Antair Games An independent game developer blog

Great week.

I’ve been writing code almost all the time, so very little tweeting or writing, but it’s all good. Everything we have in development is coming along nicely, but we’re still a way off having anything near launch.

It gives me plenty to be happy about but not a lot to talk about.

As promised last week, I sent out the invitations for the iPhone Developer community group. The response has been great, and I really appreciate it. Around a third of the developers already signed up to the Google group, and I should be able to announce everything and move it forward soon enough. I used a free MailChimp account to get the bulk emails sent out, I was very impressed - a great experience. Definitely recommended if you need to email up to 100 people at once.

Also worth adding this week, Easter came and went, and there wasn’t a peep of a promotion in the App Store. A little surprising, given that there had been special categories for most holidays or occasions. We weren’t counting on it, or on our game being included if it happened, but it did put a bit of a dampener on the Easter edition of Sneezies. Although it did okay for a few weeks there, for the most part I think it just distracted sales away from Sneezies, rather than creating any extra awareness or market. As cute and awesome as they are, it probably wasn’t worthwhile having Craig do a full new set of Sneezies graphics for the Easter version, we put a lot into it, and that raised the break even bar.

I’m happy with what we released, it’s got a nice feel and the new graphics are cute, but if anyone suggests a special holiday version of one of our games next year, I’ll probably vote against it. 

Anyway I can’t complain overall, now that that’s all over with I feel more energized and focused on new game development.

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It might be worth keeping an eye on this blog, the developers are trying to make an iPhone game in 30 days.

Owen Goss posted an explanation of his 6 months developing Dapple. 

AppVee posted a round-up of published sales figures, so you can see the wild variation in the iPhone market. It won’t make it any easier to evaluate the marketplace or predict your fate, but it’s an interesting read all the same. And Veiled Games returned to their blog to share some more sales figures. The Up There graph is not to be missed, it’s probably the starkest and most obvious indication of how important iTunes featuring can be to the success of an iPhone game that you’ll find anywhere. See if you can guess which part of the graph is from when they had a much sought after slot on the “New and Noteworthy” list. We still cross all our fingers and toes every week in the hope that Sneezies will get a slot in one of those lists, and one look at the Up There chart will leave you in no doubt why…

See you next week :).

For all intents and purposes, I’m off enjoying the Easter holiday weekend. Happy Easter to everyone!

If you’re looking for an Easter game for your iPhone, check out Sneezies Easter Edition ;). There’s also a bunch of games on sale for the weekend, including all of the Imangi games, check out this list at The AppERA.

I had a pretty good week this week, just gradually getting on with our next game.

I also got some good news and was finally able to provide a little update on the Calling iPhone Developers thing. I have the group all set up, I’ll be sending out emails to everyone involved tomorrow or Tuesday.

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A few quickfire links:-

Sailing the App Store on the ngmoco blog.
A nicely balanced and interesting article about iPhone development from the NY Times.
Pangea software’s behind the scenes video about iPhone game development.

David Frampton released an essential tool for iPhone developers (and for anyone interested in individual iPhone Game/App sales). MajicRank downloads and displays the Top 100 ranking for an application, similar to the scripts, but wrapped up in a nice Mac application.

As expected, Appy Entertainment and Snappy Touch both had their first big releases this week. Appy launched Appy Newz, and Snappy Touch launched Flower Garden. They’re both on the App Store now for a couple of bucks, and I’d love to see those guys rising up the charts, so go check them out.

A few weeks ago I posted an appeal here for developers willing to share some opinions for a little community feature I was working on. A lot of time has gone by, and you haven’t heard anything, so I hope you didn’t think I’d forgotten all about it.

It took a little while to collect and compile all the responses while I was on holiday, and I’ve been waiting for confirmation that it would go forward. Over the last day or so I’ve had some very good feedback on the initial proof of concept, it’s all looking very positive.

Thanks to everyone who expressed an interest or who provided some feedback already, it’s much appreciated, I couldn’t do this at all without your help. Over the next few days I’m going to set up a private Google Group (totally optional, but a few guys expressed an interest in some form of mailing list/discussion forum) and send out another email with more information to everyone who responded.

I know for sure that a percentage of the first info emails I sent out ended up in Gmail spam folders, so unless you opted out, I’ll include you in the next email just in case you were interested but didn’t see the message. I did reply to everyone who got in touch with me, I’m sorry that some of them didn’t get through.

Anyway, in summary, it’s looking good, stay tuned for more news. And it’s not a closed group, so if you’re an iPhone developer selling software in the App Store who might like to participate in future, drop me a note using gavin at antair.com (or twitter, but make sure you include an email address for me to contact you).

I’m back home in the UK.

We were supposed to get back yesterday, but got delayed by a day because of flight connection timing. It worked out well in most ways, it was nice to have that extra day with everyone in LA, and the whole travel experience felt a lot more relaxed the second time through.

I’m hoping I’ll be sharp enough to get some useful work started tomorrow. I’ve been itching to get back down to it for the last week or so, but I also have a big stack of mail to go through, an empty fridge to fill, and the inevitable jet lag to fend off.

Craig’s gone on holiday now, unfortunately, but we moved everything along far enough for the next game while I was in LA. I have a lot to do to realize it.

In Sneezies news, there was a review this week on Smoking Apples (part of a review of the 5 games in 1 indie bundle).

Aside from that, I’m way too far behind on everything to talk about anything else. (Ohh… I do know that two of our good buddy iPhone devs have imminent launches. Noel’s Flower Garden and Appy’s secret project should hit the store soon, links in next week’s update if I have them).

Very quick update this week. Still in LA, not getting bucket loads of work done.

I’ve had some great sessions with Craig on the next game, we’ve got a working central mechanic now that is already fun to play, and have fleshed out a lot of the design issues. If it’s fun now without a lot of the game elements and mechanics, without graphics, sound, or scoring, it should shape up well over the coming months.

This week we met @superbad24 from The APPera for lunch. Great guy.

I didn’t get to go to GDC this week, so I’m still smarting a little about that. Now I’m going to be eyeing sales figures and WWDC tickets for a couple of months (or at least until they sell out and it’s out of my hands :)).

Sneezies got a couple of new reviews, nice videos too. A very thorough video from Unique Apps, part of a series covering all the games in the 5 Finger Games bundle. Also a video & text review from App Smile. We also made it into Pocketgamer’s 10 games for Mother’s Day feature (it was Mother’s Day in the UK). Also, a mention on the Smoking Apple’s podcast.

Also for Sneezies, this tweet totally made our day. I used to scribble games stuff on my school work and pencil cases, and Craig used to draw Street Fighter characters for his friends in school, so the thought of someone basing their homework on our game is just mind-blowingly cute and awesome.

I think that’s all the news I have for this week. I’m way way behind on my RSS reader and totally out of the Twitter loop, so I don’t have much else to share. I did read this one cool article though: Is Cheaper Really Better? — yeah, you guessed it, it’s about the App Store.

Oh, and I was very happy to see that Mike’s awesome game Smiles was featured in the IGF section on the App Store, and that Owen’s Dapple made it into the What’s Hot rotation somewhere in the world. Featuring seems totally crucial to success on the iPhone, and there’s so much competition for so few slots, so it’s always nice to see some indies still making the cut. We still have everything crossed that Sneezies will get a slot in some list somewhere at some point.

This week I’m in LA, primarily on holiday, but also taking advantage of the fact that Craig lives here to get down to work on our next game. It’s been great, we usually work alone thousands of miles apart, but we made a more progress in a couple of sessions together than in recent weeks combined.

The big event for us this week was the release of Sneezies Easter Edition to the App Store. It’s a nice seasonally themed version, with cute bunny Sneezies, at a special price of just 99c. We hope you’ll enjoy it, we had fun putting it together.

We’re going to knuckle down and be full time developers again now, with our attention firmly fixed on something completely new. We are hoping to have a nice Sneezies update in a month or two though, to remind everyone we’re still alive before we release our next game. And don’t worry, our little furry friends might not feature in our next game, but you haven’t seen the last of them, we have big plans for them yet.

There’s definitely a big blog post in me on the whole Sneezies journey from launch to here, it’s been quite a ride, I just need to sit down and let it all pour out sometime.

I was hoping I’d make it up to GDC next week, there are so many people going who I was hoping to meet up with, but it’s looking unlikely right now. Hopefully I’ll be able to find a conference budget from somewhere in time for the next 360iDev though :).

Craig and I are going to meet The APPera for lunch today, that should be a lot of fun.

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Some great stuff from around the web this week. Obviously the iPhone SDK 3.0 launched, but I’m not going to talk about that too much. I haven’t downloaded it yet, and it’s been well covered. I’m excited about the ability to charge for extra content, the P2P connections definitely make multiplayer more appealing, and it’s great that they’re opening up all those extra APIs. I’m also a little excited about the Facebook connect platform, but I haven’t really looked into it too much yet.

First link, a great post from the Nimblebit blog. I’ve been following these guys and the development of Zero Gear for ages, and now they’ve absorbed Ian Marsh and his iPhone games (Scoops, Textropolis etc.). In the Trouble with Tribbles they take on some of the issues of the App Store. It’s a great read. If you want to read more about Ian, check out Appy’s Militant Optimism feature interview with him.

From the iApps Development Blog, I liked this post about integrity for developers when it comes to reviews, I’m always happy to hear from other people who like to sleep soundly at night.

Two quick links to finish: Polar Bear Farm, Challenge the Status Quo, and a good postmortem/startup advice article from Grey Alien Games.

The 99c Easter Special Edition of Sneezies is now live on the App Store. As with many new releases, it doesn’t seem to be showing up on the new releases lists just yet, but that should right itself over the next few hours. It’s accessible directly via this link:-

Sneezies Easter Edition

The 99c edition has 24 classic levels and 8 challenge levels. It’s tough enough to take a while to play through, but short enough that you can play it multiple times and compete for high scores more easily than in the full game. For trivia fans, it’s actually almost exactly the same length as our original design for the game.

Also, more of Craig’s tasty background artwork and cute bunnified new Sneezie characters for just 99c? How can you go wrong?

Very quick update this week.

I’ve just made it to LA, via a short visit to the Antair mothership in NY. I’m tired and I have a lot of emails and things to catch up on.

Cool stuff I did catch this week:-

Sneezies was reviewed by Krapps

Sneezies - Easter Special is coming, it’s in the queue for approval, hopefully it’ll go through soon.

Quick observations: I was offline almost completely for 3-4 days and the world didn’t end. But I need to do some pruning of my Google reader subscriptions. The massive email backlog I can deal with, but I didn’t need 250 blog updates waiting for me. I might tidy up my twitter account a little too while I’m at it.

With the indie games bundle live and the Easter version of Sneezies heading for the App Store soon, it’s finally time to knuckle down fully on the next game. I need to get cracking on a couple of next gen prototypes so Craig and I can make some good progress while I’m here.

If you emailed me this week and I didn’t get back to you, don’t worry, I’ll catch up.

You might have seen the mention of this in the excellent Sneezies review on Krapps, so it’s time I officially mention it here too.

We’ve made a special easter version of Sneezies and it’s been submitted to the App Store. Hopefully it’ll hit over the next few days, or early next week. Here’s a peek:-

The game is a little shorter than the full Sneezies game, and so will sell for just 99c. It’s a very nice length though, much longer than the Lite version, it definitely doesn’t feel crippled, and it’s a great length for repeat play-throughs and high score runs.

And Craig’s done a cracking job on the new graphics, they really capture the whole feeling of Sneezies but with a very specific seasonal twist. We hope you’ll all enjoy it.

One of the secret project cats is finally out of the bag today.

Sneezies is now available in the first ever iPhone games bundle. It’s an exciting thing to be a part of, 5 indie developers teaming up to create a first on the platform? Yep, we’re happy.

The other games in the bundle are Chopper, Up There, BurnBall, and Blackbeards Assault. Every one of them is well worth playing. That’s another great thing about this bundle, the five developers all came together through a shared admiration, and a desire to see each other succeed. That spirit of cooperation and enthusiasm is one of the things that make working on the iPhone so great, there’s an amazing community. We all know that we’re not actually competing against each other, we’re all just competing against lack of awareness/visibility. Ahhh… I could wax lyrical about this stuff all day. iPhone. Developer. Community. Rocks.

Big thanks go to David Frampton of Majic Jungle software, for spearheading all this, making sure it happened, and for publishing it in the App Store. Also to Evan at Veiled Games for his photoshop wizardry. And obviously, Tim and Jim, and I’d like to thank my wife, my parents, my 5th grade spelling coach…

Oh yeah, the bundle costs $4.99, which is more than half off the full price of the games individually.

Here’s a link to the games bundle on iTunes, and a link to the bundle website.