Version 1.5 of iRaspberry is about to be released. It will include a change of title to ‘iRaspberry Lite’. The unlocked videos will increase from two to four.
We will also release a paid ($0.99 US) ‘iRaspberry Pro’ version with all videos unlocked.
UPDATE: iRaspberry Lite and iRaspberry Pro are now available!
The iPad finally arrived in Australia this week. Some of us uber-geeks have had them for awhile now. (i got mine by calling my mom in the states and having her send one out for me, thanks mom!!)
(note, this is cross posted from benbritten.com)
Anyhow, it seems like everyone is showing off their clever and not-so-clever custom stands and cases for the iPad, so to day I figure I would throw mine in the ring) (plus it is sunday, and I don’t want to work right now)
When I first got the iPad, I had it propped up like how most of the stands work (ie like a picture frame sitting on your desk) However, this put it out past my mouse pad, and was a stretch to reach it. Since I mainly use the iPad to develop games, this solution was not ideal. (After about two hours of going back and forth between Unity, XCode and stretching to tap on the iPad, my shoulders were fooked)
Instead I needed something to get it closer to me. This meant getting it up above my mouse pad. This works well since the mousing area takes up a not insignificant amount of desk space, but not very much height. So I went scrounging in my big piles of junk. looking for a good solution.
Here is what I came up with:
This stand didn’t cost me a single cent. However, if you don’t have esoteric camera support gear lying about the house, then it might be a wee bit more expensive. (like, prohibitively so, maybe around $200)
You will need:
1 x Magic arm (Manfrotto makes them)
1 x Super Clamp (also by Manfrotto, altho there are plenty of other similar clamps that work just dandy)
You will also need some way to attach the magic arm to your desk (or in this case the shelf that is just above my desk. )
I have chosen the tried and true method of: find a clamp in the shed, and clamp the bastard to the shelf. However, if you are starting from scratch there are actually many better ways of doing this (for instance, maybe get two super clamps, and just use that. It would definitely look less terrible, but again, this was just what I had around the house)
The last thing you need is some spare bits of wood. I used a bit of 1×2 and some plywood.
The design is very simple, just a single cross piece screwed to the plywood (with a nice groove cut out where the charging cable fits) and a few bits on the back to give me some clamping options.
(note I am lifting the iPad so you can see the groove, it doesnt sit up like that)
(I find the top one give me lots more ‘reach’ with the arm, but is a bit wobbly. The center clamp point is more stable)
The stand works well in both portrait and landscape mode:
As you can see, it hovers right over the mouseing area. This means I can go from typing/mousing to iPad testing by just lifting my hand. Much more ergonomic! This is a perfect solution to keep the iPad in a useful position for coding and testing. At some point I might go out and spend the extra cash for a better mounting solution (either a mounting plate, or another super clamp)
Cheers!
-Ben
iRaspberry has debuted and is achieving some great downloads, 12,000 in the first three days. We had a feeling it would do well once on the App store.
It is rating well in the Entertainment catagory, getting into the Top 10 amongst several stores (Italy, Germany, Mexico, Saudi Arabia).
I am just playing around with making myself some groovy looking wallpapers and lockscreen backgrounds for my iPad and realized it is not as easy as just whacking up some 1024×768 image. There is the whole auto-rotating issue. In the end I decided to make a template, and I made it just a wee bit nicer so I could post it here.
Lovely isnt it?
The basic upshot is that for desktop wallpapers (the one that shows up behind your icons) your best bet is to make a 1024×1024 image and the center 768×768 is the area that will always be visible.
Here are some examples I took, to give you an idea:
It is important to note that the iPad overlays a gradient on top of your image (as well as icon shadows), so if you want to be color-perfect then you will want to take that into account.
As for the lockscreen, it is a slightly different beast since it has the overlay bars. In portrait, you have the same 768×768 ’safe’ area in the middle, but in landscape that is chopped down to a slightly thinner slice of image:
Thats it! have fun, make some cool wallpapers!
Cheers!
-Ben
Hey, my new book is out! (actually it has been out for a few weeks now, but I am just getting around to blogging about it )
Here is the amazon link:
http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-iPhone-Games-Development-Cabrera/dp/1430225998/
Anyhow, it is a really good book, even if you are not a beginner. Here is a snippet from the promo blurb about ‘what you will learn’:
I wrote the chapters on OpenGL, so feel free to ask me any questions you might have about them )
Enjoy the book!
Cheers!
-B
It’s been a while since I’ve written a blog on what I’ve been up to. Mostly because I’ve been quite busy with all sorts of work. Thankfully the outcome of which is that I now have quite a deal of things to write about.
First to talk about are my efforts to materialize an indie game studio and to shape it into being an entity that is considered professional and not in fact an unemployed designers idea to create a job for himself.
For the last 6 weeks I’ve been attending a small business program called NEIS. NEIS is an abbreviation for New Enterprise Initiative Scheme. It’s an initiative created by the Australian federal government to help people form all walks of life to start their own small business. Whether it’s fashion, a bakery or game development. At the core of this course is you, the business hopeful sitting down and writing a detailed business plan.
This has been a fantastic experience for myself. While upon reflection it was ludicrous to go into the indie game development space without a viable business plan, I nonetheless started work on Mole last year without considering the games platform feasibility and target market. With these considerations now in mind for my new projects I know that the games I produce from here on in will be scrutinized for their financial feasibility on top of their creative merits.
The other benefit of completing NEIS is that starting from June onwards I’ll be receiving payment assistance from the government for a period of 12 months. It’s intended that I use this money to live on a baseline while I develop the games and products required to make the business self-sufficient.
Overall I’m glad that I took on the NEIS training and look forward to spending the next 12 months utilizing it’s provided resources to the fullest.
I can also say that April has really turned out to be the month of paperwork. Additionally to NEIS I submitted a funding proposal to Film Victoria for a slice of the Downloadable Games Intuitive funding pie.
From talking to those who follow the funding closely I know that Film Victoria has received dozens of applications over this round of funding. I know that competition will be high but I do nonetheless feel a sense of accomplishment over my application as I spent the time to not only explain the proposed game project itself. But to also explain how and why it can be financially viable. While my business plan doesn’t include the funding money to make my business viable, getting that funding will most definitely help my start-up to get working on a solid social-game project.
It’s interesting that both the NEIS and Film Victoria funding application came about the same time. I’ve used both to feed into each other. I hope my many hours of hard work with all this documentation pays off. I’ll find out the result of that application in July.
The last piece of news that I wanted to cover is that Mole – Quest for the Terracore gem will be going through a big art and content update very soon.
Working with Ben Britten, we want to basically reboot the release of Mole. Giving our customers and current users a free upgrade to further improve and impress reward customers.
There are a new slew of features coming to the 1.2 update of Mole. I’ll be writing up an official press release and announcement within the next couple of days. But to summarize what our customers will be receiving within he next few months:
Stay turned for more information.
And that’s basically what’s been happening in the March and April period for me. With NEIS all but wrapped up and the funding application sent out I’ll be spending the next few months rolling out the update for Mole and some other upcoming stuff.
Until next time,
Chris Watts
Last week Ben and I returned from GDC2010 in San Francisco. It was a big few days – lots of talking, demonstrating, meeting, listening and socialising. While Ben was slaving over the FishTish table during the EXPO – I was meeting King of Kong – Steve Wiebe!
Thanks to Multimedia Victoria (ICT Trade Events and Exports Assistance Program) for assisting my attendance.
The escapeFactory leaderboards and website were down from 5:56:07 PM EST until 8:20:50 PM EST tonight, which is pretty crap.
At 5:58 EST, I got an email from our webhost telling me we were using too much CPU. As they do on shared hosting, they immediately disabled (what they perceived to be) the offending script, which in our case was the entire API directory. Turns out, doing that kinda breaks the entire site.
Ben got a tip an hour into the downtime and emailed me. I missed both emails cuz I had just headed out to dinner and had my phone tucked away. I got back around 8 and restored the API directory which put the site back online immediately and resumed recording scores.
To be clear, this only affected the web server — all escapeFactory games are designed to work regardless of the reachability of our Leaderboard API. The apps themselves retain scores locally, but unfortunately all attempts to send scores up *to* our server during this time period failed and were not recorded. (More than likely it exposed some dummy code LOLcat usernames, too.)
As of today, Mole is free for the week of GDC. In Lunarpages’ world, that made us a victim of a “Sudden Burst of Popularity“, which in turn exposed my (ahem) “Badly Written Script or Plugin”.
Every API call runs a SQL query that was only a little costly at 1000 records but an utter deal-breaker at 200,000 records. It was a junior mistake on my part, and one hidden deep that would have stayed hidden except for the sudden popularity of “Mole” today. An unnecessary subquery was causing our response time to slowly creep up over time. By the time I got to it, we were averaging over 5 seconds per API call. No wonder our CPU was topping out our limit. I refactored quickly and response time per call is happily back sailing under 0.03 seconds.
At this point, everything appears to be under control. The API as a whole is really efficient, and I think we bought ourselves some time having smoked out that rude subquery.
We’re clearly on the verge of outgrowing our little experimental phase where shared hosting stops making sense, which is frankly a great problem to have.
Hi everyone!
Chris here, Game Designer at Roo Games.
I’m happy to announce a new promotion for our first title. Mole – Quest for the Terracore gem!
This promotion is called “Mole is free at GDC!”
The game developers’ conference in San Francisco is a huge event in the video game industry. For indie developers like me it’s probably the most important for the whole year.
Because of this; Roo Games, in association with the indie games portal Esc Factory will be attending GDC in full and awesome force! We want everyone we meet to play our games. and as such; Mole – Quest for the Terracore gem! will be turned from a paid app to free starting from Friday the 5th right and finishing up on Sunday the 14th of March. Anyone with an iPhone or iPod touch can get get a copy of Mole!
Mole has gotten over half a dozen reviews and has been rated on an average of around 4 out of 5 stars. While it’s proven to be a fun, unique iPhone game, not many have had the chance to play or even know anything about Mole. I want to spread the word and let anyone give Mole a go!
We’ll also be making another exciting announcement after the GDC about some new game play content updates in the pipeline for Mole!
Even if you’re not attending the GDC. I hope you’ll give Mole a go and as always don’t forget to tell us what you think about it!
Thanks for your time,
Chris Watts
Game Designer
Roo Games
Mole – Quest for the Terracore gem!
An Analysis of the first month in the app store.
I started a few months to individuals in my local industry that I would post up sales data for Mole, regardless of how good or bad it was. This article is me keeping that promise in the interests of exchanging information.
Using the same tech that posts player scores to Leaderboards from Mole to the Esc Factory website. We at Roo Games have been able to collect a series of daily metrics to help us analyse Mole on the app store.
We’ve recorded a number of statistics including:
With these statistics I’ve made a number of tables and evaluations.
Sales:
The most important question for many people reading this post will probably be. “How much money did you make?” Which is a totally reasonable question. Especially to those looking into iPhone development in Australia.
As it stands right now: After one month of being on the app store: Nothing.
I don’t have a graph for my sales data. That’s because the game hasn’t sold enough units for apple to produce monthly sales overview. [You need to earn at least $150USD in a region if that's any indication.]
Counting up the daily sales from itunes connect I would say we’ve made around 250 sales. The issue even with that number is that it’s dispersed over a dozen worldwide regions. Making any collective payment impossible until those regions individually earn the equivalent of $150USD.
This all being said: It’s sold better then a “complete failure” app. 250 sales while small, bodes much better then if we released the same and did nothing to support it.
The next few figures of data does get a bit interesting though.
Number of “Moles” out there:
The graph speaks for itself. As stated above we’ve made about 250 sales. As the start of March there are 1400 devices with some version of Mole installed.
To be clear and to define what a “device” is:
What this means is at the end of the day we made 250 sales and there’s now 1400 people who have installed Mole onto a apple mobile device. That’s is a piracy rate of about 560%. Or 5 1/2 games downloaded illegally for every 1 sold. This doesn’t factor multi device users though.
I wont waffle on piracy to much because pirates aren’t really potential customers to a game like Mole so if they do effect sales it’s an effect we can’t control directly. Still it’s disheartening to search my game on google and have a few of the first links be pirate download sites.
Although 1400 have played mole. Not to bad.
Unique App launches:
This graph shows the number of unique app launches per day. This means when Mole is accessed but doesn’t cover the app being opened multiple times. [That number ranges from 3000 a day to 200 a day.]
At the highest point we where getting Mole played on 350 devices in one day. Low point rests around 50 unique devices in one day.
On an average day we’ll sell 4-6 copies of Mole over multiple regions. On a bad day we’ll probably sell 1 in england or the USA.
The big spike in the graph:
At this point you’re probably wondering what created the drastic spike of popularity on the 8th of February.
That was the day our game was reviewed on gamesuncovered.com There review alone pushed the game out of the category of complete failure. While to the time of this post we’ve had a total of 8 reviews. 5 of them being online English. 2 in different languages and 1 in a newspaper article, none of the other reviews have drastically boosted sales or popularity and have only contributed to a handful of sales and minor increase of unique device downloads.
Reviews and their impact:
We’ve gotten around 8 reviews on Mole so far. All of them positive and ranking the game from 4 out of 5 to 5 out of 5 stars. Safe to say anyone who plays Mole enjoys it.
Critically Mole has done well for itself. But taking the stats above onboard I would argue that critical success has only a minor part to do with sales and popularity. There’s much more going on to the apps consumer placement and promotion.
The most saddening thing for me is just how little in effect most review sites have to your game. Most iPhone game/review sites just don’t carry a big enough online traffic population to make that review transfer into sales. Not individually at any means. While every positive review helps to sell the product and the companies skill competence. It seems that unless your game has a review on the small handful very, very popular review sites like Touch-Arcade or Games Uncovered. Most reviews doesn’t transfer to money. Not in our case at least.
Why did we fail?
I think most importantly we failed to promote the game before it’s release. Review requests where sent out the day we got our promo codes and that was on the release date. Giving the promotional machine no time or warning for Mole. We have gotten requests for reviews from sites once the game was out. So the possible interest isn’t imaginary.
The game was also unplayable for the first 24 hours in store. We had to take if off market. Update and fix it. That took 5 days. I can’t determine what effect this had on our game.
The most important element: As in THE factor that makes or brakes a game on this platform is to get it featured by Apple in some capacity. Whether in the “What’s hot” or any other section on the itunes/app store.
Unfortunately there’s no proven step by step way to do that. Obviously Apple wont feature poor quality apps but your game needs to be just what they want advertised on the App store. There is a key to success to be found in that and I have a few ideas but nothing conclusive or quotable.
The game itself is a solid experience. Weaknesses include artwork that while good is not to the level of quality seen in publisher backed games. [We couldn't pay an artist though. So that's a losing battle.] Mole is also a short game coming in at 2 hours of average playtime.
What will we do now?
Mole isn’t a bad game. We stand by that the gameplay is solid and the game as a package is well worth it’s cost. [And reviewers both professional and on the app store agree.] What we now plan to do is improve upon it. Update and continue to promote it.
Over the next few months we plan to:
My conclusion:
It’s always easy to blame the small sales of Mole on factors like market over-saturation and piracy. But the fact of the matter is that while we made a solid game for the iPhone it didn’t reach the expectation of those who guard the gates to mass promotion. That being Apple and popular review sites like Touch Arcade. Although the review at Games Uncovered was a fantastic buzz.
Fortunately. We’re an indie studio and our product is digital. Updating the game to bring it up to the expectations of those gatekeepers is a viable option. We’ve found that the public love playing Mole. It’s now a case of letting them know about it through promotion.
Thanks for reading.
Chris Watts
Roo Games
escapeFactory is an international alliance of creative geeks here to help you mentally escape from daily stress, long lines, boring meetings, your cube, cramped airplanes, and weird strangers.
It is a collaboration between a developer: Ben Britten, some composers: FatLab Music, a writer: 3000 Words, and some artists: the Lycette Bros. We make games.
If you have technical questions about the specific games, contact Ben: support@benbritten.com
If you have questions about the website, contact Brent: brent@fatlabmusic.com
© 2010 escapeFactory
