The purpose here was to take a quote-unquote negative experience and spin it into something hopefully helpful for other devs, and myself (hello, hn front page).
The plan has definitely been in the back of my head for a while to release a free ad-supported version. I just wanted to get this postmortem-type thing out the door first, and it's been difficult to force myself to sit down and take a hard look at how things went.
- When you do put together the ad-supported version, include a mechanism for it to pull text from a web address and display it in a popup -- that way when you release Bullet Factory: Super-Bullet Edition, you can update that text file and all free versions will tell the players (pirated or otherwise) that the new release is out.
I'm always surprised more devs don't do this.
- I didn't want to sound critical or insulting about "not worth 99 cents" comment above, let me further qualify it.
I am not saying your app or your effort isn't worth 99 cents in a vacuum, I am saying given everything else I have to consider along side it, I may want to spend that 99 cents on a different app.
It is the same reason I won't buy $5.99 new releases on VUDU to stream them -- it's a hell of a lot cheaper than a theater, but along-side "free" on Netflix, it seems insanely expensive.
So when I compare Bullet Factory along side some of those top-10 or top-20 games that are 99 cents, I'm hesitant to spend to even get my foot in the door to check your app out, which doesn't help you at all.
A free version with an announcement feature (that maybe checks every 10 launches) would give you nice marketing for whatever game.next() is.
I would be very interested in some sort of summary how this HN post increased your sales.
Seriously: we (Blade Polska s.c.) have been through this also. We did everything according to common marketing wisdom about Tap4Two (even the landing page! [1] and real-life video [2]) -- it concluded in 10-20 sales each day. Mostly on the German Store.
We're planning runnig a facebook campaign targeted for Germans, spending all the revenue game has made so far. We will share the outcome for sure.
Your game looks like a lots lots of work with 3d engine, very impressive. What framework did you use?
Yeah, I definitely plan on follow-up posts with any changes that occur.
As for engines, I used cocos2d for all of the 2d (imagine that) stuff like menus and the HUD. The 3d objects I made using blender, modified some code I found online[1] to load them into the project, then pretty much just cobbled together a physics and rendering engine by hand. Good times.
The purpose here was to take a quote-unquote negative experience and spin it into something hopefully helpful for other devs, and myself (hello, hn front page).
The plan has definitely been in the back of my head for a while to release a free ad-supported version. I just wanted to get this postmortem-type thing out the door first, and it's been difficult to force myself to sit down and take a hard look at how things went.