Mole – Quest for the Terracore gem!

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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:

• Number of total game launches per day.
• Number of total unique devices launching Mole per day.
• Total number of devices with Mole installed.

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:

• iPhone or iPod Touch
• 1 Purchase can be propagated over multiple owned devices if the account holder owns them.

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:

• “We <3 GDC” promotion. From March: Friday the 5th to Sunday the 14th we’ll be showing off Mole at the Unity Booth at GDC and more importantly be letting people download the game for free during that period.
• Reviews: We’ll continue to work to get some solid reviews for Mole.
• Lite version: After GDC we’ll be releasing a lite version. Letting the player experience the game up until a point.
• Update: After GDC we’ll be spending some time into updating Mole to give our existing and potential player base new features and more content to bring Mole up as a stronger game and more entertaining experience.
• Facebook: We’ll be releasing a free version of Mole on Facebook to promote the iPhone version.

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

It’s been a busy few months working on these new games, but they’re coming together nicely and will be ready to show off soon (maybe at GDC!).

Lycette Bros. secured some investment funding from Film Victoria’s Digital Media Fund, to produce some prototype games, and this is a sneak peak.

Mark and I came up with the ideas and designed the gameplay and visual design, Ben developed the games and of course helped refine any usability and gameplay issues. Brent and Ben have also implemented some of the aspects of the escapeFactory API along the way.

Skate Dude and BMX Dude are the big brothers of Snow Dude, but with more tricks, levels and global leaderboards – as requested.

Steam Pilot is a game of skill where you navigate yourself above the rooftops in the fastest time possible, not so easy when your craft is a steam powered balloon with mechanical feet!

And Gooey – which is just a bit of gooey fun!

It has been a very busy few months.

I started on “Mole – The Quest for the Terracore Gem” last october. Chris (the designer) and I worked hard on a prototype that we got out in about three weeks. We submitted that to the Muse games contest as well as the GDAA indie game contest at GCAP 2009.

Originally we were slated to do an iPhone release in mid December 2009, but since we got picked as a finalist for the GDAA Indie game contest, we decided to focus on polishing a desktop version that we could show off at the conference. This paid off huge in terms of really good gameplay additions as well as some invaluable data collected watching people play the game at GCAP. We took all of that information and updated the gameplay to make it even better and also spent a few weeks getting it running on the iPhone. After a good bit of external beta in mid January, we released it to the app store in early Feb.

Unfortunately somewhere in the final frenzy to get the game out the door one of the meta data files got overwritten with an older version. We built that into the version 1.0 release and pushed it to the store.

UNfortunately that little thing caused the game to go looking for some resources that no longer existed at the end of a level and was causing crashes. I hate crashes. As soon as we found out about the crashing bug we pulled the app from the store and pushed up a fixed binary. We had some great help from some of the touch arcade forum regulars who notified us of the bug right away, so thanks to them we were able to pull it so quickly and get the fix out straight away!

Although the initial app was approved in about 2 days, the fix took about a week to get through the process (still way faster than last year, so: yay Apple!).

In any case, Mole is out now, and we have had a great response to it.

Just a few weeks after I started dev on Mole, I was approached by Tin Man Games to take over the Gamebook Adventure development.

This turned out to be a much larger job than I had originally anticipated and it took about a month longer than we had hoped. However, the final product is really great. The time we spent to make sure the game was polished and performed well really paid off. There are a few bugs in this first release and we are working on a fix for them right now.
We have had some good press coverage for GA:

PocketGamer UK review
TouchArcade Review

Next up! We are looking to finish a handful smaller more casual titles that we have had in production for awhile now, SkateDude and BMXDude are at the top of this list as well as a couple new games called ‘Steam Pilot’ and ‘Gooey’ that I will post about later.

Cheers!
-Ben

Hey guys,

Sorry I haven’t posted in a while. I’ve been working lots which, as a freelancer, I really can’t complain about, but I do anyway.

Most recently I’ve been promoting the National Geographic Channel series Taboo, http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/series/taboo

producing a series of PSAs about railway safety for Operation Lifesaver,

http://3000words.com/PSAs.html

and writing a Choose Your Own Adventure iPhone game for the GA series.

Of course, through all of this, I have found plenty of time to play some new games.

The iPhone Sol Free Baker’s Game seems to continue its hold on me. I don’t know why, other than the fact that it has the strategic yet mindless quality necessary for my longer-lasting game affairs.

Canabalt was doing it for me for a while, but I’m sort of over it by now. It’s a little too monotonous to continue to hold my attention.

I’ve been reading the Gamebook Adventures’ An Assassin in Orlandes (programmed by our own Ben B.). I’m really digging the well-written story lines and how they’ve optimized the choose your own adventure reading experience by adding features you could only get on the iPhone. For example, if you encounter a locked door and your path hasn’t brought you through finding the key, it’s literally locked and you can’t choose that path. Very cool.

I also recently downloaded Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee onto our PS3. I played it a bit when it was first out, so I’ve been poking around in it. The whole thing is undeniably cute, and maybe I’ll spend a little time trying to crack this one.

But for right now, it’s Mole all the way.  This game also has that elusive mix of mindless strategy and I find myself sucked into playing it often.  Plus it was programmed Ben B. and the music was composed by Brent L, both escFactory boys.

If you take from this that I’m a casual gamer, you would be correct. But I have been playing video games since I was a kid. And, since I have your attention, and I’ve discovered that many of my favorite old games have videos on YouTube, I’d like to reminisce… come on, you kids at least owe grandma that!

My dad let me play his Atari when I was a kid.  Outlaw was my favorite.

Yeah… that was pretty much all it was. But it is important to keep in mind that I was little… like four years old. And Night Driver was way beyond me. That paddle controller, I feel that they use the term “controller” loosely, was impossible for me to use.

As I got older and my dad gave away the Atari (I’m still miffed at him about that) I graduated up to computer games. Apogee was my best friend and with titles like Duke Nukem

and my absolute favorite of all time

Commander Keen, which I followed all the way from version 1

through “Keen Dreams” which I think is sorta version 4.5

And, by the way, yes I am totally a fan of Commander Keen on Facebook.

I also remember my sister and I taking turns playing Laura Bow. I don’t really remember too much about it other than getting really creeped out at ghosts rising from the dead in the cemetery, but really, how can you not love a game when you can get naked and things like this can happen to you:

What did you like to play ‘way back when’?

Things have been quiet on the blog here, but there is plenty going on — and a few announcements are imminent, too. I thought I would get out ahead of those and give an update on the development of our website backend and custom leaderboard API.

History

The idea for this site grew out of the work Ben and I did to give Snowferno online leaderboards. Snowferno.com was both our promotional site for the game and also the online home of users’ leaderboard scores. I wrote a custom API that allowed Ben and I to securely transmit information between Snowferno and our webserver.

Why write a custom API when so many leaderboards existed already? Well, being our first iPhone app, we didn’t want to commit to any 3rd-party leaderboard frameworks yet. I’m pretty sure a bunch weren’t even compatible with Unity3D for iPhone at the time. So rather than complicate our development, we designed a system that required only simple Unity3D WWW calls. With that, we were able to register an app launch and transmit scoring data to and from our online database.

After Snowferno launched, Ben and the Lycette Bros. started on a few follow-up ‘Dude companions to Snow Dude. The original didn’t have an online leaderboard, but they wanted something implemented in the sequels. Ben suggested we broaden the scope of our Snowferno API into one that multiple apps could use. At the same time, all of us original escapeFactory devs — Ben, FatLab Music, the Lycette Bros., and 3000 Words — were starting this site, so it made sense that our new multi-app Snowferno API should also become a part of the escapeFactory.

Design Goals

• Cross-platform: The API must integrate into any development platform without the inclusion of external frameworks. The maximum requirement must be that it can call a web URL and receive a HTTP response.
• Backward-compatibile: The API must always receive API calls from and send responses to apps once they are released, translating if needed as the API matures.
• Autonomous: Front-facing pages may piggyback on a CMS/blog framework, but all ties between the API Core must be contained within a single host-compatible “wrapper” plugin. Whenever possible, the API should recognize and behave properly on all app release platforms rather than impose compatibility requirements on any specific platform.
• Secure: Only authorized apps may communicate with the API. All incoming data must be securely signed.
• Modular: The default front-facing pages must be customizable per-app. Scoring metrics must be extensible per-app to allow multiple dimensions.
• Promotional: API and Core should serve to encourage visibility across the whole escapeFactory family of apps.

Features (as of current release v0.6)

• Site-wide app settings:
  • Toggle site-wide visibility of an app with public/private switch
  • Date-sensitive app releases
  • Toggle visibility of leaderboard pages per-app with on/off switch
  • Centralized fields to store current app price, icon image source, screenshot image sources, and iTunes App Store ID
• Statistics:
  • Total app launches and total unique devices by version per day
  • Total user install base
  • Aggregate average & median scoring trends by level
  • Aggregate achievement progress
• Leaderboard template system:
  • MVC-style modular views to allow per-app customization of leaderboard pages
• WordPress-specific shortcodes:
  • Gives site editors access to output custom data within the site-building features of WordPress without having to expose PHP functions
  • Output an app store URL w/optional affiliate encoding
  • Output a uniform product page block of HTML displaying app icon, screenshots, price, and app store links — for use in a WordPress Page
  • Output a Unity Web Player to enable play of an online version of an app
• m.escfactory.com:
  • lightweight, touch-friendly directory of the escapeFactory family of apps. Intended to be displayed in-app as cross-promotional tool
• API calls:
  • App Launch: register an app launch and update the app with current online data relevant to that user
  • Scores: record online scores and other gameplay metrics and provide the app with realtime high-score updates
  • Achievements: record online when pre-defined tasks are achieved
  • Twitter: post tweets to a user’s account, with app hashtags and custom shortened url to user’s leaderboard pages
  • Account Management: associate a user’s device with the WordPress user registration system, manage Twitter OAuth tokens and other account settings

Tools

Web Frameworks & Services
WordPress – VibrantCMS by WooThemes – jQuery – galleria – jQTouch – Random.org HTTP Interface – Twitter-async

Promotion & Marketing
ShareThis – YOURLs URL shortener – Google Analytics

Coding & Project Management
Basecamp – NetBeans/TextMate/Transmit – Beanstalk

Going Forward

The Lycette Bros.’ upcoming ‘Dudes and the soon-to-be-released Mole from Roo Games have been solely responsible for pushing me to get the escapeFactory API and Core this far. Many more new features are already on my todo lists — some you’ll see and some only we’ll notice.

Mole introduced our first online, “Play Now” version of an app, and we have big plans for doing more with Unity Web Player. Also, look for a Snowferno update that will utilize the new escapeFactory API features (ahem, tweets). And when the time is right, we’ll be bringing its leaderboard pages over to this site as well.

And of course, more great new games. Stay tuned.

Tin Man and I just finished making the teaser trailer for the upcoming Gamebook Adventure release: An Assassin in Orlandes. It is pretty cool, check it out:

Assassin in Orlandes is nearly finished, we are planning for an early January submission to the App Store, so look for it in mid to late January!

Cheers!
-B

Chris and I just got back from the Global Connect Asia Pacific game dev conference here in Melbourne. We entered Mole into the GDAA Independent Games Awards 2009 and got selected as one of the finalists.

As a GDAA finalist we were invited to put up a table and show off our game at the conference. Chris whipped up a few posters and I grabbed a couple of the stray laptops that I have laying around and we hit the expo.



GCAP is not a gamer expo, it is a game developer expo, so all the people there are somehow involved in the creation of games. Over the two day expo, we spoke to a zillion talented and creative people and they all played Mole, and let us know what they think.

The response was overwhelmingly positive. We had people coming back two and three times to just sit and play Mole during the downtimes. We had people who just sat down to have a quick look end up staying for 30 minutes trying to dig deeper and deeper.

Best of all however was the ability to watch people play the game. We spent a huge amount of time before the conference making sure that the core game play was solid and that the game was fun, and we were richly rewarded for that effort. However, watching people play the game highlighted the areas of the user interface that were lacking. It made apparent the places where we need to change the words on the menus or add new buttons. For instance, when you go to the upgrade shop from the end-of-dig scorecard, it is not at all obvious how to get back. Similarly, when people play it for the very first time, they run out of air and get back to the surface and don’t realize that they need to hit the ‘finish digging’ button to end the dig so they can start a new one. We even found a few gameplay bugs that we will iron out.

We are currently going through and tweaking all these little bits and pieces to try to hone the user experience before we release it to the app store. But we want people to play the game so I have put up the GCAP version online so that anyone can play it for free.

If you are into it: head over to the Mole page and hit the ‘play now’ link. You will need the Unity3d player, and you can get it from the game page.

We are planning on keeping the online version free to use, and we will be updating it alongside the iPhone version, so if you come back and notice some new tweaks here and there, that is why.

We love to hear what you have to say about the game, so send me an email, or leave a comment here!

While Ben is writing chapters for iPhone publications! – I’m pleased to say that we (Lycette Bros) finally got hold of a copy of a book that we have some work featured in – Animation in Process. It’s a beautiful book containing interviews with animators and many lovely images explaining their processes and of course the final works. We’re very pleased to be included in a book with so many inspirational animators we hold in high regard.

It all came about some years ago, when we were approached by the writer, Andrew Selby, after seeing some of our work at the Platform International Animation Festival in Portland. Of particular interest to him was some of the work we had produced for the small screen environment – namely mobile phones. At that stage we’d been producing animated video ringtones for the Japanese market and also some Flash-lite “apps” for the few handsets that supported it. We’re so relieved that Apple took it upon themselves to redefine the mobile device!

Get your copy of “Snowferno” now for a limited time for only $0.99 US!

Read more about Snowferno on snowferno.com or go to the app right now:

More good news! A few weeks ago, I was approached by Tin Man Games to see if I was interested in helping them bring their GameBook Adventures to the iPhone. I am very happy to announce that earlier this week, I took over as the lead developer on the GameBook project.

The first two books are titled: “An Assassin in Orlandes” and ” The Siege of the Necromancer”.

If you like adventures and you can read, then you will like these gamebooks.

As a side note: Tin Man Games is running a promo right now that if they get a few hundred new twitter followers then they will make one of their games free on the AppStore. so go and follow @tinmangames.

(while you are at it, follow me too: @benbritten )

Cheers!
-Ben