Noel

Independent game designer and programmer. Created Subterfuge, Casey's Contraptions, Flower Garden. Runner. Cyclist. Nature enthusiast. Magic addict. @noel_llopis.

The Business of iPhone and iPad App Development

Full disclosure: Apress asked me to review this book and sent me a free copy. I agreed with my usual condition of being able to really say what I thought about the book, good or bad. So here it is.

TL;DR

Great book for someone starting out on iOS development. You would be at a severe disadvantage if you don’t know about most practices described in the book. Single resource for lots of good practices you’d have to pick up from blogs or Twitter otherwise.

In More Detail…

Don’t be fooled by the title. The Business of iPhone and iPad App Development by Dave Wooldridge and Michael Schneider isn’t one of your boss’ stuffy business book. This is a practical, hands on, guide to making a successful iOS app. It assumes you already have an idea and know how to develop it, but it guides you through the steps of focusing the app, designing it so it can be profitable, and releasing it with the best possible chance of becoming a good seller.

You’ve probably heard a dozen stories of developers who create a great app, submit it to the App Store, and then wonder why they only sold a dozen copies. This is the book they need to go along with that great app.

The book roughly follows the development timeline of an app, from the initial concept, design, implementation, testing, and release. At each of the stages, it covers any aspects that can have a significant impact in the sales success of the app. Even though you can read the book cover to cover, the chapters are very well defined, so it’s easy to jump directly to the part that interests you the most.

With Casey’s Contraptions almost ready to submit to Apple, I read with particular interest the chapters on creating prerelease buzz and increasing awareness of the app. Lots of good advice there.

Don’t expect anything groundbreaking though. If you’ve been following this blog for a while, or you’ve been hanging out on Twitter with all the iOS developers, you will know most of what the book has to offer. It might still be worth it for a few pearls of wisdom here and there to fill some blind spot. However, the book should be required reading for any new iOS developer. Easily the best $20 you can spend as far as impact in the final app sales.

I usually have no patience for technical books with filler chapters and sections. This book is very good about getting to the point, although it has a few sections that feel a bit out of place in that they’re quite basic and technical (like details of generating provisioning profiles, did we really need that in this book?). All in all, that’s a pretty minor point and easy to get around them.

Delayed Release

Probably my main criticism is that the book doesn’t mention one release technique that I consider to be a requirement for any major launch these days: The delayed launch. As the authors mention several times in the last few chapters, once you submit your app, you have no control over when Apple approves it, so you have to play some guessing games.

Instead, you can delay the release of the app once it has been approved, and set it to a known, fixed date in the future (say, a week from approval). At that point, you can really kick in your PR in high gear, contact media outlets, and, most importantly, send them promo codes for your app, even though it’s not available for sale yet.

The goal is to have all the PR hit on launch day or shortly after. The more you can make that happen, the more successful any PR efforts will be, and the bigger the initial launch (and hopefully the following sales) will be.

All in all, The Business of iPhone and iPad App Development is an easy recommendation for the new iOS developer. Go read it right now before you even think of shipping another app.

All It Needs Is Love

The App Store today is a different beast from the one in early 2009, when iShoot ruled the charts. Look at the top paid games on the App Store today. Actually, don’t worry, I did all the leg work for you. Here they are:

What can we tell by looking at those games? I see two clear categories: Games with a strong, established IP (Street Fighter, Sonic), or independent games with a huge amount of polish and style. Continue reading →

Snappy Touch Picked As Top 50 Developer

Top 50 Pocket Gamer just picked Snappy Touch as a top-50 developer for mobile and portable devices for the year. I’m really honored they counted me among the best 50 of the year, especially on a year with so many great games and new developers.

2010 was the year I was hoping to ship Casey’s Contraptions, but that didn’t happen. However, it’s great to see Pocket Gamer took notice of the ongoing work on Flower Garden. Every update feels like a small product release on its own, and there were many updates in 2010!

Flower Garden has come a long way since its initial release on April 2009 (almost two years ago!). There is so much more to the game now than the initial release! These are just some of the most important new features since then:

Multiple seed packs
Multiple garden locations
Day/night cycles
Fertilizer
Green Thumb Point awards
Game Center achievements and leaderboards
Sending bouquets through Facebook (and SMS in this next update)

Flower Garden also recently reached the milestone of 5 million bouquets sent. That’s a lot of flowers! Thanks to all the Flower Garden fans for making this possible!

Flower Garden Featured For Valentine’s Day!

Two years ago, when I was working on the first release of Flower Garden, Valentine’s Day was my target ship date. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on how you look at it), I missed it and rescheduled it for April. Last year I was eagerly awaiting the Valentine’s Day features hoping for a feature by Apple, but Flower Garden wasn’t one of the apps to be selected. It was disappointing but understandable given how many newer quality apps are out there.

Fast-forward another year, and this morning I woke up to a very pleasant and unexpected surprise: Flower Garden was featured on the App Store under Apps For Valentine’s Day!

Flower Garden is still going strong, but I wasn’t expecting that at all. Thank you, Apple! Not only that, but this feature also appears on the device App Store. Flower Garden was featured twice before by Apple, but never before on a spot that appeared on the device. So that’s a first for Flower Garden!

To make things more interesting, I had been planning on doing a bit of promotion around Valentine’s Day like last year. So a few days ago I released a new update, and included another in-app purchase for the most asked-for feature: More pots in another garden space.

Finally, to round things off, I planned on doing a similar promotion to what I did last year around Mother’s Day, and I set Flower Garden to be free from today until Valentine’s Day to encourage even more people to try it. To get the word out of the price drop, I got some promotion going from Pocket Frogs and a few other apps encouraging users try out the now free Flower Garden. I’m also hoping a few media outlets cover the sale to get the word out as much as possible.

As of this moment, Flower Garden is in the top 100 apps in the US and in the top 50 games, so the combination of everything seems to be working. We’ll see how things develop over this coming week. Until then, it’s going to be an exciting ride.

For the latest news on Flower Garden, join the Facebook page by clicking “Like”:

Casey’s Contraptions Weekly Update (Jan 7)

So much for “weekly” updates. Last time I wrote one was Oct 29. Oops! That’s what happens when I get really busy and then the holidays hit. But now that’s over (the holiday part at least), so I’ll write to write more frequent updates.

This Week

This week Miguel and I are wrapping up our current iteration with the main focus of the first five minutes of gameplay. The reason we’re doing this now is that we spent quite a bit of time on the user interaction experience and we tried to nail that before adding more items and more levels. All along, we’ve been testing the game with unsuspecting victims and we quietly watched over their shoulders as they fumbled with the game without any instructions or tutorials.

I really believe we made huge improvements. We designed the whole game with touch interface from the ground up, and it really shows. I think it’s a very direct and intuitive interface, but even so, there’s only so much you can do without any instructions.

So, the focus of this last iteration is to concentrate on what a new player will see in the first five minutes of gameplay. That way, we can continue testing the game on new players and get a much better feel for how they learn to interact with the game and what works and what doesn’t.

Iterations

For every iteration (roughly about 2 weeks each) we focus on one main area, based on what we feel needs to be addressed the most at that point. To give you an idea, these have been the focus of some of the past iterations:

Proof-of-concept prototype
New, non-physical items
Game screen flow and level progression
Final user interaction
New items and locations

One thing that we’ve been doing is trying to take each goal to completion. This is an idea from Scrum and Agile development that I really like. If you implement an idea to the 90% state, apart from the fact that the remaining 10% is going to take another 90% of the time, you probably don’t have a good idea how it will really be once it’s completed. That makes future planning and re-prioritizing more difficult.

Obviously there’s such a thing as going overboard. Trying to get every single, tiny effect and animation to fully complete before moving on would be crippling. I try to think about the impact that feature, even if it’s very small, will have in the final game. The exact effect when you pick up a star isn’t crucial (assuming you have some sounds and some effects already), but the animations for the item selection and manipulation contribute a lot more to the feel of the game, so they’re more important.

In some of my past projects I took a different approach and built the game bottom up. At the very end all the little niceties and polish touches went in, which made the game radically different. Now I’ve come to admit that all those little touches contribute a lot to the final feel of the game and should be considered all along and not as an afterthought at the end.