Exobyte Smartphone Games
  • Home
  • Articles
  • Contact
  • About
  • app-ads

Releasing a snake into the wild

8/5/2012

0 Comments

 
Picture
I'm happy to say that the latest production from Exobyte games has now been successfully launched on the Google Play store.  This posting will be a fairly lengthy description of the process of going from finished code to a released game.

Super Snake is based upon the same core engine as the highly successful Cherry Chaser slot machine game.  After making Cherry Chaser I had the urge to create a feature ladder style machine and this is the result.  I think it plays better than Cherry Chaser, collecting numbers on the win line makes it a more addictive experience.

The process began when I had a version of the code that was just about done and worked well in a testing environment.  If you want to know more about the development process before that I can suggest the book "Beginning Android Games" by Mario Zechner.  I'd also suggest getting hold of the LibGDX games library for Android also created by Mario as that shortcuts a lot of the steps described in the book.  It's worth reading the book all the way through though just so you understand the engine you're working with.

The first thing that I did was begin working on the graphic components that are required by the Play Store.  The main graphics required are a 512x512px play store icon (see image above) and a 1024x500px feature graphic.  It also asks for a 180x120px promo graphic for which I use a cut down version of the feature graphic.  The promo graphic seems to only be used if the game gets promoted on the front page, I'm not expecting this to happen as a slot machine isn't really unique enough to be featured, but I put one up just in case.

When promoting Cherry Chaser I gave thought to the best style of icon to represent the game in the store.  People browsing the store will make a decision to click almost entirely based upon that image so I wanted mine to be as descriptive as possible.  The most important thing I felt was that the icon looked like what the game was supposed to represent, that is a slot machine.  I also wanted it to look distinctly like the european "pub style" slot machine that my games were inspired by.  To create the icon I took a generic photo of a real fruit machine and overlaid a screen grab of my game onto it, cutting and skewing the image until it looked right.

Once the graphics were ready for the Play store I loaded the game's project file into Eclipse and used the export tool provided by the Android SDK to create an APK file for installation on phones.  Part of the export process is to sign the games with a key, that's the thing that allows games to be "trusted" by phones and the bit that isn't needed if you tell your phone to install applications from unknown sources.  The keys have an expiry date, I set mine to 75 years as I'm an optimist.

Next we go to the Play store developer console and hit the button marked "upload apk".  Here's where we provide Google with with all the graphics they require for their listing.  We also set the title and descriptive text.  The generally accepted rule here is to have your primary search terms in the title text, thus the title of my game is "Super Snake Slot Machine" as opposed to just "Super Snake".  The next rule is to scatter other target search terms casually through your descriptive text.  I try to do this within the description keeping things readable but I see other apps just openly listing search keywords in the description.

At this point I apply a tip I learnt about getting your app as wide a distribution market as possible.  At the top of the listing details there is an option to add text for other languages.  If you go into this option you can select every other language listed there and then check a box to populated the text automatically with auto-translated text.  This is going to be better than nothing when presenting your game to people that do not speak english and so there seems to be no reason not to do it.  You may have to work with the word limits on some sections but trying different words usually works.

After that you simply check the consent buttons and then hit the publish button.  Your game will appear on the Google Play market place about an hour or two later.

At this point I hit a problem, my in-game links to the Google Play store were all broken.  An investigation of the problem revealed that the package name had a typo, it was called "net.exobyte.supernake" in the manifest file.  Unfortunately the package name is the one thing that is fixed permanently and can't be deleted so I had to fix the manifest and then go through the whole publishing process again whilst also unpublishing the broken version.

Once the game was up and published I did a final step which was to create a gameplay video.  I could have done this before I published but I sort of see it as the icing on the cake.  I used FRAPS to capture video direct from the game running on my development PC (LibGDX allows you to develop in desktop java using JOGL) and the Corel Video Studio to put all the clips together into a montage.  I'm quite pleased with the result and hopefully it will drive a few more downloads.

So now I am done and 24 hours have gone by since I released the game.  Right now I have no idea if it will be successful or be lost in the depths of the Play store.  When I released Cherry Chaser there were less than 20 games in the "New Free" tab in the Cards and Casino category, today when I looked there were over 150 games listed there.  I don't know if that's because of a change in the way Google poll the listings but it seems to suggest that the competition in this niche of the market has heated up substantially.

Now it is all down to whether I get good user ratings.  Currently I have two five star ratings and one one star rating.  That's similar to how Cherry Chaser began so I'm not going to read too much into it.  I think I've made a fun and worthwhile game, I hope enough other people do too. 

Find Super Snake on the Google Play store

0 Comments

Now available in Snakeskin!

6/30/2012

2 Comments

 
Picture
It's been a great couple of months for Exobyte games.  The release of the premium version of Cherry Chaser went really well with healthy sales and people are loving having the animated coin tray instead of adverts.  

Cherry Chaser has remained at a healthy position in the Google Play store charts, both in the paid and free sections of the casino games section.

Inspired by this success we're developing a new slot machine game with a different (and in our opinion more fun) feature board.  The new game is called Super Snake and has a number trail which can be climbed by collecting numbers on the win-line.  The game is in an alpha testing stage and hopefully we'll be able to release it some time in July.

We're also going to improve Cherry Chaser by releasing a new version with high definition graphics produced by a professional artist.  We're outsourcing the artwork on odesk and have already had a great application from a highly talented artist.  If you're an artist and you are interested in working with us on our games please have a look at our job advert here on odesk:

https://www.odesk.com/jobs/Upscaling-graphics-for-mobile-phone-game_~~cda13966c6c2b5bb 


2 Comments

Rate this app

3/22/2012

5 Comments

 
Inspired by the comments of some other Android developers, I added a “rate this app” button to my slot machine game in the last version. The invitation to rate the app appears whenever the player earns an achievement medal and this seems to work well in terms of encouraging good ratings and comments.

I released the new version just under a week ago and so far 60,000 users have upgraded out of a total active install base of 175,000 users. The number of ratings of my game has doubled from about 400 to just over 800 and the average rating has risen from 3.9 to 4.2. That’s a fairly significant rise in my mind.

Unfortunately all these extra positive ratings don’t seem to be helping my app store ranking. Just before the new version was released my game was at 62 in the free cards and casino games category, now it has slipped down to 68. The only reason I can think of for this is that the new version seems to have prompted quite a lot of users to uninstall the app. The total active installs has dropped from 182,000 to 175,000 since releasing the new version which is a steeper decline than previously.This suggests to me that the percentage of active installs has a higher weighting than the number and quality of the app’s ratings when it comes to app store ranking.

5 Comments

Is this comment helpful?

3/2/2012

9 Comments

 

Cherry Chaser performed really well, far better than I expected, at one point it was number 12 in the top free cards and casino games on the Android market and has now been downloaded over 500,000 times. I'm really pleased with the success and feel really proud of it.

It has now slipped down to 50th in it's category and what I'm finding a little worrying however is the nature of it's slide back down from prominence in the market. The point at which it stopped being so popular can be seen quite visibly on the graph of downloads on it's market page. I also know what happened at this point.

At that time two reviews appeared on the game's page saying that the game was unstable and/or crashed a lot. It also appears that a lot of Android users marked these reviews as being "helpful" using the market app on their phones. That meant that these two reviews became the first ones seen by people browsing the market looking for a game to download.

There are a couple of reasons that I find this suspicious. The first is that I have never seen the game crash or heard any trusted reports of it crashing. I get crash reports through the market and the crashes that I get represent less than 1% of all user plays (which I can estimate from ad impressions). Both of these negative "helpful" reviews were from Galaxy S2 owners and I have also confirmed that the game runs fine on this device.

The second reason that I am suspicious is that both reviews that complain of the game crashing constantly award the game four stars. That seems very weird to me. However if the market search algorithm favours higher star reviews to highlight then it would make a lot of sense to someone with untoward intentions.

I'm not sure if there is anything I can do about this. Cherry Chaser has still outperformed my hopes and still earns more than I expected so I am not going to get angry about it. If anybody has any ideas or knows anybody who they could share this story with I would be really interested to hear from them. 
9 Comments

Reaching For The Stars

2/8/2012

0 Comments

 
Cherry Chaser Slot Machine is doing far better than I could have imagined when I released it a few weeks ago.  There have been 223K downloads and it is currently installed on 135K devices.  As a "test" of the Android market it has surpassed itself.

The adverts are doing well even with a relatively low average ecpm of about $0.30 per thousand adverts.  The sheer quantity of adverts the game is requesting more than makes up for it - 765K requests yesterday.

I’ve been very lucky and found a small gap in the market for a “european style” slot machine game. It also helps to be in the less competitive “cards and casino” section of the market. I think my relatively low ecpm is largely due to me wanting to make the ads in my game somewhat unobtrusive, I feel that has helped with its popularity which is a good compensation.

Next on my agenda is to port Plasma Duel across to Android as well.  The porting process from C++ to java was less painful than expected and bodes well for finishing Plasma Duel in a timely manner.  After that I will probably do another update for Cherry Chaser to keep it fresh.  I'm seriously considering using www.odesk.com to outsource the artwork and get some really good looking new graphics. 
0 Comments

Over 9000!

1/24/2012

0 Comments

 
It's been a week since I launched my Android app and I now have over 9000 downloads.  The things I'm taking from this so far are:

*It is possible to make money as an Android apps developer.*  You just need to find the right niche, or ideally a number of niches.

*App store optimization is important.*  Having the right keywords in your description is obvious.  Also think about other search terms used in different countries, for Cherry Chaser I added "one armed bandit" for the UK market and "pokie" for the Australian market.  Adding keywords out of context to your description is somewhat crass but you can be clever and lever the desired search terms in there without being too obvious: "If you like one armed bandits or pokies, you'll love this game."

*Consider your app store icon.*  You can give more information about your product with your icon.  My original icon was the same as my app icon, a couple of cherries, it looked okay but didn't say anything about the app to a casual browser.  My new icon looks like the type of slot machine that my app emulates.  It gives the user a good idea of what to expect from the game.  After changing to this image my app store downloads more than doubled.

*Android fragmentation is a myth.*  At least the idea that it is problematic to developers is a myth.  My app is running on every version of Android from 1.5 to 4.03 without any problems.  I've even been told that it works well on a tablet, despite being targeted at lower resolution displays. 
0 Comments

We have lift off!

1/12/2012

0 Comments

 
Cherry Chaser slot machine is now available on the Android Market:
https://market.android.com/details?id=net.exobyte.cherrychaser 
0 Comments

Main engine ignition

1/12/2012

0 Comments

 
Cherry Chaser has now been uploaded to the Android Market.

Interesting process, learnt a bit about signing APK files with my own certificate and that the Android Market requires a 512x512 application icon.  I wasn't quite prepared for that so I've just used the standard game icon for the moment until I can create something better.

I'm still waiting for the app to appear on the market itself, hopefully it will be on there by tomorrow.  Looking at the vast number of slot machine games there I'm not expecting much.  I think to get anywhere in the Android Market these days will require either an exciting and unique game or a strong marketing campaign.
0 Comments

Launch countdown

1/11/2012

0 Comments

 
I've decided to launch Cherry Chaser slot machine on to the Android market in its current state.  I had plans to add some features such as multi-currency support and the ability to save the game state over multiple sessions before releasing it.  I've changed my mind based upon the philosophy of releasing early and iterating quickly.  These added features can easily be added in future updates to the app.  I think it is much better to get the app out there where people can use it and start getting feedback.

I added a feature yesterday to make particles pop out of the buttons as the player presses them.  I showed it to Jen this morning and her advice was that it didn't look very good and it was unnecessary.  Looking again with objective eyes I agree with her.  This means that some of the work I did yesterday to add the feature is wasted but sometimes you have to try things just to find out that they do not work.  Anyway the hardest bits of code I wrote can almost certainly be used later so all is not lost.

I'm now adding adverts to the game using the Admob advert service from Google.  This will be a little experiment as my first game with adverts to see if it generates any revenue.  The original Cherry Chaser game I wrote for Windows Mobile had 60,000+ downloads as a freeware app, that was back in the days when the mobile market was much smaller.  Against that, the number of apps relative to the size of the market these days is probably even higher than then, so hopefully my app won't get lost in the masses. 
0 Comments

The "game" is "finished"

7/17/2011

0 Comments

 
I've completed all the programming on the game code now and everything all seems to work well.  That means I'm about half way through the development process by my reckoning.

Things still to do include:

Nice animations for jackpots and easter eggs.
More interesting animation of lights during game.
Help and credits screens.
Game options screen.
Support for multiple currencies.
Storage of persistent data on game close.
Adverts for free version.
Animated cash win tray for premium version.

Then there is also a lot of testing and bug fixing before I can upload it to the market.
0 Comments
<<Previous
Forward>>
     
    Regular updates on twitter

    Development
    Journal

    Archives

    October 2024
    January 2022
    October 2021
    August 2020
    February 2020
    March 2019
    October 2017
    September 2017
    May 2017
    February 2015
    February 2014
    January 2014
    November 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    February 2013
    October 2012
    August 2012
    June 2012
    March 2012
    February 2012
    January 2012
    July 2011
    June 2011
    May 2011
    July 2010

    Categories

    All
    Advertising
    Cherry Chaser
    Libgdx
    Plasma Duel
    Super Snake

    RSS Feed

Privacy Policy
Terms and Conditions


​All content copyright Exobyte Ltd 2012-2024