After making Frosties free wild things happened to its rankings. topappcharts.com is a great site where you can track rankings of most apps on the AppStore. Frosties have their piece there as well, and you can see it here. Here's the nice visualization you can find there:

And it's from the most crowded store, US AppStore, and due to traffic there it's really hard to make it to top 100 on any list. Within three days Frosties was downloaded 8K times, 2600 in US, and it made it to number of Top100s all over AppStore, occupying even 1st places in some of them (Trivia games in Nederlands and Czech, for example).

All in all it seems people like Frosties. If so, it means game didn't sell initially due to poor (lack of) marketing. Note to self: marketing is more important than implementing last cool features.

Frosties' update has been approved by Apple over night (to my big surprise people work there on Saturday!). It contains number of improvements, one new board type - Hexagon and "one-liner" help texts. There's also a change in initial game board's setup - there are some frosties that are randomly unfrozen at the very start of game session. This is suppose to make subsequent games at least a bit less repetitive. No idea it it's a big game changer, though.

But this is not the biggest news. The news are two items, closely tight to each other:

• Frosties are now FREE, and
• Frosties are now ads powered

After years in game-dev industry I've became ads-space provider

Why did i do it? After a week of no sales and some read through ads related posts on couple of iOS development related I've decided that a buck (a bottom value you get if your app is worth anything) is always better than nothing. Infinitely better, a geek might say ;)

Current version takes ads from three networks: iAds, MobFox and AdMobs, to make sure I get any ads regardless of where the user is - iAds for example are available in very few countries. I've created a nice framework to use many different ads sdks, switch between them at runtime, and even change their priority remotely(!) - I think I'll share it at some point, what you think?

To increase chance of success of my new business model I need to make sure as many copies of Frosties get downloaded as possible. Luckily "selling" a free app is a lot easier than a paid app ;) To help myself with this I've enrolled to IDRTG - it's basically a retweeting group for indie developers, and at least it helps me spread the word about Frosties and it being FREE (a magic word increasing chance people will click a link by 500%).

After a week or so I'll post some info on how it all went. I love doing experiments like this! So exciting!

Here's a brief summary of first month of Frosties' sales. To put it simple, game sales are dead. Last 5 days of September (and first days of October) sum up to 0 sales. Promo codes giveaway I've had on TouchArcade forum on 28th had absolutely no effect.

So, what's next? Currently I'm putting some effort into gathering followers on Twitter (with some success) and facebook (with less success). I've even changed EyeCog's twitter profile background to a custom image I've glued together from Frosties' assets. I'm actually pretty happy with it :D

Another thing is I'm still working on first update for Frosties. I've already implemented Hexagon board (!) and done some minor bugfixing, but I'm still experimenting with one gameplay change one of my friends suggested. It's a secret ;) But it's something that will make every game a bit different. I've actually already implemented it, now I "just" need to add it to multiplayer data replication... not my favorite thing to code, but I'm the only programmer here, so tough luck ;)

I also have a little marketing campaign in mind when update's finally released, but I'll keep it to myself for now. I want to share all the info on what I did, not what I intend to do ;)

I'm not quitting - the fight's still on!

I was of course expecting it, but Frosties's sales are on the ground now - see chart below.

I'm the one to blame - I've just came back from vacation where I had sweet time away from internet. But now I'm back with some data and ideas!

As you can see game sells like crap. It already had couple of days with no sales, and on average it sells 1-2 copies per day - a disaster. If I was to make a living out of it, it would be really bad! But there's still something I can do, following what someone said that a game nowadays is more of a service than a product - it needs to live to gain attention and fans. And that's my plan!

Currently I'm working on a Frosties' update. I haven't decided on the scope yet, but here's a brief list of things that I think about fitting in:

• new game board shape - hexagon board
• time-trial mode where you have up to 3 or 5 seconds to make a move
• achievements - I'll need to come up with a fun list first
• OpenFeint integration - this one's simple to code, but needs a way of scoring players... need to design it first :D

There's one more thing I plan do to in near future. I had a read about what makes for a good iTunes/App Store app rescription and how important screenshots are - I always knew this was important, but I feel I still failed to do it right. So I plan to put some effort in preparing proper description for the game, and grab some decent screenshots. And this time I'll do some processing on them, like putting them in iPhone/iPad frame, adding additional "whizz" like everyone does. I remember in the old days, when I was releasing my first game Apple required screenshots to be exactly what you can see in the app, with no additional artist's touch - it seems it's no longer the case, judging by what you can see on the App Store.

One last thing I consider doing is having a promo-code give-away so that some people leave reviews on iTunes - currently there are none :( We'll see how it goes, and of course I'll blog it :D

Like I've promised earlier I'm going to post data on how exactly Frosties are doing. So here goes - below is a graph of first 10 days sales. Enjoy! ;)

In all it's "glory". As you can see post's title is very suitable.

First day's 33 items sold were not something to be ecstatic about. And as usual day two is like 25% of day one, provided there's no additional factors like baners, reviews, luck. None of these happened so day two was 8 sold. From that day on it's just constant descending (with occasional variations).

It would have probably been better if I did invest in a banner on TouchArcade or something, but I do have first hand knowledge that small banners don't help (I've done it for BallFill), and I can't afford a big one. Plus it seems our press release didn't have that "something" to stand out of the crowd, so also no reviews.

One factor that probably affected initial sells, when it was still easy to find Frosties on "New Releases" list on the App Store, was that game's description visible to potencial buyers missess so called "5 second hook" that will make someone buy the app. It could be the artwork, theme, icon, screenshots - it seems none of stuff I've put there has it. Maybe I should consider redoing it? Any hints on how to do that properly?

That's it of now. Stay tuned for next part of "exciting" data on Frosties' sales ;)

I've decided to make process of marketing, updating and selling Frosties an opened process. I've figured no one did that before (or I simply haven't came across that data) so it should be an interesting read for anyone more or less interested in iOS games development.

And I'm not doing it only because game doesn't sell - this is the case for most games on the App Store. I'm doing it because making iOS games is my hobby and there's no reason not to treat any aspect of it differently - I'm just going to blog about all parts of my hobby! :D

So during next few days I'm going to post data on how exactly Frosties sell (nice graph included!), what marketing have I done, what are my ideas for future and what's in the update I'm going to submit to Apple any day now.

I hope some people will learn from my experience but I also hope for some comments I can learn from as well. Also: iPhone-dev-wannabes, be warned! ;)

BTW, I've just set up RSS feed for my blog, to make it easier to follow my scribblings - you can find proper button on the left. Enjoy!

Where's my head!?!?

Frosties went live on the AppStore on September 1st, and I haven't written a blog post about it... Shame on me! You can now find more info about Frosties here.

Every now and then you can see a "numbers post" from developers that have either been very successful with their game and want to inspire other developers, or from the ones that have failed big time, investing time and money and not getting much back.

This numbers post will be different mostly because the game hasn't even shipped yet (it will in a week if all goes according to plan). I just want to spare some details on how this game was created and how much it cost me. This way you'll have a pretty clear picture of how it works for part-time indie game developer, and how much money will allow Frosties to break even. 

To give you a little background, I'm a one man dev-team doing my iOS games development in my spare time. In "real life", I'm a regular game-dev professional working on AAA games, but I enjoy very much every opportunity to code anything not-AAA related. So being an indie game developer is my hobby or part-time job. Only recently Jacek joined my team (increasing its numbers by 100%) to help me out with some marketing. He has no background nor experience with it, but he always makes up with enthusiasm and the will to learn.

Obviously I haven't written any music nor have I drawn any art for Frosties, but there will be more on this later on.

So, without further ado, to bring out the numbers first: I've spent $540 while developing my game. I'll repeat: 540 USD (approximately, depending on PLN/USD exchange rate ;)) Here's more precise division: 

• $330 - contractor Artist
• $170 - contractor Sound Engineer & Music Composer in one person
• $40 - tools - I'm planning to write a separate post about it

I'm not counting the $100 iOS developer licence, since renewed it anyway before I even decided to develop Frosties.

But there's a catch (of course!). I worked with people who do contract jobs for me on a regular basis, so I had a big discount for their services. Also, I'm not counting the time I spent developing the game, since all that time I've had a regular full-time day job. I think about the process of developing Frosties as my "hobby time". And it took me a while to implement it, since my initial prototype was ready in late December last year. I didn't spend every day working on my "hobby" project, and I even had like two months off, but still!

EDIT: After a discussion with other developers on TouchArcade forum I decided to also add time I've spent developing Frosties as development cost. It's very hard to estimate how much time I've invested in my game, especially that until late phase of development I've been doing it sporadically. And at no point I intend to place $ next to my hours. Time was a resource I used and although limited quantities of it were available at one time it was free for me. So I would estimate time spent developing Frosties to around 270 hours stretched across 9 months of development. A lot of time come to think of it ;)

As you can see, the development cost of Frosties was very low. But I'm still worried my game won't break even. One of those irrational fears everyone has, I guess ;) I do games for fun, but I do admit I'd love to see those games make some money - even if only to convince my wife that me sitting at a computer most of the time is not a total waste of time! ;)

Frosties beta test has concluded, and the game is heading for submission.

Thanks a lot to all sixteen participants! Your contribution was extremely valuable, because you didn't just keep an eye on bugs. As game's authors, we're sort of blind to entire category of issues, namely - usability. We're too used to the interface, and everything is too obvious to us.

Among other things, you made us aware of how unintuitive our icons were. There are several approaches to fixing this, but we're going to use a little less pure icons, and a little more text.

You also told us a win simply didn't feel rewarding enough. The game essentially just says "you win!", and that's it. But winning is a very special event that deserves more emotional engagement. After all, if you care about winning, then so should we (and we do, we just aren't showing it). Long story short - we would like to end a game with a little more bang. 

 

There are also a few things we've learned about beta testing. Firstly, if you ask someone personally, they're more likely to help you than if they receive a broadcast. Secondly, there is a tradeoff involved with posting your call for beta testers on forums (ones that allow this kind of advertisement, of course). On a small forum, hardly anyone will read your message. But on a big one, the message will not stay on the front page for long, and it's not very polite to keep bouncing it up. Thirdly, while everyone tends to be helpful and constructive, some people put so much effort in their feedback they basically help us move our work in a new direction!

A very optimistic outome of the beta test is that there were no showstoppers. The game doesn't crash every five minutes, and it doesn't set your phoneon fire. We're done fixing the bugs, and we've submitted Frosties to Apple.

Our planned release date is September 1.

A bug renders all software equal. In that spirit, our new puzzle game Frosties has jut entered beta.

We're doing this with help from a fantastic web service called TestFlight. It lets you download an app directly to your iPhone and give us your feedback via e-mail.

We're now looking for testers. No skills required. The deal goes like this: you get to play our game, we get to know your opinion about it, and all bugs you find get a death sentence. And it's not only about bugs - any feedback is welcomed!

If you're new to Frosties here's the game in a nutshell: Each turn you can unfreeze one creature. If your move creates a line of unfrozen creatures stretching between two edges of the board, you score points. You win if your score is better than your opponent's when all the Frosties are freed.

You can play against AI or another player, via Game Center or on the same device. The game is a Universal app, meaning that it works with iPod, iPhone and iPad. You need iOS version 4.1 or newer.

We could really use your help! In order to sign up for beta test, follow this link to TestFlight.

TestFlight requires you to register your device. Here's how it works:

1. Click the link
2. If not already a member:
   1. Register.
   2. Open registration confirmation e-mail on your mobile device.
   3. Click the "Login" button in the e-mail - this will open a webpage in Safari.
   4. Click the "Register Device" button - this will leave Safari and you'll be asked to install TestFlight Access profile, which is necessary for the whole thing to work.
   5. Click "Install" on the profile overview screen - this will install said profile.
   6. Click "Done" - this will take you back to Safari and display available builds. There won't be any initially, since your device needs to be added manually by the developer using the info you've sent.
   7. TestFlight will create a shortcut icon on your home screen.
3. Once we've received the data we need to include your device in our development profiles, we can generate a build and put it into TestFlight.
4. You will be notified about the new build via e-mail.
5. In order to give us feedback, just respond to the new build notification. Enter your feedback at the top of the mail.
6. Thanks!

Feel free to register more than one device.

The beta is open to everyone until we reach 30 testers or 50 devices (whichever comes first).