iHangtime goes Gold!
Posted by Norin in iPhone Development on June 18th, 2009
Well, that would have been the terminology for having approved the version of the game that I am going to submit to the publisher (Apple) back WHEN I HAD A JOB.
But whatever, I’m learning a ton and actually becoming a decent Objective-C programmer and Mac User. I’m writing this blog post… ON A MAC – never thought I’d see the day, but seeing as Apple has provided me with a possible way of feeding my family and making my own games at the same time, I may have a tattoo of an apple with a bite taken out of it on my ass by this time next year. What have you done for me, Microsoft?
The first title I’m releasing is going to be titled iHangtime – yes I used the ‘i’ whatever convention because “Hangtime” was already taken. Oh, and BTW, my wife is doing a great job of learning Photoshop in a big hurry and handling the art all on her own!
Upon first release, this is more of an ‘app’ than a ‘game.’ Basic premise – when you run the app, you will see a big “Throw” button on your screen.
NOTE that I do not suggest that you throw your iPhone in any situation where your device could be damaged — so, if you use this game anywhere other than a room full of mattresses and fat chicks, and it lands on a hard surface and breaks, then that’s not how I told you to play the game, got it!?
Now, when you get inside your fully padded and completely safe room, hold the device so that you depress the “Throw button” and then toss the device into the air. When you let go of the phone, a timer will begin counting. When the iPhone comes back to you, and you catch it, or let it bounce on the nice, soft surface you have chosen for a gameplay environment, it will stop the timer and tell you how long it remained aloft.
As an added “hey cool,” the app will also use the time to estimate the height of your toss in feet.
That’s it for the first release, I plan to put it up for $0.99 as an introductory price. Very soon after, I will be updating the game to include challenges such as “Toss the device 3 feet in the air” or “Attain a Hangtime of exactly 1.2 seconds.”
I hope you take a look and like what you see! Please rate the game and put comments on your posting, thanks for giving a crap about a guy trying to feed his wife and daughter!
The play screen for iHangtime
I hate writing these
Posted by Norin in Uncategorized on June 10th, 2009
By “these” I mean the “yeah I disappeared for a while” posts – because typically when I disappear it’s due to stress and I feel the need to recount those things when I come back.
In the past two months, I have dealt with losing my job, depression, difficulties with my property manager (likely leading to legal matters), and MOVING, amongst other hardships I don’t feel like talking about.
There, done bitching. There’s been lots of good stuff happen too… I love our new location, at the tip of south Austin, more rural than urban, and 11 acres of land. My daughter is doing great and my marriage is still strong.
Downsides affecting this blog are things like Project:Playerquest. Unfortunately when I became one of the former members of the workforce, I abandoned most of my side projects, devoting all my time to “what’s next” and I’m sad because of that because Project:Playerquest still excites me. Maybe I’ll jump back into it once I manage to draw some income.
That brings me to what’s going on now. iPhone games. It’s the fad, right? Everyone’s doing it? Maybe so, but you can make money off of it and it’s a well-distributed platform where independent developers can actually have their games played by lots of people.
I’m hoping to put my first ‘game’ up on the App Store by the end of the week. After that, I have three more in the queue to churn out. So we’ll see how my Objective-C skills hold up in the face of my design ambition…
Art is the biggest issue. It’s difficult to find artists who will take flat-fee payment up front to create assets for the iPhone now because of the earning potential of these games. Everyone wants a cut of the full take and for the small UI-only games I have planned thus far, it doesn’t seem right to me.
I completely understand a profit-share system if you are developing in a team, I have a team that I work with on other projects, but getting someone to put out a gradiented background and a couple of buttons–maybe 5-6 hours work tops–doesn’t merit 20% of the lifetime profits of the software, in my opinion. There are plenty of games where the art makes it succeed, and the artist should be rewarded accordingly — my first few will not be those types.
My wife is preparing to learn Photoshop, hopefully this problem will go poof.
Anyway… I’m still here, unemployed now, but maybe I’ll be able to make a living off of my iPhone stuff for a while.
Project Playerquest – Schedule Shift
Posted by Norin in Uncategorized on April 20th, 2009
I’ve decided to shift the Project Playerquest schedule – instead of running Thursday to Thursday, we’ll go Monday to Monday like a normal person… weird right? This way, the weekend activity can come after a full week of the player attraction efforts.
So, the graphs for the past week will go up today, and I’ll also be announcing this week’s scheme to capture innocent players and make them try our game.
Project Playerquest Early activity:
Posted by Norin in Project Playerquest on April 11th, 2009
The Twitter campaign has started, and I’m quickly realizing that it’s not easy work. I try to do a search for various keywords every few hours (MMO, PVP, etc) and follow the people who are posting. Then I’ll keep an eye on the twitter feed and respond if anyone says something appropriate.
For example, one guy was complaining that he had been on the phone with Blizzard’s customer service team all morning because they’re apparently mad at a few of the UK banks. I responded that we would take him with no bank information at all =) I talked to that player in-game tonight.
We’re also soliciting our current players to become followers. On the Twitter feed, I randomly mention areas of the game and run a quick event there — or I drop tips about the game that players might not know yet. This gets them paying more attention to the feed and using Twitter more (lots of them didn’t realize their friends used the service already.)
Finally, I’m soliciting all of our tweeting players to append #2HL to their tweets, and at the end of the week I will select three of those tweets at random to receive a nice prize – This isn’t doing to well yet, but it’s just the second day, and I haven’t announced what the prizes will be.
We’ve already noticed that our concurrent user average has risen from 10 to 20, this could be from the Twitter campaign, or it could be due to Bobby putting in the Easter event, involving defeating the rotten Eggmen walking all around the world. Either way, it’s nice to see people in game and playing!
I’ll be posting the metrics graphs for this week on Thursday when I announce what’s in store for Week 2 of Project: Playerquest.
Project: Playerquest Week 1
Posted by Norin in Project Playerquest on April 9th, 2009
The method of player attraction for week 1 has been decided –
http://twitter.com/secondhandlands
That’s right, we’re gonna try Twitter. It’s the new hotness and probably the most popular fad on the internet right now, so let’s see if we can create some buzz by using it! The cool thing the players is that there are going to be events ran and things to win, so it’s a morale builder for existing players as well as a recruiting drive.
Project: Playerquest #2
Posted by Norin in Project Playerquest on April 8th, 2009
Here are our metrics from release to last week. Our numbers are modest, but hopefully we can change that soon. At the very least, we’ll have things to talk about as our attempts make the numbers on the graphs swing around.
Project: Playerquest
Posted by Norin in Project Playerquest on April 7th, 2009
Secondhand Lands has released, and at this point we cannot call our launch a success. We are fully functional, and rock-solid as far as stability goes. Microtransactions are working as intended, and latency is virtually nonexistant.
How are we not successful? — We don’t have many players. None of us are really marketing gurus. We’re just game guys… but we have been forced into the realization that you can make a good game, get it out there, and none of that will matter because no one will know that you’re there. I’m not saying we’ve retained all of the players who have tried the game, but the ones we have are enjoying themselves. They (like us) just wish that there were more people in the world for them to play with — Such is the plight of the tiny-budget (less than 250k) indy mmo.
Chasing Childhood
Posted by Norin in Game Development on March 10th, 2009
This seems to me like a poem that may touch some of my friends and colleagues a bit close-
Java Applet Vs Wordpress
For the life of me, I can’t manage to make this Java Applet show up inside a wordpress post!
It works fine on my local machine, it works fine if I just put it on my site, but I can’t seem to make it work from here. The problem seems to be that it is not finding my class files, so I’m probably just doing something wrong inside the appet call where I give it the location information.
If anyone has experience with these types of things, I’d love some assistance.
Back again
After realizing that the wordpress themes had outgrown my wordpress version, I kinda dropped off of the blogging radar for a month or two simply because I didn’t want to take the time (and risk) of updating my software.
So I did it today– Login, Registration, and Commenting all work again. I’m going to start all this off by posting a new game I designed while I was still at Aspyr. Quite a few of my friends helped me playtest it, and with their input I think it ended up being something very enjoyable.
Currently I’m trying to integrate some Java that will allow me to fully explain the rules. But anyway — That’s to come with the next post.
In short – I’m back