Exbleative – Page 6 – Australian Indie Game Developer

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Unknown Orbit Post Release Wrap-Up

December 10, 2012 / Jay / Comments Off

Unknown Orbit went live 1 week ago, and my trigger finger is sore from pressing refresh on AppFigures, Twitter, and Google. I’ve gone from being very disheartened on release day, with none of my planned reviews going live, to unbelievably stoked that I got a video review by the one and only Touch Arcade! The video was mixed but mostly positive, and it was a shame that the guy playing it wasn’t the greatest at it, but seeing that video was one of the biggest professional thrills of my career. Its amazing how much importance I (developers in general?) place on these reviews. I could pretty much die happy after seeing it! If I ever got featured by Apple, I think I would explode! Having gotten that review plus one on 148 and AppAdvice, I’m now pretty happy that I’ve gone almost as far as I possibly can with promoting the game. Hopefully I’ll see a few more reviews spawn from the TA/148/AppAdvice ones, but chances are this is probably as good as it gets.

Reviews
Here’s the three reviews:

148Apps: http://www.148apps.com/reviews/unknown-orbit-review/
AppAdvice: http://appadvice.com/review/unknownorbit
TouchArcade:

The 3 reviews, plus a prmac press release, some twitter, reddit and facebook managed to keep UO around the 125 ranking mark in the app store (for iPad/iPhone Arcade/Action) for the whole week, and sales have been ok, but nothing to shout about. If this is my initial sales spike, and I’m about to fall off a cliff, I’ll be making $1 a day soon :) I’ll post a graph maybe in a week or so, so that there’s some decent data to look at. Even getting reviewed by all the big sites doesn’t seem to have that big an effect, but my greatest hope now is that because I’ve gotten on those sites, I now may get noticed and featured by Apple in some way. I’m prepping my Featured artwork now, just in case!

Unknown Orbit Response/Feedback
Feedback on the game itself has mostly been mixed, and I’d summarize that most people think that the concept, visuals, sound, music, and atmosphere are good/great, but the game lacks a little something in terms of goals, fun, progression and content. Namely more planets, which is one of the hardest things for me to add due to the hardware/loading times. I’m now thinking about what I can do in this regard, and whether its even possible to do an update where I remove support for older phones (as load times for the planet on 3gs/iPhone 4 is a huge 35-40secs). I’m going to look into potentially procedurally generating planets/systems as well – I like the idea of having a different system each time, but procedural generation can be quite tricky. I spent a long time hand making this one planet, however I did begin with mostly random perlin noise type setups, which played well too. This would be quite a task, so I’d have to decide whether the game is really doing well enough to justify it.

UO Release Date
I chose to release UO on the Tuesday for a couple of reasons, a) because I figured most developers like Thursday, and I didn’t want to compete with them at this time of year, and b) Press have more time to get onto the game, and during a more quiet time of the week. This certainly seemed to work well with TA reviewing me on Friday, right before the weekend, but who knows if they just planned to do the review at that time anyway *shrug*. I certainly failed to “get all the reviews out on the same day” as seems the classic strategy. At the end of the day you have no control over this, and just have to hope for the best. I imagine the better your game, the more likely you’ll get it featured/reviewed closer to your release date.

Gamasutra Article
I also managed to get an article published on Gamasutra called “Suck at Coding, But Make Games Anyway“, which has gone over well. Whether this had much/anything to do with getting some of the reviews, or helped my rankings, I’m not sure. It was published the day after the game went live on Wednesday. I then posted it on Reddit, which seemed rather popular too. Reddit is my new favourite site for just about everything!

Problems
There wasn’t much in the way of problems – probably the only thing that’s gone a little awry is that I had to use my company, Hyperfocal Design, to publish the game (long story, I’m in London, company is Australian, couldn’t form a new company…) so I just had to use it and say it was developed by Exbleative. Most people reported that the game was made by Hyperfocal, because that’s how it appears on the app store.

End!
Looking at my current ranking on Monday night GMT, it seems I’m still up around the 150 ranking mark (iPad/Aracade) in the US app store, which is nice considering I don’t think any major press has done features in the last couple days. If I could carry on making $30-50 a day or so, then that’d be a nice additional income stream.

Next?
I’m thinking a lot about what game/update I’d like to do next. Its also coming up on Christmas/New Year, and I’m moving back to Australia in mid January, so I doubt I’ll get a huge amount done before then. I’ll be talking to some people about the procedural generation stuff, brainstorming new ideas, and eating XMas turkey. I’m glad I got this thing out before Christmas, its a load off!

Thanks for everyone who helped me with the game, reviewed or chatted with me on the forums.

Also a big thanks to this guy on the UK app store for this thoughtful and hilarious review. I’ll end with it, for the lols:

You lot should thank me for buying this before you
by Stumpyjay on Friday, December 07 2012 version 1.0

“69p is way too much for this catastrophe of a game. Trust me shoemaker levy 9 moved better than this rubbish after it had smashed into jupiter. I just wish it had taken this tripe with it. Utter drivel. If i see 1 more negative review then you should really read reviews first you idiot and it serves you right. 69p is all this guy should ever make from this tripe. The other review is obviously fake”

Unknown Orbit is now live!

December 4, 2012 / Jay / Comments Off

UO is now live on the app store across the world!

Check it out on iTunes here.

I have sent out a press release via PRMac, and I believe I will get a couple of reviews from some big name sites as well, but I wont hold my breath until they actually appear! I’m going to now do a little more promotion on Reddit and Twitter, some token Facebook ads and then I’m finished fo’ realz. Or at least until a future update!

I’ve also been been talking to Gamasutra about an article on making games with no code (how Unknown Orbit was made), so that may appear soon. If not I’ll be posting it here.

Cross your fingers for me, and please lend a hand if you can by sharing/retweeting, etc!

Regards,

Jay

Unknown Orbit, Complete!

November 19, 2012 / Jay / Comments Off

I’m now days away from submitting to the app store, after a year of developing Unknown Orbit, I’m super excited/terrified/(?) to see how it goes. I feel like I’ve ticked all the boxes in terms of marketing, screenshots, trailers, press packs etc, I like the icon I’ve developed and I quite like the game I’ve made, so I like my chances of it doing at least reasonably well.

I actually feel like UO is the first game I’ve ever made. While I have worked with other people on games before, this is the first game that I conceived of, prototyped, then created all on my own. When I was a game designer with Ratbag, I recreated stock car racing rules, and then worked on a game design for a GTA/Mad Max style game which was never finished, and barely started. At Binary Space, I was never happy with how much gameplay we put in to the zombie games, and I was reliant on Saxon, my programming/biz partner to implement things. We also often disagreed about what features should go in, and being part time, many of my plans for the game just never made it in. So again, this feels like its ‘all me’, which is sort of scary… unless it’s a huge hit, in which case I will do an extravagant dance.

The game is probably 90% of what I wanted it to be. That 10% is probably half due to technical limitations and half lack of time, skills and resources. I imagine this is true for most games, though, and if things go well I’ll certainly be investigating updates or sequels.

Right now I’m waiting for Apple to change my account from an individual to a company. It will change from Jay Weston to Hyperfocal Design (my texture/hdri company), unfortunately I can’t use a trade name (Exbleative) nor do I want to form another pty ltd company, so I felt like this was the only option. Luckily Hyperfocal’s name somewhat translates well to games, and hopefully there isn’t much confusion as I try to promote the game under the Exbleative name!

Once I’m set to go with Hyperfocal, it’ll be one release candidate round on Testflight for super-final-for-realz testing, then I’ll submit and lose around 1 weeks worth of sleep.

Cross your fingers for me that some press like the game and review it!

Cheers,
Jay

Admiring Hotline Miami

November 10, 2012 / Jay / Comments Off

Thought I’d write a quick post on this most standout indie game. I’m planning on writing a bit more in the coming months about other games, some critiques, some reviews, some gushing “omg that’s the best thing I’ve ever seen” type of blabber. So here comes the first one:

I have to admit, I didn’t always think this looked all that hot – I saw some gameplay at Rezzed and wrote it off as ‘yet another pixel art shooter’. Then I saw it got best at show. “Judges are so easily pleased I guess” I mused to my superior taste wielding self(?) But my interest was piqued and I started to learn a little more. I still wasn’t too sold, the gameplay looked cool but still, it looked like just another violent top down shooter of some kind, and these days I grow ever more tired of the same old stuff (or so I tell myself).

Then I played it at Eurogamer, finally. I actually played it twice – first time I didn’t even bother putting on headphones, and I picked up where someone else left off. I think they were a ways through and I had no tutorial to help me out, so I was killed so, many, times. I had only just got to Eurogamer so I got up and played some other games.

I returned again after seeing everything else, determined to give it one last “proper chance”, with head phones on, from the beginning. This made all the difference – I was quickly transported into Hotline’s psychadelic, dream-like world. I wanted to know who I was, who was I talking to, and the story sucked me in. The music, the sound, the graphical style and the writing is all art, and of course the face-stomping violence sets it all off. And then there’s the masks, each one its own lovingly crafted, horror-weird item seamlessly blending Hotline’s style with some great gameplay choices.

One of the things I admire the most about Miami is the way it almost naturally markets itself. It’s not just another pixel art game with the same old look – the colours, effects, character/mask styling all put it into its own category. The 80’s/hotline/miami words conjure up that place in time, describes the story and at the same time creates its own droolworthy little marketing angles that Devolver/Dennaton (they seem like old childhood friends?) have polished to a shine. 1800 numbers on its website, glorious 80’s colours, and lately even some live action trailers. How can you go wrong? The game and theme both do sell themselves, but then they are pushed so much farther! It even feels a little like the developers and the game itself have some mystery surrounding them. You don’t just get a feature list on the website, they give you a splattering of weird game themed stuff and a trailer, and even their blog is a little that way, its all… very strange.

I highly recommend you pick this game up, install, turn off the lights and stick on your headphones, loud! It’s currently on Steam right hither: http://store.steampowered.com/app/219150/

Thanks Hotline Miami, for teaching me I’m not yet above “generic top down shooters” or games with violence (lots and lots of it). But then, that’s not all the game is :)