Flower-Garden

I only recently broke free of iOS3.x for Flower Garden, so I’m finally adding all the features I had been itching to add that required higher OS support. I had already added some iOS4+ features, but I was keeping them to a minimum because it’s always a huge cause of bugs to target multiple versions of the OS at once. One of the first features I looked into adding was multisample antialiasing (MSAA) support for OpenGL, which was originally introduced in iOS 4.0. The geometry generated for the petals in Flower Garden is fairly high contrast, and since it’s not like the textures were carefully created and laid out by an artist, the result is pretty bad aliasing around the edges. Perfect candidate for multisampling! ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

I finally managed to get through the hotel wifi and upload the slides for this morning’s 360iDev talk: The Power Of In-App Purchases. Thanks everybody who attended for the great questions and feedback! Session description The common-sense approach to make money on the App Store used to be to do anything to get on the top charts. In-app purchases changed all of that. Good in-app purchases can make your app profitable without being anywhere on the charts, and are the best hope for the independent developer. Come to this session to learn why IAPs can be so effective and how to leverage them effectively: what makes a good IAP, how to increase your user involvement, how to present IAPs in an attractive way, what things attract users, and what things turn them away. We’ll go through lots of detailed real-world data from Flower Garden and other games with strong IAPs. ...

In the last year and a half, I’ve written about the different things that I’ve tried with Flower Garden and their effects on sales. From adding Facebook support, creating a free version, adding in-app purchases, or giving Flower Garden for free for a limited time. Some strategies worked and some didn’t. Today I want to share my latest experiment, and how it was a total and complete failure: Adding the option to gift IAP items from within the game. ...

A few weeks ago I wrote about using the Google App Engine as a back end for Flower Garden. One of the comments I heard from several people is that the Google App Engine pricing scheme is “scary” due to its unpredictability. What if your server gets very busy and you find yourself with a huge bill? Google App Engine Costs At the time I wrote that post, the bandwidth of Flower Garden (and Flower Garden Free) was just under the free bandwidth allowance, so I didn’t have to pay anything. However, this last week, after riding the Pocket Frogs rocket, Flower Garden Free shot up to the #56 overall app in the US. And boy, did that make a difference in server usage! ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...