Antair Games An independent game developer blog

Yep, this is the final update here on the Antair Games blog.

You may or may not know that Craig and I have been operating as Antair Games as a self sufficient sub-division of Antair. Antair’s main line of business is making business software for BlackBerrys. The relationship was very convenient for us, and it has been in place for a couple of years, through various ventures and projects.

Now all that is changing.

Craig and I will now be operating under a new independent banner, with no ties to Antair. Sneezies becomes a product of the new team, as do the other in-development projects we’ve been working on. Previous shared projects, like our BlackBerry and PC/Mac games, have been divided equitably, and for now we’ve discontinued everything that’s coming with us. Sneezies will continue to be published by Chillingo, and can therefore remain available on the App Store without interruption.

Before going any further, I want to thank Andrey and everyone at Antair past and present for their help, advice and friendship, and for their assistance in making this switchover as smooth and painless as it could possibly be.

So, without further delay, let me introduce Retro Dreamer.

It’s the same team, Craig Sharpe and myself, Gavin Bowman. We have the same plans, we’re working on the same products in the same way. There’s a difference psychologically and emotionally for us, because now it really will be all down to us, with everything of our own making, and we’re very excited about it.

The new blog should feel very familiar, since I’ll still be writing it:-

Retro Dreamer Blog

I hope you’ll take a couple of minutes to update your links and subscriptions, it’d be great to see you on the new blog. If you’ve got email addresses on record for us, you can update them to either gavin or craig at retrodreamer.com. Andrey’s kindly offered to forward our old addresses for now, so you shouldn’t have any trouble reaching us.

We’ll be submitting an update to Sneezies very soon with the new Retro Dreamer branding.

I think that’s all that needs to be said, our story will continue to unfold in our new home. If you don’t follow us over to the new blog, thanks for reading this one.

All the best…

Very quiet week here, almost skipped the update altogether.

It was WWDC this week, and I didn’t go. I just buried my nose in some work and it flew by. Some exciting announcements, lots of nice new models and software coming. I love the fact that I’ll get to use Snow Leopard for $29, that’s an amazing deal.

The only stand out news for us this week is that we submitted a new update to Sneezies, hopefully that will hit by the end of next week. I’ll post more details then.

I’m expecting to have a lot to read next week when everyone gets back from WWDC.

The only guys I know crazy enough to announce their own thing this week are our friends at Appy, who released Face Fighter on WWDC Keynote day. That gets them an automatic link from me.

Our Sneezies update hit the App Store sometime during last weekend. And, in common with the experiences of other developers, it was almost off the new releases pages by the time they refreshed. It was interesting for us, it’s been a while since our last update, and that was back in the days when you used to get a nice sales bump on release day. Now you just seem to lose your rating.

Since submitting v1.3, we’ve been hard at work on the biggest update (by far) we’ve done since we released the game. Hopefully it’ll hit the App Store queue next week.

We’ve been making good progress on other things this week too, and our next game is shaping up very nicely. Good times!

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It looks like the mainstream press have accepted the fact that the iPhone gold rush isn’t all gold, and I enjoyed this article from the NYTimes.com. Worth highlighting this data point from ngmoco on app releases after the first 25,000: “Only 40 of 5,000 made it into the top 100,”. Less than 1 percent, and it probably gets worse if you look at the 10K apps from 30-40,000.

So onto some positives! Great sales stats released by NimbleBit this week. They show an App developer in a very healthy position on the upper east side of the window between rags and riches. These guys are where Craig and I (and no doubt most of the other indie teams out there) would love to be. We’re grateful for the openness, it’s very encouraging.

I also need to mention another great Indie collaboration effort that just kicked off yesterday: App Treasures. Read all about it on Owen’s blog (or Noel’s blog). We’ve tried a few things in the past to tap into the indie strength in numbers, and I’m still a firm believer that a gang of small teams can do great things by combining their efforts. Good luck to all involved. I’ve been playing a lot of one of the games on the label, Imangi, for Clan Wars this week.

I’ve only got time for a quick update this week.

The Sneezies update is still in the approval queue for the App Store. It was submitted last Friday, so it’ll probably hit sometime over the weekend.

The majority of the work happening on our next game is aesthetic now, we have most of the core gameplay in place, we’re tweaking the look and feel of various things and Craig is starting to think about some final artwork. It’s starting to get exciting.

We have a lot of unrelated things to do in the coming weeks, but hopefully it won’t derail our productivity too much.

Another week of progress on our next game. It seems to be shaping up well now.

Sneezies is still on sale for 99c for now, and the update is on it’s way.

The last of my first batch of App Store Roundtable posts on TheAppleBlog went live this week, on Analytics. That’s the final post from the original feedback I got from developers, and I’m reasonably happy with the way they all turned out. I could roll on and on about how one post was split into 5 and how sometimes there maybe wasn’t enough discussion or balance for some of the individual posts to stand on their own merit… but I beat myself up enough about this kind of stuff as it is :). On the whole, it went well, and the primary mission to get developers a slot to discuss the App Store on a high traffic blog like TheAppleBlog was accomplished. I’ll be sending out a new request for comments next week (if you want to get the jump on everyone else, there are open discussion items in the Group for the next topics).

Nothing else to add from our end this week. Just work work work.

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148apps launched a cool new site this week: 148apps.biz looks like becoming a great resource for developers… or anyone else interested in the business side of the iPhone market.

You know I love this kind of thing, it makes me wish we had a word game: Wonderful Word Games Week. Always great to see indie developers co-operating and trying to use our strength in numbers to benefit the wider community.

A couple of interesting articles I read on the App Store market: 6 months of iPhone App Sales Stats, and iPhone Applications are getting cheaper.

I also enjoyed reading For the sake of all that is good, ignore the App Store gold rush. I like the title, and I always enjoy a good bleak rant.

Busy week for Craig and I. We decided to do a little update to Sneezies, so we’re just testing that now, should go for submission next week. We also put Sneezies on sale for 99c. We’ll persist with that for a few more days, but I don’t really think it’s helping sales significantly. It created a nice little bump in some of the family charts on the first day or so, but it seems to be settling back to where it was in most of the larger markets.

Aside from that, we spent most of our time working on our next game. Craig’s feeling his way into the artwork, and I’ve got our development build playing almost exactly the way we want it. We’ve still got a lot to do… but we like what we see. The biggest obstacle to getting it finished at the moment is overly generous playtesting sessions :).

Another App Store Roundtable post went live on TheAppleBlog this week, this time on After Sales Support. I thought this was the best one so far, but it was the only one that didn’t generate any comments. I’m not sure what to make of that. There’s one more to run from the first batch of developer feedback.

This is my 100th post here, unless you count the Indie Bake Off page, how about that!

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Noel Llopis is doing some interesting experiments to figure out the memory system on the iPhone, well worth checking out.

The guys at Photon Storm posted a further exploration of their recent game Kyobi’s sales and revenue. Another great read, it’s really fascinating to get such an in depth look at a different sector of the indie games market (flash game licensing), and see how it compares to our own (they also made an iPhone version).

Somehow I ended up on the GotGame business news page. I bookmarked it, it looks like they have some interesting stuff.

And finally, David Frampton released a new version of MajicRank, a great tool for checking your App ranking in the international App Stores.

Making some good progress this week, despite the holiday here. Craig’s just got back from vacation, so we should start to accelerate pretty fast on a couple of projects.

Two new installments of the App Store Roundtable hit TheAppleBlog this week, and we picked up a few new developers who want to participate. There are still two parts to come from the initial round of feedback I got from developers.

Just got word today that there will be another 360iDev conference in September, in Denver this time. I’m excited, I watched all the tweets and blog posts from the last one with jealous eyes, and I’m vaguely confident that I’ll be able to make it this time. We’re (my wife and I) planning on moving over to the US, which will probably involve a bit of back and forth, but with any luck I’ll be on the right side of the pond to make a little conference trip affordable. If everything goes to plan, the move will also put me much closer to Craig, which should do wonders for our productivity.

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My favorite post this week came from Arnold Kim of Touch Arcade: The State and Growth of the iPhone Gaming Market… it makes for kind of bleak reading, but appropriately so. There’s some crazy release voodoo going on in the App Store right now, the big publishers are really pounding it with big name titles, it’s hard to imagine how they’ll all make a decent return on their games, let alone leave anything the dozens of little indie games and apps dropping each day. The guys at Nimblebit put together a nice little manifesto for indies in response to the post.

Away from the iPhone, the Grey Alien Games blog led me to some good posts from Jeff Vogel at Spiderweb software. Sales stats, we all love sales stats: Here’s how many games I sell Part 1 & Part 2.

Hey hey, it’s another friday, so another weekly update.

My first post on TheAppleBlog went live this week. That was exciting, I’ve been trying to get this App Store Roundtable idea going for quite a while, so it was nice to finally see it up there on such a high traffic site. I hope it helps the featured developers a little, and I hope the community will generate some interesting reading for future posts.

I’m playing ostrich a little at the moment and burying my head in xcode, but there are some big changes happening here. Full details will follow when everything is clear.

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Just because I don’t have anything to say, doesn’t mean it wasn’t an awesome week for great web links!

If you’re reading here, you probably subscribe to Owen’s blog by now, but just in case, his Numbers Post: Part 2 is well worth reading.

Photon Storm posted a fascinating piece about their sales figures for an iPhone game and it’s flash counterpart. Lots of good info, lessons, tidbits.

The guys at introversion posted an excellent, but rather sad, 2008 postmortem. They developed Darwinia and Multiwinia, and they talk candidly about their mistakes, finances, and prospects for the future. Not to be missed.

Finally, the obvious one, the Firemint Flight Control stats post. You’ve probably seen it, but I can’t leave it out, it’s not every day you get detailed sales statistics for the #1 paid product in the App Store.

It finally happened. The iPhone developer community project I’ve been trying to put together for the last couple of months is alive!

App Store Roundtable - The Gold Rush

It’s an App Store Roundtable. A regular column on TheAppleBlog to share the views of developers like us and you guys on a selected topic. It’s backed by a mailing list and a discussion group, and it only works because so many devs stepped up and offered to help when I made a vague appeal here and on twitter.

I wrote a rather epic first post/introduction, which gave a sample of some of the topics we might like to talk about based on the initial feedback. It was a bit too epic though, and it’s been split into 5 different posts - the first one is live now, the rest will follow in the coming days.

It’s probably for the best that it’s split, this way the featured developers get more exposure, and the readers don’t get bored. Everybody wins.

And if you missed the earlier appeal and want in, just drop me a DM on twitter or an email (gavin at antair.com).

And apologies to everyone who provided feedback already that didn’t made it into any of the first posts. There was a lot to choose from, you’re all too helpful and too interesting.

I don’t have much to say this week. I’m dealing with some things I’d rather not be dealing with, but it’ll all work out for the best in the end. Excuse me if my tweeting and writing is a little sparse.

On a brighter note, work is progressing as normal on our next iPhone games, and the Calling iPhone Developers project should get rolling very soon. It’s probably time to reveal a little more info: it will take place on theAppleBlog, I’m now a contributor over there.

I changed my twitter id this week (to gavinbowman), I renamed the old account, so nothing changes if you were already following me.

I heard through the grapevine that AppTees is now ready for the big time, and will be accepting applications from new developers any time now. Exciting stuff, get your names down.

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A little further reading from around the web… Eli Hodapp’s Great Expectations, on the price vs expectation of iPhone apps. Veiled Games’ Settling for Poverty, which I guess covers similar ground, and extends it to talk about strategies from the developer’s perspective. And Rethinking the art of making games, from Gamasutra, a discussion with some successful iPhone developers on the different challenges we face on the iPhone and how to address them.

@timhaines just passed on some info about the latest App Store success story, Stickwars. It’s great to see that an unknown indie title can still make it to the top, even if it does provide more fuel for gold rush articles ;). Check out the developer’s blog.