Antair Games An independent game developer blog

Wow, I think this was the busiest week on the blog since it started. If you’re new here, every week since we started the blog I’ve post a quick-fire round up of what we’ve been up to. It hardly feels necessary this week, since I’ve posted so often, but when we have our heads down in full on development mode it’s often the only new post each week. It wouldn’t feel like the weekend if I didn’t post it, so here goes.

We had 2 new excellent video reviews for Sneezies, one from AppVee, and one from AppSelection. We also submitted a Sneezies update to the App Store queue.

We started a cooking contest, The Great Indie Bake Off… I didn’t really see that coming myself, last weekend I was toying with the idea of baking a Sneezies cake, now a few days later I’m trying to encourage other indies to wear aprons and post pictures of tasty treats. Funny how things happen.

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Fresh call for cake submissions: The weekend is coming up, you know you want to bake a cake and enter the contest. Go on… it’ll be fun and delicious. We have 6 entries already and some great prizes.

The contest will stay open until some time in January, if it takes a drunken afternoon or a boring party over the holidays for you to decide to try to scrawl your icon on a cupcake or something, then I’m all for it. I’ll keep posting updates as I get them, and once the holidays are all over and the new year is up and running we’ll run a poll to pick the winner.

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I’ve been looking at mockups for our next project (and probably the one after that) all week, and I’m still very happy, that’s a good sign. I’m still not back firing on all cylinders in coding terms, though.

Since I’ve managed to figure out how to welcome Twitter into my life and started making some good contacts, I decided to see if I could figure out Facebook. I don’t know though, I signed in, I updated my profile, joined a few game development groups, but I still don’t think I get how I should be using it. We’ll see.

I usually have a few cool links to share from around the web, but I’m drawing a blank this week. I’ll just fall back on the obvious and include the Macworld/Steve Jobs thing, and this Daring Fireball post on the subject. Not because I was in any danger of actually going to Macworld, just because I’ve always been a sucker for Dylan lyrics in post titles.

Sneezies

An update for Sneezies is in the App Store queue, along with apparently every other iPhone App and a million new ones at the moment. Hopefully we’ll see it this side of Christmas, but we can’t be sure.

Cakes

I’m doing everything I can to spread the word about the cake contest, and we’ve been getting some good links. If there’s anything you’re willing to do to help, everyone participating will benefit. There’s a ShareThis button on the contest page, pass it on if you know someone who might be willing to bake something, or even just add a Digg.

The Great Indie Bake Off

A cake (or possibly Bento) from Tim Haines, creator of BurnBall, is already inbound, I’ll be updating the page with that one as soon as I get it.

Update: Tim’s Bento has been added, and it rocks.

Marketing

Another creative idea for an iPhone site today. The iPhone App Index allows developers to log into the site and post their own pages. It may be doomed to be as spam prone as anything that’s ever existed ever in the history of the intertubes, but it’s a noble effort. The idea of small developers collaborating, contributing, and cooperating has always fascinated me.

I’m convinced that small groups/networks of Indie developers have a lot more power than they realize or try to make use of. With their shared Google juice and combined readership… all those resources well directed could undoubtedly create a huge amount of success. There’s a lot of practical problems with that though, one being that any success almost certainly wouldn’t be spread evenly around the group, and we all want to do well. That can make participation tough to sell- after all, time is probably the second most scarce resource for most indies, after money (my new definition of an indie who’s made it is someone who insists that it’s the other way around). You end up with a Catch 22 situation, you have to get enough participation going to breed some success, otherwise most won’t see the value in participation… but then if you get a few big names or a bit of success, everyone wants to be a part of it… but by then the late adopters are just chasing a few crumbs, and they go away feeling like the participation wasn’t worth the effort. Or something like that. Anyway, basically there’s power in the group, but someone has to figure out how to tap into it and direct it, and it’s probably not possible to predict who the light will shine on.

So yeah, iPhone App Index, nice idea, hopefully not doomed to epic spam fail. And, imagine if everyone who posts on there also posted a to link back from their own blog, dugg the site, twittered about it to their friends. Then you start to get some idea of the power the network could have.

By the way, how many more times do we have to read that article about App Store millionaires dressed up and recut in different ways, do we really need another round of gold rush Apps? Surely by now everyone has heard all about the 2 or 3 stock success stories propping up every article.

I’ve been talking a little with Evan over at Veiled Games about the challenges of marketing iPhone games as a small indie developer. He went over the same topic in his post, Time to get Creative, earlier today.

He cites the problems with the cost effectiveness of paid advertising at the 99c price point, it really doesn’t seem to be an option. Reviews do seem to help, but it’s not enough in it’s own right.

So Evan has something in mind called Soap, which will seek to give a little attention to good developers who are genuinely trying to make quality products for the iPhone. Developers who are passionate about their products and are investing their time and hearts into what they are doing, rather than churning out a lot of cheap, quick, and soulless products in the hope of catching a break on some gold rush money. It sounds like a noble cause, and I’m looking forward to seeing it come to fruition.

We’ve discussed the parallels between Soap and our Great Indie Bake Off contest. They’re both low cost, low risk ideas that will hopefully help draw some attention to very similar groups of developers. If you’re excited enough about your game to spend an afternoon making a cake, there’s a fair chance you care about it :). In both cases, we don’t stand to lose a great deal if we try but can’t get them off the ground… maybe a little face in the community for failing to get enough attention or participation? Or maybe the next time we personally ask someone to participate in a venture they’ll hesitate a little? It’s possible, but it’s still a small price to pay for trying something bold. We also stand to lose some time, but the hours we’ll each put into these ideas are nothing compared to the months we spend on the games we love - any little extra effort to promote them, and to help others promote theirs, is time well spent. And in our case, like I’ve said many times, whatever happens we’ll have cake.

Anyway, this brings me onto the second part of Evan’s post. The market for web sites in the iPhone space is almost as overpopulated as the App Store. Every day it seems there’s a new review site, or a new news site. It’s jam packed. The guys launching AppBeacon, a new site which they’re calling an “app discovery engine”, are well aware of this fact, and have decided to try a little low cost, low risk marketing of their own - offering placement of apps on their site in return for help spreading the word (disclosure: even though all the ad slots are already taken, Justin found a slot somewhere to squeeze in Sneezies). If the site works as well as described, they probably didn’t need to do this, as it sounds like the kind of thing that could catch on. AppBeacon works a bit like the App Store, with app ratings and comments from users, and a developers notes section, but adds social bookmarking style vote up and down options. On top of that, there’s a system, which sounds almost like “mark as read” in email, so you can “sink” inexplicably popular apps from your personal lists, and never be bothered by them again. It sounds good if it works, and good on them for trying some different marketing and giving some smaller developers a chance to grab some free advertising.

We’ve added two new cakes to the Bake off since my first post yesterday, including a special effort from Dave Frampton for his Chopper game:-

The Great Indie Bake Off

The prize pool for the contest is really bulging too. We have iPhone games from Veiled Games, Tim Haines, and ourselves, the cool looking iPhone stand from Chillingo, and a great selection of apps from Polar Bear Farm.

I also heard from at least a couple of developers who have their baking planned for the weekend.

We’ve had a few links to the contest too, including one from 4colorrebellion, my all-time favorite Nintendo themed games site.

Sneezies was reviewed by AppVee, and earned 4 stars out of 5. Video review embedded below:-

Relaxing and adorable :). Color me happy.

Okay, I’ve seen a few indie cakes, so I’m going to take a gamble and make an open call for a Great Indie Bake Off extravaganza.

The Great Indie Bake Off

I’ll maintain the page, I’ll just need more cakes. We’ll link to, and include a picture of every entry, so get your aprons ready and see what you can rustle up.

All entries are welcome, the first 3 are all iPhone inspired, but it’s not restricted to iPhone games/apps, I don’t even mind if you base it on someone else’s game/app.

Any help getting the word out would be very helpful, if you want to post or tweet a link, digg (or whatever the kids are using these days) the page, anything, it’s all appreciated.

And if no-one else enters, well, at least we’ll all have cake.

Update: Chillingo have added an AirCurve iPhone stand to the Bake Off prizes.

Yes, this Sneezie is very delicious :).

You can blame Veiled Games, a cold damp afternoon, and my long standing fascination with Kotaku’s game cakes for this… but anything so tasty and fun just has to be done.

By the way, I had huge admiration for the makers of those elaborate video game cakes before, but I’m completely in awe of the things they achieve after trying myself.

Sneezies is on sale in the App Store for 99c, cake not included.

Tobias at AppSelection.com posted a great video review of Sneezies. (Embedded below, feedsters).

iPhone Game: Sneezies. Digg?

He liked it a lot. Nice one, Tobias. Developer friends, if you’re looking for another friendly recipient for your review requests, check out AppSelection on the web and via Twitter.

After a lot of back and forth, I think we’ve settled on the next game after Sneezies… I’m looking forward to having some fun with prototyping again. We did have a few other things on the go and in mind to come next, but we cleaned house a little after Sneezies came out. Now we only have various flavors of awesome left on our plates.

I went on a Twitter following binge this week, after finding a whole new world of iPhone and Mac developers on there. Also tried out @MrTweet, to expand my horizons a little. That was kind of fun, but it would be easy to lose a lot of time or completely over-subscribe if not used carefully. A nice side bonus was that it showed me there were people I recognized following me who I’d forgot to follow back (sorry), not sure how that happened.

I need to find my coding mojo over the weekend, I know I left it around here somewhere, and get next week off to a better start.

— ELSEWHERE —

I mentioned the other week about Andy Brice’s charity T-shirts for programmers drive. Well, he’s teamed up with Patrick McKenzie to push it a little further with a dedicated site: Programmer T-Shirts.

Last year Web Designer Wall did a great roundup of the best CSS design, and they’ve done another one for the best CSS of 2008, a great way to see the years design trends, what’s hot etc.

Another great design tour video from Wolfire: Knytt Stories Design Tour.

I know Mario theme renditions are all over the place and a probably getting a bit old hat, but I love this one:-

The app store pricing issue is still a hot blog topic. This one, Financial Realities of the App Store, is a great read. Veiled Games just weighed in too, (the link includes the first video of their new game, Up There, and a bunch of links to more reading on the subject). We went through all the same pricing considerations with Sneezies in the run up to launch, it’s tough. Hopefully the landscape will be a bit clearer when our next game is done.

Another Sneezies gameplay video, this one courtesy of SlideToPlay.

Apparently it’s “despicably cute” :).