I’m learning Blender so I can create my own models for the prototype of the game I will make next. I’m following this tutorial, and I’ve learned quite a bit so far. I’ve known the terminology and watched artists doing 3D work in my game dev experience, but this is the first time I’ve sat down and actually tried to figure out how to create something myself. I’ve never been much of a rendering guy, always more interested in the other parts of a game.
This is pretty cool though. I haven’t run into any crazy bugs yet, although from everyone I’ve talked to Blender has a bad rep. I’m not sure that’s deserved yet. But I’m still a noob so what the hell do I know. All I need is to make my goofy fatso guy so I can use him in my demo for gameplay testing. He’s standing in my field of mountains as I learn how to use proportional editing with different falloff curves. I guess that’s how you make boobs or something. He has an awesome hat I made too, but that didn’t import into the mountain scene for some reason when I brought him in. I guess I screwed up the parenting. I love how golfball-esque his head is. I think he will need a square head for the iPhone though.
Unfortunately shaking in this app doesn’t flip the chart into the opposite direction.
Yeah not a good week for Photo Resize. Photo Resize Lite has dropped off the top 100 free apps list, and this has followed with sales for Photo Resize drying up. There’s been a 2.6% conversion rate from Photo Resize Lite to Photo Resize, so dropping off that top 100 list is very bad.
Ratings and reviews for the app are good, I guess it’s just not something people feel they really need, even if it is only $0.99.
Well I hauled ass today and got the app fully polished and sent off to Apple for review. I translated it into German, French, Italian, Spanish and I added Dutch this time too. I use translate.google.com to do the translations. I can read and speak French, so I use that language as a barometer as to whether I think Google is interpreting the intention of my text properly and it does a pretty good job. I’d say the worst thing that happens in the translations is that it sometimes mixes up the order of words. 90% of the time though you can figure out what it’s saying. I’ve already heard from one customer in Italy that he has no problem with this, so I’m sure it’s better than just cramming English down their throat like everyone else does.
Well now that Whose Turn Is It? is done I am going to begin prototyping the game I plan to do next. I will start building a gameplay test in Unity, and try to get the core functionality of the game working. I can then use this to send it out to select people to get a feel for whether it’s going to work. Is it fun? If I build it out will it sell? Better to try to answer those questions as much as possible before going head first into it.
Well, I think so. Bah good enough anyways! Whose Turn Is It is now in the hands of some friends, who will hopefully test it out for me and let me know if it blows up their iPhones/iPods. No budget for replacements if it does suckers.
If you’re writing a utility app, and have an info button in the bottom right corner to flip the view to your app’s settings, then make sure you grow the frame of the info button in code to make it easier to press on the device.
While testing the usability of Whose Turn Is It the info button in the bottom right proved ridiculously difficult to press reliably for both my wife and myself. So searching the web it seems the way to solve this is:
// Grow the info button's frame so it's easier to press.
[infoButton setFrame:CGRectMake(infoButton.frame.origin.x - 15.0f, infoButton.frame.origin.y - 15.0f, infoButton.frame.size.width + 30.0f, infoButton.frame.size.height + 30.0f)];
This ensures the hit area is much larger than the 18×19 info button, and won’t mess with the performance of the button. Other people solved it by putting an invisible button behind the info button, but I think that’s lame compared to this solution.
Apple rejected my update to Photo Resize and Photo Resize Lite that addressed the WIFI issues some people were having (you couldn’t send emails when connected to a WIFI network, but 3G/Edge works). They didn’t like the fact that we use the search button style for the magnifying glass in the bottom right of the screen to show the user that if they tap that button they’ll go to the magnified view. Apparently that button look is reserved for search functions in apps. So I guess we must have got away with it the first time through.
This is another blow from Apple. It wouldn’t be a big deal except that I’ve held off sending out promo codes I retrieved the first day the app went up for sale until this update gets put on the store so reviewers don’t have issues with the WIFI situation. Now I’ll have to send them out otherwise they’ll expire (they only last 4 weeks).
The frustrations are getting hard to deal with for Photo Resize because it’s making so little money. It took me all afternoon to make a new custom button, build, test and re-upload to Apple. That time is wasted on an app that’s only selling a few copies a day right now. If I don’t get some results from reviews, or come up with some wicked marketing idea I’ll have to stop investing further time in it. That’s depressing given the work that’s gone into it so far.
I decided to do this logo on my own in Photoshop because Whose Turn Is It is so small and not worth investing money into just yet. I’m not happy with the arrows at the bottom, I’m going to fix those up, but otherwise I’m happy with it. Keep in mind this is larger than it appears on the iPhone. I wanted it to stand out a bit from all the rest of the apps. Most apps choose dark colours or blue for their icon backgrounds, but if you go with something like this I feel you stand out and maybe that will catch people’s eye when browsing through the thousands of apps on the store.
Well our first week of sales has gone by with very poor results.
34 sales for Photo Resize.
1259 downloads for Photo Resize Lite (the free version).
Photo Resize Lite is performing well, sitting at #59 on the top 100 photography apps right now. I hope this upward trend continues, if we can get into the top 20 we’ll see some real sales on the pay version I’m positive.
It’s been a tough week for Photo Resize though. Users found an error where it wouldn’t work on WIFI sometimes, so when I discovered that error I had to get a fix into Apple asap. Apple’s reviewing that fix as we speak. Because of that issue though I halted marketing the app, I didn’t want someone to review it an run into that bug. Once the update is uploaded I’ll resume submitting requests for reviews, and hopefully we’ll get some sort of press on it. In the meantime I’m not really certain there’s much more I can do to increase sales. I don’t think investing in advertising would pay off.
On other fronts work is progressing on my next app. I’m very closed to finishing Whose Turn Is It. I’m just polishing it, and bug fixing. I went back and made it much more friendly to use, to someone who doesn’t know what zero sum systems are. Also I’ve been doing a lot of research and design for the game I will make after Whose Turn Is It is uploaded to Apple. More on that in the future.
I got the email from Apple that both Photo Resize and Photo Resize Lite are now ready for sale on the App Store. It’s taken a long time to get here for what outwardly appears to be such a small little program, a lot of hard work and frustrations, but now I’m beginning to see the upside. My goal of using this project to learn the process with Apple is a success, I’ve learned a great deal about the entire process from start to finish, and I know the next thing I make is going to go a lot smoother.
I’ll have to spend most of today trying to get the word out to all of the media sites I made the big list of. I’ll generate promo codes and start emailing and filling out these submission forms for reviews. Hopefully within the week we’ll start seeing some reviews, but who knows. I’m sure these guys have a massive backlog of apps to review.
Some weird things about the submission process that I’ve discovered:
- When your app shows up on the store, the release date will show when it was actually submitted to Apple the first time (for Photo Resize it shows April 20, even though it only appeared on the store on May 12). This means when you sort by release date you won’t see your app if it was just set to Ready For Sale (unless you had one heck of a short approval process). What I don’t understand yet then is why I do see some apps with today’s date when I sort by release date. Were these apps truly approved and uploaded in one day? I’m not entirely sure what’s going on here.
- In the description pane for your app it appears to show all of the languages you have built into the compiled app (i.e. all of the <language>.lproj files you have for Localizable.strings). This is strange because when you submit you go through a whole process of entering which languages it supports and the translations for the descriptions. So apparently this means you can only enter descriptions for some of the languages the iPhone will actually switch to. This is very strange, and to me shows a lack of interest on Apple’s part in true international support.
Well, now we get to see how well Photo Resize does. I’m excited, and as I start getting statistics I’ll report them here!
While I wait for Photo Resize to be accepted and continue to plan for my next project I’m currently evaluating Unity3D. So far the editor side of things is very impressive. Being able to just drop files into the assets folder and have them automatically imported into Unity ready to plonk in the scene is great. The way you can parent things, drop components onto objects and things “just work” all looks great. I was very quickly able to learn the editor, and get a 3D scene up and running with a first person camera to run around and test out the scene.
There are some major drawbacks to it though that have really bummed me out so far. The first is not being able to put your project into Perforce (or any source control). While Unity3D has their own asset server that lets you do version control, this is hardly ideal. It costs an extra $499 and only works if you have the $1499 pro license to begin with. That’s not a small amount of money for an indie guy like me, however it is doable for the right project. Regardless of the cost I think it’s a big mistake for it to be incompatible with Perforce or any standard version control system. Come on, that’s amateur hour. It all comes down to their Library folder in your Unity project that stores all these binary meta data files. They should have used XML (ideally to allow multiple people to work and integrate), but at the worst case just put everything into one big database file and let us check the database in and out. As it is now I see no viable way for distributed development with Unity without paying for their asset server.
The second issue that irks me is that you can’t work on a mac with the iPhone add-on and pass your Unity project to someone on Windows to use the editor to plug in art, tweak scripts, tune values, etc… This is another barrier to distributed development IMO. If I were to get an artist to help me generate content for a game, the odds of finding one with a Mac and the iPhone SDK installed are quite low. Most of these guys like Macs, however have cheap PCs.
Other than these two issues though it does save a great deal of time, and I have no interest in writing my own rendering engine and physics engine. So if I had to choose right now I’d definitely purchase it. Give me a few more days with it though to say for sure!
