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Comment by greengarstudios | Hacker News Reader

I'm an independent iOS developer. My paid apps have sold over 100,000 copies at 99¢ or higher. In total, my iOS apps (including free apps) have been downloaded over 7 million times.

I took a look at your app in the App Store.

Here's your problem: your icon.

The icon is the most prominent thing the user sees when first looking at your app in the App Store.

Change your icon, and you'll get more downloads. Trust me :-)

Feel free to contact me if you'd like to discuss good icon design, or other under-appreciated aspects of selling an app.

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So could you post here a summary of what makes the icon good? I got professionally designed icon for one of my projects, but still got bunch of quite different opinions about it from various people.

Going to be harsh here:

The Icon is bad, the copy is bad, and the name is bad. A factory? I have trouble associating factory with anything fun. Call is something like Ball Crusher, sounds more fun.

This is my stupid opinion, and I could be wrong, but try to make the copy more fun, leave the technical explanation to later. Most people only read the first few lines anyway. Get a simple icon, don't try to convey too much info. Just have a colorful ball on a nice background.

Oh, and thanks for putting yourself out there for criticism, is help you and us all. There are some great ideas in the thread, and the game looks like fun.

Yeah, it's looking like a lot of people agree with you that the icon needs work. You've been contacted.

I'm definitely not in love with it, but it's better than the other ideas I had. The problem I was having was trying to depict the in-game action in such a small space. 3D stuff just seems to get cluttered or lost.

Anybody have any suggestions?

A crosshair aiming at a beach ball

An angled disc-bullseye exploding into pieces? The actual depiction won't be as important as the graphical touches. Right now, your non-3D graphics are a little amateur.

Also, can you make the balls a little more spherical? They're the main focus of the game and the background kind of overshadows them.

Actually, why are they spheres and not discs? Discs would look better (more traditional) and add difficulty when they rotate.

Or even better, use spheres on some levels and discs on others (where it makes sense.) definitely crank up the poly count on the spheres and anything else.

Here's a free idea. Let the user use any photo as the texture for the targets. User just got dumped? Let him select a photo of his ex from his photo library and blow her visage to smithereens!

This was my first thought too -- when I saw the icon at the top of your page, I was bracing myself for an awful-looking game and saying to myself "well there's the problem right there". But then the game looks great, compelling even. Talk to this guy about your icon!

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