I’ve had a lot of people asking me about how Dapple is selling and a lot of people speculating about how many millions of copies of Dapple I must have sold after Kotaku reviewed the game.

As I promised when I started writing this blog (nearly 8 months ago now), I will share some sales number and I will try to provide as much data as I can. I’ll also share some budget numbers with you, my faithful readers. However, just not yet. Patience is a virtue, my friends.

I’m flying out to San Jose on Sunday morning for 360iDev and I’ll be back in Canada next Thursday night. By the following week I should be ready to post some preliminary numbers.

If I can find the time, I may post from San Jose. I should be on Twitter at least a couple of times a day too. I’m really looking forward to the conference, as it looks like there are at least one or two presentations I want to see in every time slot! How to choose?!

If I don’t get a chance to post, see you in a week!

Owen

I’ve got two more Dapple reviews to share with you:

• We play iPhone (www.weplayiphone.com) – “Dapple is a great blueprint in iPhone game design – flawlessly executed with many small flourishes. It’s definitely worth a look.”
• iCasual: Dapple (www.theportablegamer.com) – “I am definitely hooked.”

I’ve been very pleased with how positive the Dapple reviews have been so far. Here’s hoping they continue to stay that way…

Other than scouring the internet looking for Dapple reviews, I finished up my 360iDev presentation last night. I’m quite happy with how the presentation is now. I had showed it to a friend of mine on Monday night. He used to do a lot of presenting for his last job and he told me that I had way too many words on my slides. He sent me some guidelines for creating compelling presentations, and I found some of my own. The consensus seems to be: use as few words as possible on the slides, use images wherever you can. The idea is this: use the slides to create an emotional response, then let the listener focus on what you’re saying, not spend their time reading the slides. So I took this advice and I rewrote my whole presentation. It took me two days, but I think the presentation flows much better now, and I think it will make for a much more interesting presentation.

Today I started writing some code for Dapple Lite. I was really hoping to get it submitted before I head to California, but that’s not looking likely anymore. I’ve got all the gameplay and UI changes in that limit what the player can play. However, I need to figure out how to jam a “Buy Dapple” button somewhere on the Main Menu, but there’s no room currently. I also need to design a Dapple Lite logo. And I need to do up a webpage for people to hit when they tap that “Buy Dapple” button. As usual, the actual code changes were few, but the UI and art changes are many.

Owen

Dapple reviews are starting to come out! Not only that, but they’re very good reviews! Woo hoo!

• Dapple Micro-Review: A Rainbow for the Colorblind (www.kotaku.com) – “Dapple quickly became my favorite timekiller on the iPhone.”
• The most Colorful game I’ve ever seen- Dapple (andysreviews.wordpress.com) – “Overall Dapple is one of the best color matching games on the app store.”

Getting a review on Kotaku is a huge win for an indie company like Streaming Colour. Kotaku gets a lot of hits (the review has already had over 1400 views and it’s been up for 90 minutes). Here’s hoping a few people who read the review will buy the game.

It’s been an extremely exciting day for me, one that I’m not likely to forget soon.

I will continue to post reviews as they come in. It’s looking like I should have a few more out later this week and early next week. Stay tuned…

Owen

Yes, next Monday at this time I’ll be in California for the 360|iDev conference. I’m getting really excited for both the conference and for a chance to go back to California. My presentation is coming along nicely. I wrapped up my first draft of the presentation on Friday and timed out a rehearsal, which came in at 60 minutes. Ideally I want to talk for 50 minutes and leave 30 minutes for questions, so I need to cut about 10 slides out of the presentation to make it work. That’s what I’ll be working on this morning.

I also wanted to say thank you to everyone who offered their support after Friday’s less-than-enthusiastic post. I really didn’t intend for the post to come off so down, but I guess that the mood one writes in does comes across on one’s words somehow. I’m feeling much better about things this morning. Sales haven’t picked up, but I think the weekend helped to put things in perspective. I never expected this part of the process to be easy or that Dapple would become an instant success (I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t hoped that it would happen, though). I realise that it will take a lot of work to make Dapple sell, and I know that if Dapple is to be a financial success it will most likely be of the “slow burn” kind. I’m still optimistic that I can make a living at this, but I think I may not be able to move on to the next project as quickly as I’d hoped. I think Dapple will require a little more love before I can concentrate on the next game.

With that in mind I’ve started planning out Dapple Lite. Yesterday I did a bit of work (yes, on the weekend, I know, I’m breaking my own rules again) and did up a “Dapple Lite” icon for the game. I also branched my source code into a new directory so that I can start mucking about and removing stuff from the game. I’ve been reading up on what little information is out there on creating “lite” versions of apps and it seems like there are two rules that Apple wants you to follow:

• The lite version must be fully functional on its own – this means, you can’t show a greyed out “Hard Mode” button if the user can’t play Hard Mode in the lite version. Or you can’t show a greyed out “2 Player Mode” button if the user can’t play 2 Player Mode (which they won’t, in Dapple Lite).
• You can’t “up-sell” the full version too frequently. This seems more subjective, but I take it to mean that the up-sell shouldn’t interfere with their enjoyment of the app…I’d imagine that popping up a pop-up every 2 minutes that tells the user to buy the game would get you rejected quick. I’m just planning to have a button on the Main Menu that will take the user to my web site so that they can buy it from there.

Right now I’m planning to allow the user to play Classic Mode and Timed Mode, but only up to Level 10 in Dapple Lite. This should give a pretty good idea of what the game is about, but it should leave them wanting more. 10 levels is enough to see all the elements of the game, but most players can easily get past level 10 after a few games. I’m not planning to include 2 Player Mode, just because I’m not sure of any good way of limiting the game play in a reasonable way that won’t get my app rejected. I’ll have to give it some more thought.

Finally, Gavin Bowman, over at Antair Games, on Friday posted a bunch of links to blogs he reads (including mine) and he reminded me that my Game Dev Blogs Links section on the left side-bar was in need of some serious love. These are all gentlemen I’ve been enjoying chatting with over Twitter and whose blogs I really enjoy reading. So, if you look to the left, you’ll see a bunch of new links, which I’m about to post right here also:

• Antair Games – Antair Games makes Sneezies for iPhone: an adorable, highly polished bubble popping game featuring the cutest little fuzzy creatures you’ve ever seen. Gavin Bowman posts about once a week to their blog. It’s a great read if you’re into iPhone games development.
• Games from Within – Noel Llopis, founder of Snappy Touch, creator of Tea Time and the recently announced Flower Garden, writes fantastic blog posts about his experiences developing for the iPhone. He often posts extremely useful technical information that I’ve often made use of throughout my game’s development. Noel also writes for Game Developer Magazine, so you can read more of his stuff there.
• Jason Citron – Jason is one of the co-founders of Aurora Feint, the company that made the very nice Aurora Feint II series of games on the iPhone. He just started blogging, but his first post is great, so let’s hope he keeps it up.
• Mike Krasprzak – I linked to Mike’s blog on Friday. Mike’s a Canadian iPhone developer and makes really nice, highly polished, innovative games. I mentioned on Friday that Mike created Smiles, an IGF Mobile Best Game Award finalist.
• Veiled Games – Veiled Games made the iPhone game Up There, which was very well received. They’ve been extremely generous with posting sales data for other iPhone developers to see. They also started AppTees.com, a store where you can buy T-shirts with some iPhone game-related imagery on them.

I’m not sure if it’s because iPhone development is still relatively new, or if nice people end up developing for iPhone, but I’ve been blown away by how great other iPhone developers have been. There’s so much sharing of information going on and everyone’s willing to help each other out. It’s really nice to see. I love that there’s a community of developers that really want to help the rest of the community. I’m really happy to be a part of that.

Owen

Astute readers who have been reading the blog for a long time will notice that I just reused a previous post’s title. That’s ok, the title still works, so I’m using it again.

I haven’t been posting a lot lately for two reasons:

1) I’ve been busy working on my 360|iDev presentation and I’ve been trying to minimize distractions. It’s coming along nicely. The big problem is trying to cut back everything I wanted to talk about into the length of time I have to talk.

2) I haven’t had much Dapple news to talk about.

Dapple has been on sale in the App Store for 7 days now. It’s impossible to draw any kind of conclusions from such a short time on sale, so I won’t even attempt it. I’ve had a lot of people asking me about sales numbers and I’m not ready to share that yet. Let’s just say that I’ve been less than thrilled with sales so far.

That being said, I am still hopeful for Dapple. The sales so far have been based entirely on word of mouth and based on my tweets on Twitter. My hope is that sales will pick up once I get some reviews out there on the web. I sent out a lot of copies to review sites earlier this week, so hopefully we should see some game reviews start to show up in the next week or two.

Right now my biggest problem is just getting the word out that the game exists and that it’s worth people’s $4.99. Without reviews, that’s hard.

This last week has also reinforced the need for a “Lite” version of Dapple sooner rather than later. I think people are hesitant to spend the $5 on a game they can’t try. I think reviews combined with a Lite version could be a real boost to sales.

My priority right now is finishing my 360|iDev presentation, but then I’ll probably start working on Dapple Lite immediately afterward. I was originally planning to wait until March to start working on that and give myself a bit of a break, but it’s not looking like that’s a good idea anymore.

One thing that helps with all of this is knowing that other devs are struggling with the same issues I am. Mike Kasprzak, creator of Smiles, the critically acclaimed iPhone title and finalist for the IGF Mobile Best Game Award, posted an honest look at the sales of his game:

• A Cheerfully Blunt Road Map (www.toonormal.com)

But all of this raises doubts in my mind about the long-term viability of quality titles on the iPhone store. If “farting” applications are going to continue to be the top selling applications on the store, is there any point in spending 6 months developing a high quality title that won’t sell? I really hope that there is a way that it can work, both for the sake of iPhone developers and for iPhone consumers.

Well, this post is coming off more pessimistic than I had originally intended it to. I am confident that Dapple’s sales will pick up once I can get some reviews out for the game and once I can get a Lite version out. Here’s to the future!

Owen