游戏邦在:
杂志专栏:
gamerboom.com订阅到鲜果订阅到抓虾google reader订阅到有道订阅到QQ邮箱订阅到帮看

开发者评析iOS游戏开发需注意的15项要点

发布时间:2011-07-02 16:28:20 Tags:,,,,

作者:Jeff Hangartner

入手iPhone后,我在深入探索iPhone游戏开发的同时花大量时间玩iPhone和iPad游戏,对该市场进行研究和调查。我渐渐认识到App Store的微妙之处以及其他游戏普遍采取的做法。当时,我从游戏开发者的角度出发,编撰了15条调查结果。现在我已经发布自己开发的首款iPhone游戏,今天再次列举当初撰写的调查结果,并在每条之后添加结合自身背景的注解。

iphone games(from techland.time.com)

iphone games(from techland.time.com)

1、游戏跌出前25名后销售量就会急速下滑,这种现象并不难解释。当你浏览游戏列表时,屏幕每次只能显示几款游戏。用户需要点击“显示更多游戏”才能看到下一屏,而加载这些游戏的图标需要数秒时间。但这还不算最糟糕的情况,假设你向下浏览将近80款游戏,看到有款游戏自己挺喜欢,点击确认后决定下载安装。当你完成这些步骤回到App Store时,看到的不是第80款游戏,列表呈现的依然是位居榜首的那些游戏,要回到之间的列表你只能继续点击“显示更多游戏”。App Store中有将近30万款应用,我能肯定没人在同一个列表上浏览的应用数会超过200款。所以,之所以业界普遍认同进驻前25榜单的重要性,我认为主要原因就在于此。我试图寻找更多不出名的游戏,以期能挖掘出某些潜在要素,但几乎办不到。

那么,这种情况算是好事还是坏事呢?坏处显而易见,如果你的游戏跌出榜单外,结果将相当凄惨。好处在于如果能够冲上榜单,你便有翻身的机会。如果现在你的游戏排名在10万之后,可能还没有任何人知道这款游戏。现在你可以像刚刚发布的全新游戏那样重新营销游戏,所有近几个月刚刚购买iPhone的用户会觉得这是款很棒的新游戏,你就有再次推广游戏的机会。如果你正有此类型应用,可以考虑重新采取营销措施。《愤怒的小鸟》与《Tomacow》等游戏唯一的差别是,《愤怒的小鸟》很容易被玩家看到,而《Tomacow》现在还待在排行榜末尾。如果某天《Tomacow》登顶榜首而《愤怒的小鸟》下落几十名,二者的销售状况也可能互换。

注解:以我自身情形为例,游戏于2011年E3展首日发布,但广告明信片却未能赶在展会前制成,因而我能采取的推广措施屈指可数。当时任天堂正发布全新主机,试问谁会关注一个小型独立iPhone游戏。因而,游戏在新发布列表中迅速下滑,现正处于鲜有人问津的境地。尽管如此,我并无怨言,只是把这当成是项重新营销的挑战,即要如何做才能让用户知道这款游戏。正如我在上文中写的那样,现在游戏正置身无人问津的列表中。你需要精确搜索“elusive ninja”,方能找到我的游戏。即便你用“ninja”作为关键字搜索,我的游戏可能也只会显示在6页之后。

2、类别和字词搜索也是用户寻找游戏的主要方法。分类似乎很随意,“冒险类”与“动作类”和“街机类”看似并没有多大差别。而且,上述排名前25游戏的优势仍然存在,所以匿名游戏杀出重围依然困难重重。字词搜索固然足以让用户找到那些不出名的游戏,但对应关键词仅限于游戏名称或游戏开发者姓名。如果你制作的忍者游戏名为《Death Strike》,那么输入“ninja”便无法搜索到游戏。这是否意味着游戏名越长越好呢?是否存在最佳的游戏名?事实似乎并非如此。因而我不会在自己的游戏名中用上“Fubar”、“Zoiks”或“Swoo”等字眼,玩家几乎不可能用这些作为关键词搜索。

注解:我在为游戏起名之时,确实想找个有“ninja”这个词的短名字,用上“dodge”、“action”或“fight”之类很普通的词。不幸的是,所有开发者都想这么做,结果所有短小精悍的名字(游戏邦注:这种游戏名对搜索有益)都已被使用甚至重复多次。最后,我实在找不到未被他人使用过的简短的忍者相关游戏名。坦诚地说,为此我感到十分沮丧。我决定反其道而行,起个复杂的名字。我想既然自己无法用常见关键词来起简短的名字,那就用更多非常见关键词起个较长的游戏名。最终定下《Elusive Ninja: The Shadowy Thief》这个名字,搜索“elusive”、“thief”或“shadowy”等词游戏都会出现在列表首位,但这些词的搜索频率肯定比“ninja”或“fight”要小得多。

Elusive Ninja :The Shadowy Thief (from ipa-ga.blogspot.com)

Elusive Ninja :The Shadowy Thief (from ipa-ga.blogspot.com)

3、带有iAd内置广告的免费应用会越来越流行,而这种方法可能会被用作重新营销的工具。假如游戏因跌出排行榜前列而销售量不佳,你能采取哪些挽救措施呢?添加某些iAd后免费发布游戏,这种方法怎么样?免费通告会提升游戏的流行度,而且你还可以通过游戏获得微薄的收入,总比之前什么都没有好。Backflip Studios的想法很棒,他们同时运营工作室自制游戏的广告和其他人的广告。在每年某些时间里(游戏邦注:比如临近圣诞节),他们将其他广告的比例与自身广告的比例互换,80%是自己的广告,20%是别人的广告。这确实是个非常聪明的做法。

注解:毫无疑问,iPhone游戏中的广告确实让人生厌。起初我并不想用这种布满广告的免费游戏模式,因为我是通过网络与一个素未谋面的程序员合作开发这款游戏,我想让首款游戏的开发自始自终不那么复杂。但现在我关注的是营销层面,几近疯狂地采用游戏内置广告。这时我已经不是开发商,而是希望通过其他人的游戏内置广告服务来推广游戏的发行商。我刚同Admob和Flurry App Circle两个推广方签订协议,我会在获得反馈结果时发表博文公布这些服务的进展情况。

与游戏内置广告推广同时进行的是在游戏中添加“获得更多游戏”选项,该选项链接到一个手机格式的网站,上面有些其他的游戏。我可以更新这个网站,改变或增加上面的游戏。即便有些人购买游戏长达1年之久,仍然可以看到最新的游戏列表。

4、iPad应用的免费版和精简版似乎并不多。我不知道为何会出现这种情况,难道是因为iPad游戏不甚流行?还是因为iPad用户都比较有钱,愿意直接支付8美元尝试新游戏,而iPhone用户不愿意这么做?其中的原因不甚明了,但这种现象背后应该有开发商们有意或无意遵循的定律。

注解:上述问题的原因,我仍然不太清楚。就自己的游戏而言,我知道自己在制作iPad平台高清版游戏时,可能也不会发布免费或精简版。做出此等决定主要归因于游戏设计而非运营层面,游戏内容已相当简单,所以几乎没什么适合发布成精简版的内容。如果是像RPG那样富有深度的大型游戏,那我确实弄不清楚为何开发商不制作iPad平台免费版或精简版。我觉得可能是因为多数情况下iPad应用都有个便宜得多甚至免费的iPhone版本,或许开发商认为让玩家用iPad体验那些版本的游戏就足够了。

5、iPad上的所有应用都非常贵。所有发布过免费或精简版且售价99美分的iPhone游戏几乎都有个售价4.99美元的iPad版本。因而,将游戏移植到iPad上应该是开发商在游戏设计之初优先考虑的事情,设计时游戏图片要制作得足够大,使其在大屏幕上能产生更好的视觉效果,然后再缩小用来制作iPhone版本。

注解:我在游戏开发中就是这么做的,但iPad版本似乎并不像我所想象的那般强大,因而我会再花数周时间让该版本有效运转起来。制作大幅图片然后再缩小用于制作iPhone版本,这确实是个很棒的方式。因为这不仅意味着我可以更快制成iPad平台高清游戏,而且我发现可以将这些高清图片用作营销推广材料。我可以从游戏或名称中抓取些许精灵,将其拖拽到Press Kit上,就可以取得很棒的效果。我还必须制作大量横幅和图标用来安放广告。我刚刚汇集了这些iPad版本所需内容,很快就可以将它们修改得更为精致。

6、第5点很重要,因为我见过大批所谓的“高清iPad应用”完全没有高清图像。有些只是将整个游戏放大一倍,还有些开发商用Photoshop将图像变大,因而图像看起来模糊不清,有些将以上两种技术结合起来制作iPad应用(游戏邦注:作者花10美元购买的《Broken Sword HD》便属此类)。

注解:深入了解iPad后,我发现设备较大并不意味着它比iPhone 3GS强大得多。虽然我仍然很讨厌这种放大图像的做法,但我也能理解开发商这么做的原因。因为iPad的内存与手机设备相同而且同样有20MB的Wi-Fi下载流量限制,所以很难在游戏中添加同等分辨率的两倍大图像。将来我肯定不会再高估iPad设备的效能,会根据情况规划图像设计!

7、尽管iPad版本《超级拳击2》也只是采取把图像放大的做法,但我不得不承认这是款令人敬畏的游戏,甚至超越其iPhone版本。唯美的大型手绘及动画角色、紧凑的控制方式、拇指未曾覆盖动作区域、精制的菜单、击中时痛苦的音效声,Glu的产品好得简直令人生畏。这才是我想做的iPad游戏。

注解:对于《Elusive Ninja》中的润色,我感到特别满意。我觉得游戏的视觉效果足可与《超级拳击2》之类的游戏相比,对我这个初出茅庐的开发者来说确实非常重要。回顾过往,我花费大量时间润色那些可能并不需要润色的东西,其实菜单可以做得更简单些,这样抱怨的人也会大大减少。我可能还需要学习如何平衡时间分配,让时间更有价值!

8、不幸的是,Glu在《超级拳击2》中添加微交易时犯下许多错误。无论你何时输掉拳赛,都会出现“是否需要roid rage?是/否”的弹窗。我觉得,玩家花99美分购买roid rage或许能跳过无法战胜的对手。你需要点击“否”之后,才会出现“再试一次”这个界面。这种做法实为不智之举,因为玩家在连续失败几次后首先浮现在脑中的是——这是个骗局。他们觉得开发商先让自己体验战胜几个角色的快感,然后设计玩家无法打败的目标引诱他们购买roid rage,开发商只是想让他们掏钱而已。App Store上众多《超级拳击2》的评论都这么说。那么,如果有某些新用户对这款游戏产生兴趣,当他们看到那些评论时可能会想“或许我无需去尝试这样的游戏”。

从上述实例中能吸取哪些教训呢?微交易不仅不可设计成游戏中的强制性进程,也不可让人产生这种怀疑,因为玩家会往最坏的方面想,认为导致游戏无法进行下去的无疑是开发商的鬼把戏。玩家能够接受售价99美分的新游戏角色服装,但如果唯一能击败BOSS的剑无法在游戏中获得而开发商将其标价99美分出售,这种做法就可能导致游戏受到口诛笔伐。微交易有巨大的潜力,但使用时务必谨慎以避免恶化公共关系。

注解:我对微交易不是很熟悉。这片领域过于错综复杂,而且我只是个通过网络与协议程序员合作的普通小开发者,所以游戏设计时我就不想滩这道浑水。如果我像Glu那样做,人们就会抱怨称“游戏是个大骗局,你不能通过这种方式谋取盈利”。而我对此却无计可施,除非在程序员有空时重新雇用让他修改游戏或仅为修改此处而雇用新程序员,要处理的麻烦简直太多了。如果将来我能够组建起工作小组,或许会尝试采用微交易模式,但我仍会小心翼翼。

9、iPad游戏《Mirror’s Edge》所取得的成功令人敬畏,iPhone游戏《Action Hero》也是如此。要点就在于,他们属于同类游戏,但前者的制作成功比后者高得多。我想知道,如果将销售额和开发成本两项考虑在内,哪款游戏的盈利更多呢?

注解:此刻我仍觉得这个问题很有趣。我曾在某个地方看到有人认为《Rockband》只是打地鼠类的音乐游戏而已。如果细心发掘核心机制,我认为许多流行游戏的原型都是非常简单的游戏。

10、大量游戏都会固定游戏屏幕,无论它们真得适合这么做。最早我还为设计根据屏幕转向的用户界面和游戏区域感到担心,但自从看到所有开发商都让玩家以既定方式玩游戏时,我想将来自己也会这么做。我还注意到某些控制角度会导致手掌盖住听筒或挡住耳机接口。如果我要制作音乐游戏,必须确保耳机接口位于界面右上方而不是左下方,这样就不会碰到手掌,因为任何在公共场所玩游戏的人都很可能戴上耳机。但是对某些音效不是那么重要的游戏来说,玩家可能在玩游戏时将听筒声音关小,界面设计就不用考虑上述准则。

注解:事实证明Cocos2D可以毫无破绽地解决所有问题。尽管游戏固定为横向模式,但可根据玩家持有设备的方向旋转180度,因而所谓的“挡住耳机接口”也就不是个问题了。我希望Unity及其他程序库也能自动处理该问题。

11、采用OpenFeint排行榜似乎是顺理成章的事情,至少这种方法我见得最多。它好似已成为iPhone的基础Mochi,我猜测可能是因为容易实施,而且大量流行游戏采用这种方法,人们势必也已经感到习惯。还有更普及的方法吗?或许只是我刚好碰上大量采用OpenFeint功能的游戏而已。

game center(from appletell.com)

game center(from appletell.com)

注解:我原本计划用Apple Game Center,但程序员已经知晓如何设置OpenFeint,因而我们也采用了这种方法。后来我们发现,OpenFeint可以兼容Game Center。在你设置OpenFeint,可以定义成“同样支持AGC”,这样游戏便有供AGC用户使用的AGC排行榜和成就。不幸的是,我完全忘记在游戏中添加可快速访问AGC内容的快捷键。程序员和测试玩家也没有发现,于是错误便遗留在游戏中,我只得在下次游戏更新时予以修正。令人高兴的是,尽管没有访问按键,玩家仍然可以前往AGC App查看排行榜和成就。总的来说,OpenFeint似乎是目前最佳的选择,因为你可以同时兼顾OF和AGC。

12、必须注意的是,需要注册账户才能玩游戏无疑是个很糟糕的想法。我在公车上见过几款此类游戏,在尝试时便需要输入账户和密码并链接邮箱地址提供其他信息。我想道:“我只是想看下这款游戏而已!如果确实很棒,我肯定会注册账户,但如果游戏质量不佳呢?”我并不想只为下载某个文件或查看图片就注册个账户。在不清楚游戏质量如何的前提下,我不想花费过多精力。如果你想要在游戏中设置注册账户之类的功能,至少要提供“快速游戏”之类令人感兴趣的选项。我的这种做法是否显得古怪?该方法是否也会让其他人感到恼怒?

注解:上述做法依然十分令人讨厌,但我有时还是会看到此类游戏。尽管我的游戏不需要玩家注册账户,但我还是在游戏中添加了“快速游戏”按键,在首个logo开始出现时弹出。如果你点击这个按键,可以跳过所有的logo、标题界面和菜单,直接进入缓冲界面开始游戏。我忘记对此使用Flurry Analytic来统计使用这项功能的用户数,但我觉得这是个绝妙的想法。iPhone游戏的部分优势在于,人们可以随时打开来玩。假使你的游戏需要用户注册账户,最好设计个无需账户便能畅玩的模式,或者将注册账户页面弹出时间延迟到用户首次保存游戏之时。我猜测游戏的价格与玩家是否为此感到愤怒有所联系,免费游戏采取这种做法会让人倍感失望,但如果用户已经花了4.99美元购买游戏,他们很可能会选择填写那张令人生厌的注册表。

13、我从未在游戏中见过内置反馈表,对于出现这种情况的原因也不甚明了。顾客的反馈非常重要,即便你无法修正当前游戏,也可以避免将来在开发中犯同样的错误。开发商最多只会在App Store游戏简介中写上“我们真诚希望收到你的反馈意见!”之类的句子并附上邮箱地址,而你只能将此复制粘贴到“收件人”处,用自己的邮箱来发送反馈信息,真是个繁琐的过程。

注解:现在断定内置反馈表对我的游戏会产生何种成效还为时过早,但到目前为止感觉都还不错。我收到些许漏洞报告,其中有几个非常重要(游戏邦注:有玩家向作者反馈他忘了添加查看Apple Game Center状态的按钮),但也有很无聊的建议,如“忍者应该有种超级模式,他浑身如火焰般燃烧而且可以飞翔,到另一个村庄中与龙搏斗。”也就是说,这家伙本有可能只给游戏1星评价,然后在评论中写道:“游戏中需要有超级飞行模式和龙,所以我只给1颗星!”但是,内置反馈把他的公开抱怨转变成发送给我的私人邮件,假如这是个很棒的想法,我会回复并与他继续讨论。如果我不认同这个想法,也可以通过邮件对他提出建议的行为表示感谢,告诉他将来更新时我会考虑这个想法。从理论上说,这种做法可能比该玩家在游戏后发表评论要有意义得多,因为他知道我看到了建议并对他的关注表示认可。

如果我能吸引更多用户玩游戏并获得更多漏洞报告和评论以供比较,我就可以知道这种做法是否有效。从公共关系心理层面上来说,我觉得这是个相当棒的想法。

14、用户玩一段时间游戏后,会弹出“似乎你很喜欢这款应用,为何不在App Store上发表评论呢?”这条信息,还附上游戏的超链接。我不确定这是开发商的设计还是苹果手机自带的功能,但从开发者的角度来看,我认为这种做法很不错。弹窗并不特别扰人,而且鼓励你将自己的乐趣与全世界用户分享。而且,如果你讨厌这款游戏,那么也不太可能玩到看到弹窗那个时候,这种精巧的设计确保游戏获得的都是积极评论。

注解:现在我明白了,这是个名叫Appirate的小程序,你可以在开发过程中添加到游戏里。你可以设置玩家见到弹窗时的游戏使用天数以及玩家在弹窗中看到的信息。我强烈推荐开发商使用这个程序!我在游戏中设置,用户运行应用3次后首次出现弹窗。如果玩家选择“以后再评论!”,弹窗会等到用户再运行5次后出现。我认为那些不喜欢游戏的人应该不会打开游戏3次,这样我很有可能获得的都是那些喜欢这款游戏的玩家的积极评论。

15、App Store简介使用的都是基本字体文字,在我看来,可能连黑体或斜体都不能用。游戏基本都用ASCII来编写简介,苹果应该允许开发者使用ANSI模块!

注解:我尝试在游戏的App Store简介中使用些小图标,但效果看起来并不好,我只得放弃让简介显得更为简洁。我期待系统至少允许开发商使用黑体和斜体,但现在还未有任何改变。简介默认显示游戏描述的前2到3行,用户需要点击“更多”才能看到描述的其他内容。因而,确保描述的前2到3行是某些能引人注意的内容,如引用精彩评论或游戏的良好态势(游戏邦注:“北美排行第五”之类的信息)。而且在你获得评论时,将这些评论引用到描述中。从心理学上来说,许多人根据推荐选择游戏。如果他们看到3条积极的游戏评论,他们更有可能尝试游戏。

以上就是我的15个观点!如果你是个iPhone游戏开发者,我希望上述观点能对你有些许帮助。其实在项目从头到尾的开发过程中,你就可以学到大量的知识。只要你能将学到的知识用到将来的项目中,就是件好事。犯错误是正常的,我们只需尽量避免重复错误。我觉得如果自己完成2或3个游戏开发后,应该会总结出完整的工作流程!(本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译,如需转载请联系:游戏邦

15 iPhone Game Observations, Before and After

Jeff Hangartner

When I first got my iPhone, I spent a lot of time playing iPhone/iPad games to do some research as I dipped into iPhone game development. I got a lot more familiar with the App Store’s nuances and what other games are doing in general. At the time, I wrote up 15 observations to mull over as an iPhone game developer. Now I’m posting them again but adding notes from my current perspective on the other side of development having just released my first iPhone game.

1. It’s extremely obvious why games die in sales once they’re off the Top 25. When you go through a list of games it only shows a handful at a time, and you have to hit “Show more games” to list the next handful, and those take a few seconds to load all the icons for. But that’s not the worst part…say you’re down around game 80 and you see one you dig so you click it to check it out and decide to download and install it. Well now when you go back to the App Store, are you at game 80? Nope, you’re back up at game 1 and have to “Show more games” your way all the way back down to 80. There are like 300,000 Apps in the App Store and I bet no one ever sees past 200 on one of those lists. So while it’s already well known that it’s vital to get into the Top 25 chart, I’d say this is the main reason for it. I actually WANTED to find more obscure games to see if I could find some hidden gems that I dig, but it was extremely difficult to attempt.

So is this a bad thing or a good thing? Well the bad part of it is if you fall off the charts, you’re pretty toast. That’s obvious. The good part is there’ve got to be ways to get back up on the charts. If you’re game number 100,000 right now, NO ONE knows you exist. You could probably re-market your game right now as if you had just released it brand new and all the people who’ve bought iPhones in the last couple months would think “hey, a new game, cool!” and you might be able to re-popularize your game. If you have an app on there that isn’t doing anything, consider giving re-marketing a go. The only difference between Angry Birds and a game like Tomacow is that Angry Birds is easy to find and Tomacow is way off the bottom of the charts right now. If tomorrow Tomacow shot up to #1 and Angry Birds fell a few dozen spots down their sales stats would probably reverse.

In my case, my game came out on Day1 of E3 2011 and my advertising cards didn’t arrive in time for E3, so there wasn’t much I could do for advertising. When Nintendo is announcing a new console, no one cares about a tiny indie iPhone game. So my game fell off the New Releases list fast and is now sitting somewhere in obscurity. I’m not complaining though, I just look at this as a re-marketing challenge: how do I get people to know the game exists? Like I wrote up above, now that I’m off the list NO ONE can find me. You literally have to search for “elusive ninja” to find my game. Even typing in “ninja” I’m like 6+ pages down the list.

2. The other main ways of finding games are via the Categories and doing word searches. The Categories seem kind of random…”Adventure” doesn’t seem to be much different than “Action” or “Arcade”. And you pretty much end up with the Top 25 games again, so again it’s hard to stumble across the obscure ones. Word searches will give you obscure games but it looks like the word you type has to be in either the game’s title or in the name of the game’s developer. If you make a ninja game but call it “Death Strike”, anyone typing in “ninja” won’t find your game. Does this mean “Dinosaurs In Helicopters Wearing Top Hats”? Would actually be an optimal game name? Oddly enough, it seems like it would be haha. So I won’t be naming my games “Fubar” or “Zoiks” or “Swoo” because what are the odds someone is going to type those in?

When I went to name my game, I actually wanted a really short name that had the word “ninja” in it and like, “dodge” or “action” or “fight” or some other really common word. Unfortunately everyone else wants to do that too, so it turned out all the short simple (but good for search engine results) names were taken or copywritten etc. In the end I honestly just got frustrated with not being able to find a decent short ninja related game name that wasn’t taken, and instead decided to go the opposite route and give it an elaborate name. I figured if I can’t have a short name with common keywords, I’ll take a long name with less-common keywords but more of them. End result is Elusive Ninja: The Shadowy Thief pops up near the top of the lists when you search for the words “elusive”, “thief”, or “shadowy”, but how often is someone going to search for those VS “ninja” or “fight”?

3.Free Apps with iAds (in-game advertisements) are getting more popular and seem to be used as a re-marketing tool now. Say your game falls off the charts and isn’t selling…what can you do with it? Well, how about throw in some iAds and release it for Free? The Free notice is going to boost it’s popularity and you’re still making a tiny bit of income off it VS the nothing you were making before. Backflip Studios has a great idea, they run advertisements for their own games as well as other people’s advertisements…and during certain times of the year (like near Christmas) they’ll switch from 80% other ads and 20% their own, to 80% their own and 20% other ads. That’s some smart stuff right there.

Advertisements in iPhone games are pretty ugly, there’s no denying that. I opted not to follow the Free-with-ads model because I wanted my first game’s development to stay pretty simple since I was working over the Internet with a programmer I’d never worked with before. Now that I’m focusing on the marketing however, I’m actually on the flip side of the in-game ad stuff: I’m a publisher wanting to promote my game in other people’s in-game ads sections. I’ve just signed up with Admob and Flurry App Circle as a promoter and I’ll do a blog post up of how those services worked out when I get some results back.

One thing I did do that’s along the lines of in-game advertising is put in a Get More Games option that goes to a mobile-formatted website with a handful of icons for other games. I can update this website and change or add games to it and even if someone buys my game in a year they’ll still be taken to the most recent game list.

4. The iPad doesn’t seem to have a lot of Free/Lite versions of it’s Apps. I’m not sure why this is…is it because gaming on iPad isn’t as popular? Is it because the iPad market just has more money to spend so they’re willing to drop $8 to try an App out, while iPhone users are like “$8? fuck THAT!!”? Not sure, but there’s got to be some logic behind it that everyone is consciously/sub-consciously following.

I still don’t know what the reason for this is. In my particular case I know that when I do the HD version of the game for iPad, I won’t be releasing a Free/Lite version of it. This is more due to the game’s design than any business decision though…the game is pretty simple so there’s not much you can really release in a Lite version that isn’t “the entire game”. Haha! If I was developing a large in-depth game like an RPG I would definitely want to know why other developers don’t make Free/Lite versions on iPad. I was thinking it might be that a lot of the time the iPad App has an iPhone version already that’s either much cheaper or free, and maybe developers figure because the iPad runs those, that’s good enough?

5. Everything on the iPad is expensive. Consistently, across the board, an iPhone game that’s got a Free/Lite version and $0.99 cent version on iPhone will have a $4.99+ version on iPad. So porting to iPad should be high priority, and art for games should be drawn large enough that it looks good on the bigger/retina screens and then shrunk down for iPhone.

I did actually do this, but it turns out the iPad is way less powerful than I was expecting so I’m going to have to take a few extra weeks and figure out how to get it running. Doing the art huge and scaling it down for the iPhone was definitely the optimal method because not only does it mean I can make an HD version of the game for iPads quickly, but I’m finding as I do a lot of marketing I can use the iPad art as promotional material…I can grab a few sprites from the game or the title and just drag and drop it into my Press Kit and it’s good to go. I’m having to make a lot of banners and icons for ad-space etc. and I’m just throwing together iPad assets to make them nice and quick.

6.The above point is important because from what I’ve seen a ton of “HD iPad Apps” are not “HD” at all. They’re just the entire game small with a 2x magnifying/zoom option, or they’ve got a bunch of art assets that have just been scaled up in Photoshop and are blurry looking, or they’re some sort of freakish hybrid of the two (Broken Sword HD, you cost me almost 10 bucks and that’s the quality I get?? come on now…).

Now that I’ve messed with the iPad a little more and found out that being a bigger device doesn’t mean it’s actually any more powerful than an iPhone 3GS, while I still hate this practice of just scaling up art, I understand why developers do it. It’s hard to cram a bunch of twice-as-large art into an iPad game when you still have the same memory restrictions as the smaller device and the same 20MB Wi-Fi download limit. In the future I’ll definitely be looking at the iPad as a much less powerful device and plan the art accordingly!

7. While Super KO Boxing 2 on iPad just scales it’s art up (boooo!!), I have to say it’s an awesome game. The iPhone version is just perfection. Gorgeous huge hand-drawn/animated characters, tight controls, thumbs don’t cover the action area, lots of menu polish and painful punch sound-effects…awesome stuff Glu. This is the type of stuff I want to make.

I’m actually super happy with the amount of polish I got into Elusive Ninja. I feel like visually it can compete with games like Super KO Boxing 2, and that was really important to me right from the get-go. In retrospect though, I spent a lot of time polishing things that probably didn’t need to be polished…like the menus could have been a lot simpler than they are and nobody would complain. In the future I’ll have to learn to better balance what’s worth investing my time in!

8.Unfortunately Glu made a bit of a faux pas with it’s attempt at adding micro-transactions to KO Boxing. Whenever you lose a fight it pops up a “Want to get roid rage? Yes/No” screen. Roid rage is you paying 99 cents for what I’m assuming will skip the opponent you’re stuck on. After you say No, the “Try again?” screen comes up. The placement of this is unfortunate because what’s the first thing that goes through everyone’s mind as soon as they lose a couple matches? “This is BS, the developers made it impossible after the first few characters so we’d have to buy the roid rage!! They’re just trying to suck our money out of us grrrr!” The reviews for KO Boxing on the App Store pretty much all say that. So now some new user comes along interested in the game and sees those reviews and goes “woah, maybe I don’t wanna check this out after all!”.

The lesson to be learned from this? Micro-transactions need to not only not be mandatory to progressing in the game, but need to also not even remotely SEEM as if they COULD be mandatory to progressing in the game, because gamers will assume the worst, and justifiably since there ARE developers that do attempt this sneaky trick. A 99 cent fee for a new costume? Should be fine. A 99 cent fee for a sword you can’t get anywhere else in the game that’s the only weapon that can defeat the boss? That’s going to get you some flak. Micro-transactions have a ton of potential, but they have to be really well thought-out to avoid bad PR.

I didn’t mess with micro-transactions at all. There’s the weird Lodsys lawsuit stuff going on which is scary, and just in-general as a small dev working with contracted programmers over the Internet, I didn’t want to jump into complicated micro-transaction stuff. If I did something like Glu did and people complained “This is BS, you shouldn’t charge money at this point blah blah” I wouldn’t really have a way to fix it except to re-hire my programmer if he’s available or hire a new programmer just to fix it and it’s just too much mess to deal with. Down the road when I have an in-house crew I’d like to dip into micro-transactions, but I’m trying to approach this all cautiously.

9. Mirror’s Edge on iPad is awesome. So is Action Hero on iPhone. The catch is they’re the same game, but Mirror’s Edge cost like a jillion dollars more to make than Action Hero. I wonder which one made more money when all the sales figures and development costs were factored out?

haha I still think this is a funny observation. I read someone somewhere saying that Rockband is just Whack-A-Mole set to music. I think a lot of popular games have really simple doppleganger versions when you really look at their core mechanics.

10. Tons of games lock the screen however they want. I was originally worried about having to design UIs and game areas that would work with rotating the screen, but since everyone else has said “Tough! Play this the way we want you to!”, I’ll do the same. I also notice that certain angles for certain control schemes can make your hands cover the speaker, or get in the way of the microphone jack when you’ve got your headphones in. If I was making a music/rhythm game I’d make sure the game was locked to have the microphone jack on the top-right instead of the bottom-left where it bumps into your palm, because anyone playing in public will probably have their headphones in…whereas a game where sound isn’t important people will probably play it with the speaker Muted so it doesn’t matter.

Turns out Cocos2D handled this all blindfolded. The game is locked to landscape mode, but it flips 180 degrees depending on which way you’re holding the device so all the “covering up the microphone jack” stuff isn’t an issue thanks to the wonders of Cocos2D. I would imagine Unity and other libraries handle this automatically too.

11. It’s looking like OpenFeint is the way to go with Leaderboards…It’s the one I’ve run into the most, at least. It looks like it’s basically Mochi for iPhone, which I’m guessing means it’s easy to implement and if it’s in a lot of popular games then people must have accounts for it already. Anyone know of a more popular one? Maybe I’m just happening to run into this one a lot by fluke.

I had actually planned to use Apple Game Center just to suck up to Apple, but my programmer already knew how to set up OpenFeint so we went with that. And then it turned out that OpenFeint actually wraps around Game Center now so when you set up OpenFeint you can tell it “also support AGC” and have AGC Leaderboards and Achievements for AGC users. Unfortunately one brainfart I had was completely forgetting to put in an AGC button of some kind so you can access the AGC stuff easily! And neither my programmer, nor anyone in testing even noticed so it just slipped right on through haha I’ll have to fix that in an Update. The good part is that even without a button accessing it, a person can still go to their AGC App and see the Leaderboard and Achievements for the game. All in all it seems like OpenFeint is the optimal choice right now since you get both OF and AGC with it.

12.However on that note, games that REQUIRE you to create an account to play them are a terrible idea. I’ve grabbed a few where all I get to see is the title screen because I’m on the bus trying to check out the game and it wants me to fill in a name and password and link it to my E-Mail address with other misc info as the bus jostles around and it’s like “Dude, I just want to see your game! If it’s awesome then sure, I’ll create an account…but what if it sucks?” Like I don’t have enough random “created an account somewhere obscure just to download a file or be able to upload an image or see a trailer” accounts around the net…I don’t want to make more when I don’t even know what your game is like. If you’re going to have a create an account thing, at least have a quick-play option of some kind where I can see what I’m in for. Am I just cranky or does this annoy other people too? haha

ugh. This is still annoying and I still see it sometimes. Even though I don’t have a “create an account” requirement in my game, I still put a Quickplay button in my game that pops up as soon as the first Logo starts up…if you click it you’ll skip all the logos, the title screen, the menus, and go right to the Loading screen for the gameplay. I forgot to put a Flurry Analytic on this to see if people use it, but I think it’s a good idea. Part of the draw of iPhone games is that people can pick up and play them instantly. Even if you have to have accounts, it’d be nice to have a mode you can play where you don’t need an account, or maybe the game could not pop up the required account creation screen until the user first tries to save the game? I suspect price-point would affect how annoying this is…if the game is Free, it’s frustrating, but if the game cost the user $4.99 they’ll probably fill out your annoying form to play.

13.I don’t think I’ve seen a single in-game feedback form. I’m not sure why this is. Customer feedback is super vital…even if you can’t fix the current game, you can avoid making the same mistakes in future games. The closest thing I’ve seen is in the text blurb on the App Store there’s a “Send us your feedback we’d love to hear it!” sentence and an E-Mail address that you have to cut & paste into your E-Mail prog and blah blah blah too much work.

It’s early for me to judge how this worked out for me but I have a good feeling about it. I’ve gotten a handful of Bug Reports back, and some of them are important (“you forgot a button to access Apple Game Center stats!”) but some of them are stuff like “the ninja should have a super mode where he glows and can fly and then go to another village and fight a dragon”. Haha! The thing is, that guy might have left a 1-star review saying “needs a super flying mode and dragon, 1-star!!!!” but instead I’ve kind of re-routed his complaint into a private E-Mail to me where I can reply back to him and discuss it further if it’s a cool idea, or just thank him for the advice and tell him I’ll take it into consideration in the future if I can’t implement it. In theory if that guy left a review after that, it would probably be a lot more positive since he knows I’ve heard his complains and acknowledged his concerns.

When I have more users playing the game and more Bug Reports and Reviews to compare, I’ll be able to see how this pans out better, but psychologically in terms of public relations, I think this is a pretty good idea.

14.When you play a game for a while it’ll pop up a message saying “Seems like you’re enjoying this App, why not leave a review on the App Store?” with a quick-link. I don’t know if this is developers doing this on their own or if Apple does this automatically but as a developer I think this is GREAT. It’s not super intrusive and if you’re in the middle of having fun, great, share that with the world. Plus if you hate the game you’re probably not going to play it long enough to get that pop-up so it’s smart to have that in there in terms of getting positive reviews.

Turns out this is a little program called Appirater that you can throw in your game when you’re developing. It lets you set how many days between pop-ups and what the text should say and all sorts of good stuff. Highly recommend it! I set mine to wait for the user to run the App 3 times before it first pops up, then each time you say “Remind me later!” it waits 5 more times before it pops up again. I figure if you don’t like the game, you don’t play it 3 times so hopefully I tend to get positive reviews from people who like the game.

15.The App Store blurbs are hardcore basic text. Not even bolding/italic stuff, from what I’ve seen. It’s basically ASCII. ASCII advertising blurbs, games you can download trial versions of and pay for the full version…where have I seen this before? oh right, Shareware in the late 80s and early 90s haha Apple should let people put ANSI blocks in there so we could have badass ANSI art make a comeback!

I tried doing a bunch of little icons and junk in my App Store blurb but honestly it just looks so ugly that I gave up and kept it simple. I wish they at LEAST let you Bold and Italicize things, but no go. Some notes about the blurb: I found using dividing lines to separate key chunks of it (the section with Review quotes, the section with a description, the section with features, the section with links, etc.) helps make things look nice. And the first 2 or 3 lines of your description will be what’s shown by default, requiring the user to hit a “More” button to see the rest of the description…so make sure what’s in those first 2 or 3 lines is something eye-catching like an amazing review quote or a good stat your game has like “#5 in North America” etc. Also as you get reviews, be sure to quote them in your description…psychologically a lot of people choose their games based on recommendations so when they see “oh, these 3 reviewers are raving about the game” they’re more likely to take a chance on it than if you have no quotes at all.

That’s about it! Hope you enjoyed the read and if you’re an iPhone developer I hope you got a little out of it. It’s amazing how many lessons you learn when you actually sit down and finish a project from start to finish…but as long as you learn those lessons and remember them in the future on the next project, it’s all good. We’re always going to make mistakes, we just want to avoid repeating them! I figure by the time I finish 2 or 3 games I should have a pretty solid streamlined development workflow so I’m excited for that! (Source: Gamasutra)


上一篇:

下一篇: