Up until a few weeks ago, I never had any problems with iPhone game resources. I just added whatever I needed to the XCode project, and it was ready to load from within the game. That simple. But that was because of the kind of games I was making, which were very light on content, with mostly procedurally generated assets (the consequence of working by myself and being much better at programming than at Photoshop). ...
By now every iOS developer knows that making a great game and putting it on the App Store is only part of the work. In order to get significant sales, it needs to be noticed. You need to spend a significant amount of time in marketing and PR, making sure that blogs cover it, magazines review it, or at least jump-starting it with a group of devoted and vocal forum fans. ...
Lag in games is as inevitable as taxes. It’s something we can try to minimize, but we always need to live with it. Earlier this week, I noticed that input for my new iPad game was very laggy. Excessively so, to the point it was really detracting from the game, so I decided I had to look into it a bit more. Lag In Games I’m defining lag as the time elapsed between the moment the player performs an input action (press a button, touch the screen, move his finger), until the game provides some feedback for that input (movement, flash behind a button, sound effect). ...
One of the items in my ever-growing list of things to write about, is the rendering techniques I used in Flower Garden. In the end, it would make for a post with lots of pretty pictures, but there’s nothing particularly ground-breaking. After all, it’s all limited to OpenGL ES 1.1 on the iPhone, which means only two texture units and a two-stage texture combiner. As a result, more interesting ideas keep bubbling up to the top of the list and the poor rendering idea keeps getting passed over. ...
In-game point bundles are nothing new. Even before the time of in-app purchases, Zynga was famous for releasing “points” apps to increase your game reputation or other stats. The fact that they released not just one way of getting points, but many different apps at different price points, was something I dismissed as a marketing tactic to try to get noticed on the charts. Fast-forward to now, and as more companies are jumping into the bandwagon of games that need “points” to make progress, we’re still bundles. Again, I chucked that up to legacy reasons and doing what worked with the standalone apps. ...
I’ve long been a fan of minimal game runtimes. Anything that can be done offline or in a separate tool, should be out of the runtime. That leaves the game architecture and code very lean and simple. One of the things you potentially give up by keeping the game runtime to a minimum is an editor built in the game itself. But that’s one of those things that sounds a lot better than it really is. From a technical point of view, having an editor in the game usually complicates the code a huge amount. All of a sudden you need to deal with objects being created and destroyed randomly (instead of through clearly defined events in the game), and you have to deal with all sorts of crazy inputs and configurations. ...
It has been two months since the last “numbers post”. It covered the Valentine’s Day promotion, spike in sales, and subsequent settling out at a very nice level. Here’s a recap of what things looked like at the beginning of May (revenue was about $1500 per week): The Plan Mother’s Day happens at the beginning of May (in the US and Canada anyway, I’m afraid I was too busy in April and I missed Mother’s Day in a lot of European countries). I figured it would be the perfect time to do another push. ...
Today I have the pleasure to introduce the first-ever guest post in Games From Within, Joey Chang. Like me, Joey worked for many years in the game industry, and finally took the plunge last October to become an independent game developer. Unearthed is his first iPhone project and it’s a very unique free to play, augmented reality (AR) game with an X-Files-like theme. Joey was kind enough to share the story behind Unearthed, some of the decisions leading up to the final game, and the initial reception and sales numbers. Thanks Joey! ...
Every iPhone developer fears the one-star-on-uninstall rating. I understand Apple’s reasoning for adding the prompt for rating on uninstall, but since that’s the only time users are prompted, it becomes a very biased, negative rating. There may be hundreds of users happy with your app who never rate it on iTunes, but everybody who uninstalls it gets asked to give it a review. That’s quite unfair from the developer point of view. ...
Right on the heels of the Mother’s Day promotion, Flower Garden just got its second ever App Store feature. This time it was selected as a Staff Favorite across most of Europe (UK, Spain, Ireland, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Switzerland, and Sweden!). And if you haven’t picked up your free copy of Flower Garden, make sure to do it now. It will probably go back to full price after this weekend. ...
A few months ago, I wrote a post analyzing how Flower Garden had done since it was released. It was a story with lots of ups and downs, tales of trials and failure, but ending on a positive, optimistic note. It went on to become one of the most read posts in this blog, and the comments were all very encouraging. Clearly, people, and especially other developers, are hungry for this kind of data. ...
It’s one thing to go on record saying I wouldn’t be creating an iPad-specific version of Flower Garden, and another seeing the iPhone version running on an iPad with all the ugly jaggies and huge, pixelated text. So when it came time to do a new update, I decided to at least take advantage of the iPad capabilities to make the existing app prettier by making Flower Garden into a universal app. It’s now available on the App Store, so go get it and check it out! ...
Since this Sunday is Mother’s Day (in the US at least), I’m making Flower Garden FREE for the weekend. Yes, that’s right, completely free! Am I going crazy? Giving away the fruit of my labor for so many months? The App Store will do that to people, but this is a bit more sane. The idea is to encourage many more people to try it out. I’m actually hoping some of them will like it so much, they’ll buy a few of the in-app purchases from the Flower Shop. And even if they don’t, hopefully they’ll spread the (good) word about Flower Garden and they might also sign up for the mailing list. And in this business, expanding your user base is a great strategy that can be leveraged for future projects. ...
If you follow this blog regularly you’ve probably noticed that there’s been a kind of blackout period. I hardly posted during the last couple of months. What happened? Lorax Garden is what happened. In late February I agreed to collaborate with Oceanhouse Media on a game project. They had the Dr. Seuss license and I had the flowers. Perfect match for a Lorax-themed game! And so the Lorax Garden was born. I was originally hoping to write some entries here on the progress of the game as I worked on it, but I quickly realized that I wouldn’t have any spare time for anything other than the project. We wanted to have the Lorax Garden (and the Lorax book app) on the App Store by Earth Day (April 20th), so that left us with a very aggressive 5-week schedule (and GDC somewhere in the middle!). Fortunately, we managed to hit our deadline, and you can see the results today by yourself by downloading it from the App Store. ...
This coming Monday I’ll be giving a presentation at 360iDev titled “All You Wanted To Know About Mixing OpenGL with UIKit (And More)”. It’s an extended version of my talk at this year’s GDC iPhone Summit. It’s going to be 1h 20min long instead of just half an hour. The main difference is that I’m going to go in detail about each of the different cases of mixing OpenGL and UIKit, and what better way to do that than with a live demo. I’ll be switching back and forth between Keynote and XCode and going over the details, which is where a lot of the tricky parts are. ...