My previous post has gotten some interesting reactions. One really worth noting, is this article by app genie Steve from Slide to Play. Steve argues in his article that the market for small games trumps the market for large games 1000 to 1. Even all things being equal, and development time was the same, a successful small game is likely to be more successful than a successful large game.

He’s probably right there. In fact, I know he’s right. But here’s our POV. The issue is, even though the small game market is huge compared to the large game market, it’s also insanely crowded. You want a small, 99 cent distraction app? Well, have I got 35,000 apps for you! But if you want a larger, fleshed out game? Well, I’ve got… 50, 60 games for you. Maybe the reward is larger for the insanely lucky small app, but I don’t want to try and be insanely lucky. I want to make video games for a living. I’d rather be in competition with the large game market, than another drop in the bucket in the small game market.

Of course, Steve, ever the whiz kid, points out correctly, that the missing factor in my caluclations is marketing. Like it or not, there’s still only one app store, and I have to get attention and link love from all over to make it big. There’s three paths to that route, get insanely lucky, give Apple a beej behind an arbeys for a feature, or spend bank on advertising.

I’d definitely say that Steve is right, marketing and attention is the weak link in my theory. If I want to make it big with an App, I’ve got to do more than just push it out and hope. I’ve got to spend the dough to make it a reality. You can’t count on an apps merits alone to rise to the top 10.

But, the central assumption there is that a successful app is only one that makes it to the top 10 list. What if I’m not trying to make it big? It’s an easy assumption to make, that we iPhone developers are all trying to do nothing but strike iPhone gold. 3 or 4 developers get made hundred thousandares a month on the app store, which has colored everyone’s perceptions of what success and what failure on the app store is. That’s part of the gold rush problem. Not only has the gold rush brought in thousands and thousands of developers playing me too with shovel-ware, but even decent developers, making decent profits, feel like failures if their not making rock star money.

Up There came out 4 months ago. That’s ancient history in the app store world. It’s on no top 25 lists on the store anywhere, not even in the family category. But it still made about 110 bucks yesterday. For a team of two (Sam was a lie, more on that later), that’s going to keep us going as we make our next game. And that’s my goal for the next one, to keep us going, as we continue to live the dream, and make video games. Sure, we’d love to be millionaires, but eating ramen and making video games for a living is not a bad consolation prize. 

If we want to make it big with the next one, we have to be really phenomenally lucky, or willing and able to invest bank in getting attention. But I’m not defining a failed app as an app that makes less than 15,000 a day. I’m defining a failed app as one that doesn’t help us continue doing what we love, which is making great games.

Can you keep a secret, all of the internet? Veiled Games has a second identity, that we use to test the market with. We put together a simple, straightforward app in about 3 weeks, and put it out. Being perfectionists, even for a crap app, it’s pretty darn polished and great, but it is no work of art or anything that needs to be on the Veiled name. And it is the definition of a distraction. No I won’t tell you what it is. Kind of kills the point of having a testing brand. Yesterday, the small app sold 2 copies. And that’s OK, because it was our test to see if we’d be better off making a bunch of small games, at a month a piece, or to try out the big one. Like I said, the chances of getting a return on a small app decrease every day, as more and more distraction apps enter the market. So those three weeks, from a financial sense, we’re a complete loss. I’m banking that an impressive app, something with real depth and impressive features, will be able to stand out enough to make us a few thousand a month, and keep us doing what we’re doing.

Let me put it another way. The price war has gotten even more fierce. 99 cents for a small app isn’t the bottom of the barrel anymore. Even asking 99 cents for a distraction has become too much for the market to bare, if you want to do this for a living. If you want to have a better guarantee of a living, you have to offer more for 99 cents than what other people are offering for 99 cents.

So that’s the plan. Make a great game, and stand out from the distractions enough to earn a living wage. If we make a million bucks, great, but I won’t feel jaded if we don’t. I’ll only be upset if I can’t keep making games. And that’ll happen if the market can’t even bare a living wage for 6 months for a great, expansive game at 99 cents. In which case, the market is fucked anyway, and the house of cards will come crumbling down when developers start to realize that hard work on the app store is like playing the lottery with your career. But I don’t think we’re there, and I don’t think we will get there. The guarantee of making livable money off of small distractions was nice while it lasted, but it was unreasonable to expect the market to continue to bare it. But I think we can succeed with our game, which is more than a distraction. I hope we make a million bucks, but I only want to keep making games. Anything else is icing on the cake.

I know, I know… where the hell have I been. I’m not going to dance around it, with slippery salesman speak. That’s the first thing I have to address before I even think about writing another post. Well, busy, for one. We’ve been working on a… to put it lightly… huge app… and I’ve been working every hour of the day on it. At least for me, working for yourself means feeling guilty every minute your not doing your job. Without a boss to yell at me for being lazy, I do nothing but yell at myself now. But, more on that in a moment.

It’s been a while since we’ve taken a look at the bread and butter of this blog: Sales Charts. How about some of those puppies?

There’s Roulette. At this point, this chart is interesting just because of how long she’s been on sale, and how little she’s moved.  Roulette has been lucky, and spared the lingering death that so many older apps have faced. She certainly never shined bright, but, still does OK.

And then there’s Up There:

Really put’s a feature in perspective, doesn’t it? Things have slowed down, to put it lightly. Up There still sells OK on a day to day basis, enough to live on while we make the next game, but I think it’s safe to say at this point, that the feature did not have a lasting effect. It might have helped in the short run, but in the grand scheme, Up There just wasn’t a big seller kind of app, and even a feature couldn’t change that. We’ve made some serious bank of this little devil, no doubt about it, so I don’t want to knock that feature too hard. But, don’t count on a feature to turn your app into something it isn’t. Up There was a niche app, for people who want a nice little relaxing casual game, with pretty music and a balloon for a protagonist. Not the kind of thing to rock the app store world. A feature couldn’t change that, and Up There has since pretty solidly moved to where it would have been, if the feature had never happened.

That brings me to a big part of why I’ve been absent. As we were sitting, and thinking about what to do next, when Up There was finished, we decided we were lucky. And we were right. We got an app in at the last moment an app that size could reasonably be expected to make a splash. Up There did as well as it did, in part because it was still earlier in the app store. It’s our humble opinion that the days of the tiny apps are done. That’s not to say that there won’t be successful tiny apps. There will always be a market for distraction type games and apps. But when Up There came out, we felt confident that the quality of the app would make it rise above. And it did. But now… god there are so many apps a day, I loose track in a minute of browsing the store. My point is, that you might get lucky and make a small app that makes a big splash, but that’s playing the odds. If you want a better chance of making back your time you spend developing, I think you’re in a better spot if you make something really remarkable… an app that feels like a real game, not a distraction.

Koi Pond, Labyrinth, iBeer, all of that stuff… would be in a lot worse shape if they came out today, than a year ago. Sure, there’s still stuff like Pocket God, tiny things that get lucky… But Rolando, iDracula… you knew they were going to do well, it wasn’t a gamble. I’m going the safe route.

So that’s what I’ve been working on… We started work on this game in November. It’s April now. We hope to be testing it by June or July. This is a big game, friends. This is a huge game. There’s scripts, there’s tons and tons of 3d models… lord, there’s mountains and mountains of code. We’re trying to make an event. And man, is it exhausting.

Hopefully I’m not wrong. I’d hate to see that we were better off making more small type apps, then to invest a year or so into a full fledged, expansive game. But, no matter what, it’s always been a dream of mine to make something of this scope. To create a fleshed out story, and foster an atmosphere, and real attachment to the gameplay and characters. It’s exciting times for me… and exhausting… and busy. So, I’ll be here when I can… but forgive me if I’m too busy being excited about what we’re making to spend too much time here. I’ll be back occasionally, and all the time when I can finally take a break from the development work. Until then, you should be excited about what we have coming up!

My last post was about an experiment we’re doing at Veiled Games. We opened www.AppTees.com, to see if we can monetize loyalty from happy customers, and make a little more than the 1.99 or .99 cents a sale.

T-shirts are selling, things are ticking along… now we’re trying something new. And it’s about time. Sales of Up There have dropped down to below where we were before the Feature. It looks like the featuring, at least in our case, unfortunatly did not have a long term effect. It was a beautiful month, but now we’re needing a new source of revenue. 

More on the past and sales in the next post, I’m here to talk about the future. The future is now and it’s the 5 Finger’s Game Bundle!

A month of so ago, 5 of us indie dev. teams got together, and wanted to see what happens if we work together for a change, rather than trying to scrape and scramble for the top of the charts on our own. We took our best game each, and discounted the heck out of it, into one awesome bundle. And it’s on sale now for 4.99. Each app is worth 1.99 or more, so we’re talking 50% off each app. Plus, 5 games in only 1 spot out of your precious 148. Here’s the iTunes link.

From a development community POV, this speaks volumes about what the iphone development scene is like. All 5 of us have nothing invested in each other’s success… we could have argued and bickered all day about who gets what share, and who has to do what… but we all worked together beautifully, and made this thing come out like a charm. It was a lot of work, but I think it’s going to be worth if from a consumer pov, and as one of the developers involved. And every one involved has been a blast to work with. There’s a real sense of togetherness in the community that I think is pretty remarkable. And because we all enjoy and respect each others products, we’ve been working to try and find succes together, rather than on our own.

Here’s the question though… will it work? Worst case scenario, Sales of Up There fall because people would rather get it out of the bundle, then they don’t buy the bundle either. Middle Case scenario, Sales of Up There fall, but the bundle succedes. Call me unrelistic, but I don’t see either of those happening. Here’s what I’m banking on.

I think sales of the bundle will be great. This is an awesome value, a game for everyone, and getting lots of people excited. And it may be counterintuitive, but I think individual sales of Up There will rise too. Take iFart Mobile, it was at the number 1 slot for about 1 month. That’s something like 500,000 copies sold. Same thing with iShoot. Only after that many sold did either of those apps start to fall. That is a huge market saturation… and I know I didn’t buy either of those… so there are definitly more app customers than there are copies of iFart or iShoot. If the bundle becomes a success, it will be free advertising for each individual game. Someone may see the bundle, and only want Up There. Or maybe someone shows the bundle to a friend, and they really like Up There. Every bundle sold is great advertisment for my game, and even just having a highly ranked bundle that brings attention to the existence of Up There will help.

So, we’ll just have to see what happens. I’m optomistic, and can’t imagine this hurting. It will be fun to see how this little gamble pays off.

Up There being featured was an amazing privileged. It brought huge amounts of attention to a game in a market where visibility is key. But one thing was bugging me. How could I take this new visibility, and translate it into eyeballs on the other developers in the community that I’ve worked with and respect. How can Up There’s newly enjoyed success be translated into a halo of happiness on, say, Sneezies?

That’s how I came up with a secret project I’ve been working on, and am now ready to show to the world. I humbly present:

That’s right, you can now get beautiful shirts for the beautiful Up There (and Payday Roulette, if you’re so inclined). But now, if a happy Up There customer explores App Tees and finds out about Sneezies, well then, we all win. I’m hoping that AppTees will be a way for the little guys to band together, at least in one way, and find some strength in numbers. 

Membership is not currently open to the community yet, because I have some legal stuff to work out before I can add more apps. But get ahold of me anyway at Contact(AT)apptees.com, and I’ll get back to you when I’m ready to add more developers.

This is an exciting way to make a little more than the 99 cent a pop we’re currently getting, and I am optimistic for its success. So, shop around, take a look at the site… and for gosh sake, buy an Up There shirt!

I know, I know… after my big triumphant return post, we all kind of expected me to go back to daily posts. Well, I’ve just been too god forsaken busy. This is the last week at the old day job, though, so I should have a lot more time on my hands… and I should have the result of all our hard work on a side project up in a few days. In the meanwhile… let’s get to the heart of why this blog is really here in the first place… some good, old fashioned Sales Posts. That’s your cue, Roulette!

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. Payday Roulette is proof that if you make a halfway decent game, you’ll get halfway decent sales. Sure you could make a crap app, and hope that you’ll be one of the 3 out of 17,000 that has made millions. Or you can make a good game, and make good, reliable, consistent money. I know what I would do… and have done

And now for the head-liner of this little economic burlesque! Up There, you’re on stage now!

Ah, ain’t she a beaut? Up There has been on sale for 50 days exactly now, and what a ride it has been. We’ve seen our ups, we’ve seen our downs, we’ve gotten the rude 1 star review from british 13 year olds (Our game is too worth the price of a bag of crisps!)

Let’s take a closer look, shall we? After all, that’s what I’m here for… taking one example, and making broad generalizations about the entire market. Anyway, for the uninitiated, A marks the spot where we became featured in the Unites States app store. Apple now owns my first born, and I look forward to getting a nice TV… everyone wins. When we were featured, Up There was priced at 1.99. B Marks the spot where we moved to a sale price of 99 cents. We we’re riding high! Featured, on sale, in the top 25 apps on the store. All was good in the world.

If things stayed there, I wouldn’t have much of interest to say… I’d be too busy buying life-sized models of the eiffel tower made entirely out of solid gold monopoly dogs. But, alas, “This too,” the app store said, “shall pass.” And down we went after a very fun week. The first thing I should point out, is the similar looking sales bump right before A. That little lump is when we were featured in the UK app store. Same idea happened there, we had a big start, then sloped back down to a little higher than where we started. So far, I would say that the result for Up There’s US featuring has been the same. We had a great week, and are now on the way towards stabilizing somewhere higher than when it started.

Now let’s get down to the real Nitty Gritty now, shall we? Do yourself a favor first, and read this post by my buddy Dave, developer of App Store legend Chopper, and good friend of Veiled Games. If you only take one piece of advice from that post, remember this: “If you’re high in the charts you can get higher with a lower price. However, if you’re out of the charts you can earn more at a higher price.” Before we put Up There on sale at B, we we’re ranked in the top 40. After the sale, we moved to a high of 21 in just two days. That sale doubled our ranking, and moved our income from 1321 dollars the day before, to 1845 dollars the next day. If you’re going up, ride that rocket hard friend. This is your chance, make that splash. I do not regret putting Up There on sale in the least.

Taking if off sale at C was a lot trickier of a decision. Before we took it off sale, we had slipped from 21 to 31 in rankings. By all accounts, we were on the way down. Jeff and I, at this point, reached a disagreement. He thought we should keep the sale, and ride the high as long as we could. I wanted to end the sale, so that we would stabilize at a higher point, then if we ended the sale later… and figured we’d be in the top 100 at least another week. Funny story, I do all the iTunes connect stuff… so I just kind of went ahead and changed it. And it turns out Jeff was right, at least in one regard. We were already on the way down during the sale… when I increased the price from 99 cents to 1.99, we dropped from 31 to off the top 100 in 48 hours. Whoops… I owe Jeff a beer.

But I’m not convinced I was all wrong. Yeah, we got off the top 100 in a hurry. But it’s looking like we’re stabilizing. If we were at 99 cents now, instead of 1.99, would we be making half the revenue? Would we be looking forward to another drop when we ended the sale later? I don’t really know, but I like to think so… because I feel guilty about ending the sale without really clearing it with Jeff… so I’d like to at least be right

So, we were on the charts, and we rode the 99 cent bus to money town. And we’re off the charts now, and are riding the 1.99 monorail to decent-living-burg. What great advice can I give after all of this mad experience? Um… I dunno? Get featured if you can? People really wanted a game about a balloon? I guess the best I can say is ride the 99 cents hard when it’s appropriate… but try and find the right time to switch off of it (god knows when that is, though?).

The only other thing I can say is more of a reflection, than advice. Look at our chart. Lump 1 is our introduction, lump 2 is the first sale, lump three is UK feature, and the big mountain is the US feature. The App Store seems to work in bursts. Your best day tends to be behind you more often than it is in front of you. With that in mind, do what you can to work with whatever momentum you get. It’s fleeting.

I know what you’re thinking. I can see your anger! Where have we been? Where have I been? This blog has been collecting dust for a while now, and out of nowhere.

We probably have been off celebrating, you must think. Lighting Caviar cigars with 1500 dollar bills, and all that rich imagery flim flam… not quite. I’ve just wanted to take a little time and sit and reflect on the market. I’ve been offering a lot of advice, but haven’t taken much time to sit and really just observe it. I felt like I needed to take a step back, and not be so constantly involved in it, and just sort of digest the app store. Take my theories on Lite Apps… boy did I turn out wrong on that one. Dead wrong… it seems that with the current market, a lite app is your best friend, not the enemy I thought it might have been. I think I’ve had a chance to gain some perspective by not burying myself in the day to day of the market everyday. So, I’m back to being my opinionated, pedantic self.

Also, christ I’ve been busy. Been hard at work on Europa… easy to forget I do game development primarily sometimes. Also have been working on a side AppStore related project, that I’ll talk about later. Whatever happened to SOAP, you might ask, at that mention. Well, it’s done… been done… but I don’t think it’s particularly effective on it’s own right now, and will probably end up part of another larger project I’ve been working on with a few other developers. So, there’s that. I’ll let you all know what the side project I’ve been working on is soon.

Two things to note, before I end this sideways apology. 1) Maybe you’ve heard that there’s a very possible 19.99 section for premium developers coming soon. This has sparked a lot of discussion. My knee jerk reaction was that this put’s every single indie in the “bargain bin.” At least, before, EA and Gameloft were in the bargain bin with us, and on the app store with just as much weight as us little guys. But maybe this will help change customer expectation of price. God, it can’t get any lower… 99 cents is too much for most right now. I hope it helps, I’m worried though, that Apple will think that this is the solution to all the App Store woes, and not change any of the real underlying issues. Also, where is the line drawn on who gets access to this side store? Is it just EA… or does the much deserving Freeverse, and the like get access?

2) Today was Jeff’s last day at his day job. Mine is next Friday. We both put our notice in a few weeks ago, but I didn’t want to make a big deal out of it. The first post I made for this blog was to ask the question, “Can we do it?” Can two friends become full time iPhone developers? Well, here we are, about to find out. It looks like we can quit our jobs, so we’re trying. It’s a risk, but it will let us really devote the time we need to make this happen. Wish us luck! It’s going to be tough, but I think we can make it.

Where does Sam fit into all of this? Startling revelations about Sam coming soon…!

Good evening, Gentlemen. Thank you for joining me with such little notice. Ever sense the Belize incident, for reasons of… stability… I have not been able to give much warning before I call these meetings. I assure you, GloboOmniCide appreciates your trust and cooperation, and the urgency with which we asked all of you to board the rocket-cars is an unfortunate reality. I think we can all forgive Mr. Motosoki for his less than formal attire. It is only 2 AM in the Okinawa prefecture.

I’ll cut you off short there, Mr. Grebblen. We have not found the Omega device quite yet. That is not why I called this meeting. Our leads in the Gobi desert remain strong, but the rules say we can only go forward so quickly. If we find that device too soon, we could fracture time… That is to say, fracture time before we plan to. Things are progressing rapidly on other fronts, but we must remain patient here. The life of the Shadow Pope depends upon it.

And before I cut to the quick of the matter, I realize you all have noticed the blue chair remains empty. It is with sadness that I report that Gilded Hen has completed her assignment as planned and scheduled. I wish we could have told you earlier. It was torture for her to sit here at our last meeting, knowing full well that she could not say goodbye. If I know her French nature, it took every will she had not to bid us farewell. But this is the game we chose to play, Gentleman… the secrets we keep from each other. Why, this time last month Johnston still thought Fedor was his father. Stop laughing Fedor, you old codger. No, Gilded Hen has performed her job admirably, and if any of you ever find yourselves on Asteroid Delta1, feel free to pay your respects to her memory. I’m looking at you, Serji.

I call this meeting because operation “App Store” has made momentous progress, and is nearing the completion of phase one much earlier than expected. As you all know, Veiled Game, a subsidiary of GloboOmniCide corp, has released two applications on the iPhone: Payday Roulette and Up There. Exposure to these apps has been favorable, but in the last few days we’ve made leaps and bounds. Let’s look at Payday Roulette briefly.

I know that there is nothing new to report here. I am just pointing out the tremendous job our boys in R&D at Veiled have done. With very little effort, Roulette continues to perform as planned. It is Up There that has become… of interest.

No no Gentlemen, save your applause for someone who deserves it. I cannot take credit for this. This change represents a lesson a man in my position cannot learn too many times. No mater how much you plan, scheme, and alter the gamma time-charts, fate will always throw you a curve ball. Many of you must be asking, what force is responsible for such a large Up Tick at point A on the chart. Well, as some of you may be aware, our partner and nemesis Apple featured Up There in the United States app-store. This has lead to a massive upswing in sales, and as we all must assume by now, a change in timetables. Phase two approaches.

Mr. Motosoki, once you’ve had a chance to put on less conspicuous clothing, I believe your services will be needed. If you will all join me in the Moon Lounge in 15 minutes, we will continue there, where we’ll have a better view of the Nebraska Crater. I know we’re all eager to see what impact this development has had on our pet-project. And Mr. Motosoki, I hope this will have import to you when I say, “Charlie Foxtrot Hotel Dingo.”

Um… Anyway… Yeah, so… we got featured in the US. My singing might have given that away already, if you haven’t figured that out. It’s awesome. There are only really two points I can make. 1) As we all know, Apple is the kingmaker here. That’s nothing new, but it bears repeating in light of these figures. 2) The US feature is acting different than the UK feature. In the UK feature, our best day was the first day of being featured. After that, it dropped pretty quickly. Three days deep into our US feature, and we seem to still be going strong. The chart may not show that too well, but our rankings have continued to climb. Since we were featured, they have gone up every few hours. Right now we are currently the number 37 paid game in the store. So it seems the US rankings are much more self-fuffiling than the UK rankings were. We reached just as high in the UK, but dropped. In the US, it seems people pay more attention to the more popular apps.

We’ll keep you posted as this continues. It will be very interesting to see how sustainable this will be. Once you make it into the top 50, is it harder to go down? Stay tuned, more good info on the way.

Oh yeah… forgot to mention… We’re Rich!

Promises were made… Up There was featured in the US App store… Songs were sung.
See what your hands have wrought!

Promises we’re made.. and Apple kept their side of the bargain. Up There is now featured in the United States.

As such, I will be giving a rendition of one of the musical theater songs in the comments, publicly for the world. I am a man of my word.

This time tomorrow, expect my humiliation on this blog, in You-tube form. My mic on my computer is acting silly, so it won’t be tonight. But no excuses, this time tomorrow… I sing.

Just a quick announcement! Voting has begun on the Great Indie Cake Bake Off! It’s being hosted by 148apps, and a lot of my favorite developers have a cake on display. Go out and vote for your favorite cakes (I’ll understand if it’s not Up There… But I’ll never forgive you). Best part is, one lucky voter will be randomly chosen to win the prizes that were originally going to go to the developers. That’s right, steal the victory out of our grasping hands! Check it out, by clicking on the most delicious cake ever:

One of our most recent tips was all about the magic tricks we’ve figured out about how to get a little boost of performance out of your graphics. In that post, I promised you a better idea of how to wrastle the great PVRTC of the north, and tame its wild heart… I figured I’d get around to it eventually… I dunno’, maybe pass it down as a charge for one of my grandsons to look after. But I didn’t anticipate so much demand for my sage, learned words. I’ve gotten quite a few requests on some more info on this front. I figure I’ll oblige that for y’all. 

There’s no silver bullet to get PVRTC to do your bidding. PVRTC is an ugly mother, and no amount of powdered wigs and Ben Nye products is going to maker her a beaut. But you can slip the player a couple of Smirnov Ice’s, so they don’t notice her cold sores quite as much. Here’s the majority of the things we’ve done to get PVRTC to work for us.

1) Stay away from the edge. This is good advice for potential suicides, and for PVRTC usera. If your making an atlas, keep that texture off the direct edge of the atlas. PVRTC just doesn’t understand the edge of files so well, and bleeds artifacts off the side like a wounded young prince. This is especially true if you have ANY need to tile the texture. If you put the image right against the edge, you will not get a clean cut. Pad it out with a little alpha on all four sides.  Or if your doing a tiling texture, pad it out with the wrapped edge from the other side of the texture.

2) Similarly, in a texture atlas, don’t put two textures right next to each other. This is for the same, bleeding reason. We fit as many birds as we could into one atlas on Up There, but they were just a little too close, and artifacts from one bleed into another frame slightly. If you look closely, you can see this in the game. Frames that were perfectly clean as PNG’s, bleed into each other as PVRTC’s. If you have the space, keep your textures separated on the atlas.

3) Think long and hard about gradients and hard lines. PVRTC works by taking the average of surrounding pixels, which is nice for compression, but wreaks havoc on gradients and hard lines. Don’t count on either of those being too pretty. Especially lighter gradients.. those get shot to hell.

4) Re-roll. The weird, average thing that PVRTC does is a finicky devil. If you have particularly bad bleeding on one texture, sometimes just moving it a few pixels in relation to other textures on the atlas, and regenerating the PVRTC with texture tool gives you entirely different results.

5) If needed, start big, and scale smaller. The switch from PNG to PVRTC has improved your memory and performance exponentially… so sometimes you have to use a little bit of that boost on making things look better again. Like any compression artifact, it disappears if you scale it down enough. There is very little damage that PVRTC can do, that won’t go away if you just scale the texture down. So, if you have the room, make the texture bigger than you need in the file, then scale it down in game. Sure, it takes up more memory… but beauty has a cost.

6) Finally, patch it up. There are some things that you just can’t fix. In Up There, the beginning of the sky was unacceptably ugly. Nothing we did could fix it… so we just took a slice of PNG that covered the effected area, and render it on top of the PVRTC. It’s hacky, but it works.

Hard at work, at Veiled Games labs. Sorry if you’ve sent me an E-mail in the last day or two. Things have gotten a little crazy for me at my day job, which is where I ususally answer that kind of thing… and my every minute at home has been spent working on our next project. So things have been pretty quiet from our side of the farm… can’t promise it will get better soon, but it will eventually. If I had to guess, 4 weeks from today… if you get my drift…

Let’s take a look at some more sales.

Oh Roulette, you magnificent workhorse. You perfect beast of burden, you. What more could I ask from you, but to keep doing what you’re doing. In 78 days of sales, we’ve made an average revenue of 58 dollars a day. Some better, some worse.. you know, since that was an average is. But my point being that she’s the old standby. Maybe she doesn’t sparkle like some of the other apps… but when iTouchPoop goes all Amy Winehouse on you, and sells next to nothing… There will be Roulette, waiting at home with a nice stew for you. She wears a simple, blue blouse. You can see the edge of her bust, it is modest. But it excites you, in its comfort.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. If you have 4 or 5 games out performing at this level, you’ve got yourself a career.

How about Madame Up There? Thats where the controversy is right now. That’s the young starlet.

A few points of interest here, a moment or two to point out on the Hollywood bus tour past the sales figures. For those of you just joining us, that big spike is being featured in a few stores, most importantly the UK. When we we’re featured in the UK, Up There got ranked as the number 28 app in the store. Times we’re good.

Let’s move to A. There’s a big drop after A. That’s the next tuesday, when we moved to page 2 of the featured list, and off the front page. Had to happen eventually… so, nothing too surprising to point out here. I should note that we did a german localization somewhere after A, but it hasn’t increased our German sales at all. Oh well, it was easy to do as a test. At this point, our ranking was number 36 in the app store.

B is the real interesting devil, to me. At B is where I ended the sale that I had started before we got featured, increasing the price from 99 cents to 1.99. Notice that the day we increased the price from 99 cents to 1.99, our revenue increased, and has been higher for two days in a row now. However, our units have continued to fall… which is expected.

Here’s what is… interesting. We made the choice to ask a more fair price for Up There at B, and increased our revenue per day because of it. This is good, no? We’re making more money a day. Our ranking, however, dropped from 36 at A, to off the top 100 at B. Rankings, without a doubt, are one of your most essential marketing tools, and the current system punished us for making more money. The way things work now, you are rewarded for selling at 99 cents, and punished, by penalizing your ranking, with each step up you take in price. The argument is always that you make more revenue at a cheaper price, because you move more units. This is the common cry of the defenders of the current system.

But there’s B right there. We increased the price, made more money, and are being punished on our main marketing front, by free-falling rankings across all app stores. The counterpoint, would be for us to go back to 99 cents, and stay there. But should every app have to compete at 99 cents? Is the ideal app store a dollar store, each app priced the same, and competing to be the better deal at 99 cents? As long as this scheme exists, the reward will always be for lowering your price, and increasing your price will be punished. I just don’t get Apples POV on this… What could possibly be the reason for incentivizing less revenue… and for making a store where full featured apps are punished if they don’t price themselves to compete with fart soundboards.

I know this is old news, everyone has already said there fill on the price issue… lord knows we’ve had enough open letters and angry blog posts. I just want to voice my frustration on being punished for making more money.

But not too much frustration… this is still an awesome job, and an awesome thing to be doing… developing games. Jeff and I were working hard today, and we both sort of realized at the same time, how slick the iPhone is. It’s easy to forget, as you work with the nitty gritty of trying to bump your frame rate by 1%. But these are amazing devices, and the app store is an amazing distribution model. We are all lucky to have the chance to be a part of it. As you all get holed up in this process, and get frustrated with Objective C…. and the fact that only 20 out of 60 megs of ram can be used for graphics… and all that stuff… try and take a step back every now and then, and really appreciate how unique the platform is… … … Are we featured in the US now, Apple?

Well, here we are, face to face. You wanted a private serenade, a heartfelt moment of song from yours truly. I wanted mad stax from being featured in the U.S. I should note the lack of youtube video of me singing a show tune. Take from that what you will about our US featured status. We will continue to enjoy our UK feature in the meanwhile. And there’s always next Tuesday, I suppose. Balls in your court Apple… I’ve already started memorizing the lyrics to South Pacific and Oklahoma.

Continuing my not having any decent business things to say, let’s let Jeff write us a tip. She’s all yours, Jeff!

Hi Again!

Drawing text with OpenGL isn’t easy.  You have three options:

1) Use the initWithString constructor on apple’s Texture2D class to make an OpenGL texture with your text on it.  This is fine if the text you’re showing never changes, but if it does change (every frame, in the case of Up There), you have to create a new texture, which is really expensive

2) Add a cocoa view, such as a UILabel, on top of your OpenGL view and draw a string there.  Cocoa is nice and snappy when it comes to drawing text by itself.  But apparently OpenGL stole Cocoa’s lunch money back in the day, and now they refuse to get along, because the second you put cocoa on top of OpenGL, you can kiss your framerate goodbye.

3) Create a texture atlas containing all the characters you need.  This is the one we did for Up There.  It keeps your FPS nice and high, and lets you display whatever text you want whenever you want.  All you have to do is stick images of all your characters into an atlas (we here at Veiled Games love those atlases.  Could you tell?) and draw them sequentially from that.  For Up There, we only put 0-9, since that was all we needed, but usually you’d have 0-9, A-Z, and a-z, along with your punctuation.

Nice job Jeff. A round of applause for the man behind the magic of Veiled Games.

Also, I know we’ve promised snapshots every post. But all I’ve done since the last post was write dialogue and story-line… and Jeff has just been doing preliminary code… we don’t even have a new prototype to play with. Do you really want to see a picture of some text? I might have started doing this a little early… only time will tell…

…

…

Was that long enough? Is it ok to declare that I promised this too early yet? Because I definitely promised it too early.

Some people have been asking me what the process of getting featured in the UK involved. If Apple contacted me, and how I found out? Well, if there’s a process or set of rules, or even a peep from Apple at all on this front, I’ve yet to hear a bit of it. Apple hasn’t breathed a word to us… and the only reason we found out was because other people started congratulating us on it.

I’ve heard that if your given special art, like one of those larger buttons, Apple will contact you for it. But for just being in their smaller list of featured, new apps, it looks like you’ve just got to keep your eyes peeled. It’s the kind of thing, though, that if it happens, you’ll know soon enough.

Something else I’ve noticed of interest is that Apple seems to update this list on Tuesdays. Lots of people have confirmed that, and it was the case with the five countries we’re currently featured in. That has given me a sliver of a hope, that come this Tuesday, we might be featured in some more, including the US.

If that happens, I want to give back to the community, by giving you all a chance to humiliate me. I present then, the following challenge.

If Apple features us tomorrow in the U.S. app store, I will post a video of me singing a showtune that Jeff picks out of the comments. So dig out those community theater memories, and post in the comments the musical number you’d like to see me embarrass myself with the most.

I’m defining show tune here as song from a musical, either film or theater. That means something like Hello Dolly is of course acceptable, as is Aladdin or Newsies (Though god help you if you ask for a song from Newsies. My wrath will fill the air, and shake the earth.) Jeff will pick the winner, and I will dance for your amusement. But only if we’re featured… if not, the consolation prize will be my dignity.

(I’m writing this at work, so don’t have any of my files to add a development snapshot for this post. Sorry!)

The well has run pretty dry on the more standard business advice I’ve been giving. Not a lot of people are talking about the business challenges us indies are facing, and I’m glad to keep offering input. But I ain’t got nothing new to say right now.

Let’s do a tip instead. We haven’t had one of those in a while.

Here’s a funny story about the first version of Payday Roulette. The first version, the one that hit the app store, had every image in that app on a separate texture. For those not in the know, texture here just means file. For example, RouletteBall.png is a texture, to simplify a little. Not only was every image a texture, but they were all saved as PNG’s, one of the highest quality, but largest formats… and most of them were saved at three times the size that they showed up on screen. There was no good reason for keeping them so large… that was just the size I made them, and I figured there was no reason to scale them down before the iPhone got them. The image of the table itself was over 2000 pixels wide.

Knowing what I know now, and looking back, I’m embarrassed. Roulette peaked at 48 mbs of system memory while loading, because we did the exact opposite of what a good graphic strategy for this device was. This high memory requirement worked fine on our test devices, but crashed for anyone that hadn’t freed system memory in a long time.

So what was so wrong about all that? Let’s take it one at a time.

1) Texture atlases are your friends. The first version of Payday Roulette had about 60 textures. The current version has 3. Up There, with all it’s hundred and hundreds of images, uses 5. A texture atlas is jargon for just putting all your images onto one big picture. 

Look familiar? The advantage to this is every frame you draw, you need to tell the device what file to grab an image from. The more textures involved, the more draw calls, which is more processor expensive. You get to cut a huge chunk out of processor demand, and the only cost is a potential, slight increase in loading time.

2) 1024 x 1024 pixels is the largest size a texture can be. Squeeze what you can into something this size, or split it into a second atlas. We went above that limit, and we didn’t crash and burn… but it didn’t help stability. It’s a good rule… stand by it.

3) Work in powers of 2. Every texture loaded into memory is scaled to a power of 2 if it isn’t already. We didn’t know this at first with Roulette, so every texture was randomly sized. If we had a texture that was 514 x 514, since it was two pixels over 512, it was scaled to the next power of two, 1024. That means our image size was four times bigger, taking up that much more memory, just because we didn’t know any better.

4) PNG sure is pretty… but beauty has a cost. When you take a PNG and decompress it to put it into memory, it becomes HUGE. But if you need alphas (transparencies), that’s your only choice. Jpegs don’t decompress that well, anyway. However, Apple has been nice enough to include hardware that natively supports a compressed format, with their inclusion of the PowerVR chip onboard. This format is PVRTC. This means where PNG has to be converted to raw bits before being placed into memory, PVRTC can be used ‘as-is.’

Oh PVRTC, I have such a love hate (hate hate hate) relationship with you. You take up almost no memory, run like a charm, and load in a heartbeat. When we switched from PNG to PVRTC for Roulette, memory use dropped from 48 mbs to 3! Up There is almost entirely made in PVRTC, and peaks at 9 mbs memory. Our frame rate in Up There using PNGs was half of what we got when we moved to PVRTC. It’s like a miracle drug for performance. 

Chew on this for a moment. 

Number of 1024×1024 PNG atlases you can load into memory before crashing (best possible case): 20. 

Number you can fit in graphics memory before you start swapping graphics memory (which is really REALLY bad and kills your framerate): about 5-6

Number of PVRTC atlases of the same size in memory before crash: 64. 

Number before memory swapping; 20. 

Oh PVRTC, There’s nothing it can’t do!

Except look good. PVRTC was, by Apple and PowerVR’s own admission, made for photos, not line art. It performs like a dead horse when presented with gradients, or even edges. Here’s an early prototype mouse from Up There, scaled to show the difference in quality between the formats:

That’s.. that’s not so good. But Up There looks pretty nice, eh? Well, that didn’t come easy. But that’s a story for another day, of how we have wrestled PRVTC to give us something we can work with. 

Do what you can with all of this. Everyone of these hard facts of development we learned the hard way. The dying teacher, on his death bed, passes on these great secrets. Use them to become strong, and powerful. Honor our memory with your frame rates… tame the wild PVRTC… you do us proud, grasshopper.

Oh, and true to my word, here’s this posts cryptic development image:

Really, at this point, we could just be pulling random images from Google image search. We’re not, I promise.

Quiet down you’ze guys. Everybody’s chomping at the bit to see the sales figures since we got UK featured. I feel just like the popular, pretty blond girl that’s inside of all of us, trying to escape. You know, the part of each of us that wants to wear a low cut shirt, and act snooty at the lingering glances, even though we love every minute of it.  Everyone just needs to know how my beach trip with Brandon went, and we don’t mind telling them in detail. You know, that part of all of us.

Wait… what? Where did that come from? I have the captain of the girls soccer team inside of me? And I assumed that that’s something we all share, as a species? Is that troubling? Should I be troubled by this?

Anyway, here’s some sales figures for you:

Oh man, you should have seen your faces. Roulette… who wants that dried up old hussy? Thats not sexy and new like Up There. But, she’s soldiering on, making that money. Nothing new here folks, just more of the old reliable spinning wheel and ball. We’ll take it!

How about this one:

Ahhh yeah, that’s more like it. That’s what we wanted. Now, I do the part where I make grand sweeping generalizations about this unknowable market, based on arrogance and a full belly of sushi.

So, as we lost momentum from the initial spike, you can see our units and revenue slouching towards A. And as discussed, that’s when we put Up There on sale. The figure I heard tossed around was that if you drop your price by 50%, you gain the number of units moved by 60%. And as you can see, units increased quite a bit from the 1.99 price point to the .99 cents price point. And revenue went with it as well, making up for decrease in revenue per unit. At first at least. Note the similarity of point A and B. I can tell you right now that A is 78 dollars, and B is 84, effectively the same. So the sale helped our revenue for about five days. Unless of course,  revenue would have been even lower then where it was when we started the sale at A. That’s a real possibility. Hard to know, but at A we were off all the popularity charts at that point anyway. I think we would have kept slowing down, but not by a lot. So the sale was a success, but not a kingmaker.

If kingmakers you want, look no further than C. The difference between B and C is one day. Apple pushed a button, featured us in the UK, and our sales in that country increased by 4,700% (from 10 to 480). To date we remain featured in the UK, NZ, Australia, Switzerland, and Germany, and sales are doing much much better there than they were, for sure. What’s interesting is the slope down from C, as if it was like getting a new, more powerful first week. I kind of expected the sales to stay strong or increase from their first day, as we were now in all the top ranking charts too, and with more visibility on day two of being featured than day one. Interestingly, it seems that this wasn’t the case. I’m very interested to see how this featuring choice affects the long term sales… will we plateau back at A in a while? Or will it find a new, different point to stay at, once the visibility of featuring disappears.

Apparently, featuring happens on Tuesdays. That was the case for us at least, and others have confirmed that. I haven’t found too much evidence of apps being featured in certain stores, but no others, if they aren’t localized in a way that makes sense to take this route (for example, a Melbourne travel guide is featured in Australia, but not Switzerland). Being featured in the UK is a wonderful treat, and we’re VERY appreciative. But I won’t lie, we’re at the edge of our seats to see if something happens on Tuesday in the US… my god, that will be nice. To quote Jaws, “we’re gonna need a bigger chart.”

I could go on at length about the power of iTunes advertising… but we all agree on that already. Apple is a kingmaker, no doubt about it. Any marketing you do, sales, reviews, even purchasing ads, is not an attempt to get sales for sales sake. It’s an attempt to get better ranking, and better visibility. That’s how you make money… anything else is chump change compared to what happens when Apple pushes the gold plated button.

It’s going to be quite some time until what Europa is makes sense. Until then, here’s another confusing snapshot:

Is that a flower? The top of some weird guys haircut? A dishwashing tool? God knows… And here’s something else to think about… that’s not my screenshot, that’s Jeff’s. What is Jeff doing in photoshop? I thought I did the art?

I promise, this stuff will make sense. And these snapshots will actually be useful in the future, when we’re able to talk freely about what we’re doing and why. For the beginning though, we’ve got to stay tight lipped. That will change soon, but I don’t want to let too much out now, since we’re just starting.

Got it! It’s a high-tech yamika!

Let’s talk reviews. Me and you. Let’s just sit down and have a serious discussion. Man to man… or woman.

Once upon a time I was going to list all the review sites out there, and keep info on them up to date. It was going to be my gift to you. That has most assuredly not happened. There’s just too many. That list I made and posted a few months ago is so dangerously out of date now, it’s next to useless. Some times it feels like there’s a review site for every app that enters the market. And you know who this sucks for the most? The review sites. There’s a limited readership, and it’s being split everyday. And there’s ever increasing number of apps to review. Long ago, it seemed like every app got reviewed eventually. Now it seems like only the best do, and then sometimes weeks after the app hits the store at all.

And I’ve said it 100 times, but I’ll say it again. The review sites aren’t king makers, and they aren’t your pro-bono marketers. They help, and they provide a useful service… but they don’t owe you anything, and they’ll review you when they damn well want. That’s their right. And most importantly, you still have lots of work to do. Glowing reviews from all the big sites, perfectly times won’t make you rich on that alone, and that’s a best case scenario.

All that being said, their essential. And even more, they provide an invaluable service that almost no one pays attention to… they pay attention to your brand. Billy consumer that bought your app and loves it is far less likely to remember you when he sees your next app, but the review sites will. If your first app is a winner, they’ll pay a lot more attention to you the second time. And even more importantly, if you establish a relationship with them, you’ll find yourself with invaluable business partners. All this is babel and theory, let’s put it to practice.

Here’s what my review strategy was for Up There, and I think it was a success. Before Up There was ready, I began to make contact again with the sites that really liked Payday Roulette. Specifically, I picked the few sites that I thought had both a high readership, and a lot of professionalism. I just let them know that Up There was going to be out soon, and told them that I genuinely appreciate what they do. And that wasn’t a lie. I really do. In this crazy market that’s all the buzz right now, you can blame the bottoming out prices on a lot of things: Ringtone apps, predatory development, iFart, low standards, Pangea… But really, it all comes down to low consumer confidence. Customer’s are scared to open their wallet and take a risk anymore after being burned on crap so many times. Review sites exist to guide consumers to the best apps and make confident decisions. It’s easy to forget that, as developers, but the review sites are not here for us… we’re just part of the equation. And anything that improves consumer confidence is something that improves the fluidity of moolah. And we developers love moolah, so we should love the reviewers. Give them hugs and the last can of grape soda, even if you really wanted to drink it.

Anyway, after getting back in touch with some of my favorite review sites, and catching up, I moved to phase 2. AppVee has been one of my favorite review sites from day one. Their reviews are concise, entertaining, effective, informative… and most importantly, trustworthy. I knew Up There was a good game, I just needed to get a pair of smart eyeballs on it. Most developers, as their app hits the store, e-mail everyone and think that all the review sites will jump at the chance to review your app, out of the 14,000 possible. They won’t… you giving them the same promo blast you give every other review site puts nothing of value on the table for them. Think about it from a business point of view. They have a review that you want. What do you have to give them in exchange? How about a little love and tenderness and special attention? In the week before Up There’s release I approached AppVee, and let them know that I wanted to let them have the only pre-release copy of Up There. No strings we’re attached, I didn’t ask for a review in exchange, or any favors. I just let them know the truth… I wanted their review more than any other, and was willing to wait to give any other site a look at our app, so they could be the first. This strategy worked only because I had a product I knew would impress… but none of us are crap developers, so don’t worry about that bit : ). 

What did AppVee get out of this relationship? They got the first look at a great product, and we’re able to spend more time and care with it, without fear of being scooped by the other review sites. Their Up There review video is one of their most viewed video’s on Youtube. What’s more, since this all worked so well, I decided to make AppVee our go to review site for the foreseeable future. AppVee gains a devoted developer, willing to give them first looks and whatever else they might want. And what do we get? We get a great review, on launch. As the game went live, only then did we send out the publicity blitz, with AppVee’s glowing review prominently placed. We had the ability to do a marketing push, with the praise of a respected 3rd party from the start.

Most importantly, we gain a partner in this whole app store cluster-bomb. Our relationship with AppVee has blossomed, and I’m looking forward to working with them in the future. And the other review sites are starting to listen when they hear Veiled Games. I’m not saying that to brag, I’m saying that they listen to brand identity. It’s one of your most precious resources… be sure to use it. Make friends with the reviewers… their nice people.

Sales figures tomorrow for sure… we’re not as rich as some might think… or even rich at all… but the UK feature has been nice. Meanwhile, I promised a development snapshot a day on Europa. So here’s the next one:

As this starts, these snapshots are going to be more teasers than actual substance. But as we get to a point where we can share more, lots more info will come with each one. For now… don’t she look great?

OH! Up There has had it’s first Update submitted as well! New features include a practice mode for those that need to smell the flowers as they play, and a Web-view to communicate to the masses with! (Thanks Byteclub!)

I know, I know… there’s an elephant in the room. Outside of the unspoken sexual tension between the two of us, I know we all want to talk about what’s going on with being featured… well, it’s great! Not perfect, because right now we’re only featured in the UK, Germany, Australia, and New Zealand… but still great! If Apple ever decides to keep playing King Maker, and shows us some court favour in the US store… thats when we’ll be buying solid gold balloons to give out as party favors. Until then, it’s great!

But I’m not going to go into depths on it right now. I need some more figures before I can make the grand, sweeping generalizations I’m so good at. In a day or two we’ll look at what the results have been. Patience, I recomend, until then. And If you’re a UK fan of Up There, pass the time by leaving us a good review… we need some love on the UK store for some reason.

I’m going to stick to the plan, and introduce a little info on our next game, as promised. From now until release (March or April, we hope), I’m going to try and include a snapshot of development in every post. Hopefully, those of you still living on the sidelines can live vicariously through us, while waiting to take the plunge into development yourselves.  And those experts out there can laugh at our mistakes.

We’ve had two false starts in the last few weeks, before we’ve arrived where we are today. We started work the first time a few weeks ago… but it felt like lateral movement, not forward momentum. We were making another game with the scope of Up There. Though it’s an idea we love, we tabled it to make something that felt like it could continue to raise the bar. 

So we started again. Think Big we thought, and promptly began work on our million dollar baby. Really, we continued work on it, as it’s been in our head since we started developing. This is the game that we all have tucked away, waiting to be made when we think we’re ready. And we’re not. Someday, you’ll see an app from us that is the best app on the store… but we tabled that one as well. The world isn’t prepared for awesomeness of that magnitude.

We’ve started work instead on what will be, without hesitation, the best game ever made ever… ever. I promise. It’s a game we’ve wanted to play since before any members of the team were developers. Something we all used to talk about, how awesome it would be to play, before Veiled Games was even a twinkle in our eyes. Or even the iPhone. And this game is huge. It’s going to require 3D models, 50 or so characters, tens of hours of game play, dialogue and scripts, all kinds of good stuff. 

But let’s take a look-see, shall we? I introduce our next project, code name Europa:

That’s it? That’s the great game? Well… no… that’s not even a game. That’s not even part of the same Xcode project that will be our game. It’s just a proof of concept. A test to see if the movement mechanic we have designed for the game works. And boy-howdy does it. As just a simple mock up that Jeff threw together while we drove around New Zealand on holiday, it’s more fun than 90% of the games out there, just moving around in this little prototype.

And NO, we’re not making a space game. Don’t let the black background fool you. Or the geometric shapes. This is all just theory at this point. But it’s good advice to make a mockup of your game, to find out if it’s fun, before you invest lots of time making it pretty. We learned that lesson on the first game we entered development on. I made all the art for Buggle, Jeff had done a stand up job with the animations and movement, and it was almost ready to ship, before we decided that it actually wasn’t a fun game. Time that could have been better spent if we’d just done a proof of concept before, and found out the basic idea behind it sucked. But suck it will not, this game. This game, my friends, will rock. In a few months, you’ll look back at this image, and it will all make sense.

Thanks as well to all the good people out there who had some great ideas for marketing. Byteclub suggested my favorite idea (and they just made a snazzy new website), to include a UIWebView call that displays announcements from us in Up There. This would display such things as contests, promotions, new products, upcoming features. I think that’s a great idea, and will be including that in the update we’re working on right now. We already have a great fan base, and that’s a cool way to mobilize the troops for our benefit. 

I feel like I know everyone out there who reads along, based on the number of people I keep in contact with… but if you’re shy, you should send me an e-mail. I respond to every e-mail I get, and I’m not too scary, I promise. So call to arms people hiding in the shaddows… shoot me an e-mail and say hi! I’d love to know who else is out there! Or at least, join the twitter party! @VeiledGames

We’re back from vacation. Our regular schedule of daily (or as close to daily as I can get) posts will continue on now until the next major holiday, or reigning sovereign’s birthday.

The Up There sale was a smashing success… at first. Unit’s remain higher than they were at 1.99, which is to be expected… but revenue has plateaued back to about where it was 5 days ago when we started the sale. The hope was, like I said before, to try as best we can to preserve the forward momentum of our release. You have that one first push to go big. If you don’t make it then, the chances of you making it later are slim. And since our ranking is only a little better than where it was before we started the sale, our promo-price didn’t have enough strength to push us into the top 100. Once your in that top 100, it’s clear sailing all the way to rich-port. It doesn’t look like Up There is going to make it to those sandy beaches.

That’s OK. Rich is nice, but that’s not why were here. We need to be poor developers, we only want to be rich developers. So it’s time to saddle up, and try and make Up There more sustainable. If you don’t have Up There, and you only want to spend 99 cents, now would be a good time to buy it. Don’t count on this sale lasting much longer. 

Unless you have better ideas, dear reader. I’m kind of out of thoughts… one of the reasons Sam and Jeff keep me around is that I agreed to do all the annoying company stuff, like marketing and networking, and they don’t have to worry about it. So it’s not a question of time or energy, I’m just not sure what else to try. I’ve rocked the review sites, with awesome reviews on all the biggest and best, all less than a week after Up There’s release. I’ve given out 50 out of 50 promo codes. Done the social networking stuff, twitter, this blog, facebook. I’ve done a sale. I’ve posted in all kinds of forums everywhere. We’re working on version 1.1 as we speak.

We haven’t tried everything, though… there are two things that people claim work that we don’t feel are the right choices for this game. Lot’s of developers love the light app model (I’m looking at you War Horse)… and I’m less skeptical then I was before. But no matter what way I slide it, Up There just isn’t a light app kind of game. It’s beauty is its simplicity… Apple forbids time limited, demo’s or the like… and I just don’t know how to make a more simple version of the game, and still have it be appealing… There’s nothing we can cut, that will leave the game a good representative of what it has to offer.

Others have argued that buying advertising is the way to App Store success. Even if you take into account my extreme doubt of the viability of this option (coincidence that none who are spouting this option are actual developers, but rather commentators making assumptions from the sidelines?) we just don’t have the kind of stash to do something like this. To even make a drop in the bucket, you’re looking at 30,000 dollars in banners, or more. We don’t have that kind of scratch, no way no how… especially since my day job pays me in NZD, not USD. Sorry, not taking out a loan to buy some banners.

Again I come back to you all. Any other ideas out there? I’m up for whatever, I’ll gladly be your guinea pig to test a harebrained idea. That’s what I’m here for… experiment with all this iPhone business stuff so you don’t have to. But it’s OK if you don’t. I’m ready to start positioning Up There as a noble steed, rather than a prime race horse. But if anyone has any ideas to give it one last chance at the gold, lemme know. Maybe there’s some crazy new iPhone strategy, that will sweep the world.

Also, don’t forget to enter the Great Indie Bake Off! Especially if you’re not a developer, feel free to make a cake based on your favorite iPhone game… There’s lots of great prizes available… besides the ability to munch on delicious, lovingly made cake.

Oh, and starting tomorrow, we’re going to be posting a screen shot a day of the development of our next app, all the way until it’s finished. Those of you with patience, will get to see the humble beginnings of the App that will change the world.

UPDATE: Up There was just featured in German, UK and NZ app stores… no idea what will happen, but I’ll share the figures for sure. New iPhone strategy, write a concession post with a defeated tone… featured app within an hour.

Christmas is a time of giving… And Apple has given us all so much. Without them, none of us would be doing what we’re doing, making the games and apps were making.

But man, when they take a break, they shut their shit down. Brace yourself kiddes, it’s tip time.

This tip comes in two parts, the first of which wont be useful for another 365 days. But hey, it’s nice to keep this stuff in mind as you start work on your magnum opus that has a development cycle of 1 year.

Releasing your app right at christmas is treacherous. It’s trouble. It is not without its risks. We really wanted Up There to be out for the Christmas holiday, so all the little kiddies with their fresh new iPhones could buy our game. And it was… sort of.

Apple packed their bags and went home from Dec. 24th to the 28th. In this period you had no control over what info your app was showing, it’s price, all the details like this. Not the end of the world, but annoying. What was particularly frustrating, was that shit went wrong, and Apple wasn’t there to care.

For the entire christmas season, Up There was caught in limbo between page 1 and page 2 of its primary category, and not showing up in the US store. There was nothing we could do but wait until they got back to fix it. That hurt out sales. They also took a break on pushing the OK button on all the reviews across the store. On December 24th we had 8 reviews. On December 30th, out of no where, it finally jumped to 29. Those reviews are pretty helpful, it kind of sucked to have to wait so long to get them up.

So that’s part 1 of the tip… be careful about how you time your release… you need Apple’s cooperation at all times. 

Most frustrating of all, and still going on, Apple has decided to take a break as well on refreshing anything. It seems there’s some kind of “make everyone refresh their cache” button they push, that makes the app store show more up to date info to the masses. And Apple hasn’t pushed it in about 4 days now. But hey, what makes me think there’s a magic, everybody refresh button? Well, that’s the second part of the tip.

Say you want to look at, I dunno… the top 100 Family games… but it hasn’t changed on iTunes in 3 days. The info is there, it’s just cached to hell. You can force a reload, but it’s ugly. To start, grab the iTunes link of the page you want. You get this 99% of the time by right clicking on the button that leads to the page. For the top 100 Family apps, the link looks like this:

http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewTop?id=26421&popId=30

Now grab that link, throw it into safari, and add some bogus parameter to it. Par example, the link now becomes this:

http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewTop?id=26421&popId=30&blah=blah

Run that through Safari, and boom! Refreshed App Store page. The world is your oyster now. Enjoy it.

What is so frustrating about all this, is that we put Up There on sale, expressly to hope that we could get a more visible ranking. Seems like a kind of silly thing to do if the rankings aren’t refreshing for 99.999 percent of the world.

Also, be sure to check out the New Year App Blowout… Tons of discounted apps for the holidays, including Up There!

Anyway, off to the South Island of New Zealand. This was just a brief pit stop at home before we continued our journey. I’ll be back out of communication for a few more days, but posts will return to regularity again soon. Happy New Years all, and peace on earth!