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It’s pretty clear that free-to-play games are the way to go if you care about making money from your games. And don’t give me that line about being indie and not caring about the money. On the contrary, being able to make money from the games we love to make, allows us to keep doing what we’re passionate about. I was having a discussion today about free games with other developers and I thought I would post here some random thoughts and open it up for discussion. ...

One of the most requested features for Flower Garden is to be able to move pots around. Not only do players want to group similar flowers or colors together, but they also want to be able to take advantage of the properties of the different gardens. I figured the best thing to do this is by mimicking the wobble on the iPhone launchboard icons when you enter edit mode. ...

Wether you want it or not, Xcode 4 is around to stay when it comes to iOS development. I’ve been happily comfortable with Xcode 3 for quite a while, and my first impressions of Xcode 4 left me completely cold. However, support for Xcode 3 will soon go away, so I need to get ready for the inevitable transition. Maybe I was just having a bad day when I looked at Xcode 4 for the first day. Or maybe my nightmares finally came true and I’ll be forced to look for an alternative IDE. Which one is it? Read on to find out. ...

A couple of days ago I had the misfortune of getting back home to find my 6 month-old MacBook Pro completely dead (my second Apple laptop casualty in three years–not a great track record). Long story short, the Apple Store wasn’t able to help me in any way other than ship out the laptop for repairs. Since without it I’m dead on the water, I bought a 17" MacBook Pro on the spot. They didn’t have one with SSD hard drive, so this is most likely going back to the store when I get back my repaired laptop. In the meanwhile, I can continue working and it lets me check out first hand Lion and Xcode 4. These are mostly quick notes to myself so I remember what to change when I upgrade my main machine, but I thought other developers hesitant to upgrade to Lion might find it useful as well. ...

This morning I added the goo.gl URL shortener to Flower Garden, so I thought a quick post with sample code might be helpful for other developers looking to do something similar. I use the URL shortener in Flower Garden to send bouquets through SMS. Space is limited in a text message, so the message just contains some text explaining what is it and the URL pointing to the bouquet image. (Yes, I would much rather send them through MMS, but Apple isn’t exposing that yet to developers). In this case, the full URL is http://flowers.snappytouch.com/sms.php?id=949618b4b3c6f3d76e32b45446e238a0 which gets thankfully shortened to http://goo.gl/IV5cq. ...

Unlike a lot of console and PC games, most mobile and web games keep evolving over time [1]. It’s up to a game’s designers to ultimately decide how to change and improve the game, but the more data about players’ habits they have, the more informed a decision they’ll be able to make. Having good analytics on iOS games is simply essential these days. ...

Casey’s Contraptions is an iOS game created by the two of us, Noel Llopis and Miguel à ngel Friginal. Noel, an industry veteran for over a decade, turned indie over four years ago and found success with microtransaction-based Flower Garden on iOS. Miguel worked as a graphic designer in the advertising industry for years before becoming a web developer. Casey’s Contraptions is his first published video game, although his first paper role-playing game came out almost 20 years ago. We met through Twitter several years ago, and then finally in person at a 360iDev conference. Even thought we didn’t plan it that way, we ended up working together during a game jam, and that set us in the path to collaborate in a future project. We knew we wanted to target iOS for our next project because we love the platform from a user and a developer point of view, and because it’s a platform where it’s possible for indies to succeed financially. Beyond that, starting a new game is never easy. Even though we have page after page of possible ideas, settling on a specific game idea is always very hard. We wanted something that met three requirements: The game had to be creative in nature as opposed to using destruction as the main gameplay element, it had to be something we were excited about, and it had to be something with the potential to sell reasonably well on the Apple App Store. Easier said than done! ...

A few days ago I gave a talk at Evolve 2011 (part of the Develop Conference in Brighton, England) titled “One Price Does Not Fit All”. The main idea of the talk was the importance of “flexible pricing”: Letting players spend as much money as they want to get more enjoyment out of the game and customize their play experience. Flexible pricing can result in revenues much higher than the traditional fixed price approach (derived from manufactured goods). It’s also orthogonal to the concepts of freemium and social games, and we’re only scratching the surface in ways to effectively implement it in games. Here’s the official conference abstract: Did the biggest fans of your game spend more money on it than someone who played it just a few times? If not, you’re leaving a huge percentage of money on the table. This session will talk about how digital distribution has made fixed prices obsolete and how you can take advantage of flexible pricing through in-app purchases in your games. We’ll also talk about the consequences (good and bad) of making a game free to play. The session will present hard data from iOS platforms, but applies to all digital distribution platforms. ...

If you’ve read this blog recently, you probably know that Miguel and I are busy working on the iPhone version of Casey’s Contraptions. What may be surprising is that we’ve been working on it for over three weeks and we’re still not done. After all, to make an iPhone version all we have to do is make the project Universal, recompile, and done, right? ...

Some people asked what I meant by a “toolkit architecture” in the previous post about my middleware fears. It turns out I wrote about that in a previous Inner Product column that for some reason I never reposted here. I think at the time I wrote this (late 2008), I already wasn’t very concerned about writing reusable code, and I was focusing it mostly with respect to using other people’s code and how I wanted it to be architected. ...

Once upon a time, the idea of using some kind of middleware or major external library in my projects was out of the question. Writing all my code was the one and true way! I had a bad case of NIH syndrome. Over the years I’ve mellowed out quite a bit. Now I recognize my obsession with writing endless tools and technology was more of an escape from doing the really hard part of game development. In comparison to making all the decisions involved in the design and implementation of the game itself, writing the perfect resource streaming system sounds like a really good time. It’s amazing how early it started too: I still remember spending weeks writing a Basic-to-assembly translator in 1986, before I had even heard the word “compiler”. Now I just want to make games. ...

Pocket Gamer just published an article on “The Making of Casey’s Contraptions”. It’s an in-depth interview with Miguel and I, talking about the origins and development of Casey’s Contraptions. Learn what influenced the art style in Casey’s Contraptions, how we almost went with a freemium model but pulled out at the last minute, and more.

What an incredible last few days it has been! Casey’s Contraptions launched last Thursday, and it’s now sitting at the #2 slot on the top selling iPad apps in the US and it’s in the top 10 in many other countries in the world (and would probably be #1 if it wasn’t because Infinity Blade had a major update and is on sale). Casey’s Contraptions went on sale on Thursday, and in a few hours it entered the top 100 charts all around the world. We were super-fortunate the Apple picked Casey’s Contraptions as their iPad Game of the Week worldwide and that gave it enough momentum to reach #2 on the top apps chart! ...

Casey’s Contraptions will be available in the US in a few hours! For those of you living in other parts of the world, it’s probably already available on your App Store. Go get it! For the rest of you still twiddling your thumbs, eagerly awaiting for midnight, here’s some insight on what went on in the level creation for Casey’s Contraptions. Built-in editor From the beginning of the project, the idea was to have a level editor built in to the game. The level editor was the very first thing I implemented in the game. Before there were menus, or levels, or anything else, the game was a level editor without any goals. ...

As we gear up for Casey’s Contraptions launch on May 19th, this is the first post in a series dealing with different aspects of the game. I’m planning on covering technical aspects like today, but also design and other parts of development. For those of you who have been living under a rock and haven’t seen the Casey’s Contraptions video, go watch it now. I’ll wait. Or even better, here it is. You don’t even have to leave this page: ...