Brief update

So it's been over a month since Gunman Clives release. The response have been increadibly positive and the sales have been better than I dared hope for (though still not enough to make me rich or even particularly well paid).

Here's a few of the reviews:
Eurogamer
TouchArcade
ifanzine
Pocket Gamer
Swedroid (Swedish)

I've been meaning to get started on my next game for a while now but I have trouble finding the motivation and getting into the right spirit. I did a few rendering experiments but they turned out rather crappy. After Gunman Clive I'm feeling quite some pressure to deliver another unique stylish look for my next game; and it also needs to be something production effecient and not too GPU heavy to run on weaker devices. No small feat, but I'm trying not to worry too much about it.

Finally

Gunman Clive is now released for iOS and Android (might still be a few hours before it's available on the American AppStore)

iTunes

Google Play

Soon...

I finally submitted Gunman Clive for apple review yesterday, so it won't be long now. The Android version is pretty much done as well; I'll just need to move over the final tweaks I've made, but I'll hold onto it until I can release it on both platforms simultaneously. So next week I'll try to get started on the PC (and possibly Mac) version, but that won't be released until a short while after. I'm not sure how much work that needs to be done on the PC version, the main thing is to add proper PC-centric video options and save functions and replace FMOD with something that doesn't cost money, and of course make sure it runs on a wide range of systems. I'm also thinking of replacing some of the objects with more highpoly versions, but only if I can make it look good with some basic smoothing operation, I don't want to spend a lot of time reworking the graphics.

GMC trailer

I've been working on a trailer for the last two days. I had to rush it a bit in hopes of getting it on Sony Mobiles GDC reel (which I still don't know if it will be). The one I sent off to them didn't have the captions though. I have a feeling they don't really portray the game in the best possible light but I got bored with trying to make up impressive sounding selling points. The trailer is still work in progress though; I'm not sure if I'll keep the captions and I also have too work a bit more on the timing and stuff before I send it out to any big sites.

Gunman Clive

Unless I change my mind very soon this will be the official title of my new game. Still not really sure about the name but it's the best I've got. I had a few rather lame alternatives and then I got the idea to keep the GMC abbreviation somehow, and the first thing that popped into my head was Gunman Clive and somehow it stuck (and yes I know that's technically just GC, not GMC, but whatever).

Bionic cowboy

I ran out of ideas for bosses a bit and resorted to stealing some ideas from old games, and this idea came pretty natural for some reason. It was pretty fun to make this boss though. Although I'm fairly familiar with coding characters with bionic arms it was pretty fun to make the animations for such a character, having been in charge of implementing someone elses swing-animations in the past. And while his moveset is pretty much stolen from bionic commando it was interesting trying to make a boss pattern out of it. I kind of want to make him playable though...

Gameboy shading

I was a bit bored and didn't feel like starting coding menues today so I played around a bit with my post effects just for fun. Just had to tweak some colours and change a texture to get this effect. I tried rendering it in lower resolution as well to get it more pixelperfect but it just looked worse

Pompadour

Another short video of GMC. This is the first boss in the game. He has a pretty simple behaviour but can still be quite hard to defeat.

Horsies

Short video of an enemy I've just finnished working on.
Gameplay wise it's extremely basic but the art and animation took two days to make. I messed up the proportions a bit and had to do my best to salvage it after the animations were already halfways done. I think it turned out decent in the end.

GMC gameplay video

Made a quick fraps video of GMC, showing the beginning of Level 1 and the basic gameplay and showing of the artstyle



Development is going pretty well right now, though I'm getting tired of doing leveldesign. I might upload some more videos, showing some more interesting gameplay in the near future

Finally getting started on GMC

So I've tried applying the rendering technique to GMC. Maybe I'm just crazy but I really like the style and I think I'm finally on track to get started on the game properly. I'm changing the plan a bit and I'm going to give the western theme a bit more focus han I previously intended, and have bandits as enemies instead of robots (though maybe some robots will pop up as well). Having more human enemies will probably change the gameplay a bit as well, but I'll still try have it as MegaMan-like as possible with lots of small simple enemies.

Also got it running on Android now. The post effect that's blurring the colours on the character might be a bit too demanding, and I'm not sure how much it really adds. I like it though. I get 30 fps on my Xperia PLAY, so it's probably ridiculously slow on weaker phones. Then again that phone will be about a year old by the time the game is finnished so maybe it's OK. I'm thinking of making it possible to turn of the post effects; but I have to see how much extra work that will be. I'll have to have two sets of shaders for everything in that case, as everything would work a bit different without the post effect.

Btw, what you see in the screenshot is some really old content that I've tweaked a bit. When I first started working on GMC ages ago, before releasing the Wii Homebrew version with the GreenHillZone-like environment, I tried making a train level but could never get it look remotely decent and gave up. I thought it fit the theme quite well and I don't really need much textures with this style so I tried reviving it.

More rendering tomfoolery

I was playing around a bit with the old rendering demo from my last post and accidentally spawned in the character from project GMC (who I suddenly turned into a cowboy a few weeks ago) without proper textures adapted for this rendering technique, and I absolutely love the result. The thing is, he's supposed to have two textures, one colour texture and one with some details that gets rendered along with the shading and outlines. But he's using his standard texture for the details, which just turned into massive areas of solid shading and for the colour texture he just got whatever texture was used last. In this case it's the texture for the tree trunk which turned him all brown; he also looked quite dashing when he was all green. I've tweaked the texture a bit to make some more details standout before I took the screenshot though.

The look reminds me of something but I can't quite place it. I think it looks a lot better than when I tried doing proper colouring, and somehow it just feels right with the cowboy motif as well.

I'm considering if I should just go ahead and change Project GMC to this style. I'm thinking very sparse environment art that are just outlines with some sketch shading and enemies in this style with just one colour. I'd have to rethink a lot of things, but I'm pretty much stuck anyway and have a hard time finding an identity for the game. This would certainly give it a unique style and it would most likely speed up content creation considerably, but I'm not sure I'd be able to use much of what I have so far, and I don't know how much variation I can make in this style.

I still have to try running it on phones though. It needs to render to a couple of different framebuffers and do some blurring and stuff, which seemed quite slow last time I tried to do stuff like that on iPhone and Xperia.

Old rendering demo

Found this old thing lying around on my computer and thought it was pretty neat. I made this about two years ago I think. It's meant to look like some kind of water colour + felt pen illustration. I was considering making some kind of artsy adventure game with this type of graphics, but it never amounted to anything. Maybe I should try to see if I can get it to work on GLES and do something small for iPhone/Android.

I'd need to tweak the effect a bit and have some better suited models for the artstyle though. The effect is done by rendering the scene twice, once with colours and once with outlines and shading. The colour texture is blured and distorted a bit to make to colours float outside the outlines slightly. And the sketch shading is of course done by overlaying a texture with a bunch of lines on all the shaded parts, and offsetting it every few frames to make it look less static

(Btw, I reccommend watching it in fullscreen and HD, the effect is pretty hard to make out in the small embedded window)

And now something completely different

Just realised that I have just been whining for the last few posts, and that's getting a bit tiresome. So here's something awesome and completely unrelated instead. People in freaky costumes playing sweet Dragon Quest music; what could be better?

Time to move on

So over a months has passed since I released Helium Boy and I still haven't gotten started on my next game and the sales are really awful. The brief upswing I mentioned in my last post didn't last long and now it's down to just a couple of units per day. I tried having a free weekend last week and got over 50 000 downloads. It only lead to a dozen or so extra sales the day after though, and people also discovered a rather serious bug that meant it would not run on iPad for some people so I got a bunch of negative reviews. Unfourtunately I have no way of really testing the bug as everyone I know with an iPad are able to run it just fine. I've also just gotten the game to be featured in the Xperia Play Recommender which was a longer process than I had expected and I'm not sure if it will pay off. Haven't noticed any effect at all yet.

I've been meaning to make a Lite version for iOS but I just can't decide the right balance of content between the Lite and the full version; having two few levels in it will probably seem cheap, but having too many means that there's not that much extra to put in the full version, which will make it seem like a ripoff, and there's also good chance people won't finish the levels in the Lite version and won't ever need to get the Full one. Maybe I should just put everything in the Lite version and have Ads be the only difference, though I'm really not sure how effective that would be.

Apart from worrying about sales and bugs I've been trying to enjoy some time off. I've played through Catherine and put over 70 hours into Xenoblade Chronicles; might post some opinions about them sometime later. But it's really about time to get started on something new now. Don't feel very motivated though and not really keen on either of the projects I've started on right now, but I guess starting another one wouldn't be a very good idea either.

More sales talk

After my last post the sales have slowly started going up on a bit iPhone. But now I'm freaking out because I just can't figure out what caused the bump, or if I can count on it continuing.

At first it seemed like nothing I did helped at all. I joined Twitter and some retweeting group; posted a press release on prmac which got copy pasted all over the internet; the trailer got posted on gametrailers and I finally got a somewhat positive professional review. But all it did was to keep the sales at a somewhat steady 10 units a day for a while (it sold a whooping 14 units on launch day). It was only a few days later it started going up, going from 10 a day to 20 > 50 > 50 > 80 > 75.

The last bump could possibly be explained by the release of an update (though I'm not sure how that would actually affect anything, as I was mistaken in thinking updates would appear on the release list in the AppStore). I can't find anything new written about it on the internet, or even any new user reviews, and I doubt it has made any toplists or gotten featured by apple. The sales seem to be fairly evenly distributed wordwide as well.

I don't really understand how the App Store works; how do people find games outside the toplists? Is it normal to get random sales bumps? Or can I actually expect for the baseline to continue at 50-80 a day? Even though it's still not much (especially with the crazy swedish taxes) I could make a meager living if those sales continue and then hope to increase my income after a few more games, but with any less than that it seems a bit hopeless.

Helium BOMBA

It's been a very frustrating week. I've tried my best to pimp Helium Boy online, I've posted on a couple of forums, sent out promo codes to a bunch of review sites as well as random people to get user reviews, I've joined twitter and some indie retweet group, gotten the trailer up on GT and paid good money for a press release. But the game has still barely managed to catch up to Trouser Troubles first day sales on iPhone, despite being a considerably less crappy game, and those sales weren't exactly spectacular either.

Things have been even worse on the android side. I released a demo but it didn't spur sales at all and even the free demo has only gotten 400 downloads in four days. The new Andriod Market means I can't rely on updates to get attention anymore so I'm guessing the money I get from there will almost completely stop before long.

All in all it's starting to look a lot harder to make a living off iPhone/Android apps than I previously thought. My plan was to make a couple of games as quickly as possible until their combined sales could provide me a decent income and then possibly move on to some more ambitious stuff. But these kinds of sales makes me wonder if that's really possible and if there's much point in starting on my other projects. So I don't really know what to do. Should I keep spending all my energy on pimping my stuff and building a name for myself; should I try different business model (freemium or adds or stuff); should I give up and get a job; should I stop making small generic games and bet everything on one spectacularly ambitious project; or am I just overreacting, and I should just keep at it and hope the sales pick up with the next update.

Helium Boy is released!

It's finally done! Apple review process was a little faster than I expected so I didn't get time to really polish the trailer or to test the Android version on that many platforms but I think it should run moderatly well on most GLES2 compatible phones.




Android Market
AppStore

Very nearly done

Today I have finally submitted Helium Boy for review for the Apple appstore. I'm slightly ahead of schedule because I cheated a bit with the last two levels. I was really bored with level design and didn't feel that I could make them very interesting so I made them rather short.

So next week I'll be working on a trailer and try to make sure it runs on as many Android phones as possible while waiting for Apples review team. I also need to fix support for the touchpad on Xperia Play, but that turned out to be quite a hassle. You need to use the NativeActivity class, which is only supported from android 2.3, for it to work so I have to make two versions and change some of the code structure.

Looking back at the blog I realised that I have only been working on it for about two months now. It feels like forever so I was rather suprised. Even with the original version (of which there is little left in the game) and the Wii port I made a few years ago, I still haven't worked on it for more than 5-6 months in total. While the game is hardly massive or even very good, I have to say I'm a bit proud considering the short development time.

Almost done

I just need to make two more levels and then fix the iphone version and then, after five and a half years (or three months depending on how you count) Helium Boy will finally be done. Hopefully I'll get it out by mid october.
Anyway, here's a quick video: