Show HN: 6 months ago I quit my job to pursue indie dev. Here is our first game
playadrift.com
playadrift.com
Here's a little bit of feedback:
+ The graphics are super polished. Great work!
+ The touch interaction could use some work. Sometimes, I drag and I feel it colors squares that I don't want to color. Or it colors squares that I've successfully colored already, and it's not clear how I can backtrack. Take a look at path drawing games like Scramble with Friends to see how they handle backtracking.
+ I understand that advertisements are ugly and you want to keep your game very slick and polished, but... you are leaving a lot of money on the table. I would make your app a Universal Binary (add iPad support) and then throw an iAds/AdMob banner ad at the bottom of the screen. Then, make it very clear that if the user buys an IAP, that you'll remove ads forever. You can keep your iPhone version ad-free.
+ Why isn't your app just called "Adrift"? Was it taken already? "Adrift by Tack" looks a little clumsy, or err... tacky.
+ From appstorerankings.net, it looks like your keywords are "3d cube connect center adrift by tack". Center comes from Game Center, and Adrift by Tack comes from your title. So it looks like you don't use many keywords. As a new app on the store, I'd add more keywords like: puzzle, flow, board, etc. And try to find more unique ones where you might rank highly.
+ Good luck working the press! You've already done a great job with HN. :-)
Email me at {my_user_name}@gmail if you want to chat.
Once they complete a challenging puzzle, say something like "Congrats. You demolished that puzzle! Want to share this with a friend?" Then when they hit the FB/TW share icon, you can share the same exact puzzle (http://playadrift.com/?puzzle=3653) as a link. This will improve your virality.
Also, what toolkit did you use to write the iOS game? cocos2d? Or is there some magical toolkit that allows you to render out an HTML version of your app too???!!
There are people who can never pay you (kids whose parents have disabled IAP). There are people who would have been happy to pay you after 20 levels, but got distracted by a new SuperCell game and never came back to your game. You want to monetize every user, even if it's for 1 cent. Or if you don't monetize them, you want them to tell their friends about your app, to improve your app virality.
I understand if you don't want to bombard your users with IAP and ads, but monetization is truly important. It allows your company to survive. Without it, you might have to go get a job someday, and this will prevent us all from enjoying your awesome games.
Also, it's not clear that there are more level packs if you swipe horizontally. Maybe if you add the three little dots (page indicators) at the bottom? Or maybe arrows that you can tap to change the page? I know this all looks ugly, but sometimes you have to be explicit. There are lots of users who need a bit of guidance to navigate your app.
I had a hard time figuring this out too.
Having said that let me give you some numbers which you can correlate to your download figures to come up with an estimate of how much ad revenue you are leaving on the table. Today you can expect your ad revenue to be about 3-10 USD per 1k bootups. Maybe more if you do some ad mediation between networks to increase fill rates[2] but this is a realistic estimate. This is from personal experience using Chartboost and revmob. To achieve a steady 1k daily bootups, you will need about 150 downloads/day. This is a steady state equilibrium I've found true for my apps, it takes into account new user acquisition rate and churn rate (which is surprisingly high, from my stats only about 80% of users will even open you app, and of those 80% only 30% will open it on the next day, after 30 days you can expect about 5% of users to still be using your app).
There's a lot to be said about App Store monetization but take these numbers into account when considering whether to ad ads to your app. Btw all of the above is for full screen interstitial ads shown once on app launch. And honestly most users are ok with tactful ads that don't interfere with the user experience (predictable and consistent positioning out of the way of gameplay--e.g. at app launch or between levels/after you "die"), I can tell you I've never had a bad review because of ads.
I just wanted to give you some advice re. ads as it's something I emotionally struggled with at the beginning, and I'd hate to see a talented team like yours not get the results you deserve, esp. by leaving money on the table.
Cute game btw!
[1] www.goonbee.com [2] www.github.com/lmirosevic/GBAds
Does the website demo work on an iPhone (I don't have one to test)?
The standard solution is to give away a bunch of levels for free and charge for additional levels using IAPs.
Relying on the App Store is a good strategy for development firms that cannot build their own hype. So far, I'm guessing these guys are doing an okay job.
But I have zero data on any of this, hopefully they do and are acting appropriately.
[1]: http://www.addictinggames.com/puzzle-games/3dlogic2.jsp
Free sells.
This one has much better controls on the web app, as well.
If I had an iDevice I would pay for this. Good luck.
I'm not sure how making a game for free is a business, but still, best of luck!
* An iPad version is needed. The graphics seem to be high res enough to make an iPad version feasible, and if this is on the iPad I'd buy it for sure. I don't really like the idea of trying to trace out the paths on the tiny iPhone screen.
* Charge money for it. I'd definitely be willing to pay personally.
One thought: I'd consider making the first few levels much easier. This article on Yoyodyne's trivia games is along those lines:
"As Yoyodyne got busier, we had less and less time to write each game's questions. Finally, one day, we launched a game that had very little effort put into the questions - a rush job, as I recall. The questions were factually correct, but there was no witty writing, no twist, and the questions were really easy to answer.
When the game ran, we were surprised to see that the response rate, instead of hovering around 30%, actually exceeded 60%. We had put less work into crafting the experience, and there were more players who wanted to participate. ... [u]sers wanted two things from their e-mail game experience:
1. POSITIVE REINFORCEMENT: Users wanted to be told that they got the answer right, and that they were winning.
2. NO INVESTMENT: Users did not want to pay for that positive reinforcement in any way. They didn't want to think, work, get up from their chair, or otherwise make any effort to get the reward."
People ultimately want just enough veneer on their games that they can pretend it isn't just a big you win button that showers them in confetti.
Out of interest, do you make the levels by hand, or do you have a script to generate them? Would be interesting to know the rules for a valid level against an impossible level.
Edit: Ah, didn't realize you increased the density of squares on the cube as levels progressed. Very nice.
Are you sure this won't be a problem?
Edit:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5332485
Yeah, its a clone of an old shockwave game I played
about 10 years ago and felt it would be perfect for
touch interaction.
>"it[']s a clone of an old shockwave game" //
Personally it doesn't look close enough to me to be a copyright infringement, game mechanics aren't copyrightable (but are patentable [depending on jurisdiction]). It wouldn't matter if the game had been released yesterday - in copyright terms - you can copy the concept of the game as long as you don't copy (or derive) your implementation.
IMO the 3D Logic version is vastly superior I'd just add a "hold button" to allow the cube to be held still whilst you draw.
First of all, your presentation is terrific. Great art and sound. Top notch, feels like it came from a very talented team. With this game on your resume, you've got a great future ahead of yourselves.
Now, the bad part: from a gameplay perspective, your game is not unique enough to win out on its own merits in any app store. If you have any money left, spend that cash on those awful, dark-alley fake review and promotion services. Take all of Ronyeh's advice, it's excellent, but you can't stop there. To succeed today in the app stores, you have to cheat, so go buy some reviews and downloads so you can raise your ranking in the store. It's a self-fulfilling cycle: higher rankings, more sales.
There is an awful lot to be said for this being a complete game with a pleasing experience, but there are already a dozen games with similar gameplay in the AppStore. though yours may be the most polished, sales of games in AppStores are less about quality and more about cheating to get more sales, or having a juggernaut that's already on top, like Angry Birds.
That being said, this is a perfect game to hang such cheating tactics around: it looks the part and sounds the part of a successful game, and it doesn't go the easy route of copying Angry Birds in every single interface window. Compare that to, say, Hill Climb Racing, a top ten app store game that looks awful and is infested with spyware.
But I think the best advice I can give you is to add some sort of meta-layer to your game. The fundamental gameplay is interesting and often challenging in the right ways, but there's no uniqueness factor. Perhaps adding some type of incremental reward for the puzzles. Completing a puzzle without reset gets you some form of currency, which can then be spent on customizing your hot air balloon, or on some form on in-game assistance. Think Dungeon Raid. Most mobile game companies just implement the puzzle and are done with it. The real stand out games take those simple puzzle interfaces and layer complex game elements triggered by successes and failures in the puzzle game.
Keep up the good work. You're obviously talented. You'll make money at this, but you can't rely solely on the press and the quality of your game. You have to game the app stores to succeed.
Oh, and when it comes to press, I really don't have any good advice. Try to find some small outlets to work with because the big guys will ignore you, and do so in a mean and churlish way. It's sad to say, but the gaming press these days are mostly retarded monkeys with no idea what it actually takes to make a game. Yer not going to get to the front page of IGN, so don't waste time trying. Find some small app store review sites no one has ever heard of and be nice to them. They'll give you a bigger bang for your buck.
> You have to game the app stores to succeed.
What the hell?
Edit: As antoko points out, this doesn't really add anything to the discussion, which I was aware of. I just felt the need to express disgust at what I feel to be blatant and inexcusable dishonesty. Never mind the risk of getting caught or some other backlash, what if you value honesty and pride in your work as much as the money?
1. write crap game. 2. buy reviews. 3. profit.
However, if your app is awesome, that initial burst of cheating allowed your game to push through the crowds of 50,000 other apps to get the eyeballs it needs. If it's a great app, those initial users who were suckered in by cheating the system, are now happy, satisfied customers telling their friends about your app. You don't need to game the system anymore: you've broken through the brick wall that is the first 10,000 or so sales. After that, you can rely on the quality of your game to win people over, but when you're naked, alone and review-less, the app store can be a terrifying and unfriendly place.
The way you are describing it basically makes it sound like a hidden listing cost to be on the app store.
Eventually though people are simply going to stop believing reviews at which point Apple/Google will have to start taking some action against this.
A crap game doesn't get good reviews, so boosting the app rating by buying fake reviews is just throwing good money after bad.
Anyway, I wonder how long will it take before this tactic becomes too widespread so that only huge players will have enough cash to game the system like this.
I don't want to sound cynical, but why do you think it hasn't already spread so wide that only huge players can game the system enough to gain the top spots? There was an article on HN this month about how book publishers even game the NYT book rankings.
I played 10 levels of this game on the web site, though, and it never even encouraged me to brag to anyone else about how quick I solved a puzzle, and had no replay value, e.g. I can't solve a puzzle better or worse really. The game has nothing to get each user to draw in more users, so it would be a waste to do the ad spend at all...
And, as for Super Hexagon, I'll play anything Terry Cavanagh makes. He is a fucking god. 4-Letter-Word melted my brain.
Do you believe the quoted statements from the GP are false?
Or do you not care if they are true, and rather believe that that kind of advice is always wrong?
And by the way, you're recommending buying fake reviews. Here's a better tactic (and one that's guaranteed not to get you kicked out of the app store): get your launch announcement to the top slot on a popular discussion site, and get the real people there to leave real reviews instead. Which, if you're reading this and want to help these guys, is probably the best thing you can do.
It's entirely possible to succeed using only honest, community focused methods. But yer competing with a huge pack of other guys who don't use those methods, and have a significant advantage because of it. This isn't hugs and puppies. This is business.
But the advice you're giving here is roughly equivalent to telling a young cyclist in their first pro race, "hey, listen buddy. If you want to succeed, you've got to dope. Everybody's doing it. There's no other way."
And yet, if he wanted to ride in the Tour De France, I think we all know he'd lose unless he did a blood transfusion every single night....
Actually, wait. No I take that back, I do not agree. A starting cyclist will compete in local, small time races. There's only one App Store, and it's Pro's take all. These guys may be just beginning, but they're already swimming with sharks.
And if that's not enough mixed metaphors, I'll edit again!
It's not optimal, but it's the status quo that tens of thousands of developers face: you can't win if you don't employ dubious means.
Okay, that made me laugh. Thanks for adding some humor into this otherwise rather downer discussion!
I used to race (although not on very high level), I know the environment and I would bet my balls that last few Tours have NOT been clean.
My opinion is this: cycling may be a bit cleaner in a sense that maybe doping is not as widespread as it used to be and maybe the effect of doping is more limited because they need to be more careful. But I don't believe cycling is clean now. There are new drugs that are undetectable and mentality has not changed. I believe this is more realistic: http://www.cyclingnews.com/news/italian-judge-says-doping-is...
And about SKY team - I have no proof and it's nothing more than just my guess but I don't believe they are clean either. Remember last TdF? They totally ruled, they controlled the whole race. My cycling intuition tells me this is not natural. They certainly compete against some (I would say many) riders who are not clean (some of them even got caught, like Frank Schleck) and they were not even competing on the same level - they were superior. I don't believe it is possible without doping. The fact that they claim otherwise on every occasion means nothing to me - I have seen this too many times.
My guess - and I realize it's nothing more than guess - is that if in 2030 they use their new methods to test today's samples they will find out that there is some substance that is undetectable today.
I would love to be proven wrong on this - I love cycling.
Read more of the in-depth articles about Sky. Their training methods are hugely different, and came from the GB track cycling programme which has taken the world championships and Olympics by storm over the past decade. They're open about what it is, and unlike with others, it's only the performance which makes anyone wonder. Look at the figures, and remember, they're still 10% slower than Armstrong! What they are using is demonstrable physiological science and feedback: a manifestation of the benefits of the Quantified Self approach!
We're almost done with our slot machine game for iOS (lame, I know), but we only have 2 people, and we definitely don't need to be in the top 25 to make some real money (that can fund new, "real game" projects).
http://thegamebakers.com/money-and-the-app-store-a-few-figur...
http://www.gamesbrief.com/2011/08/selling-an-iphone-game-the...
Or really, just use this link:
http://www.pixelprospector.com/the-big-list-of-game-revenue-...
Games are top-heavy, but there is an overlooked middle ground of devs who have a decent passive income...
Seriously? You don't understand why not?
I'm assuming this is against the TOS of pretty much any app store and could get whatever apps he is associated with pulled.
Also you may want to look up "rhetorical question" when you have a spare moment.
But you are right when you say that this discussion is way off topic, so I'll probably leave it at this. Nice seeing ya.
It's very simple, which I suppose is way the parent asked the question: I don't want to attach my name to anything I do on the internet, really.
Could you explain this logic?
(And that's true regardless of whether it's effective -- it clearly is, though I think mostly in the short term).
Edit: Since I'm being fairly negative here, I want to add that VonGuard's comments on gameplay and adding unique elements seem well-informed and well-intentioned.
My comments on the app store are strictly from the cynical perspective of seeing what works. It has to be said. If you go in not knowing the table stakes, yer at a disadvantage. This is just like search engine optimization: fluid, ever changing, highly competitive, extremely scummy, but EVERYONE does it.
The alternative from the perspective of say, EA or a GluMobile, is to play completely by the rules, but produce 500 games per year. As a smalltime developer, cheating is immeasurably helpful when competing with the giants that can launch 2 new games every week.
I can't help but feel your desire for me not to talk about it this loud amounts to you plugging your ears and saying "LALALALALALA NOT LISTENING!" This stuff happens every day. Ignoring it means losing to it.
Your advice sounds cynical because it is. People don't want to cheat to win - and you're telling them that they have to. Well, who are you to say that? Why should people listen to you? You may be an IGF judge, but that doesn't mean you've ever sold a game (well scratch that, I actually don't know the qualifications required to become an IGF judge, but you catch my drift).
I say this not to be critical of you personally - but if you're saying 'you need to cheat', and then brandishing your status as a judge in a relevant body, then people are going to listen to you. If you're wrong, you've given people bad advice - and this means that you should lose credibility. If you're right, then you'll gain credibility. Simply 'opting out' of the credibility problem makes it very easy for supposedly credible people to give bad advice - which doesn't help anyone in the long run - and in fact can damage a lot of people's businesses and livelihoods.
It's advice, you can take it or leave it.
You're more than welcome to be the guy/team who says, "we're going to do this the right way!". But so do a lot of other indie gaming teams, and they go under. I lived in the social gaming space for a while (Facebook). The biggest discouragement is that the quality of games made little difference to getting noticed and making money. I am no longer in the space.
You can do it the "honorable" way, and that's great, and may work. If you want to make a business of the business, you have to get your hands dirty. Don't hate the player, hate the game.
90% of the games that are currently on my iPhone were a) made by dev teams with 1-3 people, b) provide a unique and polished experience, and c) became known mainly based on community outreach. None of them are currently in the top rankings, but as far as I can tell they make enough money for the teams to get by. People keep talking about "hidden gems" on the App Store that failed to succeed despite having an excellent product, but so far, the only ones I've seen were either outright clones, failed to do any outreach at all, or had a poor business model. (Freemium with very little incentive to upgrade, for instance.)
Sure, if you're a hundred-person company, you might need to resort to shady means to be profitable. But I don't think that's at all necessary to make money on the App Store.
Asymmetry is a real problem in the App store.
This equation also works, sadly, when you replace "uniqueness/novelty factor" with "boobs." Look at the top apps and see that this is true.
Simogo has made a couple of very unique and artful games, including last year's Mobile Game IGF winner Beat Sneak Bandit. It's notable that their games are premium priced ($3), but still have hundreds of reviews.
Mika Mobile is a husband & wife team with a number of fantastic brawlers under their belts, including Battleheart and Zombieville USA 2.
Tiger Style is (in their own words) a "distributed collective of independent game developers" that have most recently developed the award-winning exploration/space-gardening game Waking Mars.
Jeff Minter releases a new iOS game what seems like every other week. (Though he once characterized it as "run[ning] frantically on the iOS treadmill".)
Zach Gage has made a number of small, fairly popular games, including SpellTower and Bit Pilot. ("Net Gross for me is probably around ~110k for 3 years of work. but the profits would probably be quite a bit lower than that")
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Notable recent failures include Punch Quest (F2P model didn't yield any income, so they switched to paid) and Gasketball (again, the F2P model they were using was too permissive).
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So, not a perfect ecosystem, but not an abysmal wasteland either. Enough for the kooky hobbyists to get by as long as their products are top-notch and their business model makes sense. (At least that's how I see it.)
Feel free to email me win@insertquarterly.com, would really love to have you write a piece for us!
I expect that's due to sending infinite data back home. Plus it has permissions to read all sortsa data, like every free game.
Ask for a review after the user gets 5 stars in a level? :p
Here's a particularly shameless example: http://imgur.com/8UGRals
But yeah, you'd probably get better results if you're like "hey, here's this free thing, want it?" (tap YES) "Here you go!" ... "Please go rate us thanks it really helps" because of people's sense of reciprocity.
In any case, my point is to use your fans and your customers to boost your rank, rather than shady services and botnets.
For example, have a random time-based trigger that will unlock a DLC item in the middle of regular play. Tell them they got it, make it shine and sparkle, and then--maybe not right away, but after a minute or so, after they've gotten back to the game and might be playing around with their new toy--ask them for a rating.
Another way to put it is: if Nintendo, as some unknown up-and-comer, had released SMB3 on the App Store, a ratings dialogue would almost certainly appear approximately two minutes into the Kuribo-shoe level.
There's of course Facebook mobile app installs, but a lot of other ways to get installs also that might be more cost effective. Some others: http://www.appoday.com/#developers http://www.curios.me/
Best of luck!
That said, Apple's App Store is an absurdly tough market in the U.S. When your game goes live, it needs to be at its best, and even large gaming companies have trouble getting games out there that do well, even with significant legitimate ad spend.
Here are some ideas, based loosely off of the experience I have had:
- Start contacting other indie-devs with relatively high dau numbers and arrange for X-promo via notifications and features.
- Stage your ad-spend when your metrics are known. Ie, if you beta test your app in some country like Brazil or New Zealand and improve your metrics so you have a known LTV, you can spend accordingly when you launch in a big market like Canada or US.
- Start with Android first because it is an easier ecosystem to iterate upon and attain an niche audience.
- There is a growing body of proof that burst spending on launch day is not the best strategy. There are games that launch early and are unknown but gradually improve their grossing metrics and buy audience in batches over time. I believe Rage of Bahamut was one such game [1]
[1]. http://www.appannie.com/app/ios/rage-of-bahamut/ranking/hist...
Please see my thread http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5339639 i will appropriate your your input.
I have a similar problem i guess :) , although i am in the thouht that we did a very good game but the game is not climbing...maybe i am just asking too much :)
if you dont want to look at the thread i will just say that my game name is Atlantis Breaker HD, link: https://itunes.apple.com/app/atlantis-breaker-hd/id576385319...
What do you say?
Additionally, if you are going to cheat, get that monetization play in order first.
As a developer you are already at the total mercy of these app stores. That doesn't seem to be a problem apparently for many people here because of the belief that the pride of the work should be completely secondary to monetary gain.
The owners of these app stores don't seem to care much either. The more people who make apps regardless of revenue expectations, the more they improve the quality of these app stores and add value to the owners, not the developers. The Apples, and Googles don't have any incentive to make the marketplace any more fair it would seem.
I recommend contacting local newspapers, they are usually very willing to write stories like "local programmer quits day job to pursie his dream of creating games etc".
What's more surprising is that this is a top comment! People who upvoted this are not any better than you are!
It's always better to be honest and take pride in your work. Hacking is about making something great and interesting, not making a cheap buck.
With nearly 600 upvotes, 250+ comments, and the front page of Hacker News, he shouldn't have trouble finding press coverage.
If you are "going indie" you have to think about your real motivations -- are you building games to make a profit, or are you building games that you want to play but do not exist? The most successful games seem to fall in the latter category (successful indie games, that is). I do not say this to be snide or critical, just my honest, well-intentioned advice.
This. The latter, indeed, always make the best games. But if yer making this game because you want to make a living making games, push ads, track phone calls, pull down people's address books and sell that shit, after pumping fake downloads and such. If you want the money to fund the game you really want to make, just go full on evil, no half measures. You can be nice on the game you really wanted to make, when gameplay can float it on its own.
Observing that a lot of corruption is taking place is different from actively suggesting someone to do it. You can do the first, but the second is bad!
You are not a game dev. You don't know our pains. If you are honest, I suggest you reveal the evidence anonymously. I hope all such scums get outed. This is morally bankrupt.
Gaming app stores isn't morally bankrupt, it's about circumventing an arbitrary set of rules set out by Apple or Google. It's not breaking the law, it's not raping and pillaging. It's capitalism. The other games in the app store that have this gameplay are dialing home, selling ads, etc...
Yes, you can make a good living making awesome games and selling them in the app store. If yer a game dev, you should know that just expecting every game dev to make an awesome game is ludicrous. Gameplay design is about iteration, refinement, testing, and iteration, refinement and testing. Just like software dev. It's really tough to get right, too, because gameplay doesn't "compile" in the same sense as regular logic. You have to test subjective "fun" levels. Making an awesomely fun game with a unique gameplay hook is the hardest possible thing to do in making a game.
So what is an indie dev to do? Monetize the lesser games to fund the big, awesome ones. Is gaming the app store any more scummy than downloading a user's phone book? Tracking their phone call regions? Reading their cookies?
See this from a user's perspective-> I spend $200 getting a fancy phone. I go to the app store. I see an app which is highly rated. I believe that the reviews and ratings are real. (The reviews are fake, I don't know that.) I spend $0.99 or more getting it. The app is horrible. This repeats a few times. I eventually stop downloading apps. I have been robbed off my money through lies. This is not just bad marketing. I slowly stop trusting app stores. I don't want to download anything from the open Internet either.
Don't you see how this hurts the whole ecosystem?
Apple's rules are not arbitrary. I could then claim that the laws of a country are arbitrary. I could denounce democracy. I could hire someone to kill my enemies. This is how mafias are formed. App store scamming is nothing but a modern mafia which doesn't kill directly.
You seem to be a person in power. I kindly beg you to use that power for good in a bolder manner. Reveal these scumbags anonymously.
If you equate selling ads with scamming, then someone else can equate scamming with murder. I bet a lot of frustrated devs are in the position.
This pattern has repeated time and time again in the history of software. See the videogame industry in 1984, or the Wii, now: crappware hurts the whole ecosystem. I totally agree. Please go browse through the Android App Store and then explain to me how the ecosystem is in anyway un-besmirched now. There will be a flush out. The decision of these guys doesn't make a difference. Get while the getting's good.
>Apple's rules are not arbitrary. I could then claim that the laws of a country are arbitrary.
Yeah, you could. But in this case, we are talking about the rules of a marketplace versus the rule of law. The rules of marketplaces, historically, are gamed over and fucking over again. See any Ponzi scheme/Mortgage crisis/stock swindle. It happens all the time. The rule of law sometimes overlaps with the rules of the marketplace.... I dunno where I'm going with this...
It's just that your statement equivocates the rules of a private, corporate entity with the rules of a democratically elected body of government, checked and balanced with the judicial system. Say what you will about the process of our Republic/democaracy, but I'd say it's anything but arbitrary.
For some reason, when you say arbitrary, I think "spontaneous," and... wow... the federal government as spontaneous. It may be completely non-sensical, but the government tends to move in very premeditated, well explained fashions. OMG, the extent to which they go to explain things.... Jebus.... 10,000 page research studies and... this is another argument.
Point being, Apple's rules change when Apple wants them to. Our laws change when ( and this is another argument waiting to happen) the people decide.
Here's the problem: in the app store graph of revenue, the top 10 apps are on Mount Everest, the next 15 to 25 are at sea level, and the next 75 out to 100 are in the Marianas Trench. Everyone else is somewhere in the molten core of the planet. I was offering blunt advice on how to succeed. The sad fact is, gaming the app stores is a whole line of business. App stores suck. As a game dev, you should know this. Xbox Live Arcade? How's that for patch management? Apple? Holy gods! Why are you so protective of their TOS? I mean, yeah you should abide by all rules of your marketplace. But people don't. And people get rich that way. I sure as fuck don't get rich. On anything. Maybe that's why I am so bitter. Or maybe it's SimCity V's BS...
I am sort of arguing from a post conventional stage.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kohlberg%27s_stages_of_moral_de...
Don't think I am arguing from a religious perspective or from a moronic "rules are holy" perspective.
Fuck religion and fuck the rules and laws.
There is a universal moral core which is the only thing I am arguing from.
I would say that money is the guiding light of many here, perhaps only out-shined by the dictums of clean, recursive code. I just felt obligated to tell these guys how they could best support themselves with this game, as is, barring another 6 months of reworking it. Having quit his/their jobs and such, I'm sure money is very important.
Making money on games, and making awesome games are kinda two different things. The lines around advertising, Terms of Service, and the general expectations of a free versus paid user, this is all some very shaky ground on which to stand. But when I'm giving advice on a game in this market, I just calls 'em like I sees 'em. It's a terrible reality inside the app stores. Their terms of service change monthly, they can throw you out in the street for a lot less than gaming their systems. It's a marketplace, and these paid install services are growing, just like search engine optimization sites did. It's one of those icky business decisions, and lines that you pay a suit to worry about. Given money from this app, these guys can go and make a great game that can stand on its own merits.
- Even though it's bouncing, I didn't see the "play now" arrow, and went directly for the video button. You might also want a "Play now" button in the main button list.
- In the video, I had to watch quite a bit of it to even know what the game was actually about. I would have liked if you showed me actual gameplay earlier in the video.
Keep it up!
But It's a beautiful looking game and when the light bulb went off of how the game is played, I will be downloading it.
Perhaps edit the video so it shows more of the core gameplay (like the part in the last 10s in the video).
I'm in no way trying to argue your decision, I'm genuinely curious how much work it was to create a game like this. Also, how much of the conceptual work for this game had you done prior to leaving your job?
Incidentally, it would be nice if you could backtrack to remove colored path blocks if you make a mistake like accidentally dragging across a small corner. I've only tried the webapp version, so not sure if that works in the iOS one.
Were you in game dev before you quit to do this?
And would there be a possibility of rotating the cube?
+ the website javascript to load the next level or refresh the current level doesn't work on my computer(aurora firefox on osx)
+ the video doesn't work that well. (volume controls don't work, the play button doesn't work, got the video to play by clicking the video background)
overall it looks like a fun game but I am curious how you are going to make some money with this if it's free.
Congrats on the release, and best of luck with the game!
One minor feedback: when the tile color is yellow, the star should be colored different (because when highlighted, it is also yellow)
Some feedback from my experience playing the HTML5 version on a computer with a mouse (Firefox 19) and on an android smartphone (Chrome 18):
- On both platforms the "LOADING" message does not go away after hitting "close" on the little instruction cloud, and the level does not load. Only after hitting the reset button (with the circular-arrow symbol) does the level load.
- On my smartphone, my finger tracing can easily outpace the tile coloring, and this leads to some tiles being skipped. The animation is also choppy. Probably not an issue on the native version.
- I think you should prevent diagonal tile markings since they do not work to connect the star tiles anyway.
- If there was a way to stop accidental over-writing other colors due to clumsy mouse usage, that would be nice. This seems like less of a problem on a touch screen.
[edit: Asked and answered below. As an Android user (and obviously this is anecdotal but it's all I've got), I spend more money on in-game purchases -- reasonable ones, not FarmCityWhatever insanity -- than I do purchasing them outright. For something like this, level packs seem like a good IAP.]
1. You've earned my $1 2. Please cater more of my OCD. I see you count number of turn and time... GIVE MY 3 STARSSS!!! 3. Utilise Game Center more,.. "Hey, John finish this level in 2 second with only 3 turns." Since Letterpress I actually have friends in game center.
That gave me a thought around branding. The name ("Adrift") and the tagline ("A puzzle game in worlds of whimsy") both feel whimsical and fun - which is great for a game. But I wonder if focusing the branding around "brain training" might help expand your target market.
Most games are fun time-wasters, and tend to appeal to people who want to have fun and/or kill time. This game has a considerably wider appeal: it can help people exercise their brains, especially older people who want to keep their minds active. This is why a lot of people do Sudoku and crossword puzzles: http://healthland.time.com/2012/01/24/use-it-or-lose-it-keep...
I had a brain injury a decade or so ago, and the doctors told me to do certain puzzles to keep my brain active. It gave my brain a workout, and I was reminded of that feeling when I played your game.
One way to expand the target market might be to eventually do an expansion set called "Adrift: Brain Island" or something? You could target PR to the demos that brain workouts could appeal to.
Good luck!!
http://i.imgur.com/za2UXWh.png
One a separate note - awesome game! I plan to buy it. On the web version, one thing I'd like would be able to toggle a miss clicked space back to "neutral" with a click. I'd also make the levels slightly harder before getting to level 5 - they all seemed too easy up to that point.
Try that query on there. They managed to index a LOT of pages that way.
Here's the thing. Your site has been compromised. Look. I'll fetch the same page with two different user-agents. One will show up as some generic curl thing and the other will look like Google's crawler.
$ curl http://www.craftymind.com/factory/guimark3/video/flash_720p_high.html > ordinary
$ curl -A "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)" http://www.craftymind.com/factory/guimark3/video/flash_720p_high.html > googlebot
$ grep viagra ordinary
$
I do the same for the second.
$ grep viagra googlebot
[ ... tons and tons of garbage ... ]
Sorry.
To see what I mean by hints, see this HTML5 port of my game I've been doing (work in-progress): http://noisytyping.com/NCT6745/index.html
It might benefit from additional types of tiles that introduce complexity, maybe like a tile that reacts to the color placed next to it and becomes colored the same way. Maybe a tile that reacts to all the colors next to it and becomes a mix. (IE: You need a purple tile in one spot, so in order to have that tile or tile group to turn purple, you need red and blue squares next to it). Sparse use of elements like that keep the problem from being identical.
Then again, maybe it's not needed. People enjoy working through books of sudoku problems.
FWIW, I would have paid $0.99 up front. I bought the level pack, but it's pretty rare that a game will hook me to the point that I make it through the free levels. I probably wouldn't have bought it if I hadn't seen this post - if I'd just stumbled across the game somewhere.
How do you intend (or do you intend) to ramp up revenue to match your previous salary?
I rated it 5 stars, added a review, and referred it to a couple friends. I want to see this game succeed. If you want to support these guys, why not do the same?
Just one thing, the web version seems kinda blurry. Even on a non-retina 5+ year old LCD.
Just checked and it's even blurrier on a retina ... the website itself is super crisp, but the textures in the game area itself kind of aren't.
ETA: Thanks for no ads. Easy-priced paid content is worth not cluttering my head with more noise.
I went with two apps and a Lite version. It's a bit of a hassle.
I'd pay for this game on android, but paid level pack would also work for me.
Very nice presentation!
The game is FREE and it went live on the 15th of February 2013, till today we got more than 150 reviews with an average of 4.3 and we still dont see us in the rankings..
sorry, i forgot to mention the game :)
Game name is Atlantis Breaker HD link is : https://itunes.apple.com/app/atlantis-breaker-hd/id576385319...
by the way any suggestion and feedback would be highly appreciated.
thanks.
The game is beautiful, too. Wonderful job!
Take a look at Cut the Rope web version, they have built a pretty sweet web version.
If you change up your webversion to be better suited to being iframed in let me know (or contact us at Kano Games) and we can iframe it for web and link to you iOS version for our mobile users.
The game is A LOT of fun ;) I definitely see myself and people I know playing it. Best of luck in the app-store. No doubt you all will do GREAT!!!
But that's what makes it fun. It's the perfect combination of familiarity & challenge!
EDIT: or even take a lower-level solution and inject another path into. So every prior level is a seed to future levels. Rotation of the three faces, even cycling the colors, would probably make it hard to recognize the older level within the new one (at least, for casual use).
The problem can in fact be modeled with a graph in which you need to find vertex-disjoint paths between pairs of vertices (s1,t1), (s2,t2), and so on, but this problem seems not to be reducible to max-flow, instead it is NP-hard.
In order to cut down some of the search, you can make the recursion smarter (e.g. extend one color at a time, early cycle / impossibility prediction, etc)
1) https://github.com/dbunker/SABR/blob/master/module/other-tes...
2) https://github.com/dbunker/SABR/blob/master/module/other-tes...
One small thing that annoyed me was that even if i connected a path to complete a puzzle, if my finger slipped and removed another path, i would still have to go back and correct it before the puzzle is completed. I think that the puzzle should complete as soon as the final path is connected; the validation shouldn't occur after my finger is lifted from the last move.
Anyway, great look and feel and overall design. Best of luck!
edit: I would also love a shake gesture to clear the cube.
That's a huge win IMO.
I have the in-app purchases disabled in the Settings, so upgrading an app like yours requires doing an app switch, then typing in Restrictions password, enabling IAP, switching back to the app (frequently needing to restart it to), making a purchase (including typing a password), then going back to Settings and re-disabling IAP. In other words it's a hassle.
Here are many more for you to enjoy: http://www.janko.at/Raetsel/Arukone/index.htm
I'm glad people are getting onboard with HTML5 for apps and games. You should get a blog going, I'd love to hear about your trials and tribulations over the 6 months since you quit your job.
Without having looked yet, what is your revenue model, if there is one? Is the plan to release this for free, build an audience, a name, get feedback and all that - to go bigger later with a new game?
you guys made a nice game, but it's very fringe, and it's not even super striking like swords and sworcery, which, btw, was not a big financial success.
i learned the hard way by working on ~20 super fringe games that failed hard (less than $5k total revenue) during the early days of the app store. these are the games where the artists went wild and really had themselves a time and were super pleased with themselves... not a formula for success.
your art is fringe, your gameplay is fringe.
try finding something else not so fringe that you guys STILL love, and make another game, and then another...
I'd rather if my move didn't get set until I stop holding down the cursor (may be different on the mobile version, don't have an iPhone).
I linked my wife to it and she got a kick out of it, too.
Would love to hear more about your technical stack, especially on the web side.
Congrats to shipping.
* The cube could do with some lighting hints
* Some visual clues on the menu would be helpful. I didn't know how to get past the tutorial besides randomly swiping.
This reminds me of Colorbind, one of my all-time favorite iOS games, but expanded and taken 3d. I've always wished there was more to Colorbind...
Did you work on this game by yourself or with other people?
Did you use any existing game frameworks like Cocos2D or Unity?
First stab at basic time challenge puts me at rank #2.
I think the challenge system could be something quite fun if you integrate it well.
One thing I may want to add - Porting the game to different platforms would be great.
I wish you can undo a color so it can be neutral (grey again). But I realize you can repaint it with another color while you're in the middle of dragging, you just need to drag a diff color to the mess up paint.
edit: It seems that on reload, things are working fine, there is some glitchyness with the intro help text not always disappearing
Either way, fun game. Great work.
pins app tab
I hope I get some work done today.
Very impressive!
You did good. I hope it sells. I am gonna pay for it now.
Just grabbed it for my phone for free but I would have easily paid $0.99 for it. :)