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Comment by Arjuna | Hacker News Reader

"The key thing for me is quality."

I wanted to say that I developed Rocket Renegade [1] for iOS. It's an 80s-inspired arcade shooter, with elements reminiscent of Space Invaders, Asteroids, Galaga... and, of course, it contains bosses.

I wrote all of the code, and I composed the soundtrack as well. The bitmap graphics were done by game designer Daniel Cook, who released them under a Creative Commons Attribution license.

I believe that it fits all of your requirements: the quality is high, the gameplay is fun, it runs rock-solid at 60 frames per second, the music is awesome, and it's a POP game (Pay Once to Play); no IAP, no ads.

It's essentially a straight-up, gun-for-your-highest-score-classic-arcade-shooter.

[1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/rocket-renegade/id955229059?...

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Just purchased and played several times. Very solid gameplay, nice retro graphics, fun music. Congratulations.

I was kind of hoping for some power-ups, like a faster shot rate or scattershot. Those might be present, and I just didn't get to them yet, only made it to stage 3-x on first attempts. I also wish the stages had more variation, might feel too repetitive after a while – though that might happen later also.

Anyway, for $0.99, I'm definitely not complaining. It's a fun game and definitely an example of what I'm looking for. I'd personally be willing to pay more, in the $4.99 range, for a game like this, especially if it had some the variation features I mentioned above – but I might be unusual.

Well, first off, a massive THANK YOU for both the purchase, and for taking the time to provide feedback!

Unfortunately, there are no power-ups, and the levels do repeat after the boss level (although the game does become progressively more difficult). Those are definitely great ideas for the next iteration of the game.

Thank you, again. It means a lot to me.

More unsolicited advice: A prestige mechanic can be a good way to increase re-playability, whereby current progress can be traded for future boosts.

I play(ed) a game called Sky Force 2014 that would have benefitted from a prestige mechanic.

Fun game! (Sorry for your loss, indicated in the credits.) I'm not much of a gamer and I kept getting clipped by the rocks because I couldn't see my ship under my finger!

Thank you for your kindness.

As for your game-play issue, try off-setting your finger on the screen, away from the actual ship. That is to say, I made it so that you can actually have your finger anywhere on the screen to control the ship (i.e., you don't have to have your finger directly on the ship to control it). That will help you as you're trying to navigate through the asteroid field (and the other levels as well)!

Thanks again!

Hi,

Could you please take a look at my game:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/drone-invaders/id1047158768

Powerups are there. :)

IAP were something he/she was specifically trying to avoid.

There are no IAPs in iOS version.

At 0.99 though, do you really make much money? Back of the envelop numbers seems that any game at that price point is so underpriced to never be profitable or more than a side project. Especially when an ad driven install costs more than that - relying on the pretty poor app store discovery mechanisms cant drive much traffic. (ive worked for free to play, so maybe we just saw a totally different thing)

The reason IAP became so big is because there was a huge race to the bottom in pricing in mobile, $1 isnt sustainable, so everyone was forced to find alternate revenue streams. If apple got rid of free and <$5, the average quality of the app store could be so much higher

I keep thinking that a virtual arcade model could work well... you get N plays per day for free, but if you want to buy more "coins" you pay like $5 and they carry over...

Each version improves existing games in the arcade and/or adds new ones... you can play your 20 coins/day first, then buy extra if you choose... there's no reason that model couldn't work quite well.

Isn't that exactly what P2P/IAP is?

This is the model most Facebook games use. They might call credits "energy", but whatever.

Depends on what you define as 'much money'.

I spent 3 months building Hipster CEO and its made me approx $40-45k (as well as leading to other projects). Not a bad return for 3 months work.

Piggy backing on this to plug our game as well: Fleet of One [1]. Retro 80s space shooter with an original soundtrack composed by a SAMA (South African Music Awards) nominated musician, original artwork by a professional artist, a lot of time spent on level design with classic bosses. Have a look, there's a free demo as well. No IAPs. Real love went into this.

We didn't even make the development cost back. We actively fought against the idea of IAPs and trying to hook whales, even though it would have been easy to introduce mechanisms to do it (on the hardest level it's almost impossible to beat).

[1] iOS: https://itunes.apple.com/za/app/fleet-of-one/id580453079?mt=... Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=za.co.polymorp...

Is this a Unity game? I built something similar (way worse I'm sure) based on the Space game tutorial:

https://unity3d.com/learn/tutorials/projects/space-shooter-t...

No, it's not Unity. I used Swift, along with SpriteKit [1] to develop the game.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/spritekit

Sweet, I love SpriteKit. It's really great to work with.

I just bought it and gave it a try. I have to say, it is not really my type of thing. After beating the boss, it just repeats, which is not really fun. I really liked the graphics and whatnot, but there was very little in ways of Replayability. It reminded me a lot of Xenon, but was basically over after the first boss. Still, great job! Hope it makes you rich.

Thank you for checking it out! Yes, your feedback is well-placed; it does need additional game-play elements (e.g., power-ups, shields, variation, etc.) that would give it a higher replay factor.

Again, thank you for taking the time to play and provide feedback. This was my first game, and it's clear that I have a lot to learn!

Welcome. And best of luck. This is an awesome start!

iOS only? It looks fun, but I don't have a working iOS device at the moment.

Thank you. It's iOS only.

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