headcaseGames, I tried your game a while back and thought it was quite fun. Listen to ArtCoder. He is dead-on correct. Share and enjoy,
@headcasegames: I have a series of short casual (and FREE) games coming out soon and I would like to invite you to send a banner ad for 180 which I will be including in the "More Games" section w/in the app. I'm not guaranteeing anything but if these games become popular, the extra exposure might help. Please drop me a DM on Twitter or PM. Hey, we gotta help each other if we want to succeed, right?
While I do think that 180 is a GREAT game, I agree with that. I find them to be not enough detailed and their animations to be too limited to give actual "character" to the game. It's not a big deal - to me, is just as if they weren't there, but I don't think the game needs them in the first place.
egarayblas - hpw nice of you to offer Will contact you shortly. We little devs gotta stick together! sam - I hear ya. I will be honest - the characters only exist as window dressing, and they were not intended to do much other than add some personality to the game. I took the cue from Bust-a-Move for how they were implemented (if you are familiar with that game, this should be fairly evident) - but I guess these days, when you do something like that, people are going to be expecting more along the lines of Puzzle Fighter (where the characters have unique "attacks"). We had very limited frames of animation due to programming restrictions, even so I am happy with how they came out and used it as an excuse to try and get more from less. If you are old enough to remember the old Nintendo game & Watch games, I used their philosophy of animation to tackle these characters (simple 2 or 3 frame anim's with some very cartoony "ping-pong" exaggeration) and I personally think the effect comes off nicely - that's just me though, being an old-school gamer I wanted to play them up a bit more during big chain/combo/specials, have start game/end game animated sequences, etc but ultimately we've learned when doing this with a small team, you can only implement as much as your budgeted time will allow (at this point I am talking programmatically, more than asset generation). But hey, for a game that costs a couple of bucks, I don't think we skimped At this stage I am happy to have some established characters (even if there's no "story" yet) and would love to do more with them, either within the theme of 180 or spinning them off into their own action game(s). Hey, just a thought I'd love to do a Simpsons Arcade (iPhone) type of game or something of that nature, for starters..
Lol, touché Honestly, that is an amazing job you've done marketing your app, and if that hasn't given you the results you want then it's hard to say what will. I do however second AssyriaGameStudio and think that getting reviews plays a key-role, and will probably implement a similar suggestion in our apps. As things are today, people mostly rate an app when they delete it - which is great if you're selling something with the lasting appeal of a chewing-gum I suppose...
After a couple of big promotions, we blipped on a couple big guys' screens and they reached out to us. As I have been doing all the promotion on my own, using a larger company specializing in this stuff has been something I've never been concerned with. However, I do know through all my research that our game does have mass-market appeal and this is a good way to go about getting that exposure. At this point I do need to start spending some real money to chase it, understandably. I have spent a bit over a grand of my own money between all the marketing/promo stuff I have done. The big firm which contacted me claims they will need a few hundred bucks a day to run some initial testing and gauge what to do, and from there it will get more expensive to actually chart. At that point, you are spending thousands of dollars daily, but if you are charting you are earning thousands daily. I have more research to do, of course, but it is something I am considering after all the work I have done to get to this point. I also know there's gotta be a point where you say "enough is enough" and move on.. anyway I wonder if anyone here has had similar experience, positive or negative, and could shed some light on things? Depending on feedback I might start a new thread on this topic, just to get a little more eyeballs on the matter..
Guess its time to share my own experience. I'll make it really brief, I promise. I have 2 apps to date--Card Drop and SOW. I was lucky that Card Drop was featured by Apple when it was first released and it actually stayed on the App Store frontpage for almost a month. Card Drop made it to the top 5 paid Card Games and even reached the top 200 overall paid apps. I honestly recoup my investment in a week's time and spent nothing on marketing. I released my 2nd game several months after and the story was entirely different. SOW wasn't featured at all when it came out so I decided to do the hard work myself. I contacted review sites (only 15% replied back), had it advertised on a couple of small iPhone game-related sites, tried print advertising, gave out FREE copies, used social-media-inbound-marketing and even conducted promos and contests. Since SOW involved planting and business, I also went to "green" forums and tried spreading the word there. After a month of doing marketing work, I even decided to hire a 3rd party company to handle that for me. My sales increased a little but not substantially. From a copy or two a day, I sell around 5-6 copies per day now but still, those aren't my expectations. I took this as an advantage and decided to experiment with it by changing its business model. SOW was a FREEmium app when it came out and one had to purchase a $0.99 Premium pack to "unlock" the full version. I decided to change my approach and re-released it as a simple paid app coupled with a Lite version. Sales doubled after that and in addition, I got extra revenues from ads on the Lite version. SOW may not be on any top 10's but its a steady income generator for me now and I figured, if I can just churn out more games like this, my income can only get better. I guess the point here is that maybe there's nothing wrong with your marketing but rather, your business model may need a different approach? Have you noticed why some apps sell even w/out Lite versions? How some apps make more money being FREE than paid? Have you taken the time to sit down, evaluate your app and find out if you're better off going FREEmium or even FREE? Just some ideas you may want to consider. I know you can do it. They've done it, so can we!
FREE would be great, but my programmer support is so limited that I don't really have the ability to add any meaningful in-app purchases for a very long time. I only have one other game tt upsell to within that, and it's not one that is really designed to move. So free feels like a dead-end. It was nice seeing the numbers jump for a minute through I am planning to work with a different programmer in the future and maybe we can build something a little higher-tech off the base of this, but everything is up in the air for awhile. In the meantime, successful sales or not, I am still extremely proud to have a very fun and polished app available for sale on the store. I feel like it is very representative of what I want to do as a game developer, and that means so much to me.
hey, man ,what u said is really constructive. may i have yr contact info as i have some further Q and i hope i can get yr sincere suggestion.
