NimbleBit

Things are JAMMING here at NimbleBit HQ. All of our forces have assembled to form the Ultra NimbleBot.

A quick aside, here is a cool postmortem article from Cogs‘ creator Rob Jagnow of Lazy 8 Studios about indie game wrangling and lessons learned.

Onto the meat!

Doxygen is a neat tool that will take your source code as input and output nicely formatted HTML documentation. Ogre uses it and has really nice documentation. As Ian is currently helping out with Zero Gear, I decided it was time to generate proper docs for the game. The only problem is that docs aren’t being generated for a few random files. Does anyone know why this might be? I have EXTRACT_ALL selected in the settings…

Last week I continued the never ending journey of making the game run faster, smoother, and 10% more delicious. One quick thing I did that resulted in a smoother game was smoothing out the synced time between the server and client instead of just directing setting it upon syncronization. I like simple solutions like this! Still not perfect, but getting there. Also, I decided it was time to limit the server framerate (it was up to 3000 FPS at times!) to 200 FPS so it uses less CPU time.

This week I am down in sunny San Diego (and HOT compared to foggy SF) to work with Dave and Ian on Zero Gear. We are already making great progress and have a small LAN party planned for this weekend where we will do some testing. Should be fun!

Last week I finished up the graphics of my new Skate map, which in a fortunate turn of events has transformed into a great physical sandbox for all our kart physics testing needs. I have clocked in many miles over the last week constantly driving and tuning, driving and tuning - rinse and repeat. I have also been testing all the bug fixes coming through.

This week will be much more testing and driving and tuning (while battling a wicked cough / head cold). More Zero Gear is being played in the NimbleBit offices than ever before, certainly a good sign!

Last week I submitted updates to every one of our twitter enabled iPhone games, adding features that toggle tweet visibility to your followers and store a score tweet to send later when you’re offline. In other news, Moon Drop has been featured in the “What’s New” section of the App Store! We’re hoping this brings more attention to our newest NimbleGame.

Right now I’m up to my neck in Lua trying to help out with Zero Gear, wish me luck!

Last week was pretty busy, here’s a quick summary:

Poison Oak, it is poison and tries to eat your arm. That is what I learned last week. Also, to be sneaky, it will wait about 5 days before making its presence known. It is to be avoided at all costs. As I watched my arm get eaten over the course of a few days, I managed to get some work done on Zero Gear. A few errors related to weapons being destroyed, a really tricky bug that was causing the wrong kart to display, general optimizations, and an unexpected math error (I wish dividing by 0 would just produce 0, dumb math) bug preventing name tags from displaying in certain cases were all taken care of.

There are only 2 more big items left on the tracker. I am planning to take care of those today. On Thursday I am heading down to San Diego for a couple weeks to work with Dave and Ian on polish and testing. The build is really starting to look good!

Last week I spent a brief bit of time working on promotional graphics for yesterdays National Ice Cream Day Scoops promotion, as well as playing a lot of Moon Drop. For the rest of the week I was working on a new Zero Gear map taking the form of a giant skate park, or I guess I should say, kart park. Hopefully it will be the first map of a new stunt-based game mode, although it should make a pretty fun tag map as well.

This week I am going to put some glitter and veneer on the map so that I can post some media of it!

Last week saw the release of our latest game Moon Drop! Sales have started out pretty slow, but what reviews it has gotten so far have been glowing. I spent the weekend hammering on our Twitter integration, adding things like a switch to make your score tweets public or private (invisible to your followers), a Nearby scores page showing scores within 300 miles, and the ability to click on a player and see his past scores. Twitter’s powerful search parameters made it a breeze to implement and since the scores are web-based we don’t have to wait on Apple to push these new features live! Yesterday was National Ice Cream Day and our special Scoops promotion! Close to 35,000 took advantage of the tasty holiday and downloaded Scoops for free, hope they find it cool and refreshing! Scoops will remain on sale for 99 cents for the remainder of National Ice Cream Month. This week I’ll be wrapping up some updates to Moon Drop and other iPhone games before taking a vacation to PC game development land to lend a hand on Zero Gear.

After a 13 day stint in the app review queue, Moon Drop is now available on iTunes! Feedback so for has been positive and we look forward to any and all comments about the game. What are you waiting for? Get in the lunar landing control hot seat and start landing those colonists! If you haven’t seen the game yet, be sure to check out the Moon Drop page or go straight to iTunes!

One of the big things that iPhone game developers (at least forward thinking ones) are constantly working on, is finding alternate ways to point customers towards their games. It is very difficult to build significant paths to app discovery besides the App Store, but it provides some much valued security from the rollercoaster and fluctuation of the app charts.

In that effort we have a “NimbleStore” built into all of our games, which can be accessed from the main menu. The store is displayed using a web view, and we have Google analytics embedded inside to track how people are accessing it. In this post I will show a month’s worth of data from our NimbleStore.

This month of time is a particularly interesting chunk of data to look at, because halfway through the time frame on June 18th, two things happened. One, Scoops 2.0 was approved - which I think provided a spike in visitors to the store as people who might not have launched Scoops lately checked out the update. Two, on the same day we re-designed the NimbleStore to feature the individual games as icons instead of banner-type graphics.

Here we can see the number of unique visitors hitting the NimbleStore per day. In the first segment you can see an average of around 3,000 unique visits a day. There is a big 200% spike when the Scoops 2.0 update goes through. It goes to show how important regular app updates are to keep people coming back to your app over time.

This graph is the average time on the index page of the NimbleStore, which is a little tougher to interpret. You can see that it does climb up slightly from the point the graphics were re-designed, which I interpret to mean that the new design is more interesting, and causing fewer people to close the page and more to study the games shown.

This is one of the most telling bits of data about our new design of the NimbleStore. After the re-design, our bounce rate was halved, from a little under 30% to a little under 15%. This is probably the most important stat to look at for us besides unique visitors, since it tells us how many people actually proceed to access more information about one of our games. According to this data, around 85% of people visiting the store go on to access one of the specific game pages containing review quotes, a description, screenshots and a gameplay movie.

Here is the number of page views for our individual game pages over that time period. It shows which games people wanted more information about. This information matches more or less how well each game is selling according to sales numbers.

We recently created a new gameplay video of our next title Moon Drop, due to be submitted to Apple by the end of the week. Check it out!