Ask HN: Please review the advertising page for an iPhone game I made w/ a friend | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Please review the advertising page for an iPhone game I made w/ a friend

10 pointspaulbaumgart13 comments

http://onehotgaming.com/perilcanyon

Hey everybody, thanks for taking the time to look at this.

A little background: a friend from college and I put together this game over the last few weeks, based on a project for a class we took together our senior year. This is entirely a side project, but since we put a lot of work into making the game, we want to put enough work into selling it so we have at least a shot of making it successful. Since we're very much novices at this sort of thing, we'd really appreciate some advice from the HN community.

This is our advertising page (for submitting to review sites, etc.). Basically we want it to be the landing page for any potential customers.

Some specific things I'd like feedback on:

  1) How is the game description copy?
     (Is it too verbose? Should it be a bulleted list?)
  2) Does the color scheme/layout work?
  3) How's the video?

Related: any tips for good iPhone game review sites to pitch this to?

Tangentially related: can anyone recommend a decent A/B testing tool for Django?

1. You can afford to cut the second sentence in the first paragraph. Like so.

"Take control of an F-22 fighter jet as you hurtle down a narrow, winding canyon. Using the accelerometer, dodge obstacles and avoid the ever-narrower canyon walls."

As opposed to:

"Take control of an F-22 fighter jet as you hurtle down a narrow, winding canyon. You have good cover down in the canton's depths, but your enemies with their missiles are in hot pursuit, hoping you fly too high and give them a clear shot. Using the accelerometer, dodge obstacles and avoid the ever-narrower canyon walls"

You can trim the paragraph down without losing all that much.

On the second paragraph, I'd take out the jargon and make the first sentence simpler. The second sentence is pretty good, and does a good job of closing the description.

2. The color scheme's layout is a bit unclear, because of a lack of alignment and visual guides. The #CCD color is a little soft, and doesn't have enough contrast with the black to be clear. I'd like it if it was just black and white for the color choice. I understand the call-to-action button should be prominent, but there are other ways to highlight a call-to-action than the gray button with white colored font.

I'd lose the beveled type with drop shadow over an embossed rounded rectangle though. The logos could use a little work, that whole header could some work, I'm not gonna lie.

3. The video could look better if you hosted it from within your site, and used more and varied shots to make it more exciting than gameplay over song". Think of how videogame commercials are usually put together. Especially the ones produced for your target market.

I haven't played the game yet, but congratulations on releasing it! Best of luck and I hope to see a sequel!

Thanks!

The first thing that jumps out is the Peril Canyon logo, you need to refine it. Compare with the style of your Download button.

I'd like to see the video use more screen space for the actual gameplay, perhaps move the iPhone frame out in the HTML background. The YouTube interface that comes up makes the spacing to the Download button look a bit naff too.

The lighting on the plane in the video is weird. In a canyon I would expect everything to be lit from the top by the sun with plenty of ambient light. It actually appears to be lit from behind and is almost black when facing up.

The copy mentions upgrades and unlocking things, can you use some images from the game to tease us with those?

The game actually looks kind of fun, congratulations!

What engine did you use BTW?

It's just Cocoa Touch + OpenGL and some royalty free .obj models from the web.

The plane does have very little ambient lighting, it's pretty much all specular. The idea was that this would help make it look more "steath fighter-like", but thanks for the feedback that it's not accomplishing that particularly well.

I'll have to think about what to do with the video. Video editing is kinda a big time sink, but I definitely like the idea of putting the iPhone frame around it to make the screen bigger.

Thanks!

Mm I see what you were going for with the lighting, a solid black plane would stick out like a sore thumb in a light brown canyon though.

If I were you, I would just spend some money and get a professional template like http://templatic.com/cms-themes/iphone-app which is specially for you to sell apps. (It's a wordpress theme)

This particular theme may not suite your genre of app, but I'm sure on the internet there are many. Also as for promotion, maybe you would like to contact freeappaday.com which does promotion - but you would have to offer your app free for a few days.

Instead of worrying about this ad copy you'd be better off wrangling up as many credit cards as possible to try to pump it into the top selling apps so people can actually find it after launch day.

Do people do that? It seems like it'd get expensive pretty fast.

They most certainly do.

Hm. Seems I'm not offering enough incentive for more people to care about reviewing my stuff. Maybe if there were an actual playable game involved that people could try out?

Clickable link: http://onehotgaming.com/perilcanyon

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