Universal Star Nomad Elite, 2d spacesim tribute to elite, privateer & escape velocity!

As a newbie solo dev, I read a lot of devblogs from other indie devs or teams and it seems freemium is "the way" for both platforms due to a few reasons:

1. Barrier of entry, this matters a lot when the dev is an unknown, few people would risk paying an upfront fee to even try it. This is more often the case on Android for whatever reasons which we can all speculate about.

2. Butterscotch Shenanigans and other indie studios have noted that on Android the piracy rate is 95-99% for paid games. Now, I am not one to argue about lost revenue due to piracy because we all know most gamers who pirate would not spend money on the game either way. But the problem appears to be the relative ease at which piracy can occur on Android and also the user base seems to have an expectation. I mean, how often do you hear your friends say "I go with Android cos I can get movies or games free, no itunes or app store".

3. Many small devs have given the same advice for Android, releasing a great game on Android as a paid app with no IAPs is asking to fail financially.

As a newb, I don't know which approach is better TBH, I just take advice from others who have done better than I have and learn from their acquired wisdom. But I dislike having IAPs in my game, because I had this happen on Android, it put me off the freemium model.

This iOS version is superior to Android due to iOS8's insane Nitro-JIT. On Android, in large fleet fights, fps can drop to 45 and the CPU is hammered 75% or more. The max CPU usage I've seen on my iPad Mini 2 is 20% during a big battle with so many ships & projectiles & particles, and it kept a stable 60 fps. While I won't say that Android is an inferior OS, for my purposes due to my usage of PC javascript/html5, iOS8+ is literally 10x more efficient at processing my code.

 

It should but it will be too small, my UI is all touch base and requires some precision during intense fights. I could not enjoy it (I do have big fingers though), but I know others who play it fine with a stylus. Either way, I cannot claim it was intended for the iPhone 5's smaller screen.

 

It was a very generous approach on Android because I hate IAPs that are mandatory, like most freemium games, timers, energies, stupid game balance design, or shovling IAPs in the users face.

I want gamers just to play the game and not even think about IAPs. What I was expecting for Android is that some well off gamers with little patience would perhaps buy a few cheat IAPs (hence the optional part) to basically subsidize the rest who spent nothing. But as I've shown in my reddit discussion, its not like that in reality.

I'd like to be able to pay the bills and keep making more games. In the future I'll just release premium games or go with a free game with 50% of the content, and an IAP to unlock the rest once off.

 

I've tested the idling on my iPad 2 Mini & Air and it had no impact on battery, it properly paused when returning to the home screen, and resumed with about a 1 second delay. Thanks for letting me know, I'll send a report to the JS compiler makers.

ps. Yes, native development is #1, but I lack resources ($$) to port it over natively.

 

I used to be in academia (Latrobe University in Australia & University of Geneva in Switzerland), and ran labs & tutorials between doing my experiments.

But I got tired of the bullshit politics in academia and wanted to follow my long-held dream of being a gamedev (that was halted due to life & people always telling me otherwise).

 

It would not have been possible for my code without iOS8's major improvements. My own testing as well as other devs show that Apple devices with iOS8 crunch javascript about 10x faster than older iOS versions (& Android), and even faster than PCs. It's some sort of voodoo magic. But what it means for cross-platform devs who use javascript for PC, is that they can take the exact code build and it will run excellently on iOS8.

 

I don't begrudge that, for all they know, I am a terrible dev who has made a terrible game because I have no track record.

What I can say is the game has LOT of content and a very long main story line that branches out based on your choices. I personally rate it 7 out 10, because a lot of features I had wanted, during development, I had no idea how to implement, so the game is designed around my lack of talent.

Luckily I've learnt a lot, and making Star Nomad 2 of late has taught me heaps more, to a point where any features I want, I am able to implement. This means as I find time, I'll update Star Nomad to improve it a bit by bit. Hopefully make it a 8 out 10 soon enough.

ps. Apple gamers aren't so bad. Android gamers are strange. I get so many 1 star reviews "Game won't start" or "Game crash on loading" from users with devices so ancient and so below the clearly stated minimum specs. Google doesn't help because they don't allow filtering of hardware specs. They just throw a list of 12,000+ devices in your face and ask you to individually disable a device from that list. Interestingly, their device ID names aren't even obvious so devs have to search out each single one to find what device/specs it is. I gave up after a few hundred.