding in DLCS for the game to continue the story and the adventure. It however did not generate enough revenue to even break even from the costs to make it.
In 2023 I’m hoping there will be a fix for a compiler error that hurts trading with NPCs in the game. I’ll be looking further into the game engine I used to create the game to see if that issue has been resolved.
Outside of that single patch that is more than likely the last update that the game will receive. While I had immense fun working on it. Ultimately the game engine I was using ended up being more restricting than I would have liked to want to try and turn that game into something more than it already is.
Nightly Dungeon
@Nightlydungeon is an ARPG that I’ve spent the last several years attempting to develop. I discovered quite early on that I rather enjoyed designing game zones and that is where a large bulk of my time was spent in the years leading up to 2022.
2022 was the year that required the bulk of the coding of many different systems and trying to get everything to work together with every else. Needless to say the magic I found while making zones faded fast with mounting frustrations and never-ending costs in trying to turn the game into something I wanted.
I had high hopes of resolving a lot of my issues by buying a 3rd party service that would do a lot of the heavy lifting on the backend and code side of things to help me realize my dream. That service however kept having delays for Unreal Engine support.
I evenly went out and bought a few different assets off the Unreal Engine store in hopes I could try to better understand the issues I was having on the coding side of things or replace what was not working. That however ended with a giant and massively expensive failure.
It was with a saddened heart that I shelved the project in March of 2022. While a part of me hopes one day I’ll find solutions to my long-term issues and find a way to release the game at some point. I don’t miss the endless dead feeling that I was just bashing my face against a brick wall making no headway.
Community Closures and Steeping Down.
2022 had a lot of closures on my part as well apart from @Nightlydungeon. It was quite a rough financial year. I ended up closing down both on-chain and many off-chain communities. Along with stepping down from quite a few roles.
The hardships of 2022 between the crypto bear market and my personal life appear to be in further decline than at the start of 2022. 2023 is expected to be much worse and I’ll more than likely be looking to make further cutbacks and personal sacrifices if I want to keep trying and doing some things I rather enjoy.
Entropia Universe
Over on the main gaming blog @enjar, you will notice quite an insane amount of content this year was created around the game Entropia Universe. On occasion, I notice certain things in a game that I want to get ahead of by laying the groundwork of content.
I am thrilled to say the amount of content I ended up creating in 2022 was beyond the expectations I had set for myself. While I ended up spending many times over my usual yearly gaming budget to do so. I wanted to get ahead of what I see as a rebirth of the game once they release their Unreal Engine 5 version of the game.
In the past, there have always been games I wanted to go big on when I felt the time was right. It was however always a lack of financial ability to invest the many thousands of dollars in blockchain games early on to be able to create the content I felt was needed to be a top contender for content in those games.
My content on this Real Cash Economy game I believe surpasses a lot of websites out there other than the game's forums in terms of guides, first-hand experiences, and giving players a wide range of what to expect within the game.
A lot of the websites I was competing against appeared to be nothing more than copy/paste wiki websites. I wanted to create an experience for those playing the game and looking for certain information to come across. Along with an adventure for those that don’t play the game to enjoy.
I’m hoping long term this will pay off. I have noticed recently a growing amount of Entropia Universe players have started to stumble upon my content for the game and some have even reached out to me personally.
Hopefully, with the groundwork, I have laid if the game gets a massive burst of fresh players. I’ll end up being the place they stop in for content. Since I’ve created an experience of sharing my adventure that is more than just rants that YouTube is filled with to people who AFK craft stream on Twitch.
Enjargames.com
In 2022 I decided to launch my own Hive frontend using Engrave Dblog that would for now consist of only gaming content being published by the @Enjar account. With the goal of better understanding the kind of traffic I was bringing in and taking advantage of trends over the long run.
This has had its ups and downs. For the first short while, things were going great. I was starting to surpass the number of views my content generated on my Hive frontend than I was getting on other hive frontends.
Sadly at some point, Google decided to start delisting over 60%+ of all my pages. Just shortly after most of them had finally been ranked. I was even starting to outrank Reddit and many other high ranking websites depending on the game and what was being searched for.
I’ll be continuing this experiment using Enjargames.com in 2023. Some other features Engrave Dblog offers that I’ll more than likely be looking to take advantage of after doing some needed testing in 2023.
I will also keep putting up the fight to get all my pages relisted on Google. This is sadly needed a lot more than I wish it was. As to make my operations sustainable I need to grow into millions of page views one day.
Needless to say, I failed to even hit 100k views in a single year. If things keep going in the negative direction they are I won’t be left with much of a choice in needing to shut everything down as there are only so many years of living below the poverty line for my area that I endure trying to charge after what I enjoy doing.
Sponsored and Referral Content
While having referral links in my content on occasion has never been anything new. In 2022 a program I had attempted for the years to meet the requirements to apply for I finally got accepted into. I really can’t say much more directly about said program without having to title this entire post as “sponsored” with discourses at the bottom of the post as well.
As always when it comes to this kind of content. I always try to make sure I’m disclosing things when possible in those posts. From things when I have received a game for free to me sharing a referral link to buy the said game off a particular marketplace I receive a compensation form.
As such, I found myself in a situation where I had a lot of older reviews and guides that I could suddenly attempt to monetize. I went through and updated those posts with the proper referral links and discourse at the bottom of those posts.
While it would be nice to not need to do such things. When you are putting in 80+ hours a week into something at some point you need to be able to make a living doing so or at the very least breaking even on those costs.
While I was hoping with the amount of former content I have that I would be generating enough extra income to at least buy myself a new PC this year and try to cover all my expenses. Things however in this avenue fell quite short of the mark.
Hopefully, 2023 will be a much better year. Since 2022 was not a big year of writing reviews and covering a bunch of different games. I have acquired a decent backlog of games I am excited to get around to creating content in 2023 for.
Running A Node
Quite a long-term goal has always been to run some infrastructure in the form of nodes in crypto. I am however quite a novice in that sort of thing. Outside of running a couple of gaming servers in my past which was a lot easier than you would think. I simply lack such experiences.
2022 gave me such an opportunity to test the waters with @Enjargames.spk in running an SPK node. I was hopeful that after a few rough days this would just be a set-and-forget kind of thing. Other than checking in on it from time to time to see how it was going.
This soon turned into a daily ordeal of my node always having some kind of issue. It became quickly apparent that I was just not cut out for doing such things. After attempting for a while I decided it was just best to shut my node down and move on to other things.
Discord Bot
In the latter half of 2022, I found myself in a situation of wanting to make a Discord bot. An ordeal as one might guess since it involved programming did not end well. Thankfully I did not document my journey publicly about it.
Needless to say, Discord had a lot of updates to how things were being handled. It left the major of guides and places to try and seek help outdated to not working at all. It was a nightmare just to find a working solution to get a bot up and running. Let alone doing any of the basic stuff I wanted.
This might be a project I return to in 2023. At this point, however, I’m starting to feel quite defeated anytime it comes to needing to code or runs a server. So only time will tell if I end up trying again.
Final Thoughts
People have often wondered how I’m able to create and spend a large amount of time required to do what I’ve been doing. It has required massive sacrifices financially, personal relationships, sleep, and sanity. It has been a very harsh and lonely oftentimes journey. Thankfully my most loyal friends seem to understand and have stuck with me through such times in my life. Even during my most unbearable days to be around.
While I am thrilled 2022 is almost behind me. 2023 at least in the very few months is going to be some difficult times ahead for me. Hopefully, I’ll still be able to blog on @Enjar along with expanding into some other types of content formats.
I’m sure along the way there will be far more learning opportunities than I would like to have. Many will not have the desired outcome I will be hoping for as they often do. I however keep moving forward the best I can and try different things on occasion.
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