Its been an escatic but frustrating week......

General (non-technical) Off-Topic
#1

So I took off the last two weeks of the year to spend time with family, etc… But I also took it off so I could crunch on my mobile apps.

I feel like I have ADD. I’m jumping back and forth between apps, trying to get things working and when I hit a roadblock or have to do dishes or whatever, I can’t get past anything.

Here’s a summary of the week. I partially blame Ansca for my problems. How dare they give us so many goodies right before the holidays to play with.
Project 1. Add game credits to Omniblaster Lite.
While credits are not new, I got the bright idea of trying to add them to this existing game to try and generate revenue from the several thousand copies out there. Its great that my inneractive ad revenue is up, but I need to make more. Looked easy to implement, but I’m hitting a couple of odd snags. But I also decided to add some additional things for people to buy besides ship upgrades and now I’ve got to do art and dig into this nasty code (it was my first project and the code is atrocious…)

Project 2. Add Push Notification to my son’s music blog RSS reader app and make it newstandable.
This is mostly working. I’ve successfully hand sent a push notification. I’ve got the app restyled, my frustrations with the tableView widget (which doesn’t always work in the sim and has weird behaviors, but is working fine on the device) is now stuck because I’m using the plugin EasyAPNS for a wordpress blog and I can’t see where its actually trying to send the messages. I just want this to work. Its “Easy” APNS… after all.

Project 3. Game I put on hold to work on my Christmas game which I did not get released.
I had hoped to spend time on this app. The new FaceBook SSO is very tempting to add to avoid having to roll my own login process, but I want to put push notifications in and there is the whole multi-player aspect that I want to add, but I can’t get any traction on working on it. I wanted to spend my energy here!

Project 4. An app using the new email/sms feature!
A simple app with a pickerWheel and a couple of tableViews. It needs to be able to add, delete and edit table view items. It’s so close it being ready to ship it’s not even funny, but the more I chase a problem deleting items, the worse it seems to get.

So I’m very happy that I’ve gotten push notification as far as I have. It’s like rocket science and while the Lua code so far has been uber simple, its the other stuff that ranges from “PITA - Pain in the Arse” to quantum physics.

I’m very happy that my email/sms based app was (sans-bugs) feature complete in about 9 hours.

Sigh!!!
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#2

Nice - this is the kind of blaming the team I love to see :wink:

Is the regular version of Omniblaster in the store yet, or are you waiting to complete the Lite version first?

Peach :slight_smile: [import]uid: 52491 topic_id: 19654 reply_id: 75951[/import]

#3

Omniblaster launched in early May. The lite version came about a month or two later.

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/omniblaster/id434030469?mt=8&ls=1

and

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/omniblasterlite/id441026682

This game was born out of frustrations trying to build other games. I actually built it for me to play when I was just in a mood to blow things up… Then I found it had turned into a real game. I got an artist friend of mine to replace all of the internet art with her own (except for the NASA backgrounds). I’m now working on my 6th update to the game.

Sales of the 99 cent game have not been stellar. Its a game that I just can’t get any press on. So after a month of disappointing sales, I decided to do a lite version, hoping to get some conversion, though I’ve not seen that either. I put in inMobi ads, but it was too late to capture the initial surge in game play (and inMobi’s fill and pay rates are abysmal). I did a release to switch to inneractive’s ads, and I’ve doubled my ad money in two weeks from what I did in inMobi in four months, but its still no where near “income”.

So I’m going to to try and add credits to it so the free players can earn their ship upgrades.

I figure if I’m going to make a buck a day from a game, why not put out a bunch of titles. 10 games making a buck a day, now thats measurable and one might become a hit.

Oh, I should point out, the pay version of Omniblaster has like a 4.5 star rating. One person gave me a 1, another a 4, everything else has been 5’s. I don’t know how many ratings it takes to make a difference. But with an obvious “rate” button in the game, begging my friends who have it to rate it just isn’t getting a lot of traction either.

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#4

I’ll pick it up when I next top up my account (next week, I hope) - I don’t know why I don’t have it already!

RE monetization, have you considered ads? I’ve used both credits and ads and I have to say that when using inneractive $ was a lot better. (Just my two cents.)

Peach :slight_smile: [import]uid: 52491 topic_id: 19654 reply_id: 76122[/import]

#5

Well the lite version of the game is currently using inneractive ads and I’m making miniscule money mostly due to the games age. It’s going on 6 months old and I’ve really not added anything new to it. This change to add credits will at least hopefully incentify the lite users to get an upgrade to their ships with little effort that will turn into some additional cash. They can earn credits by playing the game more too which will hopefully drive the ad revenue upward a bit.

Today has been less frustrating… In fact I would go so far as to say moderately successful.

I actually have all of the the code working in OmniBlaster Lite to do credits except for actually getting credits from SuperRewards. I’ve posted a bug because we can’t use the test UID’s with out it causing an error (Case 11147). I’m also encountering “No Offers” and such. I’m wondering if its because I haven’t uploaded my W9 yet (well I tried to day and the website is erroring out uploading it, so I’ve emailed them…) But at least I’m feeling good about the code. Now if I can figure out how to deal with multiple missiles, I’ll add two MIRV options, one a 3 missile spread and one a 5 missile spread. This code is so badly organized its not going to be that easy to add multiple warhead missiles into the game. But I think it will be a cool feature. The pay game will get the MIRV launchers automatically when they get their ship upgrades. The lite version, the MIRV launchers will be purchasable, I think.

Then I went into my Email/SMS app to track down my delete row woes and quickly tracked that bug down, so I’m going to install it on my wife’s phone tomorrow and let her test it over the next couple of days and hopefully when iTunes Connect comes back to life, I’ll be ready to release it… Seriously… who closes down their website for the holidays? I can see saying “No new app reviews” or turning off submissions, but let us prep-stuff, check our sales, etc…

I haven’t spent any more time on the push notification app. My son has gone into winter hibernation with his blog. Apparently the music scene he covers is dead for a few months and he’s trying to get some friends to help with the blog. So it’s really pointless for me to push this app out until he starts blogging again. The main motivation is to update the RSS project with this latest code so you, the community can have at a full TabBar controller based, tableView driven, RSS reader with push notifications. I’m likely going to back burner this and then get started on my other game that will take advantage of push notifications if I can find a good use for them!
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