So with all that being said, I’m coming to the end of my first iPhone game, which hopefully will be done in a week or 2 and then sent over to Apple for approval. I regard this first project as somewhat of a learning experience, although I think it’s turned out to be a great little arcade/puzzle game, and I’m curious to see how it goes. I’ll post a kind of post mortem once it’s been on the app store a few weeks.

But to the point of this post. It’s obvious to me that if you are going to try to make an impression on the app store you need to do it with something of quality. Yes sometimes “small” games can go big, but that’s too much of a lottery approach for me.I think a better approach is to make a splash in an already established game genre, more of the same yes, but with some twists.

The approach I need to take is to work on a game project that have a number of qualities, these can be listed as…

1. Is more of a niche game genre.
2. Appeal to an older generation.
3. Brings something new to the table in that genre.
4. Is inherently social in it’s nature.
5. Is inherently designed for IAP’s.
6. Is a project that can contain high quality visuals that are possible for 1 person within a reasonably short amount of time to create.
7. Is well suited for a community to grow up around it.

My “big” iOS project fulfills all those criteria. It’s a fantasy turn based strategy game. Which I’ll be starting work on at the beginning of May. It’s a whole lot of work, but my approach is to plan out the schedule into 16 weeks, I’m hoping that will keep me on track, otherwise I know exactly what will happen, development will drift along and it won’t be complete until the new year, which might mean me missing that train I mentioned.

So what does that say about the industry we are in? New bubble or wise purchases?

There’s been talk in the main stream press of a new tech bubble, but I doubt that’s the case. This is all being driven by mobile, and primarily Apples iDevices. This is why Instagram has been snapped up and Pinterest hasn’t, although Pinterest will mostly likely be the next big buy, especially if they can get their mobile version up to speed. But mobile is the tech space to be involved in, everything else is basically a waste a time at this point.

And to follow on from the above I would argue, anything which is not mobile AND social is a waste of time at this point, whether it be games or apps. The direction to success is fairly clear even if the path isn’t, and that’s mobile/social apps that are easy to use/play.

Twitter! ha, I’ve finally discovered it Started using it properly about 2 weeks ago and went on a find people to follow spree and I’m now up to 1300 people, 90% of those are game devs. I’m also up to about 107 people following me which I’m kind of happy about, although interestingly I found that when there were hardly anyone following me I didn’t really have any hesistation tweeting, but as the number of people following me grew I started to feel a responsibility to those people to say something which had actual meaning and worth. And that’s the thing about (I know this is all been blogged about 5 years ago, but you have to bare with me as I’m late to the game) Twitter it seems to me you have 3 main types of people using it…

1. People who use it to advertise
2. People who use it to talk about their daily lives, whether that’s actually interesting or not
3. People who use it to spread interesting comments/articles/links to the rest of the community

There are people of course who do all 3, and that’s a fine line to tread but I think the correct path for me as well. I don’t like blatant advertising and I don’t think most people do either so just using it for that works against you. If people like what you have to say, and like who you seem to be then they will be interested in what you are doing, it’s as simple as that. I’m aiming for a 1000 followers by the end of the year, it will be interesting to see if I get there or not.

The only negative thing I would say about using twitter is there is so much information coming at you, I havn’t really found out how to filter it all, or maybe that’s the point of it anyway.

Next is I’ve pretty much settled upon what my development tools will be over the coming year, and that’s Adobe AIR and the Sparrow Framework. AIR covers me for cross-platform and also it’s AS3 which I know, and Sparrow covers me on the native iOS front, and it’s also based on the Flash hierarchy. I am finding Obj-c a pain in the ass to get my head around though, AS3 is much more intuitive, hopefully within a few months obj-c won’t look so foreign to me.