I plan to pay my bills with the games I create as soon as possible. The first experiment I’m conducting in that regard is displaying advertisements within my games.

Is that a viable source of income for what I’m doing? What amounts of money can I expect to earn with ads? Will I be able to make enough money off this to finance a couple more games with the same business model or do I have to quickly move on to more promising ways of monetization?

Basically, I’m about to make a similar step that Flash programmer and web developer Emanuele Feronato made five years ago. He started an experiment in 2007 where he tested how much advertisement money he could make with Flash games that took different amounts of time to develop.

He mostly used MochiAds, which I will check out as well. But for now, I want to see if I can get ads from the big one: Google’s AdSense.

Being a developer, one of the first things I want to know is how I implement Google ads into my game. This is how that went:

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I have made good progress the last couple of days. I learned a lot, and I got a lot of classes and neat features done. Too bad I won’t be able to use any of them in my upcoming game.

I managed to create a working implementation of the Facebook Connect button in Flash. And I would have gotten away with it, too, if it wasn’t for Flash’s meddling security features.

The work I got done will not go to waste. I’m sure I will be able to reuse most parts of it in the future. But for now, I have to admit that I’ve hit a dead end. This is what happened:

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I have now talked about how you can publish artifacts to your local repository and how Ivy resolves dependencies for your project.

As mentioned, Ivy uses the ivy.xml to know what files and libraries your project depends on. Ivy tries to retrieve these and will copy them into your project folder.

In another post, I have described how I keep my Ant build.xml files small and clean by putting targets I use often into central files. But not only build.xml files can contain information you need time and time again. Certain dependencies or Ivy settings might be used in many projects, and I don’t want to copy them around, either.

Maven has parent POM files, which are pom.xml files you can inherit from. All settings, dependencies, plugins etc. from the parent POM are used and can be extended or overwritten. With this, you can create a hierarchy of build files that you can combine as needed.

Ivy has a similar mechanism, though it is not as refined as Maven’s. Still, you can use it to put often used dependencies in “parent Ivy XMLs”.

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