Bytesize Adventures

To celebrate this holiday season, Coffee Cellar is on sale with a massive 50% its regular price. That means you can pick up 6 months of blood, sweat, and tears for the low price of 1 dollar – well actually 99 cents (69p). Its not actually a 6 month supply of bodily fluids, its an actual iPhone App (Just wanted to clear that up).

If you still need convincing, read this review from Tap! Magazine.

The sale will last over the Christmas period and then it will return to its original, although still reasonable $1.99 (£1.49) price point.

I hope you can take advantage of the offer. If not, perhaps you’ll consider buying a copy for a friend or loved one.

By Chris | Posted in: App Development, Development Diary, News | Tags: app development, coffee, coffee cellar, iphone app, promotion, sale
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My App Development series is nearly wrapped up. I want to spend the next two posts sharing some data with you and dissecting the project. For this post, we’ll focus on the results of my marketing efforts and I’ll share my sales data with you – warts and all!.

Launch day

Coffee Cellar has been available on the App store for 3 weeks now. This means I don’t have a huge amount of data to share, but still enough to give you a taste of the results I’m seeing.

My original plan was to go live with Coffee Cellar on Wednesday 17th August. As I approached that date, and with some promised coverage on launch day, I felt it was too risky to leave the launch until the morning. What I instead ended up doing was to soft launch Coffee Cellar on the Tuesday evening (16th August). keep reading…

By Chris | Posted in: App Development, Development Diary, iDevBlogADay | Tags: App, app development, coffee cellar, iDevBlogADay, marketing, pr, promotion
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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
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The idea behind Rocket Santa was to rapidly develop a fun Christmas game, partly to gauge interest in holiday themed games and partly because I was keen to create a second game before the end of 2009. The game had its fair share of teething issues and feedback i’ve received for Rocket Santa has varied wildly. A few people have stated that its too easy and lacks depth, others have said that it’s really enjoyable and has a good pickup-and-play factor.

Rocket Santa has been in the App store for nearly 1 month now so I thought it would be nice to share the sales figures with you. Rocket Santa is listed in the UK and US stores only and i’ve converted all values to dollars to make it easier to digest. keep reading…

By Chris | Posted in: Development Diary, News | Tags: app bake off, iphone app sales, mundue holiday promotion, notcot, promotion
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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
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Star Fusion was released on 26th July so its been available for a full week now. I want to share with you the download statistics and the promotional efforts I have made so far.

Star Fusion Download Statistics

So, a total of seven people have bought Star Fusion and ten people have used a promo code to download the game for free. Clearly I have some work to do in order to increase the number of sales. I have to say that even though these sales are fairly dire, the thought of 17 people playing Star Fusion is an incredible feeling. keep reading…

By Chris | Posted in: Development Diary | Tags: feedback, iphone app sales, promotion, promotion efforts, promotional code, rating, reception, sales, statistics
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Star Fusion App Store Submission

Some great news today. Star Fusion has been submitted to the iPhone App Store for approval. Providing Apple do not find any glaring errors, it should be available to buy within the next week or so.

I’ll get a trailer up as soon as I can and i’ll also put some promotional material on the official Star Fusion page which can be found here.

It’s certainly been a journey to get this far. I started learning iPhone development a little under 4 months ago with no knowledge of the platform, armed with just a book! (Beginning iPhone Development by Dave Mark and Jeff LaMarche). I came up with the idea for Star Fusion 1 month ago so development on this game has been pretty fast. Obviously the journey doesn’t end here and i’m looking forward to the next stages (Promotion, Game updates, and new ideas).

By Chris | Posted in: Development Diary | Tags: app store submission, apple, approval, promotion, Star Fusion
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