Our first mistake was to make the Tutorial an option on the Menu screen. I somehow managed to forget my entire history of playing games and assembling furniture (that would make a good game). Like most gamers, I never chose to do the tutorial or read instructions but because of some strange thought process of mine I expected WarPath players to do so.

To resolve this whoopsy, we changed it so the tutorial gets loaded the first time people load WarPath, HAHA! You have to play my tutorials now, I am victorious! This will be so until the tutorial is completed, or they quit to the main menu.

Now we have you trapped in our tutorial world, you will encounter the second boo boo.

As Mr. Know it All you don’t bother reading our carefully crafted text, so you hit the screen until something happens, maybe after a few minutes you give in to the madness of reading the instructions. I can’t blame you really, I don’t read instructions if I don’t have to, I count it as losing. So, rather than our literary excellence, we replace the tutorial with pointy fingers.

These pointy fingers move around guiding you to what you have to do, and when you follow them you realize how to control everything in the game, and maybe one day how to control the world.

So, what have we learned today?
1. Make tutorials happen at the start of the game, nobody chooses to load tutorials.
2. Make it more visual than text.
3. Make it interactive rather than a lecture.

Lots of great quality artwork around the theme of Villany, some great sketches, models and artwork. I was very captivated by one of his pieces in particular of the lady. I don’t know what did it, but it just grabbed me, very high quality work. Check out his site if you want to see more.

Oliver Carson – Computer Games Technology – Facial tracking for avatars

Oliver’s software was taking data from an existing piece of facial tracking software, then trying to optimize the data captured to the basic needs so that it could be sent online and used for digital avatars. This one just perked my interest mainly because of my interest in Kinect, so the tracking of something like this for digital avatars in games would be amazing.

Al Campbell – Computer Games Technology – Variable difficulty

Al’s project was based around making variable difficulty games, the game will track a number of different things in the game, and based on how well the player copes with them it adjusts each of them. In his example it was a platform game, so it adjusts the jump height, the number of spikes and the spacing between platforms. He discussed with me the challenges of doing such a thing as you have to get a balance between tweaking difficulty and keeping the game challenging ( which is obviously the whole point in these games ).

Sorry Al and Oliver I don’t have links to your websites or anything because it wasn’t in the programme, please contact me with your details and I’ll put them up if you want.

Me and Alvy Ray Smith

One of the last parts of the talk, and also covered in the Q&A section was recreation of humans entirely on computers, digital actors and motion capture. This got me thinking in the concept of games and the increase in power, LA Noire, Rockstars latest game the digitally recreated actors are amazing and are a core concept of the game. In the future you might be the actual person asking the questions using Microsoft Kinect, something we have talked about before, actually having conversations with the game ( or suspects in game in LA Noires case ) which is amazing to imagine.

Today I am going to check out the Abertay Digital Graduate Show and see what they have in store, I’ll blog about anything interesting I see there tonight.

First of all I would like to say I love the Apprentice, I never learn anything from it apart from most of these “great” businesspeople are self-serving arrogant twats, I think I speak for the country when I’m saying that. I don’t know if I am being a dreamer when I believe that you don’t have to be a dick to be a success in business.

I am not at all surprised the apps turned out to be Jamster esque annoying and “funny” sound apps, they were put on the spot to come up with a new idea that can be made in 24 hours, along with the pressure of being on the show and so forth. However 24 hours to make an app may seem tight, but considering what comes out of the game jams I’m not sure if that’s much of an excuse.

My main problem was that this season is meant to be about how you can create your own business without lots of cash or government assistance, and this episode failed. No money was made and lots was spent.

If you are not aware of where money was spent ( they didn’t mention anything ) let me help you out.
1. The app developers, they are not free, you have to pay for the app they create for you.
2. The website coverage, with so many other cr-apps like this most websites would just leave them to die the death they deserve, they obviously can change their minds when a bit of money is involved.
3. The games conference, chances are you will have to pay for sales pitches and for space at a games conference.

All of this cost together and no real talk of future money, they had a little patter about how they could sell more content but doubt anybody would pay for a few more annoying noises or silly accents.

What I would definitely have changed about this episode to make it based on feedback rather than first day downloads. This way they could have covered how hideous the app was, how there are so many other apps like that one and most importantly discussed how they could possibly make money from it.

I will keep watching this season, but it’s just annoying that they are meant to be concentrating on inspiring people to set up and become successful businesses but if they followed the example of this episode they are very unlikely to.

Total sales : 11 copies

4 – UK
3 – US
1 – Switzerland
1 – New Zealand
1 – France
1 – Sweden

Less than I expected to sell, but I hope to gain more as I do more updates and improvements.  I am however quite pleased it was a variety of places as I expected it was mainly going to be UK buyers.

Release Date Problem

I possibly have missed out on sales with my Release Date listings.  Although you should never rely on being on these sort of lists it does help. I am going for the long term approach of constantly improving and adding to the game, so launch day and appearing in the New Releases list is less important to me.

Anyway, I’ll explain the problem so any other new developers can avoid the mistake I did.

You have 3 dates to make yourself aware of.

1. Availability Date
2. Approval Date
3. Release Date

Availability Date – Set by developer in iTunes connect
Approval Date – The date that Apple approves your app ( out of your control )
Release Date – The date that appears on the App Store and is used when Sorting by Release Date ( funny that ).

The problem that I encountered, is as follows.

I set the availability date to far in the future.  When it was approved I changed it so I had 2 weeks to try and get a bit of hype/marketing going.

My Availability date was set to 31st March, the Approval Date was 14th March.

When my game WarPath released on 31st March the Release date appeared as the 14th March ( even though this was it’s first appearance in the App Store ), because of this I was buried multiple pages deep when sorted by Release Date despite this was the first day it was in the App Store.

Apparently the system will choose the earlier of the two as your release date. So you have the following situations.

Availability Date before Approved = Release Date as Availability Date – Buried
Apparently no longer the case, it will update to Approved Date now so you will be on the first pages of sorted by Release Date section
Approved before Availability = Release Date as Approved Date – Buried ( what I have done )
Approved on Availability = You are far too lucky -  First pages of sorted by Release Date section

According to a FAQ on the AppStore

The Released date displayed on an application product page is the date the latest version of that application went live on the App Store.

But currently it doesn’t seem to be the case.

Also be aware that after being sorted by date, the list is sorted by Alphabetical order.

Marketing Efforts

I thought it would also be helpful for people to know what my marketing efforts were and how successful they are to get a better idea of what they should try.

Paid

Press release

Along with Paul we wrote our press releases for the announcement and release day and sent them out via PrMac from where it was automatically re-posted in full on various sites.  It might help your SEO a bit, but I am unsure of the value, as far as I know most of the sites it appeared on were automatic, and I am unsure people would regularly visit a part of a site which contains any old press release.

What I intended for these releases was a way to reach out generally for interviews or human coverage.  I got a number of emails from various sites, but nearly all of them asked me to pay for advertising or a feature which I have decided against.  I am unsure if the lack of pickup is due to my game, the game being my first game or what.  I got one bit of free coverage from Arnold Zafra at iPadNewsHub.com who did a preview (and possibly upcoming is a review of the game) and have been contacted by a few others for promo codes which will hopefully turn into something.

Free

Submitting game to review sites

No reviews yet, a few responded asking me to buy advertising or paid features.  Looking at iTunes Connect about half of the promocodes were loaded so people did have a look at the app which is good.  Getting reviews would be great promotion, but also I would really love feedback on the game so I know what to improve.

Touch Arcade Posts

Touch Arcade posts I would definitely recommend. For the preview post we got some early feedback  and lots of people looking at it.  With the right game I think this could convert into lots of sales.

Touch Arcade Preview post
Touch Arcade Release post

TIGSource forums

I had a poor number of views for my post in the TIGSource Feedback forum could be because not many of the users have iPads, or because I am quite new there.

Social Networking

Youtube trailer
Twitter – My tweet announcing game release retweeted 12 times and various people did tweets encouraging people to try my game.
Facebook – Release announcement that was sent out by lots of people too

I am unsure how effective these have been, but the word has definitely been spread.  Twitter I use mostly as a networking tool, I have a number of people in my Follow list that support me and help me out which is nice.

Game in Scotland Event

Because I have my company listed on ScottishGames.net (who plan on doing a piece on me soon) I was asked by Game in Scotland if I wanted to attend.  The event is a games industry recruitment event, and I’m not currently recruiting, but I pitched to her that I could come as an adviser to people who wanted to set up their own companies and so forth which they were fine with.

So at the event I was an adviser and promoted my game there, lots of good feedback and amazing amount of people came over just because they liked our company name or logo which was nice.  I was introduced at one point as “The owner of the best named games company in Scotland”.  This event was great for getting general feedback, and also as a good networking event with games companies around Scotland (and there was free food and drink there too which is a bonus).

Overall

In total all these things drove 99 visitors to my website in one day (highest count so far) and led to the 11 sales on release day, hopefully more in the future too.  As it is the first game I have designed, developed and marketed I have to remember to keep my expectations in check, it’s very easy to get carried away seeing successes on the App Store and forget that there are a small number of hits and thousands that fail.

I plan to continually improve WarPath to gain more users, and as time goes on I should improve my skills in making and promoting games and hopefully it will pay off.  If not, as the plan has always been, I will have picked up valuable skills and at least I can say I have tried when I had the chance.

And before I finish I would like to thank everybody for their support so far.  I have been amazed how many people have been really supportive of me in general and helped promote Whisky Biscuit and WarPath, obviously going Indie full-time as any start up is a risky business (but fun one) and having all this support has really kept me going.

Feedback on my promotion efforts and how I can improve sales are definitely welcome, please leave some in the comments.

Thanks,

Stuart.

We at Whisky Biscuit are very very very very pleased to announce that our first game WarPath has sold just over 2.5 million copies on the first day.

I would like to thank everybody that supported us along the way.

Me and Paul now plan to add a few more features to WarPath with this new riches ( once we have finished partying, I think I might go to Florida for a long holiday first, sorry but most of you would do the same).

I would write more and put this in a more official format, but I am just too excited! THIS IS THE BEST DAY EVER!

Catch ya on the flip side, and Tanks for all the help .

Stu

Get it in the App Store here.

If you don’t have an iPad, why not borrow the iPad of your friend/enemy/sibling and buy it for them. Or just buy it anyway and be part of something. Click here!

You plan your day, you run to the first ride and start your adventure.  You go along your day enjoying the rides, as the day passes, your excitement starts to fade, and your energy runs out after all the thrills and spills of the day.  But you ain’t done yet, you still have lots of rides to go on, but the park is closing soon.  If you leave now you will not have had the full park experience.

OK, thats enough of my metaphors, I got a bit carried away and thought I would run with it. I’m possibly going to DisneyWorld later this year and it’s going through my mind daily. Anyway, here are my 8 tips for finishing an iPad game:

From Start to Finish

To me, the start of a project is the most thrilling, energising and enthusiastic part of any project.  The mind is filled with ideas and the creative juices are flowing (that term sounds so wrong) but by the end of a project generally you just want to get it over and done with.  Your initial enthusiasm has been worn away through countless revisions, bugfixes and things not working out how you expected.

This change is fairly inevitable for most people.  What you want to avoid is a massive drop in enthusiasm that causes you to give up on the project altogether. Or release a poor, unfinished game which will only further lower enthusiasm when you get poor sales and reviews.  In this post I’ll tell you how to avoid these drops, giving examples from our development of WarPath.

Scale

Avoid being overwhelmed by making a massive game all at once by building it piece by piece.

1. Prototype your core gameplay feature
2. Figure out the minimum it needs to make it releasable, and do it.
3. Release it
4. Get feedback
5. Build new feature from feedback or new ideas

This way the game has the magic spark ( it’s actually fun ), so everything else adds to the game rather than just making it look prettier.  More about this style of development here.

Unfortunately if I’m really honest this is probably the biggest mistake I made with WarPath. I had the idea for gameplay and put a rough prototype together, then moved on and started making the full game.  Rather than getting the gameplay perfect, then building slowly but surely around it, I worked on it all at once and had to fight through low motivation.  I managed to push through and get the game done to a standard I was happy with, but if I had planned better then I wouldn’t have had to struggle with motivation and I could have had something out much earlier.

It’s ok to drop projects

Sometimes though, you end up midway through the project and you simply realise that no matter what you do, it’s not worth it and no matter how you work it, you will never achieve what you wanted to.  This is the perfect time to quit. It’s very common for people to accidentally slip into a project that is far too ambitious either in terms of skills or timescales.  It is ok to drop these since keeping going is wasting your time, energy and money. Sure, you have invested so much time and energy in the project already that it’s a shame to dump it, but sometimes you need to realize when to stop flogging a dead horse and drop the project so you can concentrate your energy on something you can be more effective with.  And don’t think of it as wasted time – keep what you’ve learnt. As Thomas Edison is often quoted regarding his numerous unsuccessful attempts at inventing the electric lightbulb “I have not failed 10,000 times. I have successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work.”

Enthusiasm

Keeping projects short and small means you can still be in the honeymoon period of an idea.  It is one of the good reasons to keep your game smaller, so you can keep that initial excitement, then revisit it later to add more and each time you should have enthusiasm.  WarPath was a project I was doing during the odd evening while I was working at my old job, then for months on end when I set up Whisky Biscuit officially.  Time takes its toll and eventually you will start to loathe the project.

I’ll be honest and say this isn’t advice I have taken, but after going through the stint with WarPath I wish I did, and hope to in the future. So rather than “here’s my tips” its more like “don’t do what I did” sort of advice.  Hopefully with this you can get through and kill that last Big Boss Bug (I always get the biggest bug to fight at the end).

Be aware of your progress

Keep a checklist of tasks, then as you check things off you will feel like you are making progress.  I keep old versions of my game so when I feel particularly demotivated I run old builds and laugh how primitive it feels compared to the latest build.  My lowest enthusiasm points in WarPath and other projects have been the times I have not felt like I am making progress.

Set deadlines and make them tight

This is well summarized by Timothy Ferriss in The 4 Hour Workweek

If I give you 24 hours to complete a project, the time pressure forces you to focus on execution, and you have no choice but to do only the bare essentials. If I give you a week to complete the same task, it’s six days of making a mountain out of a molehill. . . . The end product of the shorter deadline is almost inevitably of equal or higher quality due to greater focus.

Basically the less time you give yourself, you can concentrate on what is really important on your game and to get your game done.  I haven’t tried one yet but I plan on doing game jams with tight deadlines to build up my focus so I can stop faffing about on the unimportant details and concentrate on what makes my games good.

Remove bottlenecks

As indies we are often just a very small team.  Make sure your game suits what your team is capable of, and plan around the resources you have.  I felt overwhelmed multiple points because most of the work was on my shoulders, alot of work could have been done by Paul if I had simply created a system that means he could have altered the positioning and sizes of UI elements himself easily rather than having to ask me each time. Things like these which sound trivial would have allowed me to spend greater time concentrating on the other problems and feeling less overwhelmed by what I had left to achieve.

Rest

And most of all, make sure you are rested.  Towards the end of WarPath development I was working every waking hour, and not progressing too well, feeling helpless and so forth.  I decided one night to take a break and just relaxed and watched some the special features on my Toy Story 3 Blu-Ray (I love Pixar!!!) and went to bed at a normal time.  The next day I was incredibly productive so I made sure I kept it that way and I have had productive days ever since.  Unfortunately, your brain isn’t like most things that you can just grit your teeth and get through it, they work best when they rest every now and then, you would not believe how many bugs I introduced when I was in that unrested state (I have fixed them since of course).

Summary

• Make small games that your team can achieve
• Don’t worry about dropping bad projects
• Keep checklists to stay aware of your progress
• Set deadlines and make them tight
• Remove bottlenecks to avoid being overwhelmed
• Rest

I hope this helps. As always feedback and comments are welcome.

What we did in WarPath – and you should do in your apps too – is have a review prompt in your game to try and get reviews from people who are more likely to rate you positively.  To do this is quite simple, as I will now show you.

Keep track of the amount of time since they installed

When you load the app for the first time, keep a note of the date and at a predefined point in your game check if a number of days have passed and if so go to the next check.

Keep track of the game time

If you track the number of games played, or if that is not suitable for your game the length of time played, you can use this as a check too.  We use this in WarPath to ensure they are fairly active players, and have played a number of games to get a true feel for the game.

Allow users to delay until the next prompt, or disable prompts permanently

Some people will not like this prompt, or it’s not not the right time for them. So ensure you have the option to delay or disable prompts.  Doing this means you won’t annoy the players and risk getting a negative review because they are being pestered by prompts.

Remember you need reviews for each version

As you do updates to your game, remember the app store has ratings for both the current version and all versions.  So ensure you collect some reviews for your new versions too.

Balance your thresholds to get sufficient amount of reviews

Remember that not everybody will review when prompted, and you want to get a large amount of positive reviews to have any effect.  So make sure the thresholds set for timing a prompt aren’t too high. A few 5 star reviews isn’t as good as hundreds of 3-5 star reviews.

Prompt at appropriate times

Ensure that you prompt your players at sensible times, no player is going to be happy getting asked for a prompt during the middle of a game.  In WarPath we prompt once a game is complete.

Code Sample

We store data such as time the app was first started in NSUserDefaults, it is probably the best place to store them.

The properties we will store in NSUserDefaults are as follows

1. appFirstRun stores the date that the application was first launched.
2. reviewAllowed stores if we allow prompts (so if user asks for no more asking for reviews this would be set to NO)
3. gameVersion stores the last version of the game that was rated.  We store what version this is set at when they review the game.
4. appAskedForRating stores if this version has asked for a rating
5. gamesPlayed stored how many games have been played this version

NSUserDefaults *defaults = [NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults];

 if (! [defaults objectForKey:@"appFirstRun"]) {
     [defaults setObject:[NSDate date] forKey:@"appFirstRun"];
     [defaults setBool:YES forKey:@"reviewAllowed"];
     [defaults setFloat:0 forKey:@"gameVersion"];
     [defaults setBool:NO forKey:@"appAskedForRating"];
     [defaults setInteger:0 forKey:@"gamesPlayed"];
     [[NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults] synchronize];
 }

In the code above it loads the NSUserDefaults and checks if the app has ran before. appFirstRun is a property we create, so if it doesn’t exist it is the first time they have ran the app. The last line of code just ensures that those values are saved to the NSUserDefaults.  Then we make the checks and updating the values:

if([defaults boolForKey:@"reviewAllowed"]==YES)
 {

First we check if reviews are allowed, if not there is no point in doing the following processing.

if( [defaults floatForKey:@"gameVersion"] < CURRENTVERSION)
 {
   [defaults setObject:[NSDate date] forKey:@"appFirstRun"];
   [defaults setFloat:CURRENTVERSION forKey:@"gameVersion"];
   [defaults setBool:NO forKey:@"appAskedForRating"];
   [defaults setInteger:0 forKey:@"gamesPlayed"];
 }

If the version has changed, we reset all the values apart from reviewAllowed so we can make a check for this version.  CURRENTVERSION is #defined within the code.

 int gamesPlayed = [defaults integerForKey:@"gamesPlayed"];
 gamesPlayed++;
 [defaults setInteger:gamesPlayed forKey:@"gamesPlayed"];

Update the value for games played.  Here we store it as an integer as it is simply the number of games played, if you chose to store it in game time or whatever, you may need to store it in a different format.

 NSInteger daysSinceInstall =
[[NSDate date] timeIntervalSinceDate:
[defaults objectForKey:@"appFirstRun"]] / 86400;

Here we find out how many days has passed since it was first run and divide it by 86400. The function returns seconds since the date so we have to divide it by seconds per day (60secs * 60mins * 24hours = 86400 seconds in a day).

 if (daysSinceInstall > kDaysToRate &&
 [defaults boolForKey:@"appAskedForRating"]== NO &&
 [defaults integerForKey:@"gamesPlayed"] > kPlaysToRate) {
    [self showReviewPrompt];
 }

Here we make the checks to see if we want to ask for a review or not, appAskedForRating is a property we have defined that changes to false when this version has made a prompt.

It would probably also be wise to check if they are connected to the internet, otherwise you might send them to a review prompt when they aren’t even online and that is fairly pointless.

The function showReviewPrompt will setup and display the review prompt however you wish.

 [[NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults] synchronize];
 }

We end by synchronizing the NSUserDefaults and end the if statement that we opened near the start.

In the Display Review Options you will have 3 functions: one if they chose to rate, one if they chose to delay and one if they chose to have no further prompts.

- (void) rateApp{
    NSUserDefaults *defaults = [NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults];
    [defaults setBool:YES forKey:@"appAskedForRating"];
    [[NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults] synchronize];
    [[UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL:
    [NSURL URLWithString:@"LINKTOYOURAPP"]];
}

So when the player choses to review your app, you load up the NSUserDefaults, and set the appAskedForRating property to true, this means they will not be prompted again for a review this version.  You then open up the link to your app in the appstore.

- (void) delayRating{
   NSUserDefaults *defaults = [NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults];
   int gamesPlayed = [defaults integerForKey:@"gamesPlayed"];
   gamesPlayed = gamesPlayed - NUMGAMESDELAY;
   [defaults setInteger:gamesPlayed forKey:@"gamesPlayed"];
   [[NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults] synchronize ];
}

When the player decides to delay, what we do is simply reduce the value of the games played. NUMGAMESDELAY will be #defined in the code.

- (void) disableRating{
   NSUserDefaults *defaults = [NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults];
   [defaults setBool:FALSE forKey:@"reviewAllowed"];
   [[NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults] synchronize ];
}

Here is when the player wishes to disable ratings entirely, so as you can see we set the reviewAllowed to false.

And that’s it, with all that I have mentioned you should be able to build your own customizable review prompt and have full control over when and how it happens.