Antair Games An independent game developer blog

Away from the iPhone for one second, we’ve re-organized the pricing for all of our BlackBerry and PC/Mac games.

All of our BlackBerry games, like Asteroid Jane, are now $4.95, and our PC/Mac game DoubleTake is down to $9.95, that seems to be more in line with where the casual game market price is headed these days.

So I got started on my second decade of self employed independent software development. There isn’t a lot of software development happening so far, but it looks like it won’t be long before I can bury my head in Xcode and get on with making our next game. I feel like I’m on a wave that’s about to break. In the calming sense, not the crushing disaster sense.

I put out an appeal last night for iPhone developers to contribute to a community feature I’m trying to put together. The response so far has been awesome, so thanks to everyone who replied or helped spread the word on Twitter. If you haven’t replied yet but think you might want in, the details are in last night’s blog post: Calling iPhone Developers.

There was a great new review of Sneezies this week from Andy’s Reviews.

We should have something going to Apple for approval next week. Not our mythical “next project”, but something interesting all the same we hope. Another item we’re very interested in is already in the approval queue, we’re waiting to hear. It could be a busy week.

To make things even more hectic soon, I have a visit to see Andrey in NY coming up, followed by some time with Craig in LA. It’s primarily a holiday, but I’m hoping make some good progress on our next project too. My blogging and twittering might get a bit erratic for a while, so don’t be offended if it takes me longer than normal to respond.

And yes, in case you’re wondering, I’m very irritated that I’m going to be on the west coast fractionally too late for the 360iDev conference. I spent the whole week jealously watching the tweets and blog posts from it.

It’s possible that I’ll write more here when I’m away, I have a couple of posts I’ve been itching to write, and this might give me the opportunity. I definitely want to write something about the 10 year indie thing, however it comes out. It’s also possible that I’ll have no time to write at all, I never know how these things will work out.

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Saw this post yesterday who wants to know what happens when your app is featured. It’s interesting, the 20x sales factor seems to be very similar to the boost that Veiled Games had during their feature, based on the last graph they posted.

Also, enjoyed this post on Techcrunch this week, Information Technology 50 years ago.

You might want to check out iPhoneish for iPhone news. It’s new, just launched this week, but I checked in there a couple of times during the week and usually found something interesting.

A small consolation if you missed out on the 360iDev conference too, Owen Goss posted his presentation.

Finally, our good friends at Krapps made it onto the Alltop iPhone page. Nice one.

I’m trying to put together a gang of App Store developers for a regular community feature. It requires a very minimal commitment from developers, and yet could be fun and may shine a nice little light on some of the participants.

All I need is a vague commitment to *maybe* share some opinions on the record once or twice a month, on development, sales and marketing, and the App Store. Nothing hard, all optional.

The feedback from the guys I’ve talked to about this already has been good, it’s not spammy, and I’m not looking to waste your time or annoy you.

This is open to anyone who has their software in the App Store, or who will have software in the App Store very soon. Apps and games are equally welcome.

So, if you think you might be up for this and want to hear more, drop me an email at gavin at antair.com, or send me a DM on Twitter (please include an email address so I can send you more info).

If I might not know you from your email address or Twitter ID, it would be helpful if you included something so I can connect you to your Apps/Games.

There isn’t going to be any painful dancing around or registration or anything, send me your email address, I’ll reply with everything you’ll need to know to decide if you want to help.

What a crazy week, can’t even remember when it began. I only remember that it must have consumed a weekend at some point, because I remember installing stuff on a Macbook while watching football. Lots of good things going on, but now I’m completely exhausted. I’m aiming to crash this weekend and do as close to nothing as possible.

I’ve posted one of these updates every week since I started this blog, and I basically just spit out everything that’s on my mind or links that have built up over the course of the week. It’s cathartic, and it helps me round off and compartmentalize the weeks. Sometimes I don’t have much to say, sometimes it works out perfectly, and other times you get this horrible wall of text that must be completely unreadable.

So this week, I’m introducing a revolutionary new feature… sub-headings. They’re like titles, but smaller ;).

Sneezies

No new reviews for Sneezies this week. We’re still on the lookout for review sites who haven’t already covered it, but a slow down in the pace of reviews seems natural once a game has been in the App Store for a little while.

The big news with Sneezies this week was that we ended the 99c sale. The game is now $1.99, and will be for the foreseeable future.

It’s obviously going to hit sales, but it feels good to have made the change. We’ve no doubts about the game being worth 2 bucks, and as well as it’s done, it wasn’t really visible enough for the 99c offer to drive it up the charts in any of the big markets. We’ll now focus on building the sales back up to the same level again at the new price.

Unintentional bonus: we instantly doubled the value of our promo codes!

Next project

Although I’ve been juggling a lot of balls this last couple of weeks, none of them was “open up Xcode and get on with coding the next game already”… I’m hoping to rectify that over the next few weeks. We seem to know what we’re doing again, and it’s almost exactly what we thought we were doing a couple of months ago.

The other little puppies that have come along since have almost all been taken outside and dealt with, Appy-style.

Indie Milestone

It’s now exactly 10 years since I finished my last day working for “the man”. I’ve been surviving as an independent developer ever since.

This has been on my mind a lot lately, it’s like turning 30 or something, you know it’s coming and you know it doesn’t really mean anything, but you can’t help thinking about it. I feel like I should write something about it all, and I might do that next week, but it’s hard to know how to approach it. Ten years is a long time, a lot of stuff happened, good and bad, and I went through a lot of different stages. Fortunately, this current stage is easily the best, maybe I still have a shot at becoming one of those 10 year overnight successes.

I should probably celebrate somehow… but just having a real weekend will feel rewarding enough for now. I have a trip before too long, that’ll be a good chance to recharge, reflect, and hopefully come back ready to kick off the next 10 years for real.

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I’ll leave it there for this week… it’s a shame I didn’t get to mention how Owen got reviewed by Kotaku, or how the BBC wrote a nicely balanced article about the App Store.

One of the secret side projects we’ve been involved in hit this last week, AppTees was launched. I’m excited about this, and we have some great shirt ideas in mind.

I didn’t bookmark any new Sneezies reviews this week, but sales have stayed a little higher than they were since the Lite version hit. Probably getting towards time to do a little update on the Lite version experience, but there’s not really a lot to say. “It helped.” would be the gist of it.

We were excited this week because we had a run at the top of the paid App Store charts in Russia, the final validation we needed for the Big In Russia t-shirt :).

Big personal indie milestone coming up next weekend. I’ve been pre-occupied by it, I’ll be glad when it’s passed.

My TV and Wii were re-united this week when I returned to Mario Galaxy. I bought a 360 shortly after Galaxy came out, and was seduced by the shiny HD… I don’t have a lot of time to play these days, but I plan to make up for my sins. With my failing thumbs, and the fiendish difficulty that hides behind Mario’s bright visuals, it could keep me busy for the rest of the year.

—— ELSEWHERE ——

So many good iPhone articles this week. I won’t write much about any of them, it would take ages and they all speak for themselves.

Our good buddy David Frampton, developer of runaway App Store success Chopper, was interviewed by AppCraver. Well worth a read.

Jason Citron, co-founder of Aurora Feint, started a blog. Based on his first post, about mitigating gameplay confusion, it looks like it’s going to be good. Add it to your feed reader.

Two great posts from Craig Hockenberry, the first one is about raising prices. The second, Bootstrap, is a great overview of getting started in iPhone development. What to read, what you need, all that stuff in one place, bookmark it for beginners.

Rob LeFebvre wrote a nice piece this week on his personal blog about the satisfaction and positive feeling that working on The Portable Gamer gives him. It’s a nice thing to read, and it’s always worth remembering why we do this (aside from making a living) and the things we get out of it. I get a lot of pleasure from linking to and talking about the things that other great developers are writing and doing, and out of side projects like the Bake Off and AppTees that aim to bring indie devs together and increase awareness.

Gogogic have been rocking their blog lately, and their latest gem is 10 things to do before creating your first iPhone game.

To finish, two similar, but both interesting articles from two guys I enjoy chatting with, and who I hope everything works out for. Mike Kasprzak, whose Smiles games is one of the best things available on the iPhone, wrote his cheerfully blunt road map. In it, he discusses how things are going for Smiles, and tries to figure out where to take it next. As advertised, it’s blunt and honest, and that always makes for a good read. I’ve got a lot of respect for Mike’s position, he’s held strong with the $4.99 price tag on his game, which is clearly worth it, when he could easily have flinched and yo-yo’d the price all over the place. Owen Goss is in a similar situation with his new game, Dapple, and he writes about it in No one said it would be easy.

So there, as I said, a lot of good stuff this week…

Craig is moving this week, and will be going without internet access most of the time, so unless he surprises me, we probably won’t have a sketchbook corner this week.

Instead, these are some of my favorite shirt designs on the newly launched AppTees site.

— For Up There (iTunes) —

This classy and stylish design would grace any chest. Love it.

— For Sneezies (iTunes) —

I feel a little bad including one of our own designs in this list, but I can’t help it, I love it.

— For The Portable Gamer —

I’m a sucker for retro, and stylized updated retro, this shirt totally rocks.

— For Blackbeard’s Assault (iTunes) —

Erm, yeah… confession time. I didn’t get it. I was having a slow day, I thought the third thing was a mug (laugh it up Evan ;))… Great shirt, great idea.

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I think those are the pick of the first batch, but there are some great designs on there, and I’ve already spent an age playing with the color options on just about every design in the store. I want them all. 

AppTees

Note, In case you’re wondering, Craig isn’t moving to a Malibu mansion, we haven’t suddenly struck gold, you can still buy our shirts without worrying that we’ll use the profits to light cuban cigars.

Remember those exciting secret projects, well Veiled Games just unleashed the first one.

You’ve got your iPhone, and you’ve got the App Store to get all those cool games and apps… but what if you want more? What if you love a game so much that you want to show the world?

That’s where AppTees comes in. Great T-Shirts based on great iPhone games, and we’re thrilled that Sneezies is a part of it. Check out the first round of Sneezies shirts here.

There’s also a cooler than cool Limited Editions section on the site, where we’ll be putting more topical shirts. First up are a BurnBall Tribes shirt based a contest Tim Haines is running, and a Sneezies “Big In Russia” shirt.

Sneezies and Sneezies Lite have been doing well in the Russian App Store, and a Big In Russia shirt was a popular suggestion. I think I’m going to order a brown one, they look awesome.

Oh yeah, before I forget, you can choose your own color for any of the shirts, the default ones are just a suggestion.

Be sure to link us in to any pictures of yourselves wearing your AppTees shirts. We’d love to see them.

Various things taking shape this week, but not a lot to talk about. Some interesting projects, you’ll be hearing about them all when the time is right, hopefully soon.

This week, we had two nice new Sneezies reviews, one from The APPera and one on the Touch of Gaming podcast.

After a couple of weeks, the Lite version of Sneezies still seems to be helping sales of the full version. We’re scraping the bottom of the UK games chart, and having good runs higher in the charts in a few of the smaller territories.

We posted some Sneezies art and sketches in the second installment of Craig’s Sketchbook Corner.

I finally figured out why Xcode was so sluggish for me - Research Assistant. When it’s open, the text editor can get really unresponsive, when it’s closed, everything is just swell.

—— ELSEWHERE ——

Just found these Indie Developer Survey results from an indiegamer forum member this morning, interesting stuff.

Even though it was well distributed, it’s worth drawing more attention to App Cubby’s post this week, following up on their pricing experiment. We can definitely identify with much of that article. Particularly with the response to the TUAW article that assumes iPhone developers are regularly selling 100,000 copies and uses that assumption to suggest that 99c is a sustainable price point. The App Cubby post draws on the sales figures for Up There that Veiled Games have shared on their blog as a very valid counter point. This is a game that’s been featured for several weeks in the App Store, that’s had a good run in the big charts, and that is a seriously good game from a quality developer. In other words, they did everything right, Apple smiled on them, and they’ll be happy with the way it’s gone. But their published sales of around 25-30,000 copies, are a long way short of 100,000.

I don’t want to hammer on the point too strongly, they’re friends of ours and they deserve all the success in the world, but I know Veiled Games will agree with me when I say that they are one of the lucky ones. Take a look a their sales chart if you need an indication of how much influence a slot in one of the App Store lists has on the success of an iPhone game (in the case of Up There, it was a slot in the “New” section). Now think about the hundreds of iPhone apps that have been released PER DAY since Up There was released. The spread in sales between the #1 spot in the US App Store and the #100 spot is apparently between about 10,000 sales per day and 200 per day. So the #1 app would sell 100,000 copies in 10 days, the number #100 app would sell 100,000 copies in about a year and a half. Except, the App Store works primarily on visibility, so whereas the top end of the chart is sticky because of the increased visibility, the bottom end of the chart changes constantly.

But I could ramble on about this for pages and pages. The bottom line is that a lot of iPhone games and apps must be making close to nothing. That is sad in itself. It’s more sad that the gold rush articles just keep on rolling in, stoking the fires and increasing the volume of (largely) doomed apps, often perpetuating an assumption that iPhone developers are all lighting cigars with $100 bills. There is money to be made developing games and software for the iPhone, but it’s not an easy meal ticket, and your 9 year old son’s software probably won’t make you iShoot money.

That’s all for me this week :).

I’m supposed to be taking the day off, so I’ll try to make this short. Craig and I thought it might be fun to take a look at some of the artwork in Sneezies this week and show how they progress from idea to completion, try to give some kind of insight into Craig’s process.

The following image shows 2 of the backgrounds from the game, alongside the original tiny concept sketches Craig put on the storyboard for the game.

When I’ve worked with Craig in the past, he would take those sketches almost all the way to perfection, then scan them in and work them up some more in Photoshop. With Sneezies there aren’t a lot of sketches because he’s been painting the digital versions directly these days.

This is interesting stuff for me, as a non-artist I love to see how it all comes together. I’d really like to see a side by side progression through 3 or 4 versions of one of these backgrounds as it came together in Photoshop, see where the little touches came in and brought it to life… what do you think? I might be able to persuade Craig to dig something like that up if you’re interested.

We’re just finding our feet with this slot on the blog, so if you have any suggestions, or if there’s anything in particular you want us to focus on or highlight, please use the comments to help steer us in the right direction.

PS, While you all see me making a noise here and on Twitter, Craig’s quietly getting on behind the scenes and drawing all the cool stuff you’ll see in our future games. If you ever want to tell him how awesome something looks, thank him because you loved the game, or anything like that, commenting on these blog posts is as good a way as any :).

I usually keep these for the Weekly Update posts on Fridays, but there are two new reviews for Sneezies that I like so much I just have to talk about them.

First up, the APPera. This is a great new site, very supportive towards the development community, very keen to engage us on Twitter and with various features and aspects of the website. We wish them very well. Their review of Sneezies is just glorious, very thorough, and filled to the brim with lovely comments. This snippet will be going in our review quotes section in the Sneezies iTunes description:-

“Sneezing Powder Sprinkles - God We’re Addicted!” — theappera.com

The other great review comes from the Touch of Gaming Podcast. They talked at length about the game, and I enjoyed every minute. The highlight though, has to be the description of the kids running around the house shouting “Achoo”… that’s so awesome.

Thanks to a few good links here and there, a little side project about to spring to life, and our continued chart success in Russia (and now the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, Israel… thank you all) we’ve decided to give the game one more week at the 99c promo price (regular price will be $1.99). So, if you’re tempted but haven’t picked up the game yet, get to it.