Bytesize Adventures

Trying to get visibility on the App store is a constant struggle. In most cases it requires ongoing effort to publicise your game, finding a way to get it in front of the people who it will appeal to.

Astro Noughts is my latest iPad game. It’s an arcade number crunching game with, what I consider to be, a fairly unique concept. You can read a postmortem here (it was also featured on Gamasutra). I released Astro Noughts on 14th December 2010 – incredibly bad timing since there were a large number of high profile, kick-ass games released at exactly the same time (and EA decided to play hard ball). Despite the bad timing Astro Noughts sold 16 copies on its first day – you might consider this terribly low but I consider it a success. Sales bounced around for a while but by the end of January this year they had petered out to precisely 0 sales every day. That’s where it has remained, receiving 0 sales for the past 2 months. keep reading…

By Chris | Posted in: Development Diary, Game Design, Tangents | Tags: astro noughts, free, marketing, promotion
12 Comments »

Star Fusion was the first game I created for the iPhone. It has been in the App store since June 2009 and has been downloaded a total of 1,619 times. It’s had some positive feedback and I’ve used it for experimenting with marketing and pricing as well as getting to know the ropes of the App store.

Rocket Santa was my second game. It had a troubled, slightly rushed development in order to make its release date of Christmas 2009. It’s been downloaded 768 times in total. I created it, with the help of a fantastic pixel artist, to test the Christmas market.

Today, both Star Fusion and Rocket Santa are going Free… forever. I’m also putting them live in all countries worldwide.

Why? – I’m still very much on a learning curve when it comes to creating games and, at this stage, it’s pointless for me to have paid games sitting in the App store with very few downloads. This decision does not affect the pricing of my future games (which may still be paid downloads).

You can grab both Star Fusion and Rocket Santa here.

By Chris | Posted in: News | Tags: free, rocket santa, Star Fusion
17 Comments »

As detailed in my previous post, downloads of Star Fusion have been fewer than I would have liked (as low as a few sales each month). I really want to get the game into the hands of as many people as possible to get some feedback for updates and gain experience for future games. Priced at 59p ($0.99), this couldn’t possibly be the barrier preventing people from trying it, could it? keep reading…

By Chris | Posted in: Development Diary, News | Tags: analytics, data, downloads, free, graphs, promotion, promotion efforts, sales, Star Fusion
12 Comments »