Introduction

If you haven’t played the game, LandFormer is a puzzle game for iPhone/iPod touch. Each level is made up of a 5×5 grid of terrain at different heights (oceans, up to mountains). The goal on each level is to use land forming tools to modify the heights of the terrain tiles to flatten things out. It’s a challenging game that starts off very easy, but get quite difficult in the harder levels. It’s a game that requires skill, patience, but most of all, intuition.

The game is free to download and try (there are 12 levels currently in the free version of the game), with In-App Purchase (IAP) available to upgrade to the “full” version of the game, as well as IAP for additional visual themes and additional levels. I think of it like a demo, where the user gets to try it and then decide if they want to spend money on more levels. The free version also contains ads, which are disabled if the player buys any content from the in-game shop.

The game launched on June 29, 2010 and has had 147,000 downloads of the free version of the game so far.

What Went Right?

1) Gameplay

I’m really happy with how the game itself turned out. LandFormer started as a prototype called “UpDown” that I did in 6 hours at the all-night GameJam for 360iDev Denver in September, 2009 (I participated via Skype). After I launched Monkeys in Space, I returned to the prototype in early 2010 and started playing around with ways to make it more fun, and settled on the terraforming theme, which helps players understand what they’re supposed to do, and why.

What I like most about the game is that I haven’t really seen other puzzle games like it. It’s similar in play-style to sliding block puzzle games (it requires a similar combination of spatial reasoning and intuition), but the up/down movement of the pieces makes it feel very new and requires new ways of thinking. It’s also very easy to learn how to play, but takes time to really master it and get good at the more difficult puzzles. In the end, I think the gameplay stands as being strong, and I’m very pleased with how the game turned out.

2) Strong Launch

This is my 3rd game, and thus my 3rd game launch. However, with LandFormer I decided it was time to try a new launch strategy. With my previous games, I launched the games as soon as Apple approved them. This caused all sorts of problems in terms of getting press materials out, and reviews trickling out gradually. With LandFormer, I decided to set a proper release date. When Apple approved the game, I set the release date for a week and a half into the future. I immediately sent out press releases to sites along with promo codes (yes, they work once the game has been approved, but before it’s available in the store) for press to try the game. Because my content is all IAP on my server, I could also make it available to the press for free during the pre-launch review period. Very handy.

The result of this new launch strategy was that several large review sites had reviews out within one or two days of launch. This helped pick up momentum for the game, then the first Thursday after launch Apple featured it as a Hot New Game. The Friday immediately after the feature, Gizmodo ran a review of the game, which boosted downloads tremendously for the following weekend.

I really couldn’t have asked for much better a launch. The only way it could have been better was by getting a front-page feature, or App of the Week feature from Apple. They’re probably just saving that for my next game (har har).

3) Free + IAP

As all developers do, I struggled a lot with the pricing model for the game. My other games are both paid games, but Dapple has a separate Lite version for players to “try before they buy”. The thing I don’t like about the Lite model is that it requires players to download two separate apps if they then want to buy the game. It always felt kludgy to me. Ultimately I decided to set things up like a PC or XBLA demo: free to download it, but if you like it, buy the full upgrade from within the game. This is the really exciting monetization path that IAP opened up when Apple introduced it.

Because I was implementing the in-game store for this anyway, it also allowed me to developing a theming system for the game and sell themes. It also means I can continue to release new level packs for users without having to update the game itself.

I think the model has a lot of potential on the app store. The free download gets you maximum visibility on the store (people are willing to download something just because it’s free), but then you have a way to earn some money within the app. However, it’s not all rainbows and unicorns: see the corresponding section in What Went Wrong.

4) Level Editor

When I started building the game, I was building levels as string of data then loading them into the game and testing them. This was ridiculous. I realized early on that building a level could be seen as solving a level in reverse. I was able to very quickly build a first pass at a level editor just by reversing the rules: start with a flat plane, and use the tools to deform it. This had two advantages: 1) it made building levels much easier, and 2) it meant that any level created in the level editor was guaranteed to have a solution.

Once I had it working for my own purposes I decided that it needed to be available to players in the game. The level editor is so easy and intuitive to use, I need people to be able to play with it. I’m happy I took the time to do the UI work required to build the level editor out into something that everyone could use.

The editor allows players to create their own levels, but beyond that, I implemented a sharing system based on URLs, where players could email a level to a friend. The friend clicks a link in the email and the level opens inside their copy of the game for them to play. It’s a simple system, that I think works quite nicely.

5) Doing Everything (Almost)

Since Monkeys in Space, I’ve been doing everything except the music in my games by myself. For both Monkeys and LandFormer I did all of the game design, programmer, artwork, UI design, sound design, PR, and marketing. I don’t do music, because that’s just something I’m not capable of doing myself. However, doing everything myself has given me a lot of freedom to make the game exactly how I want to make it. It also allows me to think about how a change will impact all the various aspects of the game. And, perhaps most importantly, it allows me to save a huge amount of out-of-pocket expense. I would love to have the funds to pay a full-time artist to work on the game, but that’s just not in the cards for me yet. I do have some art background, but doing all my own art for these games has helped me get a lot better than I was. I hope I’ll continue to improve. However, this is also another one of those things that also appears on the What Went Wrong section. So let’s get to that now.

What Went Wrong?

1) Free + IAP

I listed the reasons why I thought Free + IAP was great for LandFormer, but it’s also something that didn’t work great. One thing I was not at all prepared for was a backlash from users over the pricing model. I thought that players would be happy that they were given an opportunity to try the game before spending any money on it. However, the reaction from a lot of players instead was “The game says it’s free, but you have to buy stuff!” I got called a cheat, a liar, and a con artist.

My immediate reaction was that my app description clearly states that you only get the Beginner levels for free and have to buy the others. The app page in the store also lists the top IAP. But what I learned is that no one reads that stuff. I think I got a lot of downloads (especially after some of the big press stories ran) from people who saw the name, the icon, and “free” and downloaded it.

The problem is that there’s a disconnect between my view of the pricing model, and that of the minority of angry, vocal, app store consumers. I saw: “LandFormer offers you a way to try the game for free, and if you like it, buy it.” That customer sees: “Hey, a free game!” And then is angry when they discover they can’t play all the levels for free.

In the end, I’m not sure if the pricing model I chose for LandFormer was the right call or not. I’m not convinced that I wouldn’t have made more money by distributing a Lite version and a separate paid version (or only a paid version). App Store customers have gotten used to that model. I think it’s a problem with the fact that IAP didn’t exist from the start. Users had a year to get used to a certain business model, now we’re trying to change that. It’s going to be a difficult transition.

Not to go on about this for too long, but I think the Free + IAP model works best for games where you’re giving away a complete game for free, and then selling IAP for additional content that’s not required. If I ever do another free game, I’ll be looking toward that model.

2) iOS 4 + Multitasking

Apple launched iOS 4 on June 21, 2010, 8 days before I launched LandFormer, but 2 days after Apple had approved it. I had time with the beta SDK to make sure the game didn’t crash and that the game could be put into the background and restored properly before shipping it. However, I spent a great deal of time over the next 3 updates fixing weird little issues that cropped up because of iOS 4 multitasking. Multitasking caused all kinds of problems with my level sharing system, as well as my save system. I believe there was also one crash that only showed up in iOS 4 because of a change in the way some touch events fired. I’m not blaming Apple, it was just bad luck on my part that I launched so close to iOS 4, and I couldn’t afford to delay the launch of the game any more to deal with all the little issues that cropped up.

3) Ad Network

I mentioned in the introduction that I decided to include ads in the free version of the game. This is in this section for several reasons. At the peak of LandFormer’s popularity, it was being downloaded about 12,000 times per day. This translated into about 50,000 ad impressions a day. However, my click-through rate (CTR) was abysmal. It turned out that the way I was loading ads meant that a lot of people never saw the ads I requested. On my best day, I made about $5 off of ads. In the first update to the game (v1.1) I released a fix that made sure that ads were displayed properly to users. However, by the time it was approved I was down to a few hundred downloads a day of the free game. Even though my CTR increased dramatically with the change, my earnings averaged out around $0.30-0.40/day.

On top of that, the ad network I used had a crash bug in its code. After a couple of weeks trying to help them track the problem down, they told me they weren’t going to look into it any further. I was getting several support requests a week from players about this crash, so ultimately I pulled their ad network out of my game and I wrote my own custom system.

The game now (in v1.1.2) pulls ads of my own server. This is cool for several reasons. Now I get to decide what ads get shown in the game, it means I can cross promote my other games, and it means that I can promote games that I actually buy and play. I use LinkShare to get a small royalty any time someone actually buys through this system, but that’s been next to nothing so far. Still, I’d rather help support developers whose work I respect and have no crashes, than get the $0.30/day but with 10% of users experiencing a crash every time they launch the game.

4) Themes

When I built the IAP system I was very excited to be able to sell themes (skins) for the game. The way I had set up the graphics engine meant that it would be easy for me to load different textures to change the look of the game. I thought players would like the chance to be able to customize their experience a bit more too, but I was wrong. I’m seeing about a 0.1% conversion rate on themes (i.e. about 1 in 1000 people download a theme).

At this point, I only have one theme for sale. So it could be that people just don’t like that theme. It could also be that people just like the default art more. Or it could just be that people really don’t care about theming this kind of game. Though, if you think about it another way, if 1 in 100 people buy the premium content, the users who would buy a theme are probably a subset of that 1 in 100. So that means about 1 in 10 of those people have bought the theme, so maybe that’s ok. Still, when you do the math, that’s about $100 made off the theme so far, and it took almost a week of art work to build it (not even counting the time it took to put the theming system in place). When you look at it like that, it’s not as worth it.

I’m currently working on another theme. If it doesn’t sell, I probably won’t be releasing more themes. I think themes would sell better in a game where you could play the whole game for free. I think people might be willing to buy a theme in that case.

5) Doing Everything (Almost)

I’ve already outlined why I thought this worked for the project, but doing everything by oneself also comes with some big downsides. The biggest is time. LandFormer took 5 months from start to launch (then another month of work after launch). I’d guess that at least 2 months of that was doing the artwork and UI design for the game. If I could have afforded to pay a professional artist to do that for me, they probably would have taken half the time, and they could have been doing it while I programmed.

The other big downside is not having someone to bounce ideas off of. Working with an artist allows you to brainstorm, to try new things, and play with the concepts in the artistic direction of the game. When you’re doing it all yourself, it’s easy to get caught in the trap of just doing the first thing that comes to mind. It’s hard to force yourself to try multiple things and to find the best artistic solution to a problem.

Conclusion

In the end, I’m extremely pleased with the way that LandFormer turned out. I think it’s my strongest game to date. The game was also an opportunity for me to experiment with several new things I’d never tried before: IAP, free games, ad-supported games, and user-created content and sharing. I’m very happy with the number of free downloads the game has had. I find it absolutely amazing to think that almost 150,000 people have downloaded my game! At the same time, I’d be lying if I said I was happy with the conversion rate I’ve seen from free to paid.

The game continues to get a couple hundred downloads a day, and it seems to have stabilized there. I hope that it will maintain this level (or higher) for quite some time. The fact that it’s free seems to help keep the downloads alive.

Every game is an incredible learning experience, and I’ve learned a lot in making and launching LandFormer. I’ll be continuing to support it and add new content, but I’m also looking ahead to what’s next. Onward!

Owen

Thank you to everyone who bought one of my games over the last two years; you’re awesome. And a big thank you to the indie iPhone and indie games community for all the inspiration and support. I’m honoured to be part of this community, and I look forward to being a part of it for years to come.

Owen

I returned home from the Game Developers Conference (GDC) nearly a week ago, but I feel like it has taken me this long to be able to recover from the late nights, the jetlag, the cold I caught, and put things into perspective. I thought I’d share a summary of my experience there, for those who are thinking of maybe going next year.

Executive Summary: SO AWESOME!!!

GDC is held every year in San Francisco. I’ve been in the games industry for over 6 years now, but this was my first time at the conference, so I wasn’t really sure what to expect. I managed to get an All Access Pass to the conference, so I was there for the summits and tutorials, as well as the main conference.

Let me back up a little and talk about my reasoning for going, as that will help you understand why the conference was so valuable to me. At the beginning of the year I started thinking about what conferences I wanted to attend. 360iDev was a must-attend for me, so I booked that first. However, I was torn between attending WWDC (Apple’s big annual conference) or GDC. I attended WWDC last year and it was great. But this year I felt like what I really needed was general game design inspiration, and less Apple-specific technical inspiration. With that in mind, I chose GDC. My goal for the conference was to focus mainly on game design sessions and take in a few technical and business sessions.

So, I arrived in San Francisco Monday, March 8th, the day before the Summits started. I managed to meet up with a bunch of iPhone devs I know from Toronto, other conferences, or Twitter. We had a few beers and tried to adjust to west coast time. It was a good way to ease myself into the week.

Tuesday and Wednesday were the Summit & Tutorial days at GDC. There were two summits I was interested in: the iPhone Summit, and the Independent Games Summit (IGS). I think I spent about 60% of my time at the IGS and about 40% at the iPhone Summit. I saw some great technical iPhone talks by Noel Llopis from SnappyTouch and Phil Hassey from Galcon. I also saw some great IGS talks that ranged in topic from managing an independent game studio’s creative process, to how to better design indie games. I saw a session by Ron Carmel from 2D Boy, several awesome sessions by the people at thatgamecompany (Flower is one of my favourite games), and a terrific session by Randy Smith from Tiger Style (among so many others!). By the end of the Summits, my head was already spinning with inspiration. The IGS design talks in particular were extremely motivating for me. Getting a chance to meet and hear amazing indie game designers/developers talk about their processes was fantastic. It started me thinking about a lot of things as they relate to my own processes. More on that later…

A tiny segment of the massive GDC Expo

The IGF Awards

Thursday through Saturday were the main conference, expo, and Independent Games Festival Awards. I sat in session after amazing session listening to industry leaders in game design, technical development, and business talk about their processes. I saw Peter Molyneux talk, Sid Meier talk, and even Will Wright talk. I saw a moving and inspirational talk by Brenda Brathwaite on her exploration into board games with serious themes. I saw a head-ache inducing (in a good way!) talk on PixelJunk Shooter’s real-time fluid dynamics system that made me really miss doing PS3 SPU programming. I saw an in-depth and honest look a the successes and problems encountered by Naughty Dog’s attempts to create an active cinematic experience for Uncharted 2. I was blown away by the quality of the content, and I was left reeling by how the talks started forcing me to think about the direction I want to take with my own games.

There were huge crowds in the halls between sessions!

But of course, the sessions are only part of GDC. The other part comes from meetings and parties. I was able to set up a few meetings with iPhone press to show them my new game. That was really great to be able to demo the game in person. I think it was extremely valuable. Then each night there were countless parties happening. Each party was a great chance to meet people in person who I’ve only communicated with on twitter or via email. It was a chance to discuss iPhone development with other people going through the same thing as me. It was a chance to discuss game design in general with other game designers and developers. It was a chance to have fun with people who share in the same daily challenges that I do.

Will Wright giving his presentation!

For me, I got out of GDC exactly what I wanted: design inspiration, new friends, new business connections and a wealth of knowledge. But perhaps most importantly, GDC helped me to put me back on track with where I want to take my games. When I decided to go indie in 2008, it was because I wanted to make the games that I was compelled to make. What I’ve noticed is that I’ve been making more and more design decisions lately based on what I think will sell well. This isn’t how I want to make games. I want to make the games that I have to make, not that I think I should make because I think it might make some money, even though the idea doesn’t excite me. Granted, I would love to be able to make the games that I feel compelled to make and have them also become a financial success. And obviously I can’t ignore the fact that I’m running a business. But GDC helped to remind me of what I want my priorities to be, and that, to me, is the most important part of having gone.

Owen

However, over the last few days I’ve been returning to my own projects and getting back into the swing of things. As you might recall, I took part (remotely) in September’s 360iDev Game Jam night and created a prototype for a puzzle game idea I had. I’m happy to report that I’ve been developing that idea further and it’s coming along nicely. The game now looks very different from the screenshot I posted on Touch Arcade, by the way. As for a preliminary look at what the game is becoming, I might have something to show early next week, so keep an eye out for that!

Yesterday I decided to rewrite the rendering part of my engine to take advantage of a bunch of optimizations I had been putting off making. It turns out that the changes I made over the last day reduced my render time by about 40%! That means that I can render nearly double the sprites on the screen without dropping my framerate. This is great news, and I’m looking at porting the changes back into Monkeys in Space at some point to help out with that game’s performance.

In other news, I thought I’d mention that I’ve decided to attend two conferences this spring: the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in March and 360iDev in April. I’m looking forward to both conferences, but I’m especially excited about GDC as I’ve been in the games industry for over 6 years now, but I’ve never gone to GDC! I’m really excited to get a chance to finally go and see what all the fuss is about. I’m also looking forward to attending sessions on game design that are more broad than just iPhone games.

That being said, I’m also happy to be attending 360iDev again. It will be great to see the iPhone developers I speak with every day on twitter in person again. Last year I had a fantastic time at the conference and I expect no less this time. I’ll also be speaking at 360iDev. For my presentation I will attempt to create an iPhone game prototype in 80 minutes based on audience suggestions. While doing that, I’ll be highlighting some of my best practices for rapid prototyping. If you’re attending the conference, I hope you’ll check it out. If you’re not attending the conference, why not? Check out this amazing schedule of speakers. And if you’re thinking about it, go register!

Owen

Because I really enjoy reading Game Developer Magazine, I thought I’d follow their template for a postmortem and list 5 things that went right followed by 5 things that went wrong on the project.

What Went Right

1. Prototyping, Iteration, and Early Feedback. One of the processes I put into place when I started Streaming Colour Studios is the extensive use of prototyping and rapid iteration. When you build a large console game, you need to plan out everything a lot more because there are 100 people working on the game. When it’s just you, you can afford to play around with ideas a lot more.

Monkeys in Space actually started out as a completely different game. The first prototype I built involved controlling space ships with black holes. One of the things I learned with Dapple is that the sooner you get feedback the better. So this time I sent that first prototype out to a few trusted friends to get their opinions on it. The feedback that I got was that the controls weren’t intuitive enough and the game wasn’t really fun to play, just frustrating. This was fantastic feedback to get so early in the process and I was able to start trying new ideas and iterating on the design.

Eventually I got to the point where the game was fun, but the space ship theme wasn’t working for me anymore. I had had an idea for a bonus level that involved picking up monkeys floating in space with your ship, but after discussing this with a few friends over coffee (one of them ended up writing the music for the game) I decided that the game might be more fun to play if the monkeys were the focus of the game. Once this decision was made, it opened up new avenues for art direction, marketing, names, and even merchandise.

Once I had the monkeys in the game, I opened the game up to much more public play testing. People were playing the game and providing regular feedback at a much earlier stage of the development than with Dapple. This proved to be invaluable for fine tuning the design and polishing the game.

2. Gameplay. Monkeys in Space fits into the “line drawing”/”chaos management” genre of games, but it needed something to set it apart and help it to stand out. I had also learned, through my experiences with Dapple, that I needed a gameplay mechanic that was easy to understand, but offered depth to the experienced player. Monkeys in Space offers familiar gameplay goals to players familiar with the genre (get the monkeys to the bases), but adds a twist that adds depth to the game (linking monkeys together). The chaining mechanic was added about mid way through the prototyping process, but the feedback from play testers was unanimously positive. I’m very happy with how the game ended up playing out. The chaining adds a risk/reward factor to the game that has been mentioned in a lot of reviews.

3. The Name. I mentioned above that the game was originally about space ships. Well, it was a search for a name for the game that ultimately led to the game being about monkeys instead. I was brainstorming game names with some friends when I mentioned I had been thinking about adding a space monkey level to the game. Immediately we all started thinking about fun names for a game involving space monkeys. My favourite at the time was “Space Monkey Rescue”, but I ultimately abandoned it because of trademark concerns. I contacted my friend Stacy, who is a writer, and asked her for help. I sent her some of my favourites, including just “Monkeys in Space”. I told her I was looking for a 50’s or 60’s sci-fi b-movie feel for the title and she came up with “Monkeys in Space: Escape to Banana Base Alpha”, which I absolutely loved. I think the name is perfect for the game in that it captures that silly retro feel I wanted, and it says “yes this is a game set in space, but it’s not a serious sci-fi game; it’s fun and it has monkeys!”

4. Artwork. With Dapple I had decided to hire a professional artist to do the game’s artwork. While the artist did an amazing job and I was extremely happy with her work, hiring an artist is also expensive. With Monkeys in Space I decided to take a different risk and do the artwork myself. Now, I took some art classes in university, I’ve done a little life drawing since then, and I once had a job where I was using Photoshop for eight hours a day, but I’m not a professional artist, so this was kind of a risky move. However, in the end, I was quite pleased with the art in the game. I think the monkeys especially turned out quite well. No doubt a professional artist could probably have bumped the artwork up a notch (or two), but I’m happy with the results. On top of that, it was also really fun. It was great to get back into drawing regularly again and I think it’s something I’ll be considering for future games, if it’s a possibility.

5. Reviews and Apple Feature. Monkeys in Space has received some great reviews from the iPhone gaming press/critics (you can read them on the Press page). Every good review helps to build buzz around a game, but one of the biggest reviews the game got was from TouchArcade.com. Their Monkeys in Space review was on their front page for two days and during that time I saw a sales spike close to what I was to see being featured by Apple. Then a week after the Touch Arcade review ran, the game was featured on the App Store in the Games -> What’s Hot section. This happened just before Christmas, which couldn’t have been better timing. It wasn’t a front page of the App Store feature, but it was enough to push me into the Top 100 Kids Games in the U.S. store. This gave the game some momentum through the holiday boost.

I’ve decided that while I don’t want to share sales specifics about the game (like the infamous Dapple “Numbers” post), I will share the shape of the graph of sales since the game’s launch:

What Went Wrong

1. Release Date. I mentioned this earlier this week, but my release date turned out to be a big mistake. I submitted the game to apple in mid-November and wasn’t sure when to expect it to be approved. I got the email from Apple saying the app was ready for sale at about 7:30pm on Wed, Nov 25th. I was so excited that I switched the app into the “for sale” state (by setting the release date to the 25th) and started preparing the email I’d send out to the press in the morning. On Thursday morning I sent out my press release along with screenshots and video, etc, to iPhone sites. At that point I started getting back “out of office” replies and suddenly released it was Thanksgiving in the U.S. See, we Canadians celebrate Thanksgiving in October, so the date completely slipped my mind.

At first I didn’t think it would be a big problem. But then I started reading the review sites that were staffed for the holidays and most of them were just running stories about the hundreds of games that were going on sale for Black Friday in the U.S. Not only that, but it turns out a lot of people apparently take a long weekend from Thursday-Sunday, so it meant I didn’t hear from anyone until well into the next week.

However, I can’t really complain as the game eventually did get picked up by review sites, but the roll out was more gradual than I had hoped. The delay meant that my marketing lost some momentum right at the start, which isn’t ideal. In the future I will be paying closer attention to U.S. holidays when I set my release dates.

2. Delays. When I did the first concept sketches for the game that was to become Monkeys in Space, the original plan was to build the game in 2 months or less. From start to finish, the game ended up taking almost exactly 3 months. One extra month isn’t terrible, but that’s a 50% overshoot of the original plan. Now I have excuses: my wife and I moved cities, which ate up a few weeks with packing, moving, and unpacking, etc. But I think the biggest reason the game took longer than I thought it would was because I decided to do the artwork. Because I was doing the art and the programming, it meant that the two couldn’t happen concurrently. When you work with an external artist, they can be drawing while you’re coding, but I didn’t have that ability this time. The artwork took longer than I thought it would, which pushed my timeline out. Ultimately, it was worth the extra time to make sure the art was good enough to meet my expectations for the quality of the game, but it did delay its release.

3. Marketing Push. I learned some important lessons with the launch of Dapple. One of the most important was the need to have your marketing push happen all at once. You want everyone to be talking about your game at the same time. I’ve already mentioned the problems the release date caused with this, but I suspect there were some other missed marketing opportunities around advertising that I didn’t explore. I haven’t had a lot of luck with advertising driving sales. However, I think if done properly, there may be ways to leverage advertising effectively, even for $0.99 games…I just haven’t figured it out yet.

4. Not Enough Levels in v1.0. During development I had to make a call about how many levels to include in the initial version of the game. I looked at the great games in the genre (e.g. Harbor Master, Flight Control, etc) and looked at how many levels each had shipped with, and decided to ship three levels. I also chose to limit myself to three levels at first because the game was already taking longer than I had expected. However, what I discovered is that people expect new games to contain as many levels as the other games do now, not how many they contained when they shipped. Some of the reviews of Monkeys in Space have mentioned that they would have liked to have seen more levels in the game. Since then I have released a fourth level as part of a free update and I hope to release more. Regardless, what I failed to realise is that the free update system for iPhone apps creates a different set of expectations in people’s minds. They don’t care that game X shipped with one level; what matters is that it has five now. This was an important lesson in competitive analysis for me.

5. Public Recruiting of Testers. I almost listed this in the “What Went Right” section as well, and it just barely squeaks into the “What Went Wrong” list. Very early in the process (much earlier than I’d ever considered before) I started asking people to play test the game and provide feedback. I put out a call on Twitter, on this blog, and in iPhone gaming forums, looking for people who wanted to play the game and provide some honest feedback about what did and didn’t work. The reason this should also be in the “What Went Right” is that I got some terrific people playing the game and providing me with insightful and helpful feedback. However, I also had a lot of people sign up, get the builds, and I’d never hear from them again. I think there is a small group of people who say they’ll beta test a game just to get a free game. The good news is that I’ve met enough great people that I now have a decent list of preferred testers I’ll ask first next time.

Conclusion

All in all, I’m extremely proud of Monkeys in Space. I think that I learned a lot from some of the mistakes I made with my first game, but I still made a few new mistakes. I suppose that’s all part of the process of becoming a better game designer, developer, and business person. What I like most about Monkeys in Space is seeing new players pick it up and to watch how easily they get involved with the game. I also love watching people laugh when the monkeys scream and wave their arms frantically. People seem to have fun with the game, and that makes me happy. To me, that alone makes the game successful.

Owen

At any rate, since it’s the first day back at work after the holidays, I thought I’d take the time to write up a post looking back at 2009 and looking forward to what’s coming up in 2010. I know…big surprise, right?

First, let’s take a look back at what 2009 held for Streaming Colour Studios:

Dapple

In February, I released my first game as Streaming Colour Studios called Dapple for the iPhone and iPod touch. The game has had several updates made to it over the year and I was extremely pleased with how the game turned out. The game was received very positively by the game critic community. It didn’t sell as well as I had hoped it would, but I learned some hard and valuable lessons about the importance of marketing a product. One bit of nice news is that the game continues to sell a few copies a day nearly a year after its initial release, so that makes me happy. After nearly a year of sales, and a lot of perspective, I can honestly say that I think Dapple did well considering it was my first game.

Dapple Lite

In March I released a free version of Dapple that let players play 3 levels of the game and try it out. I believe that it helped sell a lot of copies of Dapple over the months, especially when the price of the game was over $1.99. At $1.99 and below, I question how much the lite version helps. I think at that price point a lot of purchases are impulse buys and having a free version available might actually take sales away from the full version. However, I don’t have enough data available to draw any real conclusions from this; it’s just a hypothesis.

360iDev

In March I gave a talk at the first 360iDev conference in San Jose. I gave a talk on the processes and lessons I learned in creating Dapple. I think the talk was well received. The conference was amazing and was one of the best conferences I have ever attended.

App Treasures

At 360iDev, myself and a few other devs started talking about ways for indie developers to get more noticed and for ways to cross-promote our games. We started looking at what publishers do, but we didn’t like the limitations that working with a publisher can place on you. We decided to form an independent games label called App Treasures. Since its formation, we have grown to include 8 top independent developers and 20 games.

WWDC

I was lucky enough to be able to attend WWDC this year. What an experience that was! I learned an incredible amount in the sessions and I met really amazing people at the parties. My wife and I then spent a week in San Francisco after the conference on vacation. I have to say, San Francisco is probably my favourite city I’ve been to in the U.S.

Mobile Developers and Designers of Toronto

Early in the year I decided that Toronto needed a meet-up for iPhone developers. I set a date and discovered that another local developer, James Eberhardt had had the same idea and called a meeting for the same night! We decided to roll the two meetings together into one bigger group that wasn’t iPhone focused, but rather mobile development focused. While I was in Toronto I really enjoyed being a part of that community.

Guelph

In September my wife and I moved from Toronto to Guelph (a small city about an hour West of Toronto). Since I work out of my home, that meant that the business moved too. I still try to remain in contact with the Toronto dev community, but I’ve been trying to get a south-western Ontario developer meet-up going. The problem is that there are a lot fewer of us outside of Toronto.

A Chapter

Earlier in the year I was approached by Apress and asked if I’d be willing to write a chapter for one of their new iPhone books. I said I would, and I wrote a chapter called “You Go Squish Now! Debugging on the iPhone” which appeared in their “Advanced iPhone Projects” book. It was fun to write the chapter, and now I can add “author” to my list of credentials.

Monkeys in Space

Finally, at the end of November I released my second game: Monkeys in Space: Escape to Banana Base Alpha. With my second game I tried to learn from a lot of my mistakes made around the Dapple launch and marketing strategy. I also tried to create a game that was much more accessible. I think I succeeded in creating a game that was much more easily played, but still had some depth to it. However, although I learned a lot on the marketing side of things, I still made one critical error: I accidentally released the game on American Thanksgiving. It was an honest mistake; it didn’t even occur to me that that’s what the date was. However, when I started sending out press releases, I started getting back “out of office” replies from review sites. Couple that with the fact that what seemed like 90% of the games on the App Store had a Black Friday sale, and the whole thing derailed my marketing plan.

However, what seemed at first like a failed launch had a turn-around. Good reviews started coming out for the game in the week following Thanksgiving. One of the big turning points was the Touch Arcade review of the game. Getting on the front page of Touch Arcade gave me a two day sales spike akin to being featured on the App Store! Then a week before Christmas, the game showed up in the Games -> What’s Hot lists on app stores around the world. The first week of being featured was great and helped boost the game’s rank in a lot of different countries. Because it wasn’t a front page feature, the boost wasn’t enough to get me into any Top Games or Top Paid Apps lists, but it was still great to see.

So I think it’s safe to say that 2009 ended on a high note for Streaming Colour Studios. 2009 was certainly an exciting year for my company, and for me personally. Running my own business has proven to be an extremely rewarding, and challenging, experience.

What’s coming up for 2010?

360iDev

I missed the second conference in Denver because I was moving, but I’ll be in San Jose in April for the 3rd 360iDev conference, dagnabit! I’ll be giving another talk, and this one might be a little crazy. It’s called “Improv Prototyping” and I’ll be attempting to code a game prototype on stage based on audience suggestions…in one hour. I will also, at the same time, talk about the processes I use in my own games for rapid prototyping. If you can make it to San Jose in April, it’s going to be an incredible conference. 360 Conferences runs an amazing show and their prices are ridiculously low given the quality and quantity of presenters. And if you book soon, the prices are lower than if you book later. So go book a ticket!

Monkeys in Space

I do have some more level updates planned for Monkeys in Space, so stay tuned for more news on that.

More Games

My book of game ideas is bursting at the seams. In 2010 I’m looking at putting out at least 2 more games, and hopefully more. I have a bunch of small game ideas I’d like to build, but I’ve also been thinking about a much bigger game concept that I’d like to get to at some point. We’ll see if 2010 is the right year for that or not. I’ll still be doing iPhone stuff, but I’ve been thinking about taking on another platform or two. We’ll have to see things go.

South-Western Ontario iPhone Dev Meet-Up

I would really like to get a dev meet-up going for Guelph, Kitchener/Waterloo, Cambridge, London going. If you’re a local developer and are interested in meeting up once every month or two, please send me an email and let me know: info@streamingcolour.com

It looks like 2010 is going to be another exciting year for me and Streaming Colour Studios. Here’s hoping it’s a great year for us all!

Owen

Earlier this week I thought I’d better do some trademark research to make sure the name I had chosen for the game didn’t conflict with any existing trademarks. When I did a search with the Canadian and American trademark offices, I discovered that there was a potential conflict an existing mobile game name in the US. The names weren’t an exact duplicate, but I think that if that company had wanted to, they might have been able to argue that my name could have been confused with theirs.

The net result of this is that I need to come up with a new name for the game. This bugs me, because I really liked the name I had for the game, and now I have to come up with something totally new.

I’m hoping that I’ll have a new name in the next few days and I can redo the title screen art with the new text in it. Until then, I’m afraid the game shall remain slightly shrouded in mystery.

If you want to run your own searches, you can search the US and Canadian trademark offices here:

• Canadian Trademark Search
• US Trademark Search

Owen

I’ve been thinking a lot about all the data I gather related to my business. Every morning when I get up, I check the following list of analytics data:

• Dapple sales stats from the previous day
• Dapple Lite download stats from the previous day
• Dapple and Dapple Lite world-wide rankings in the App Store
• Google Analytics for Streaming Colour and App Treasures
• LinkShare reports for click-throughs to the App Store from various places on the web
• Google AdWords campaign data
• YouTube channel view data
• Bit.ly account for click data on some important links

There is an incredible amount of data available to us as iPhone game developers and web site hosts to micromanage aspects of the business. The staggering thing is that all of this data is available on a daily basis. Some of it is even available on an hourly basis! What I’ve started wondering recently, however, is if checking this data every day is necessarily a good thing.

Take a look at what happened with the iTunes App Store last week when Apple rolled out iTunes 9 at their iPod event. The store was broken for a few days, in that games sub-categories disappeared. The issue was fixed in a few days in the US store, and this morning it looks like the Canadian store has been fixed. But developers, myself included, went insane! We were able to watch our sales plummet every day, and watch our rankings plummet by the hour.

The important thing to note is that, for myself, I had one bad day of sales as a result. After the 2nd day, my sales were basically at where they were before. I’m sure for some other developers who have larger daily sales, it had more of an impact. But it really got me thinking that maybe I worry about the short-term too much. Maybe we all do.

Don’t get me wrong. In an industry that moves as quickly as ours; where a game can go from the #200 ranked game to the #10 ranked game in a matter of hours, this kind of granularity definitely has its place. It’s important to follow your trends and pay attention to what works and what doesn’t.

However, I think it’s equally important to remember that not everything can be tracked at this level of granularity. For myself, even, in my first Numbers Post, I talked about the small spike in sales I received from the Kotaku review of Dapple. But what the data and the graphs don’t tell me how many people saw the review but didn’t buy the game right away. How many people saw the review, but didn’t buy the game until they read two other reviews of Dapple? When we look at the data in such a narrow window, we lose sight of the bigger picture.

After Dapple’s release, I spent the next several months promoting it, advertising it, coding updates for it, and watching all the data roll in. I tweaked what I was doing every day in response to the data. While this approach taught me an incredible amount about what seems to work and not work when promoting a game, I think there are also several big problems with this:

• It takes too much time – I’m a one-person studio. Every hour I spend on one thing means I’m not spending that hour somewhere else. While marketing and PR are an incredibly important part of launching a game (the most important, perhaps), spending that time wisely is also important. At the granularity I was looking at data and reacting to it, I think I wasted a lot of time. I will learn from that with my next game.
• You lose sight of the big picture – Early on, when I’d have the occasional day of 0 sales, it would suck the wind right out of my sales. It was like someone slapped me across the face. But what I’ve learned is that a day of 0 sales now and then doesn’t matter. If every day has 0 sales, that’s a different story. But the occasional bad day is going to happen. What I try to do now is look at bigger trends more often. I look at sales over a week or two and look at whether they’re trending generally up, down, or stable. This allows me to make smarted decisions about what to try next.
• You don’t have enough data - My university degree is actually a Bachelor of Mathematics, so you think this lesson would have set in sooner. I took a lot of stats classes, and they told us this a lot, but sometimes you have to remind yourself. There’s a lot of noise in data. This is especially true when your sample size is small. This relates to the previous point. If you’re selling between 3 and 10 copies per day of a game, it’s impossible to draw any kind of conclusions from daily data. There just isn’t enough of it there. However, if you have 10 sales one day, and 3,000 the next, that’s data you want to pay attention to. Looking at data over the longer term helps to eliminate noise and show more important trends that you can draw real conclusions from. If I change my app description text one day and my sales go from 2 to 4 the next day, I can’t conclude that my description change doubled my sales. However, if my sales went from 14 sales per week to 28 sales per week, now I can feel slightly more confident in saying that it helped.

So my point is really this: daily data is important. We shouldn’t discount the usefulness of this data. It has the ability to show us big changes due to immediate events (like being featured by Apple, for example). But, let’s not forget that data over the long term is also extremely important, especially when you’re looking at building a long-term business strategy. We can’t rely solely on the daily data to derive our conclusions. There’s just too much noise in that data most of the time. Plus, worrying and agonizing about your data every single day will just drive you nuts.

For my part, I will keep checking that data every day, because I do need to be aware of daily changes. But I’m not going to let that daily data run me and my business; I’m going to try to draw conclusions from data over the longer term. When I see big changes from one day to the next, that’s when I’ll dig in deeper to find out why. Hopefully this will allow me to concentrate on what’s really important: making and selling great games.

Owen

Yes, I admit it: it drives me crazy that people won’t pay $1.99 for my game because it’s too expensive, but I’m guilty of it myself! I’ll stare at a game on the App Store thinking “is this really worth my $2?”

So I started to wonder why…why does the App Store, or the iPhone, encourage us to think this way? I don’t think there’s a simple answer, but I started thinking about some of the reasons that might be contributing.

All the major game consoles have downloadable games now. Xbox 360 has XBLA, PS3 has the PSN, Wii has WiiWare. Even the handhelds have online stores now: PSP has the PSN, and the new DSi has DSiWare. The iPhone is clearly not the only game platform that has an online store for purchasing games. However, its games are the cheapest.

According to 148apps.biz, the average cost of a game on the App Store is $1.39. The cheapest you can sell a game on XBLA is for about $5 USD and most games are priced at $10 and above.

As a developer I think about these kinds of things a lot, and I’ve started formulating some theories about why people aren’t will to pay more for iPhone games. Disclaimer: I am not a psychologist, I don’t have a psychology degree, and these hypotheses are not based on studies, they’re just my theories about why things are the way they are.

1) The Upper Limit

I’m sure that Sega is getting sick of people blaming them for setting the upper limit to game prices on the App Store, but the fact is that they had the title with the greatest brand recognition out at iPhone launch. When they set the price for Super Monkey Ball to $9.99 in the US, that set the standard and somehow became the upper limit for games pricing.

2) Virtual Insanity

I think one of the big problems in getting people to pay more for an iPhone game is one of tangibility. When you purchase something on the App Store, nothing physical ever changes hands. You click on a virtual button; your credit card (or gift card) information is stored on the system, so you don’t even have to hand it to someone; something is downloaded to your computer/iPhone; you can play it right away.

While this is very exciting for a developer, as it means no manufacturing costs, I believe that it devalues the game in the consumer’s mind. They didn’t have to hand money over to someone, and they were never handed a bag with their purchase in it. I think that in the consumer’s mind, because they didn’t buy something they can feel, it has minimal value to them.

I know that this isn’t always the case, that XBLA games are often able to charge $15 for a game. However, I just bought Battlefield 1943 from EA on XBLA for $15. The game is just as good as a Battlefield game you’d pay $60 for to get it on disk. So why can’t EA charge more for it? Is it just because it’s not tangible?

3) Size Does Matter

As humans, we have a built-in instinct that bigger is better. Most people want a bigger house, more land, louder stereo, bigger lawn mowers, faster, larger cars, bigger TVs. For some reason it seems to be ingrained in our brains bigger things are more valuable.

I suspect it has something to do with our understanding of how things are traditionally made. If I build a big house, the consumer understands that it took more work, that it used more materials, and that it probably required more people to construct it. However, this all breaks down with digital media. A game takes just as much work to build for the iPhone as it does to build the same game for the PC. However, the game is played on a much smaller device when played on the iPhone.

I believe that because the games are played on the tiny iPhone, it reduces the perceived value to the customer. Why else am I willing to spend $15 on a game that I play on my TV that I wouldn’t pay $5 for on the iPhone?

4) It’s How You Use It

As much as Apple is a fan of describing the iPhone as a gaming device, it is still primarily a phone and a media player. I’d be curious to know how many people list apps at the primary reason they buy an iPhone or iPod touch. I’d guess that it’s very low. I’d wager that people are looking for a phone or media player and then might think of apps as a secondary benefit.

Because the device’s primary functions are those of the person on-the-go, I think the games are thought of as momentary diversions for the player. It’s something to do in line waiting for a coffee, or something to play on the subway. I think it’s rare that someone would sit down with the expressed purpose of playing iPhone games. That’s what people turn to their other game consoles for.

5) Developer Perception

I think a lot of it comes down to trust. The reason I’m willing to spend $10-$15 on an XBLA game is that I know that the developer had to jump through a lot of hoops to get their game published on XBLA. Developers go through a much more rigorous and stringent approval process to release a game. That approval process means that games, on average, are required to be of higher quality than on the iPhone. Only companies who are really serious about making a game can afford to publish a game through the system.

I’m not sure that it’s the best way to do things, but I think it’s clear that having almost no barrier to entry isn’t helping anyone either. One of the reasons I’m so hesitant to lay down $1.99 on a game I know nothing about is that it could be absolute garbage. That’s why I spend more time reading reviews and forums for $0.99 iPhone games than I do for a $60 console game.

This problem isn’t limited to the iPhone; the same kind of thing is being seen with the Xbox 360’s Xbox Community Games system. XBCG games doesn’t go through the same approval process as XBLA games do. When you remove the quality bar from games published on your system, you lose the trust of the consumer community.

I’m not saying that all games on the iPhone are garbage, because that’s clearly not the case. However, there are a lot of sub-par games available for the device. Once people have been bitten downloading a few duds, they’re going to be hesitant about all their future purchases.

6) The App Store

Finally, let’s not finish talking about this without talking about the App Store itself. For all that is wonderful about the App Store, it does do things that drive the price of the apps down. This has been talked about in a lot of other places, so I won’t go into a lot of detail.

One of things most talked about by developers is that the rankings are all determined by number of units sold, not revenue. The result of this kind of ranking system is that cheaper games end up higher in the rankings. If I sell a game for $10 and make one sale, I’ve made just as much revenue as someone selling their $1 game ten times. However, that $1 game is going to rank significantly higher than the $10 game because it’s purchased more frequently.

The problem this creates is that developers know that they need to drop their price to $0.99 at some point if they have any hope of getting into a top 100 list. While this is great for the consumer in the short-term (Hell, I bought Peggle when it went on sale for $0.99 even though I already bought it for both PC and XBLA), it will only hurt them in the long-term. If developers can’t afford to sell a game at $10, they won’t make a game with the production values that would require them to sell it at $10. You’ll see a trend towards simpler games with less time invested by the developers, as investing time and money becomes too risky.

Conclusion

As I said, these are just my thoughts and hypotheses about why prices on the App Store are what they are. I don’t pretend to know how to fix any of the problems, or know what strategy is best for dealing with the current situation. However, I do think that by considering these things, it can only help me to improve at making games for the iPhone platform. What I’m try to do is look at the App Store as a whole in order to make intelligent decisions about what kinds of games to build in the future.

Owen

It has been an incredibly exciting first year. I managed to get my first game out the door and some people bought it. That alone makes it some kind of success. I learned an amazing amount about what to do and what not to do. I even learned a few things about marketing.

Working for myself has been scary and frustrating at times, but it has also been extremely rewarding. There is the occasional day when I miss having someone tell me what I’m supposed to be doing, but most of the time I can’t imagine going back to working for someone else. I love this job.

So, thank you to everyone who bought a copy of Dapple and helped to support my burgeoning enterprise. I have a lot of exciting ideas for what I hope to accomplish in the coming year. I can’t wait to see what the next 12 months bring!

Owen

P.S. Related to this, I meant to post this some time ago and it slipped through. Gavin Bowman and Craig Sharpe (creators of Sneezies for iPhone) have started their own company: Retro Dreamer. If you have a minute, go check out their site and wish them some luck setting out on their own.