Pint-sized success story
February 16th, 2010 3:32 pmI submitted an entry in LD14. Those of you reading my journal during the compo will understand that I didn’t expect to win, place, or show. The goal for me was just to finish something, anything. After 48 frantic hours I was astonished to discover that I made my goal; I’d written a real live game! I’d finally succeeded at game development, which is something I’d tried in vain many times before.
That was about nine months ago. Next challenge: commercial game development. I came up with an idea in January, and just under a month of furious coding later, I finished my very first iPhone game, Teragati. Other than alpha channels, 22KHz sounds, and accelerometer as the principal control, it’s straight out of the 1980s. Good, clean, crack-like addictive fun.
Apple approved it for sale today in the App Store. 99 cents. If that’s out of your price range, let me know and I’ll find a promo code for you.
Next challenge: is there a Ludum Dare competition for marketing? 1,000 sales from scratch in 48 hours?
Congrats and best of luck with Teragati. That’s a pretty awesome turnaround into making games commercially! Keep on going…
I was thinking about doing a “48 hrs to App Store” competition in February for the mini LD. But I didn’t have the time to run it. Maybe I’ll have that be an official meta-competition in one of the main compos this year
-Phil
that’s hilarious.. I almost did just that but I guess I wanted the competition to be a bit more inclusive of all the platforms people develop with. A lot of my thinking about my constraints theme came out of recently finishing a port to iPhone as well and that got me thinking about how constraints really force you to be creative in different ways then you may be used to.
Congratz! It’s always great to see people going above and beyond like this (something we want to encourage more and more).
By finishing a product and getting it out there, you’ve passed the first hurdle. Most people don’t get this far. So even if you only sell a hand full of copies, still be proud of the fact that you completed something start to finish.
Marketing is it’s own beast, especially on iPhone. You will have to work hard to earn and find your first sales, but there’s so much you can learn at this stage. It’s a good chance to practice cutting a concise+short trailer, contacting iPhone websites (there are plenty of them), getting a feel for a market, talking with customers, and so on. You can then take what you’ve learned and try it again, ultimately to see if you can beat your prior sales and marketing reach.
What’s key though, as long as your project development times stay short, you can try more ideas. Be it game ideas, or marketing ideas.
Best of luck!
Thanks, PoV (and thanks for helping me get through LD14, too!).
You’re dead-on about the marketing. It’s the other 90% of effort that goes into a commercial game, in addition to the 90% design and 90% engineering. (The other 10% is apologizing to spouses for our being locked in our offices for the last 72 hours getting the finishing touches on the release.) I’ve never been so tired as I’ve been in the last 48 hours getting the word out! Great learning experience.
congrats and good luck sowbug!
Thanks!
Hey I bought the game sowbug and left a review. Good simple fun!
Thank you very much! You have earned a $1.00 credit from me toward your next commercial game!
Good job! If it can be ported to Linux, I’d check it out.
Nice job. Well worth the 99c, fun game. I like the music. Congrats on shipping!
The loading screen (default.png) is a good opportunity to add some sizzle to the game, it’s like the “box art” or the “book cover” for the iphone — you might want to see if you can find an artist to make a snazzier loading screen, the current one is functional but not too appealing.
Also the color-cycling pixel stars in the background are nice but kind of clash with the more realistic style of the ships and rocks. Making them less blocky, or just limiting them to shades of white/blue would make them fit in better..
The gameplay is pretty solid, however. I had fun.
Hey jovoc, thanks for trying out the game! These early dollars are worth way more than $1.00 each, so I owe you bigtime!
Great feedback, particularly on the stars. Guess which artwork I did myself, and guess which I got from a real artist?
I started out with an 8-bit theme (Galaxian/Galaga influence) but fell in love with the 32-bit perfectly alpha-blended sprites from this guy, and never updated the remaining stuff to match. I’ll consider it for a dot update.
Have fun and stay tuned; online scoreboard on its way soon.
jovoc, I managed to get the blue/white pinpoint star change, as well as some real box art on the loading screen, into the 1.1 update, which I submitted for review this morning. If the App Store’s as quick as it’s been in the recent past, it might go live this evening (Friday Pacific time). Thanks again for the feedback and let me know if you have other suggestions.
cool i will check out the update when it posts
Woot! Way to go!
Just bought it based on people digging it and the screenshots.
Congrats on shipping!!
Thanks, Z66831! Hope you enjoy it. If you have feedback, we’re trying to build up a community over on Facebook, so try the fan page there (I can’t put a link to it or this comment is marked as spam). Otherwise, just reply here.