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: