Having released Astavoid back in April I very much saw that as a springboard to my 10,000 hour project. I had delivered on a lifelong dream to write a game, however basic, and now I was ready to make something more complicated.
This was my first error. Having remained focused on Astavoid to make a game that was simple and therefore achievable meant I got it finished. However, on reflection I bit off more than I could chew meaning my ambition outweighed my ability and I become disillusioned a little. I was attempting to write a grid library that meant I could do a game like train yard, polymer, letterpress etc and have a formula that was repeatable to get more games out. However, as I evolved the grid I lost focus on my goal of the library and started dabbling with no real purpose.
As writing this its a little like therapy and maybe I'm being harsh on myself but I feel I had lost 6 months development time and certainly hoped to have at least one more game released in my first year.
What I ended up with was a partially complete grid library and some prototyped game ideas but none of which I particularly wanted to play once complete so why would anybody else. This is also when I started doubting whether Corona Labs (renamed from Corona SDK) was actually for me.
To qualify this I had chosen Corona after research because of its ease to build to iOS and Android devices. I had launched on both including Kindle with reasonable ease but found the effort to support both outweighed the returns. I found i was getting about 8 times the download on Apple devices. Also I personally found setting up a developer account for Nook tortuous and still to this day haven't pursued so why were my main drivers multi-platform.
Also the true lack of Gamecenter (matchmaking) and iAD support personally limited the direction I wanted to go in. Also having spent $349 on a Corona Pro license I felt pressured to churn out games, to make money to provide a return. On reflection completely the wrong way to manage my projects. While Corona do other an Enterprise license that may overcome these issues with access to native code that is further investment. My biggest bug bear was a lack of IDE and visual debugging. The writing to console was painful and extremely time consuming and took me back 10 years when I wrote classic ASP websites. While in fairness there are third party IDEs such as LUA Glider now on the market they still dont offer the tools that others already have in place.
This led me to Unity. Without a doubt the tool to use at the moment and the possibilities are endless and having made my way though tutorials had quite an affinity for it. The use of C# is closer to my experiences as well. I dabbled with it for about 6 weeks I again found I had lost focus. The trouble I was finding was that it was just such a large tool and again the costs were prohibitive for somebody who had 3k downloads and no revenues. Since I last looked at it fellow Indie Matt Rix has brought out a library called Futile to work in a way I am more accustomed but feel I need some more games under my belt that has more community examples and support.
This is when I made my choice which I'm now content with and refocused and that's Cocos2d / Kobold2d. Its not just one of cost but also the support and maturity of the community. While Cocos2d has proved really successful to date it had suffered in the frequency of its updates, this is where Kobold2d comes in in terms of its efficiencies it brings to the development process such as ARC and full Gamecenter support to name a few. The use of Xcode again gives me tools which I feel have been lacking.
So looking back over my first year as an indie I haven't achieved my ambitious goals in fact got nowhere near (for example Astavoid achieved a highest position of 82 in action category in Spain) but I still continue. A vast number of Indies don't make a second game and to be honest I can see why but importantly I addressed my challenges, refocused and am looking to continue.
Look out for my second game in the New Year.
The last six months have been a hell of a journey and have learnt so much. What I don't understand are those people who write a game, expect it to become the next Angry Birds and then give up. What I have learnt from writing Astavoid has been invaluable but more importantly it is what I do next and having learnt from my mistakes are key to me achieving my goal.
This project and reaching out into the indie development world has been brilliant and would like to share some of the snippets I have received either directly via email or gleaned from other postmortems, blogs, tweets and browsing the interweb.
The general feedback I got about Astavoid was that it was a great first effort, that it was complete and polished with some neat twists but ultimately too hard and not sticky enough. This is supported throughout my analysis.
Keith Shepherd of Temple Run and soon to be released Temple Run: Brave fame was kind enough to feedback via email on my blogs and design of Astavoid with a number of pointers. Probably the biggest pointers I got from him were don't do soft launches but instead make a big impact by publicising your predefined launch date while also ensuring you never pay for reviews on review sites. The other main point was making sure you keep player retention and he used the analogy that 50% of Temple Run's users were still playing after a month.
Another Indie I have had the good fortune of exchanging dialogue with is Whitaker Trebella. He too has just launched his first game but his launch day tactics were exceptional. He really got the word around and while he has some contacts in the industry having done some excellent scores for games such as Tilt to Live, Super Stickman Golf and Casey's Contraptions, he ensured he got the word around. Again, tips I have picked up from him were use Twitter, use blogs and forums (Reddit, Touch Arcade etc) and create a decent game trailer, the latter of which I was disappointed in my own efforts. Whitaker wrote a very good article on using Twitter to support your game launch: http://www.whitakerblackall.com/blog/a-guide-to-using-twitter-to-promote-your-game/.
Matt Rix of Trainyard fame and inadvertently Noel Llopis (Casey's Contraptions, Flower Garden), were incredibly helpful in refining my game design for different reasons. Matt was kind enough to be one of my beta testers and gave me some constructive criticism to make the game more accessible to the masses. Like all good ideas (well good ideas to those that conceived it) you think that everyone will love it. The challenge with apps is that you aren't dealing with gamers or a specific target audience specifically and for that reason you don't want to overcomplicate gameplay. This is definitely something that Matt pointed out to me which meant I went through a number of iterations of beta testing based on his feedback to make the control mechanic more akin to Tiny Wings and Jet Pack Joyride et al. Noel, on the otherhand, gave me insight into indie development as a whole which I have blogged separately about but I was able to be a beta tester on his Flower Garden game that gave me a view on to how games should be tested and user feedback being considered and adopted so late in development cycles.
I have also read some great articles concerning the guys over at UsTwo who, amongst other titles, are reasonable well known for the very enjoyable Whale Trail. To paraphrase a few articles the tips from these guys are:
- Give journalists a story to tell: the app store is too populated to just be about the game on the whole. Have an angle to sell in and make you stand out from the crowd
- And target the right journalists: Review sites may not be the write medium as not everyone is a gamer. Look for other mediums such as newspapers etc
- Get the right offering together before launching: make sure what you launch is right and not rushed to get something out on the market
- Talk to your fans: ownership, involvement and loyalty will undoubtable helped mould a better experience
- You don’t just need a good idea, you need a marketable idea: What do users actually want?
- But it needs to be a marketable idea that you like: make something you want to make!
Along with this advice that I have gathered so far I thought I would share a few learnings of my own. For what it is worth my game, Astavoid, hasn't been a great success. It was launched mid April 2012 on iOS devices (iPhone, iPad and iPod), Android and Amazon Kindle. The breakdown of stats are as follows:
iOS downloads: 2,297
Android: 270
Kindle: 89
Total: 2,656
To be honest I don't know what I was expecting from my first game but these seem respectable. That said half my iOS downloads were on the first day. But considering, despite my best efforts, to get reviews and press coverage this is purely word of mouth and one press release via prMac.
The only thing I have done is invest a total of $140 ($70 on iOS and $70 on Android) in AdMob advertising campaign. The tactic of this was to see if this had an impact on sales and whether in app advertising was a future strategy I should consider.
I ran the AdMob campaign on separate weeks, with a daily spend of $10 and a click of $0.01 which should generate 1000 click throughs to the relevant app stores. So for $140 I should get 14,000 click through to stimulate downloads.
The following two graphs are the effects that the advertising had on the downloads figures:
Android
Android: 270
Kindle: 89
Total: 2,656
To be honest I don't know what I was expecting from my first game but these seem respectable. That said half my iOS downloads were on the first day. But considering, despite my best efforts, to get reviews and press coverage this is purely word of mouth and one press release via prMac.
The only thing I have done is invest a total of $140 ($70 on iOS and $70 on Android) in AdMob advertising campaign. The tactic of this was to see if this had an impact on sales and whether in app advertising was a future strategy I should consider.
I ran the AdMob campaign on separate weeks, with a daily spend of $10 and a click of $0.01 which should generate 1000 click throughs to the relevant app stores. So for $140 I should get 14,000 click through to stimulate downloads.
The following two graphs are the effects that the advertising had on the downloads figures:
Android
iOS
The graphs are a little misleading as the spike on the Android one is much larger given the relative non existent downloads to that point. What the graphs do show is that the ad campaign did stimulate spikes. However, despite the campaign breakdown as shown below the relative click through rate and the resultant conversion to a download was negligible
Yep thats right $10!!! So just AdMobs alone I am at a $130 loss. But this is what this is all about learning, experimenting and putting these skills and thoughts into action that mean the second, third and one hundredth game.
So what will I be taking forward into my next game? To summarise:
Check out Astavoid on App Store and Google Play and download for free.
As you can see my ad was show some 2.4m times but the general awareness didn't really stimulate anything. This then brings me to the main point of monetarisation. Going back to the advice that Keith gave the game must be sticky and there is no truer word then when you have a free app reliant on ad revenue.
Just to be clear about my goal although it is about making enough money to put my kids into private education and pay off my mortgage I wasn't expecting to make a dent in that with my first game. In fact I see my first year making a loss and hope there are enough lessons to build on for year two to be profitable. With that in mind I will share with you my bag of loot.
[Update: As noted by AC in the comments this is timelapsed based on revenues per day]
So what will I be taking forward into my next game? To summarise:
- A paid for app [Update: main comments are to consider freemium, we'll see :)]
- A game that allows short bursts but brings the user back
- To engage far earlier in my marketing. To fix a date some two or three weeks after the app is approved and let the media, forums, blogs and the world know its coming
- Create a quality teaser video that does it justice
- Make a richer, deeper but polished experience for the user
- Try to instill some elements of community
- Learn more
- Keep having fun
Check out Astavoid on App Store and Google Play and download for free.
I thought I would disclose a warts and all appraisal week by week of my success of each game I launch. Being that Astavoid was my first game there was little blueprint to work to other than read around and get a sense of what others were doing.
To be honest I'm not that happy with it as I don't have anything more than an iPhone 4 and a GorillaMobile tripod so the quality is pretty amateur but heh I'm learning.
For prerelease I also have two twitter accounts mygamingproject and parachutingfrog that help spread the word and keep people you to date.
For launch I released to Google Play, GetJar, Amazon App Store for Android, Amazon Appstore for Kindle, as well as the Appstore for the universal app for iPad, iPhone and iPod including Retina support up to IPad 3. So I had most bases covered apart from Nook Color which I am still waiting on administration.
I started off with a soft launch because there were some key upgrades I wanted released and approved by Apple before telling the world. Alas there review process takes so long (7 days for first version and a further 6 for the update) makes a coordinated multi platform release quite tough.
So on day of launch the only marketing was tweets and the trigger process that kicks in over the internet when new apps are out. The weekend of 21 and 22 April I did two things. I submitted my app to about 30 sites android review and probably 20 for Apple. The frustration I have found with review sites it would appear is that nobody is prepared to write a review for free unless you have connections or prepared to pay for it, or wait a long time for it to become popular. A little chicken and egg.
The reason I didn't want to pay too much in marketing in the first instance is that my game is free so I needed to understand what the click rates would be and recycle it into marketing. The exception to this was a PR release I did via prMac. prMac has various packages but for a reasonable $20 you can release a press release which can be distributed to over 700 press agencies. So I did that and here is my press release.
So now you know my prerelease and marketing efforts lets have a look at what the first week's downloads look like.
As you can see, and to my surprise, I had a massive launch day surge. I can only assume this came about from twitter accounts and "watcher" services that broadcast when new games are out. I have quite an eye catching icon logo and unusual name so seemed to catch the imagination of some.
The interesting thing is that iOS tailed off dramatically after that first day. Android, however, given the same marketing efforts has had pitiful downloads.
So this is all very interesting but what does this equate to in terms of hard cash. Well as I mentioned I am doing the first one as free so revenues are purely down to advertising revenues. I have positioned ads on the front menu screen, pause menu as well as the game over screen. This should mean that even the shortest of games should put in two ad requests. The problem however with ad revenues is you get nothing for impressions but only for those that are clicked on.
The next area of analysis of how the people are of my app are engaging with it. This is where Corona SDK provides a very useful tool called Launchpad that is by default is switched on for pro subscription developers that provide insight into these trends.
The first is the session length. You will see that from this stat that iPad is by far the most popular device and that most are only playing my game for a maximum of 39 seconds. The very nature of my game being a quick pick up and play is working against me in making it sticky enough to get those additional ad rotations in and therefore money.
The next is sessions. The peak of sessions corresponds by day to the downloads and again supporting that the most popular device was iPad.
As for unique users this kinda shows that there isn't a great deal of return visits going on. In my mind people are playing it, trying it and then deleting. A concept of course which is well supported by having a free app as they have nothing to lose but ultimately not great for revenues.
So what does this look like for revenues. As you'd imagine nothing life changing! I have implemented an aggregator into my code which first uses Admob and if this can't fill for whatever reason trickles down to Inneractive. The reason for these two being used is in some part limited to what Corona SDK supports but also those that are around most countries.
and for iPad a little greater success where in 4 countries got into top 100. This of course is supported by the stats in the other graphs
As I said at the outset this is a warts and all reality of indie development. I have learnt a lot in this second week about how I could have done it differently for next time but not sure I can retrieve the situation without some investment in a marketing budget. But that is for another week.
I released Astavoid on the 19th April 2012, a Thursday. I am led to believe that this is important as far as the Appstore is concerned as this is their changeover day so launching on a thursday allow you to build up downloads, recognition etc over the week so more chance of getting featured the following week. A wives tale I'm not sure.
I wrote a very basic website to support the launch on my main Parachuting Frog website as well as create a gameplay teaser on YouTube.
To be honest I'm not that happy with it as I don't have anything more than an iPhone 4 and a GorillaMobile tripod so the quality is pretty amateur but heh I'm learning.
For prerelease I also have two twitter accounts mygamingproject and parachutingfrog that help spread the word and keep people you to date.
For launch I released to Google Play, GetJar, Amazon App Store for Android, Amazon Appstore for Kindle, as well as the Appstore for the universal app for iPad, iPhone and iPod including Retina support up to IPad 3. So I had most bases covered apart from Nook Color which I am still waiting on administration.
I started off with a soft launch because there were some key upgrades I wanted released and approved by Apple before telling the world. Alas there review process takes so long (7 days for first version and a further 6 for the update) makes a coordinated multi platform release quite tough.
So on day of launch the only marketing was tweets and the trigger process that kicks in over the internet when new apps are out. The weekend of 21 and 22 April I did two things. I submitted my app to about 30 sites android review and probably 20 for Apple. The frustration I have found with review sites it would appear is that nobody is prepared to write a review for free unless you have connections or prepared to pay for it, or wait a long time for it to become popular. A little chicken and egg.
The reason I didn't want to pay too much in marketing in the first instance is that my game is free so I needed to understand what the click rates would be and recycle it into marketing. The exception to this was a PR release I did via prMac. prMac has various packages but for a reasonable $20 you can release a press release which can be distributed to over 700 press agencies. So I did that and here is my press release.
So now you know my prerelease and marketing efforts lets have a look at what the first week's downloads look like.
| 19th April | 20th April | 21st April | 22nd April | 23rd April | 24th April | 25th April | ||
| iOS | 1130 | 379 | 157 | 130 | 75 | 36 | 18 | 1925 |
| Android | 3 | 1 | 1 | 5 | 2 | 5 | 2 | 19 |
| Kindle Fire | 1 | 6 | 2 | 0 | 2 | 4 | 0 | 15 |
| 1134 | 386 | 160 | 135 | 79 | 45 | 20 |
As you can see, and to my surprise, I had a massive launch day surge. I can only assume this came about from twitter accounts and "watcher" services that broadcast when new games are out. I have quite an eye catching icon logo and unusual name so seemed to catch the imagination of some.
The interesting thing is that iOS tailed off dramatically after that first day. Android, however, given the same marketing efforts has had pitiful downloads.
So this is all very interesting but what does this equate to in terms of hard cash. Well as I mentioned I am doing the first one as free so revenues are purely down to advertising revenues. I have positioned ads on the front menu screen, pause menu as well as the game over screen. This should mean that even the shortest of games should put in two ad requests. The problem however with ad revenues is you get nothing for impressions but only for those that are clicked on.
The next area of analysis of how the people are of my app are engaging with it. This is where Corona SDK provides a very useful tool called Launchpad that is by default is switched on for pro subscription developers that provide insight into these trends.
So what does this look like for revenues. As you'd imagine nothing life changing! I have implemented an aggregator into my code which first uses Admob and if this can't fill for whatever reason trickles down to Inneractive. The reason for these two being used is in some part limited to what Corona SDK supports but also those that are around most countries.
As you can see from the stats again its supporting the the number of downloads to ad requests. But what is important is that there is only about one impression per download. This means some people may not even be playing the game which seems a little odd. Most important though I have only made $6 in revenue which is the equivalent of roughly having about 14 paid download apps. As you'll see from the clicks there weren't a great deal despite the reasonable impressions.
The final thing is to look at how the downloads faired across the world. I am using the excellent Appannie to give me stats. Also try the excellent Majicrank for realtime stats if your app reaches a rank of 200 or better.
For iPhone I had a reasonable spread across countries if not ranking that high ...
| Store | Action | Arcade | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| # of top 500 stores | 6 | 7 | ||
| # of top 1000 stores | 19 | 19 | ||
| Turkey | 166 | Apr 19, 2012 | 375 | Apr 20, 2012 |
| Mexico | 385 | Apr 20, 2012 | 341 | Apr 20, 2012 |
| Cyprus | 465 | Apr 19, 2012 | 403 | Apr 19, 2012 |
| South Korea | 479 | Apr 20, 2012 | 394 | Apr 20, 2012 |
| Sweden | 481 | Apr 19, 2012 | 593 | Apr 20, 2012 |
| Spain | 485 | Apr 20, 2012 | 437 | Apr 20, 2012 |
| France | 513 | Apr 20, 2012 | 472 | Apr 20, 2012 |
| United Kingdom | 599 | Apr 20, 2012 | 380 | Apr 19, 2012 |
| China | 602 | Apr 19, 2012 | 549 | Apr 20, 2012 |
| Netherlands | 641 | Apr 19, 2012 | 634 | Apr 20, 2012 |
| Brazil | 654 | Apr 22, 2012 | 603 | Apr 22, 2012 |
| Armenia | 705 | Apr 21, 2012 | 599 | Apr 21, 2012 |
| Italy | 706 | Apr 20, 2012 | 670 | Apr 20, 2012 |
| Japan | 724 | Apr 19, 2012 | 643 | Apr 20, 2012 |
| United States | 747 | Apr 20, 2012 | 664 | Apr 20, 2012 |
| Germany | 759 | Apr 20, 2012 | 611 | Apr 19, 2012 |
| Canada | 760 | Apr 19, 2012 | 688 | Apr 19, 2012 |
| Switzerland | 805 | Apr 20, 2012 | 728 | Apr 20, 2012 |
| Egypt | 945 | Apr 19, 2012 | 844 | Apr 19, 2012 |
and for iPad a little greater success where in 4 countries got into top 100. This of course is supported by the stats in the other graphs
| Store | Action | Arcade | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| # of top 100 stores | 0 | 4 | ||
| # of top 500 stores | 10 | 15 | ||
| # of top 1000 stores | 10 | 15 | ||
| Turkey | 104 | Apr 19, 2012 | 86 | Apr 19, 2012 |
| Ireland | 104 | Apr 20, 2012 | 88 | Apr 20, 2012 |
| Italy | 104 | Apr 19, 2012 | 195 | Apr 20, 2012 |
| Romania | 109 | Apr 19, 2012 | 80 | Apr 19, 2012 |
| Denmark | 116 | Apr 19, 2012 | 110 | Apr 19, 2012 |
| Spain | 130 | Apr 20, 2012 | 88 | Apr 19, 2012 |
| Japan | 172 | Apr 19, 2012 | - | |
| Brazil | 173 | Apr 20, 2012 | 153 | Apr 20, 2012 |
| Sweden | 187 | Apr 19, 2012 | 171 | Apr 19, 2012 |
| Israel | 194 | Apr 20, 2012 | 167 | Apr 20, 2012 |
| Netherlands | - | 170 | Apr 19, 2012 | |
| Mexico | - | 176 | Apr 20, 2012 | |
| El Salvador | - | 177 | Apr 24, 2012 | |
| France | - | 180 | Apr 20, 2012 | |
| Saudi Arabia | - | 190 | Apr 21, 2012 | |
| Switzerland | - | 197 | Apr 20, 2012 | |
As I said at the outset this is a warts and all reality of indie development. I have learnt a lot in this second week about how I could have done it differently for next time but not sure I can retrieve the situation without some investment in a marketing budget. But that is for another week.
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