Comment by ronyeh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ronyeh | Hacker News Reader

Welcome to the App Store! I'm very impressed with what you guys have done in 6 months; it took me much longer to ship my first app.

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.

Additionally: Since you already have a web-playable version of the game, you should have a feature where a user can share a puzzle with a friend.

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???!!

Thanks for all the feedback, it's all really good advice, We've gone back and forth on the ad thing and we're still not sold on whether to integrate them or not. The game was written in cocos2d, and I wrote the initial prototype in html5, so thats whats being used on the website. Also yeah "Adrift" was taken as an app store entry, so we had to figure out something else for the title, I agree its a bit clunky.

Yeah, I didn't include ads for my first year either. Now, my model going forward will always be: Free + iAds/AdMob + IAP to get more content and remove the ads.

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.

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.

I sympathise with you 100% from first hand experience as an iOS dev[1] on the ad front. As designers we want our products to be beautiful and "pure", and for every single user to love the experience of using our app. You have to remember though that at the end of the day you want your company to do well and provide some sort of return on your investment.

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

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