Protonaut has been suffering a slow death. Ever since the first beta, it hasn’t generated a single sale and is suffering from a severe lack of traffic. No traffic means no new levels, which means there’s no reason for traffic to keep coming back… One of those old Chicken-and-the-Egg problems.

Of course, since I last really worked on Protonaut, Greg Wohlwend has been off making fantastic trailers and new games, and I’ve been working on SteamBirds. We haven’t had a lot of time or desire to work on something that isn’t being successful.

Greg and I decided that Protonaut wasn’t really working; it’s missing a key nugget of user-retention-fun, and the effort required to fix it is exceeding our desire to continue work. We pretty much decided to write off the game and put it to rest, but I decided to give it one last push.

In the latest update, I added some character-building signposts and rewrote a bunch of the tutorial levels. Fixed replays and made the controls keyboard-and-mouse, which is a whole lot easier to master than the old keyboard-only layout. And then I did the crazy: I posted it up for bidding on FlashGameLicense.

Bidding is probably a week or three away from closing, but it’s looking good so far! The game is already exceeding average sponsorship rates, despite the fact that the game has been out for a while (albeit with no traffic) and has a few external links in it. Exclusive sponsorships probably won’t work without a fancy non-standard deal with a sponsor, and yet we still have a lot of interest!

If the sponsorship gives the game the boost of traffic it needs to jumpstart the engines, I’ll be able to continue developing it. But if it fizzles out over a month or two, I won’t put in much more effort than bugfixes. Crossing my fingers!