Hey folks, sorry for the lack of updates - we have been really busy banging away at new games for you guys! I also just got a shiny new laptop to replace my aging work machine, and to christen it I decided to make an official NimbleBit wallpaper. It looks so nice on my screen that I decided to post it for everyone to try out!
your desktop: now with 200% more color!
Here is an iPhone sized one to go with it.
A brand new week! Huzzah! Here is the skinny on last week:
I spent most of last week confirming my suspicions: being healthy is much better for productivity than being sick. Even with this blight upon my mortal vessel, I was able to get a few things taken care of including fixing a few remaining issues on map change, polishing some weapon’s behavior, and a few other small issues.
This week I am feeling healthy and ready to enact my vengeance on the remaining bugs in Zero Gear. Also, I got one of those fancy XBox controllers that all the kids seem to like. I plan to get it working in our code after all the vengeance is done being enacted and whatnot.
Last week I was doing some more testing for Zero Gear, trying to figure out the cause of a few bugs in our persisting quest to get to another larger scale testing phase. I also spent some time working up the graphics for our next iPhone game, Moon Drop. I have also been spending time playing the game and working with Ian on tweaking the gameplay and screens. This week I will finish up any graphics that remain to be created and trust Ian with tying up all the loose ends! Hopefully you will be playing Moon Drop soon.
Last week was all about recovering from WWCD-itis which seemed to spread like a wildfire through the weak and immune system compromised nerds up in San Francisco. After being revived I got to work on our recently announced game titled Moon Drop. As you can see from our video preview, we’ve got the core gameplay nailed down and are hoping to have a finished product in the next week or two.
Hey guys, wanted to show you a little preview of what we’ve been working on here at NimbleBit (when we’ve had the time). The video below shows and describes the gameplay. But for those who wish to read:
Your mission: Colonize the moon!
Guide ever-growing waves of lunar landing pods down to the surface of the moon to populate it with as many colonists as possible. Using your touch guidance system, maneuver the pods to the landing pad at a safe speed, only so many mistakes are allowed!
* Art and game play are NOT FINAL! *
Screenshot 1
Screenshot 2
Screenshot 3
Screenshot 4
Screenshot 5
No blog posts between IKWYDLW updates… either we have been lazy last week, or we have just been very busy. I will let you decide!
*Murphy has contracted an illness which I can only assume is a new strain of “Cat Flu” due to his regular proximity to cats, so I will just mention a few things he worked on last week -dave.*
A few weeks ago we finally started using an issue tracking piece of software to nail down exactly which things we want to finish for the next beta of Zero Gear. We used Pivotal Tracker which is free and a very nice tool. So Brian has been working his fingers to the nub to whittle down the list of issues until we arrive at our next milestone for beta testing. Here are some of the issues he has crossed off the list in the last week:
Twister and Puncher weapon functional again, game bogs down when rapid input is given
graphical kart wheels not rotating properly
kart does not reset orientation when respawned
soccer ball object not graphically scaling, LUVbot weapon functional
GUI unresponsive to input
client not able to connect to a server if connection has failed in the past
camera not functional in garage
client lua error when switching maps.wow, exciting stuff!
Last week I spent a few days working up some more graphics for an upcoming iPhone game which you should be hearing more about soon. The rest of the week I spent testing and logging bugs in order to more clearly define how close we are to the next Zero Gear beta. We finally got all the weapons working together, so I spent a few days tweaking masses and force values in order to make them all a behave a little better in relation with each other. The emergent gameplay that comes out of all these physical weapons interacting with each other, players and game objects is quite cool!!!
Last week I attended my first WWDC (Apple World Wide Developer Convention) in foggy San Francisco. It was quite the experience, and I’m glad I ended up going. Days were spent attending iPhone sessions and evenings/early mornings were spent at various parties sponsored by websites, developers, and publishers. I met a lot of great people, and learned much. I am glad to be home however, finally getting back to what I enjoy the most, making games! The long wait continues for the Bluebird and Scoops updates to be approved, but I’m wasting no time and diving in to our next iPhone game, more details to come!
Lots of excitement last week with E3, here is what we did between watching new game trailers:
Many bugs were killed last week. R.I.P. bugs. I spent a good amount of time working on the kart physics with Dave. Ray casting is also back. Ray casting allows the developer to shoot a line out into the world and see what it hits. This was needed to detect what surface the kart was driving on (ice, grass, dirt, etc). It is now working with the threaded physics thanks to a concept called futures that the prince of code told me about a few weeks ago. Good stuff!
This week I plan to get the rest of the weapons (puncher, twister, ice cube, and sea mine) working again in the new networking system and hopefully get around to finishing up some polish on the LUVBot. Other than that, we need to do a lot of testing (hopefully some small play tests too, yay fun stuff!!).
Last week I spent a long time testing Zero Gear vehicle model and making improvements where I could. I did a bunch of laps around some of our maps and tried to tweak the collision shape and suspension settings of the physical vehicle model in order to improve stability and cut down on some unwanted behaviors. I also worked with Brian some to put in a few little tweaks and tricks to the physics model.
This week I plan on doing a few things here and there to make sure we have everything ticked off the checklist for the next Zero Gear beta, and also work up some graphics for our next iPhone game.
Last week I was preparing for WWDC, which I’m enjoying right now! I updated some of our product descriptions across iTunes and the NimbleStore and captured and added some gameplay videos. The wait continues for both the Scoops and Bluebird updates to be approved. Last week I also started prototyping a new iPhone game, but that has been postponed while I am out of town.
Introduction
Media coverage about iPhone development seems to be a bit bipolar. There is no shortage of stories covering the few big iPhone success stories - #1 apps that bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars for their developers. Lately there have also been a number of refreshing articles reminding everyone that the vast majority of iPhone developers don’t make enough to cover their costs. So who’s in the middle?
From the beginning, my goal (shared by NimbleBit as a whole) has been to earn enough to keep making fantastic games - not to get rich quick. It became apparent from the start that betting all your chips on a single game or app was a risky (increasingly so) strategy. Luckily casual games are a perfect fit for the iPhone, and I’ve been able to develop a polished casual game every month or so (sometimes with Dave’s help). While we have been fortunate with the success of Scoops (which never made it into the Top 25 Paid Apps) we still think building an entire family of quality games has many advantages. By using cross promotion you can build a brand name and build up a larger fan base. Success of individual games can also be shared by all to a certain extent. You can bring in fans of a particular title who have the potential to grow into cheerleaders for all of the rest of your games. This is certainly NOT an argument for pumping out shovelware. We try to make sure that every one of our games (6 so far) stand on their own and don’t consider them just more lottery tickets.
We’ve decided to release NimbleBit’s sales numbers as proof that it isn’t only rags or riches for small independent developers on the App Store. Hopefully it will give some hope to talented iPhone indies still struggling or waiting to take the plunge into iPhone development. It is my opinion that dedicated developers can survive on the App Store with minimal luck given the right approach and enough hard work.
The Numbers
We’ll start with a raw breakdown of each game. The “sales” numbers are total downloads of a game both free (during promotions) and paid. Most large figures are rounded to digestible whole amounts. The development time listed is a rough estimate and does not include time spent marketing, providing customer service, or developing updates. All revenue figures are after Apple’s cut, but before Uncle Sam’s. All figures are as of June 1st 2009.
Hanoi Plus
Developers: 1
Development time: 3 weeks
Age: 10 months
Sales: 26,000
Rev. (to date): $13,500
Rev. (last month): $380
Scoops
Developers: 1
Development time: 1 month
Age: 8 months
Sales: 170,000
Rev. (to date): $140,000
Rev. (last month): $19,000
Textropolis
Developers: 1
Development time: 1 month
Age: 4.5 months
Sales: 14,000
Rev. (to date): $18,500
Rev. (last month): $1,400
Kyper
Developers: 2
Development time: 1 month
Age: 2 months
Sales: 14,000
Rev. (to date): $880
Rev. (last month): N/A (now free)
Sky Burger
Developers: 2
Development time: 2 months
Age: 1.5 months
Sales: 56,500
Rev. (to date): $17,000
Rev. (last month): $11,400
Graphs
The resolution for some of these graphs gets pretty low in the earlier months, this is because I don’t have saved daily reports going back that far. Sharp dips are usually the result of setting a game to free for a short period.
App Revenue
We started tracking game launches with a news ticker in Sky Burger, in the last month it has been integrated into each of our games. Unfortunately we don’t currently differentiate which game the news ticker is being loaded from. We use the unobtrusive news ticker (usually on the main menu) to provide links to promotions we’re running, new games that have just launched, or just a friendly little message. You can see a large spike during our last Freebie Friday promotion.
NimbleBit game plays per day
Into each game we’ve also integrated a “NimbleStore” which allows players to browse all our games in a custom styled “App Store” launched in game (no kicking the player out to Safari). We track visitors to the NimbleStore using Google Analytics. You can see the same spike for the last Freebie Friday. Unfortunately we don’t currently track how many visitors follow links from the NimbleStore to the real App Store.
NimbleStore visitors per day
NimbleStore front page
NimbleStore game detail page
Conclusion
While we’ve had our moderate successes and failures alike, we still don’t have all the answers when it comes the the ever-evolving App Store. I’m certainly glad we kept going after our first game didn’t top the charts. Looking forward, the best advice we can give is to be passionate about what you’re creating, get involved in the iPhone community, and keep trying new things until you find something that works.
Number eleven of IKWYDLW, in this episode: we wonder why you are reading this instead of absorbing crazy E3 announcements!
Slow build times are very bad. A build time is how long it takes for a change in code to be built into the game. I spent a couple hours speeding it up which will have major payoffs in the long run. I finally got Rinky Dink working. It took much, much longer than I expected to get a cylinder shape working for the puck. Rinky Dink still needs some polish but it is generally working. And most importantly, on Friday I ingested way too much caffeine and strange energy candy bars and got a bunch of work done related to smoothing out networked object movement.
This week I hope to fix some remaining issues with networking and the last remaining bugs before the next release. The end is near!!
Last week I finished off a bunch of new custom items for Zero Gear and even made a little compilation image. I also did a new background image for Scoops. This week I am going to mock up some new Zero Gear guis as well as helping in any way I can to shape up the next Zero Gear beta. Hopefully we will have more news about that in the coming weeks! We are eager to get the game back into peoples’ hands after all the things we have been working on.
Last week I spent most of my time putting together the Scoops 2.0 update which will include new music, new background graphics and the ability to tweet your scores! Our last Freebie Friday can be deemed a success getting picked up on popular sites like Touch Arcade and TUAW. To start the summer off with a bang we’ve also put both Scoops and Sky Burger on sale @ 99 cents. Last week Bluebird officially flew into the App Store and is available now for 99 cents!
This week I’ll be prepping for heading out to WWDC and hopefully prototyping a new game as well as writing up an iPhone development blog article.
Anyone forget about Freebie Fridays? We have decided that the Freebie Friday for May should be Sky Burger! We’d like to thank all our fans who have been playing Sky Burger for over a month now, and we couldn’t continue without your support. If you know a friend with an iPhone or iPod Touch who hasn’t been introduced to NimbleBit games, here is a golden opportunity!
Don’t forget also, Textropolis is still on sale for 99 cents until Sunday!
I have been making a lot of new custom items for Zero Gear lately, and Brian suggested I post some of them - it’s been a long time since I started making them so I decided to see what all of them looked like together! Here are all the ones we have in the game so far… by the time you read this there will probably be a few more. Each one of these items has up to 4 customizeable color areas.
Time for number TEN of those weekly updates you have come to know and love. Soon, you will know what we did last week!
This week I plan to smooth out some issues on the client, continue work on our favorite love fueled robot, and finally get Rinky Dink fully working
I am going to stamp out a few more and then I will post later in the week with a few glimpses of all the new items.
This week will be spent working on a 2.0 release of Scoops and outlining a book section that I’ll be contributing to.
