Gem Hunt for iPhone now available on the AppStore

We are happy to announce that Gem Hunt has finally hit the appstore.

Gem Hunt for iPhone approved and available on December 14th

Good News Everyone!
Our new freemium color match game "Gem Hunt" is approved by Apple and will be available for iPhone and iPod touch next Tuesday, December 14th.

On December 15th (CET) Gem Hunt will be featured on DailyAppDream [1]

In Gem Hunt usually ads are shown which can be disabled via IAP. For everyone who downloads and runs Gem Hunt while being featured on DailyAppDream, ads will be disabled automatically.

PressKit

More Info about Gem Hunt as well as screenshots for press usage can be found in our new PressKit now available for download.

[1] For those of you who don't know DailyAppDream yet, it is a new program for free apps that allows free of charge promotion for developers. Their iphone app can be found here.

Going FREE while featured on the AppStore

Our game Into The Blue SD was surprisingly featured about two weeks ago. I couldn't believe my eyes when i opened up iTunes and saw the icon on the front page of the AppStore. A few hours later we decided to drop the price to $0.99 in order to get a maximum of sales and reach the highest rank possible.

One day before the feature in New and Noteworthy was about to run out, we decided to take a risk and make it FREE before the weekend.

Why oh why would you do that?

The game had been featured before. The last time our ranks and sales dropped to almost zero in a couple of weeks after the feature ran out. [We think this is due to the fact that Into The Blue is a quite "special" game that doesn't appeal to a wide range of users].

This time we didn't want to say goodbye to the upper ranks so easy. At least not without a fight. If the ranks/sales will drop soon anyway, why not getting the app more known and get some more buzz before going down?!

What we didn't know...

...was that after last Thursday we were still in the last slots of New and Noteworthy AND What's Hot. So the timing for going FREE was not that great after all.

The Positive Effects

• Going FREE while being featured last Thursday & Friday brought us around 30k free downloads and a way larger user base than we had before (~2k)
• Our customers who bought the former release could grab the new release for FREE (we want our customers to be happy)
• Media Buzz: lots of twitter messages, news posts, a review and few more covers and youtube videos
• Increased visibility due to reasonably high free app ranks (#58 free games, #6 free strategy games in U.S)

The Negative Effects

• Lost sales (since the game was still featured the next days)
• Ranks dropped quite a bit
• Bad ratings due to users who don't like the game/genre anyway

Lesson learned

it's hard to say what would have happened without going FREE. Most likely though we would have been able to keep our rank a bit longer and have a few more days with higher sales.

I conclude that going FREE either makes sense if the ranks are down anyway or if the app gets enough coverage (100k+) by being featured in one of the free-app programs. The latter would definitely increase the chance to get the ranks up again more easily after switching to paid.

But this is probably something that really depends on the game.

I looked up the ranks of about 10 games lately that were featured before by one of the major free app programs. The result was that only one of these games could increase sales/ranking after the free period. So it's probably more about getting a game known than getting more people to buy it.

Pricing

after reading the great post from Matt about pricing today i wanted to say a few words about our recent price changes as well.

Going on SALE for $0.99 definitely helped with the number of sales but i would estimate that it only increased by 15-20%. Making it $1.99 (the introduction price) would have been the more viable revenue option while being featured.

Going on SALE is possibly a question of going to the top or not. And by now we know that ITB is not a game that appeals to everyone - thus we probably could have stayed with the regular price tag ($2.99) and just enjoyed the ride while it lasts ;-)

In the last days we changed from $0.99 to $1.99 again and whilst we have about 25% less sales the revenue is higher.

Lite Version

we also released a lite version for Into The Blue SD a few days ago. Actually i'm not sure if having a LITE version out there does us any good. But more about this in a future post...

Suggested Reading

• Struct.ca - How to price your game
• Four Door Lemon - 99c problems
• Parade of Rain - Decoupling Ranking from Revenue
• Mundue - Pricing and Ranking, [part two]

Into The Blue (SD) FREE on Friday!

Now that Into The Blue is back in the AppStore and at the time of writing featured in "New and Noteworthy" we decided to make it FREE this Friday, Nov 12th.

Happy downloading everyone!

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/into-the-blue-sd/id398897674?mt=8

Gem Hunt - our upcoming game for iPhone

I feel that it is finally time to introduce our upcoming game Gem Hunt to you. The idea to make this game came from a little free & casual marketing game called StuderusMatch we developed for a client of us this summer. StuderusMatch resulted in a fun little hiscore game and we really liked the mixture of physics and color matching. So we kept the idea in mind to make a similar game. One day...

The Palm Experience

A few weeks later we got word about the Palm PDK Hot Apps Contest. We decided to participate and chose to go back to the physics and color-match concept with the popular gem theme on top. So we went ahead and put together a playable version in about 2 weeks time. Unfortunately we started about 4 weeks late and the contest was already running. There were multiple prize sections depending on the number of sales. Since all slots in the paid section were taken we participated in the free section.

Being new to the platform and late in the contest we weren't able to win a big prize in the contest. But we still got rank #34 or so with about 15.000 free downloads.

It wasn't quite enough for the 10k$ prize but it showed us that the game had potential and that there are users who like it.

Since we like the game ourselves we thought that it might be great to have this game available for iOS too and started the work about 2 weeks ago. Now we are spinning to take the game further and polish it to make it even better.

The following image shows the game how it is right now. The graphics will probably change until release...

Gameplay

So what do you do in this game? It's quite simple. You have 60 seconds to beat the hiscore. In this time you direct gems in a billiard-like manner. Two gems of the same type match and disappear from the screen. If you match the same color a few times in a row, you are able to score more points. We'll also add more game features and possibly also alternative modes in the next weeks. Some of the features will be available in an IAP shop whilst others will be available to start with. I will write more about the game and features in the next blog posts.

Beta-Testing

Although we haven't really started beta testing, it would be great to get some feedback on the game early. If you like to give it a go let me know on twitter. Thanks!

Into The Blue (SD) Re-Released

After a few weeks of being offline, our game Into The Blue is now back in the AppStore!

We recently moved from a company to a common developer account. Unfortunately in this situation apple's system doesn't support moving applications across just yet. That's why we had to pull Into The Blue from the store and resubmit it using the new account.

SD vs. HD

Why is it named SD now? Simply because we weren't able to submit the game with the same name since the old version is appearently still in apple's system. Also chances are good that after we have finished working on our current project Gem Hunt (will blog about it soon) we'll find time for an HD version for Into The Blue.

While we had to resubmit anyway, we now added PlayHaven support to it and updated OpenFeint. We'll be also looking into releasing the LITE version soon with the new account.

Latest Proceedings: JSPortal.app, gh-unit and drilldown UIPickerView

Todays post is a about where i'm at with my current iPhone project and what i've been up to tech-wise.

My current project: JSPortal(.app)
I'm currently working on an iPhone App for a friend's WebApp called JSPortal.
I don't want to go into too much detail in this post but let me at least tell you that it is a quite cool time- and budget tracking software. It's also free of charge for up to 3 users. If you are looking for something to keep track of your development projects you should check it out.
Joost did a great job in providing a demo mode that let's you demo the WebApp right away. No signup, no email verification. Peace of mind.
The first version of the iPhone App is going to help JSPortal's users assigning work time to projects.
Since last week i made a lot of progress and hope i can finish it in time. This would be the 29th of October. Let's see if i can make it.


Unit Testing with gh-unit
Back in my Java days i wrote a lot of automated unit tests with JUnit. Since i started making my first iPhone game i've become a bit somewhat slack and didn't do much testing. Last week i finally started looking into testing again. At first i looked into OCUnit which i understand is shipped with XCode. It runs the tests during the build and you can see the results in the build view. I see that running them together with the build has its advantages. Such as having your build simply fail when there are tests not running. But here's the thing, i'm a very graphics oriented person and i only want to look into my tests when i'm running them. I want to see green and red bars. That's it. The gh-unit project runs its tests seperately from the build. The iPhone version of gh-unit runs the tests within an own iPhone AppDelegate which gives you also the opportunity to test aspects of your view as well. The only issue is that it also misses my beloved green and red bars. So i went a head and forked the gh-unit project and implemented them.
I feel that the table-view with these rather big bars and labels works well for a limited number of tests. For bigger projects smaller rows might be better. I can also see a custom view with lots of little squares for each test-method. That way you might not see which method in detail failed but you'll have a better overview over which suites/classes passed.


Drilldown UIPickerView Component
I still consider myself more of a freshman in the UIKit area but i also feel like my understanding is growing a bit every day i work with it. Today i was able to create a UIPickerView component that supports nested elements. It has some really hacky bits in it (the code, not the view) but it works well. It is also reusable because it gets its row items from a delegate. If someone is interested in the sourcecode, let me know.