Everyone and their kitchen sink is talking about iPhone development

Just a quick post about the amount of “articles” that seem to be everywhere on the web about “iPhone development. I’m always on the look out for new info on iPhone development, so always googling “iPhone Development” (on the 24 hours setting) and it seems that so many results are literally just articles setup with no real purpose, no real information, it’s just I guess for SEO reasons, to drive traffic to their site. It really does show you, just how much buzz there is around iPhone development, everyone is talking about it, even if they have nothing to say.

 

Advice snippet 2

Game type – This follows on from the last snippet. I don’t know how many blog articles about mobile games which havn’t succeeded I’ve seen that if I had been able to talk to these guys/girls when they were developing their app I could of told them it was never going to be a hit. Mobile games are not the place for fast moving arcade games, at least not if you want to make money it’s not. There might be one exception to that and that’s the Nintendo and Sony handhelds, on those machines an arcade game might do well with good visuals, but on the phones…nope. The phones seem to me very much a casual market. Look at the games that have done really well, Words with friends, Angry birds, Tiny tower, even Temple run which is a fast moving game, requires very simple hand movements to control it. So think casual.

Advice snippet 1

Location, location, location – where your game is, is all important. A great game can fail on the wrong website/platform, and an “average” game, put in front of the right kind of audience can be a huge success. All the “ville” games succeeded because they where on a social platform. Angry birds succeeded for the exact oposite reason, because it was on a platform where the audience wanted a “hear and now” play alone singular experience.

Looking back

So then new blog, I thought it would be good to cover some of the past few years, talk about what went wrong and what went right.

Past

About 5 years ago I decided to try and work on games full time and earn a living from it. It almost didn’t work out, by the end of 2008 I was just about to give up and go back to Flash contract work for ad agencies, when I had a conversation with a certain individual that opened my eyes to what I’d been doing wrong. Basically my “flaw” was I kept coming up with original game ideas. These were ideas that I thought were cool, but I had grown up on the computer games of the 80s where you were expected to basically work at the game to get enjoyment out of it, i.e the opposite of “casual gaming”, so even though the games I created were cool little games, they were not suited for the new generation of casual gamers. Then I hit upon the idea of making a match-3 type game, but giving it a Christmas twist, as it was September by that point. These kinds of “games” were very popular and from what I could fathom pretty easy to code, so I spent about 5 days making one. That game was called Christmas Crunch and up to this point has had about 170 million game plays and has made a lot of money through in-game ads. I won’t go into details as to how much but let’s just say it’s paid most of my living costs for 3 years. That game and that experience taught me a lot, wisdom which I’m happy to pass on in this blog over the coming months.

After Christmas Crunch (which is AS2) I decided to give this new fangled AS3 a try, and my first ever AS3 game was a game called War Droids, which ended up being front paged on NewGrounds, and was my first decent sponsorship deal. I also entered 2 games into the Mochi/Rockstar competition and came 2nd in both parts of it (public and judged) winning a nice amount of dollars and 2 funky looking iPod Nano’s :)

After that I played around with physics in Box2d and that became the Quest for Power games. Over the proceeding few years I created different types of games, from puzzle to defense, and most recently something in-between called Puzzle Prince.  Last december I also launched a new version of Christmas Crunch, my first Facebook game called Christmas Crunch Deluxe.

How should it look then?

After name comes…Design.

I have to admit I love wordpress, I’ve used it in various sites for years now and it’s just so damn easy to use that for someone like me who hasn’t got the time to spend weeks putting a site together just for the purpose to type some words, WP is easy to use (mostly, depending on how fiddly the theme is). What I always do get stuck on is choosing the right WP theme. I knew I wanted something that looked like a “blog” and not a portfolio or company site as I have another site for that, no this has to look like it’s sole purpose is for me to rant and express my thoughts, and nothing else. I also knew I wanted it to be responsive which I think is going to be the big thing for sites this year, websites that “respond” to the device they are on and display content accordingly, pixelPower was one of the first I looked at, and offers responsive design, and also is similar to tumblr, and what I like about that is that the posts are clearly marked as to what they are.

There might be some stuff that I’m going to change design wise, but I’m pretty happy with it. Hmm I’m pondering if I should have a proper logo, but I’m kind of getting used to laid back font used for it currently.

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