Show HN: My first iOS game, Hungry Henri
hungryhenri.com
hungryhenri.com
If you're a paid game, you're going to have a very hard time getting sales, because you can't acquire users. The 99 cent 'race to the bottom' also means you need a lot of sales, but it's tough to achieve that today without a brand or big-name. Even Apple featuring you doesn't add up to as much as it used to.
So, you might have noticed a pattern amongst the more successful freemium titles. Lots of wait timers, short gameplay bursts, unlimited purchasables, etc... what hardcore gamers deem as evil, is actually what these companies have determined is the most optimal way to make money. I'm not trying to be depressing here lol, but before you make the decision to go free, make sure you understand what you're up against. I personally hope we can head to a more League of Legends type model where you make $5 on a lot of people rather than the Farmville route of making $5000 on a few 'whales'. I personally much prefer a great game that lets me pay when I'm ready to invest, than a game that is trying to milk me the whole time.
Just an FYI, me and a friend built Stratosphere: Multiplayer Defense for iPad and have gone through much of this dilemma lol. Good luck!
And I'm downloading Stratosphere now! Always looking for good on screen two player games
The more traditional games — games with more genuine depth behind them, from the point of view of the "hardcore gamers" you mention — when they make money, they tend to be pay-up-front. They're charging more for a significantly more personal and higher-quality engagement, and can partially make up for lower quantity that way.
But even then it's been really hard to know how to approach these questions. My advice is to release something small quickly, because being in the situation is the only way to learn what works and what doesn't. That's not exactly what we did here, and though I'm really happy with how the game has turned out, we sometimes felt like we were fumbling in the dark on the way to this point.
Also, December is a busy month because EA and the big guys all do a lot of sales. January is much quieter, but up to you :)
What have you found challenging during the whole process?
2. Making sense of feedback from playtesters who were not always in our target audience
3. Importance of having beautiful art
4. Making natural-sounding effects
5. Writing music to go along with an existing theme
Long version:
Well, my friend learned to code by starting this project, so that was the first big obstacle. That meant that the development cycle of the game was much longer than lean-startup, rapid-iteration ideas floating around here would have it.
Related to that was the difficulty of making sense of the feedback we got from playtesters. It would have been easier if we were still in college, but we had a hard time getting feedback from people who were in our target audience, namely people who play mobile games at all. We asked everyone we knew to play the game, and it was psychologically difficult to separate out feedback that was probably not relevant because it came from someone who would never buy the game in the first place. For example, many people thought it was too hard, but they were often not really people who play games in the first place. This was made doubly hard by the fact that we've played the game so much, so we couldn't trust ourselves to know what was too hard or too easy. We didn't do anything special to solve this — no "7 Ways To Get Out of Your Own Way" blog post is coming out of this. Essentially we did the best we could.
Another interesting thing was just how central it is to have beautiful art. It sounds obvious but it's one of those things you don't completely grok until it happens to you. Before the artist came on board, we had a well-designed protoype, and we retained the majority of the original design (enormously to the founder's credit). But perfect execution by a talented artist makes for an incredible difference in emotional appeal. I wouldn't call this a difficulty, since the art came out so well. But it was a lesson.
I was in charge of the sound and music, and that ended up being surprisingly difficult too. You would never know without trying to do it yourself how hard it is to come up with sounds that feel natural in context and aren't distracting or annoying. I'd say we ended up with fewer sound effects than I would have liked for that reason.
The music was hard too. I had experience with rock music, but I had never written any piece of music to go along with a pre-existing theme and mood. So writing the main theme to have a French feel but with the right amount of levity took a lot of iteration. And the level background music has to be catchy enough to be fun and motivating, but not so catchy that it prevents the player from concentrating on the game. Furthermore, I'm not a great keyboard player, but I used a keyboard to record all the tracks and in order to get the timing right I had to do literally hundreds of takes and slice and dice the music pretty finely.