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Comment by TheNewAndy | Hacker News Reader

I made this iOS game:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/two-birds-one-stone/id15396463...

I have wanted to be able to play this game for a long time, and probably thanks to pandemic, I did the work to enable it to be shared with others. It has made a grand total of 3 sales this year, and that isn't really bothering me (the main frustration is the apple developer fee...)

There is various info (including a trailer of sorts) here:

https://ideationapps.com/

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Nice! What you can do is reuse the structure of your game, and make another one. Basically, just re-skin it.

Then, I think a better approach is to just give it away for free. Then, display ads, or sell tokens when they player dies.

Only display ads, in non-critical parts of the game, like when the player dies, or when he pauses the game. Or in between levels.

But, the biggest money maker, might be to sell tokens. Once in a while, you’ll get some guy that just drops $20 on your game. These guys are the whales.

What did you write it in? Objective-C or Swift?

Most of the development time was offline (on a train), so this basically ruled out anything to do with networking.

There are probably heaps of ways to monetize it (from what I can tell, the "buy a game upfront" model is mostly dead and everything is now free to play. But the reason I'm mentioning it here is because "I don't care if this succeeds".

It was written in C (using SDL2 as the library for getting things on screen). I did have a version in swift, but being able to do most of the development in linux made made things much better for my workflows.

Please don't support such dark patterns that are already used everywhere. Your comment honestly reads as if you don't want the game to be enjoyed and this isn't at all in the "I don't care if this project succeeds" idea of the topic.

I think you read way too much into my comment.

Why don't you have that video on the app store listing? It would explain the game so much better than the 2 screenshots you have up there?

I'm working on it. It is incredibly hard to get videos in the format that apple demands when you have limited hardware. I now have an M1 mac, and I was hoping it could do things in real time in the simulator so I could capture videos that way, but something about OpenGLES support or whatever that I don't understand means that simulators still run really slow.

Record the screen and airdrop to your mac. There’s an option in iMovie to export as screenshot video. Also it’s not available for download worldwide?

I don't have an iPhone and my wife's phone is an SE, which apparently isn't high resolution enough for Apple to accept the video from. The video on youtube was recorded that way.

It is available in all the countries that Apple says they will handle the tax for. Any country where I need to worry about tax is unfortunately missing.

Very cool! You have one more download now :) Please add music!! :)

I have kind of the same experience with the little game I made a while back (lots of effort, but no marketing, so no sales...).

Shameless plug: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mayday./id956530400

Nice - I got a score of 23, which I think qualifies as "not very good, but at least I gave it a shot".

Thanks for the download.

Best $1.99 I spent all morning.

Your score disappears on game over, so I didn't get a chance to see my exact high score. Somewhere in the 1,700s I think.

Thanks for the kind words.

Your highest score should be displayed in small black text under your current score. 1700 is a very impressive score.

Thanks! Old Angry Birds muscle memory probably.

Found the high score, 1773.

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