Unfortunate Necromancer

The Unfortunate Necromancer is a small, really rather silly, Flash game in what I can only think to call the “fly-swatting” genre. The premise (or “plot” if you want to engage in hyperbole) is that you’re an incompetent fledgling necromancer who, in an attempt to raise your pet cat from the dead, has unleashed a horde of ghosts.

The gameplay is trivial: click on a ghost (sometimes clicking two or three times per ghost, in the later levels) to poof them out of existence. Miss three ghosts in one level, and the game ends. Hitting three ghosts of the same color in a row increases a score multiplier, while missing a ghost or letting a ghost escape reduces the multiplier.

The real point of The Unfortunate Necromancer was to experiment with Flash development and the Kongregate and MochiAds tools.

If you’d like to kill 10 minutes, and perhaps cramp your clicking finger, you can play The Unfortunate Necromancer on Kongregate here: http://www.kongregate.com/games/TheWasabiProject/the-unfortunate-necromancer

In spite of how simple and silly the game is, Kongregate does make it very easy to report lots of statistics, so there are a handful of highscore and ranking leaderboards, if you’re into that sort of thing.

There is also a MochiAds version of the game, which you can play here: https://www.mochiads.com/games/the-unfortunate-necromancer_v2

The MochiAds version supports fewer statistics, but there is a basic highscore leaderboard.

Statistics

I’d like to make all of the impressions and earnings stats (meager as they are, and were intended to be) for The Unfortunate Necromancer public: the Mochi services offer convient “Share Your Stats” options, but unfortunately Kongregate does not (or if they do, I haven’t found it yet). I don’t mind updating the Kongregate stats by hand, but I’m sure I’ll fall behind on upkeep, so I may look for another solution first.

In the meantime, here are the URLs for the Mochi tracking pages:

MochiBot (which tracks views and hosting information, even for non-Mochi hosts): https://www.mochibot.com/shared/?key=34daecb0da67abbf019dfc787f1d0cab

MochiAds (which specifically tracks MochiAds impressions): https://www.mochiads.com/share/stats/the-unfortunate-necromancer_v2/d91e895a82dc7d28

The Mochi graphs seem to be a little flakey, especially for newly added projects, but the raw numbers appear to be correct.

Unfortunately, MochiBot’s tracking didn’t get added into the mix until after the initial release to Kongregate, so that traffic spike (and quite possibly it was the only traffic spike they’ll ever be) isn’t visible in the MochiBot report (it’s also not visible in the MochiAds report, but that’s by design since the Kongregate version doesn’t show MochiAds).

Graphics

The graphics in The Unfortunate Necromancer are all modified versions of tiles designed by David Gervais which are generously available under the Creative Commons license. For anyone who might be interested, the tiles are available here: http://pousse.rapiere.free.fr/tome/