Yes, hindsight is a wonderful thing. We spent almost 4 years on Star Saver. We were sandboxing mechanics for almost a year before we even started on content. Now, mind you we did contracts and other games over the same period too, and we're still profitable as a company even if Star Saver is a complete failure... but it's painful anyway. The intention was to make a handheld quality (GBA specifically) game in scope and style on iOS. There are very few of them because they take considerable effort to make, and are quite expensive. We have done projects in a couple of months before, but those have additional discovery problems and my expectations for them based on past experience is even lower. Heh, damned if you spend the time, damned if you don't .
I wish I needed only ~1200 sales. What do I think will be different sales performance wise on PC? Very little. PC is an even tougher nut to crack than mobile. I think we can ask for a little higher price, and there may be some additional PR and marketing opportunities that may present themselves simply because mobile is 'not very interesting' to most outlets. As far as the game goes - we're working on art improvements and additional polish. That will probably carry over to a mobile update. I suspect console is where we will probably find our market. But it's nice to be getting a real feedback loop about what we have now to know what needs addressing.
I don't know, but if you can't give it away on mobile, I don't know why you would be any more likely in either of those markets. Getting onto steam would help if you can because then you are in a smaller market. Be careful not to throw good money after bad. Good luck!
I guess you are a bit jaded by your experience but I don't think your app is what you think. Graphically it is lacking in the screenshots and they don't draw any interest from me (who loves click and point games). I think the key is short prototypes to test. I think your assumption on more time makes something better is wrong. I think an experienced developer could of made this very quickly. Lack of content never hurts your sales on appstore just your retention. Sometimes I think people just in bubble that their game is so much better when that isn't the reality. That said I haven't played your game but the screenshots as I mention turned me off straight away.
Yeah, I hear you. Sunk costs are just that. I hate losing money but it won't be the first time and won't be the last. . We're being pretty cautious, but it is cheaper to port than iterate on a new design. For better or worse it's just pure execution. I am a little bit worried about the cost of marketing and PR for a relaunch. As far as not being able to give it away, I don't think we're unique in that regard. I've worked with quite a few teams who had similar problems on mobile. We didn't go in expecting a goldmine, but the cliff was a little steeper than we anticipated. The good news is, we have great retention and conversion.
Thats what I thought, those costs would scare me away! It is a hard market and there is a lot of question of what the right way to advertise is. I often considered putting down 500 on advertising but generally the advice is won't make any significant difference.
That's a tad harsh. Watched the video, and it certainly looks interesting if a little rough. The QTVR style scenes with 3d elements is an interesting concept. The realtime 3d sequences do look a touch out of place though. I think I'd either gone all 3d or all photos. For 99 cents I'll give it a go at least. I think you might have fallen into the same trap we did. We just spent way too long on the game, overscoped like crazy, and we aren't exemplary of the genre no matter how many unique features we added. We've also got a similar problem too with poor first impressions and trying to condense the experience in screenshots. I've always been a gameplay aesthetics first, then beautify second but I'm really starting to rethink that approach.
Yeah, 500 bucks won't move the needle at all. We tracked all the performance from all the ads we placed. Granted our ads weren't super great (I suppose we could have burnt more money by going to an agency), but it was an interesting, if expensive experiment to see how effective they were. I do think the PR approach is the best approach, and I would double or triple my spend on that front.
Hey just a note - I just picked up your Lost Diamonds game. The screenshots really don't do this game justice. I mean, REALLY don't. You need to get on that. The game and the production values are actually pretty damn good. Glad I checked it out. You start the beginning of the game with a WAY too hard puzzle though . And I really don't want to use the hints.
500 represents a couple of days pay which is really all I can say goodbye to and not care. I still plan to do some advertising at some point but I believe that I be smarter. I like the idea of using 5'er and doing 10-20 of them costing me like 100 bucks and not really much to lose. I am going to look at doing lots of small things since plonking 500 on ads won't help me.
If you have weekends free, and can get table space, try doing game related conventions in your area. It's super localized (but so is $500 in advertising). We've had really good luck at those and been able to move more than a few copies + some merch.
I going to a few in Melbourne like Unite at the end of October and have been invited to speak, so hopefully that will open some doors.
I think a big part of Star Savers poor performance isn't just the intro but the way it's marketed. I was in HS and College during the heyday of Shareware and I never actually bought a single share ware title through the mail like what was offered. Yes, pre Internet you got a disk at a mom and pop computer store with whatever shareware game on it and if you liked it there was a file to print the orderform. What did I do? I waited for full game releases at retail. So I played all of Wolfenstein and the other games but not at the mail lrder pricing scheme offered and you know what? That scheme as good as it looked in paper wasn't as successful as retail. In fact it didn't even stick around that long. Sure companies have tried to being it back through supposed dlc (which at times is just content held out from the main game to sell later)... But as a whole shareware isn't profitable. I think it's even less so on iOS. For one, iOS (and android) offer many ways to cheat the system. Not that that matters much as those gamers aren't the ones that buy games. So then there's the people who do buy games. Wether anti IAP like me or not, when you get tons of games free its easy to let something I didn't pay for fall through the cracks and never get played because I have so many games I did buy and feel I need to put time into before games with IAP unlocks or ads. So a lack of faith in the game to sell as a game is a big deal. More to the intro stuff, when I don't pay for a game it's easier to give up and delete something that doesn't click from the start. But if I do pay for a game I will hammer away at it till either I declare it a lost cause and waste of money or I discover the actual core game is awesome. With star saver i would have bought it near launch based on user feedback and would have hammered past the intro to the meat of the game and would have raved about it and encouraged others to stick it out past the first part of the game. Case in point, Goblin Sword and Traps N Gemstones. These are two fantastic games (one more Metroidvania than the other but both would fit in well with Star Saver). Both launched with a fixed price and by word of mouth and reviews alone they managed to quickly climb the charts out of nowhere. This really was the first more core game for Donut Games and Gelato Games first game was a market flop (despite being good) and they were mostly unknown. So the moral here is, free doesn't ever mean making money on the AppStore. Especially with core games. If you (not Star Saver) are aiming at the freemium market riches then think of it more as gambling in the lottery. Chances are its going to fail.
Thanks for checking it out, and the positive response. Yeah it's really difficult to do the screen shots justice, this is about our 3rd iteration on these, As soon as they are stationary, it looses all impact. The 30 second preview is the best thing that iTunes have added, as soon as I get the right versions of os to upload. What way is it hard? the grabbing of the moving object (We've slowed it to half in android version, or the finding of the bandage.) We tried to put enough hints in the actual game dialogue so you don't need to use hints, but its really difficult to erase my memory and play from scratch ;-) It's difficult to undo the story line, but we realised that the first (hook) level is probably the most difficult, in some ways. The urgency of fixing your head would etc. We've also doubled the Time for the head wound death in the android version. Obviously the iOS version shares the same source, so it will get these changes next update. All the best of success with your project.
I agree to some extent about the screenshots, they usually have more in them after a puzzle is solved, but I don't want to use those shots as they would spoil the game. I'm certainly always trying to improve them, so I'll take this on board. I never assumed more time make something better at all, it just takes a long time to make this sort of game, and once your committed to a story and puzzles its hard to shave bits off, believe me I did. You said - "An experienced developer could of made this very quickly" I laughed, you haven't even played the game, yet you can make this statement. Have you ever made a point and click adventure game? I've been doing this for 20 years (Full Time, self employed, my first game was programmed in Borland Pascal for MSDOS 5. ), sorry I'm so inexperienced! Google "The Adventures Of Down Under Dan" Wiki has the developer and publisher reversed. It also said it was my one and only title, but I worked for other publishers after that, the most recent, Eureka Multimedia, for about 10 years doing educational 3D PC games, the last few years IOS / Android apps. The Lost Diamonds, has over 600 lines of dialogue, 300 lines of hints, 2,600 photographs were specifically taken for this project, Haven't added up the code, but my last game framework had about 70,000 lines of code in it. This ones probably about the same, Although I started with the basic framework I had for the educational projects. I added a hell of a lot to make it a first person Point and click framework. I did this all on my own, using a few assets and music purchased from 3rd parties. I literally rode my motorcycle to some of the remote locations, with my specialised panoramic capturing equipment, on board, all of this actually takes a bit of time. Did I mention my app is different! The reason I may come over as inexperienced, is I never self published before, which is where I definitely struggle now, I always had a publisher with artists and marketers doing that work. As far as the content goes, In hindsight I should have made the first level free and then charge 99c a level, but a lot of people don't like IAP's. I do have a lite version, but I took it off the market for a while, not sure if it helps or hinders sales. I'm sick of typing, so I'll end this now. I'm sick of typing, so I'll end this now.
My point was if you had a third of that content, I doubt it would of changed how the app went. Making a first person click and point framework would be easy for me. I have made apps which have the elements before and would be confident of making a decent full working prototype in a week max if I did it full time. Maybe I just come from an area where rapid prototyping is valued and i do it a lot. It wasn't haven't a go at you, it was more a comment on how mobile development needs to be done. I get the whole feature creep, blowing out time spent etc. I am terrible for making games to 75% done and making another prototype.
Yeah, the game (Lost Diamonds) certainly seems way overscoped. But also, when you're working on adventure games specifically it's hard to cut bits from the middle. We had the same problems. Once we committed to certain puzzles and certain progression we had to execute or shuffle large parts of the design around. And re-do large pieces of content. I don't know how you develop, but we usually work from the middle of the game out so our best content falls nearer the beginning of the game. We just vastly underestimated the time we'd spend on content.
I always make a working prototype as quickly as possible. Then if we proceed we get it in the end user hands as fast as possible with an MVP (minimum viable product). Personally when I make games I just do it for fun or to teach people but I try to follow that. I try to get people to try the game as soon as it is playable. It gives you a reality check watching someone else play it. That game star wars commander, the prototype which got it approved by Disney took 2 days to make by one of their staff which had a lot of the gameplay elements which now make up the game. It actually keeps making me want to attempt to make it as a single player game cause I love the mechanics.
Kinda agree with nightc1 Back in the 90's i used to love shareware games which regularly came on a CD on a magazine, used to give me a taster of the game and some you could then phone up to order the full game or wait a month till its out and as you knew you liked it you would then buy it asap. With iOS its strange, 'if' Star Saver was a paid game from the start it might have sold a few, instead people seem to just love free things ! They might have played the first part and then when it came to the 'now pay for the rest' they deleted it. I'm personally a fan of the more older iOS method of 'shareware' like Star Saver, gives me a proper chance of playing it (rather than making up my mind by watching a video) and i regularly then unlock them buy paying. But iOS fans are all different, some hate freemium , some love it, some dont like 'shareware' methods others do. I think for any future games i would go with a premium price rather than an 'unlock' one. Its still crazy though as i really think this unlock/shareware method is great but i think too many people might have downloaded it , not read much about it, thinking it was 'free' and then were surprised when you had to get the rest of the game. I did like it, the graphics i wasnt so keen on i must admit. But being a retro fan its all about the gameplay to me so graphics dont matter 'as much' Edit - I reinstalled it but i'll move my comments to the main thread
Not trying to justify anything, because we obviously did it wrong. But believe it or not there was a method to the madness with our whole 'shareware' concept. We figured getting installs was the the important thing. We knew the game was a bit hard to explain and an unknown ip is always difficult to sell (I come from the world of licensed games myself, and there's nothing like a built in audience). We also hoped the game was deep enough that conversion would take care of itself, and we'd get some indie community support because of that. Part of the idea was to give enough content that the player felt committed and would want to finish. Also, we wanted to clearly demonstrate value, which is why you can see the doors with the levels in the temple. Wish we could compare alternate universe performance, and see where we landed had we just launched with a premium price. I think the key thing though, is that we didn't demonstrate the value effectively to the press and to Apple. It's possible the 'shareware' model may have had something to do with that though.
