Parade of Rain

With December quickly approaching we’re finishing up our next major update to Tilt to Live. We just finished putting in the new achievements and I figured I’d share with you some of the guidelines I try to follow more or less. Maybe you’ll find some good ideas for achievements for your own game if you happen to be working on one, or maybe re-think some of them.

Bad Idea

Don’t make the player grind (actively)

This might be fine in a hardcore RPG (I don’t think it is personally, and just a sign of an outdated design philosophy), but in the mobile games arena time is of the essence. Most games have a very short life span in regards to how long a player will play it before moving on. Using your achievements to artificially pad out the time spent on a game doesn’t not improve the quality of the game. I’m referring to achievements where players have to simply spend  X amount of time doing Y and there is zero challenge to doing Y other than overcoming boredom.

I put the ‘actively’ qualifier because there are certainly some achievements that could be considered ‘grinding’ in Tilt to Live, yet I feel they are still fun to have. But I tend to think of those as passive achievements. There is one, for example, for traversing a few hundred thousand pixels (the pixels equivalent of a quarter mile or something). Players don’t actively go into a game trying to get that achievement. They simply accumulate that from playing the game normally and enjoying it. It’s comes as a surprise, a nice milestone, and interesting fact all rolled into one!

Don’t reward the player for things that are inheritant to the game.

Beat level 3? Achievement! Bah! It kind of annoys me that a lot of Xbox console games do this, but I’m not sure if it’s from sort of political pressure to make the 1k gamer points easily attainable or just lack of interest. I haven’t seen this much in mobile games yet, but in case you were considering it….don’t. The few exceptions I would grant this case would be in tutorials. And the reason would be to not only reward the player for learning some skill set for how to play the game, but also introduce them to the concept of ‘achievements’ overall so they are familiar with the system and sequence of events.

Don’t make achievements for the ‘hardcore’ only

Keep an eye out for the less experienced players out there. Don’t make the difficulty curve for your achievements flat and high. This one is definitely hard to gauge on your own and will probably require some user testing. Despite what you may think, if you’re making the game you are an expert player. We recently ran into this when assessing our new achievements and had to introduce some new ones and tweak the current ones to get a more varied difficulty curve. Having developed the game for so long it’s hard to really judge what is easy and hard now.

Good Idea

Think outside the normal play mechanics

What is a fun thing to do in your game but doesn’t necessarily make the player get any closer to finishing the game? Encouraging exploration with the game mechanics and tools at hand I think is usually a good thing. If the player loves the game enough they’ll take to these achievements and have fun with them, and feel like  the game acknowledges their dedication and curiousity. If another player simply wants to blaze through your game, there isn’t anything lost here. Any example of this is in the picture above for one of the Tilt to Live achievements. Putting an artificial constraint the player has to enforce in his or her head makes the game play at a slightly more deliberate pace, but still frantic and fun regardless.

Softening the blow

We recently added one that falls in this theme to the new Tilt to Live update. We made it hard enough where most players will have to consciously achieve some ‘massive’ goal and in hilarious fashion lose it all. Acknowledging the player just royally screwed up can help lighten the situation and reduce the frustration. This is probably a hard one to fit in most contexts, but I think can be fun in the right places.

Badges of Honor

I like to think of these as just more of the old-school ‘OMG I R 1337′ achievements. They are so hard that only the truly dedicated will have the skills to earn the achievement.

Outside the Box

What about achievements that are accomplished not in-game but inside the menu systems themselves? Or externally somewhere (with mobile devices and location API’s this could get really fun). Here’s one: Hey! You just played Game X at 400 MPH!!! (assuming the player is playing the game on an airplane)

Meta Achievements

There seems to be huge potential here for some fun achievements involving not the game itself, but some sort of factor influenced by the game. This would really put the ‘social’ in social gaming platforms. A straight forward example is having some aggregate number of enemies killed between all players who own the game and once that number is reached everyone unlocks that achievement as a community. They are pretty much community milestone markers. Noby Noby Boy has a similar meta game. With iPhones being constantly connected it seems this could be a really good fit for this market.

Before I start, I just want to mention that after 18 straight weeks of making iDevBlogADay posts, that this will be my last one. I’m following Noel Llopis’s lead and making room for that LARGE waiting list of developers waiting their turn. The point of iDevBlogADay was to encourage developers to blog regularly and help them get in the habit of blogging. I’ll still be making regular posts, so be sure to check back each week!

Coming into the App Store as new comers and even from an outsider’s view, rank seemed to be king. If you were in the upper echelons of the charts then you supposedly were making $$$$. And if you were no where near the top of the charts, then you’re probably making peanuts. For the most part, this holds true in the early days of a game’s launch. But over the past several months, our focus has shifted from ‘topping the charts’ to a much more sustainable view of getting as much ‘reach’ as possible.

From all the media, blogs, and podcasts I got the sense that once you drop out of the top 100 the app is more or less ‘dead’. Ok, that’s a slight exaggeration, but on the iPad this is far more pronounced due to the structure of the iPad app store. When looking at the performance of Tilt to Live, it seemed to be completely untrue. We’ve barely hit the 400-300 ranks in ‘All Games’ for several months, but sales never seemed to be effected by it. They held steady. Regardless if we had a higher than normal rankings on weekends or holidays, our sales per day stayed very close to a steady, but healthy number. Why?

We were fortunate in the early months to garner a decently large player base of Tilt to Live by letting it go ‘free’ for a week, which gave us about 500k more players. We were disappointed that this didn’t translate to a higher up take when we switched to back paid, but as time goes on I’m starting to think that large influx of players is paying off more in the long term than short term. With each update, we get another chance to re-engage players in our game and let them know of any upcoming titles or updates. And with the larger player base, ‘word of mouth’ tends to have a much longer lasting and stronger effect. This is one of the biggest reasons we’ve been able to support Tilt to Live and expand on it for so long.

So to help explore that a bit more, we decided to try a slightly different approach with Tilt to Live HD. With the power of in-app purchases, we tried to create a seamless upgrade experience for players playing a free demo version of our game. The guiding thought here is, the less amount of taps and thinking a player has to do to upgrade to the full version, the better chance we have at making a sale. Now our method of tracking a player’s path is crude (ie, nonexistent), but it’s mostly because we didn’t care to implement anything sophisticated. Hell, just having an IAP to unlock a full version is already a lot more sophisticated the ‘Lite app’ route. This is a better situation compared to doing a “Lite” version  because you wouldn’t be able to easily see where your users are coming from  even if you wanted to. Random aside: on the PC end of things for example, Cliff Harris obsesses over this stuff, because that market is very reliant on getting your own game out there as opposed to a centralized distribution. And reading some of his take on marketing could probably do some good for the indies on the app store surviving on apple features and rank alone (me included).

Doing an IAP for a ‘full version’ for a game seems to be going against the grain of the culture of the app store. Most games do a separate version, but again, I feel doing that is more short sighted and focused on app store rank than the ‘long tail’ of a game’s life.

Some of the benefits we’ve felt when we changed our mentality were:

• Development became less of a fast pace “DO IT NOW OR DIE” feeling. Constantly sending out press emails, review requests, forum posting/lurking, was all time sensitive and a very “gotta get this done now” mentality. I use to constantly watch the ranks of our game and keep thinking of ways to boost it because the idea of “Rank = Revenue” was engrained in my head. Now I’ve gone weeks without really know what our rank is and don’t care too much as we won’t be seeing the top of the charts for a long while..if ever.
• Early on when we were “blue sky” thinking of follow up projects, I was constantly obsessed with trying to find something that would fit the “Top of the charts” type mold. It’s as if we were giving up the very thing we went indie for: creative freedom.  Now, it still is a business and we’d be crazy not to give due diligence to market research prior to making a game, but the game we’ve settled on currently is something we’re both super excited about and feel we can reach a nice size audience and still come out ok on the other end . Chasing the top of the charts isn’t for me.
• With IAP of a full version, each app update not only notifies your current customers of new content/fixes but a large pool of potentially paying customers as well. The free customers get to see what fun they are missing out on!

So how is the Tilt to Live HD experiment going? Surprisingly well. We’ve got a 5% conversion rate right now since release, and within the first month of downloads we recouped our expenses and time. The daily download numbers and rankings are dwindling, but the daily sales are having a far less steep decline. I like to think we’ve decoupled our rank from revenue .

I’m not going into detail in this post on specific numbers and revenue on purpose because I’m saving it for a “Numbers post” closer to the end of this year, but hopefully those about to launch a game or just coming into the market will know at least one thing: You’re biggest volume of sales will happen at launch due to release date, category, and rank charts. You should really have a plan beyond that to be able to exist “outside” the hustle and bustle of the app store chart monster .

This post is more of a public service announcement. Prior to Tilt to Live’s Game Center/Retina update we wanted to extensively test the game with a wider tester base. So we ran a small ‘open beta’ (as open as Apple’s ad-hoc program would allow us). Prior to iOS 4.0 users had to do a cumbersome dance to get an ad-hoc game on their devices. And by cumbersome, I mean anything dealing with the desktop iTunes client. There was a lot of room for error, and for those (like me) that loathe syncing with iTunes, it creates a barrier because the act of adding an ad-hoc pretty much wipes my personal device since I buy all my apps 100% on the device and never sync.

Enter iOS 4.0. I discovered this tidbit on Twitter one day. Sadly, I can’t recall who tweeted or retweeted it, but thanks!

With the new iPhone iOS 4, you can distribute apps wirelessly without iTunes intervention. You still need to collect the appropriate devices id’s and create the appropriate provisioning profiles but if you already have those sending out files is easy.

The benefit? Oh where to start? Your testers no longer need to be tethered to a desktop to actually test your app! Our beta e-mails contains direct links to the provisioning and ipa file. The user simply has to tap on both and the game installs over the air! It’s almost easier than buying an app on the app store. The barrier to beta testing has been dramatically lowered because of just this one feature. You can almost coin it as ‘one-click beta installs’. It’s good stuff.

The other upshot? You get more feedback. Some beta testers may simply be out and about and won’t remember to connect to their iTunes client when they return home for the day. We had a lot more responses this go around and even some quick back and forth e-mail discussions as people installed, played, and replied all in one sitting.

Another good thing is we were able to get some ‘field data’ on our Game Center implementation. I would imagine most people have wifi on their homes nowadays. We were getting some feedback from some testers that were on EDGE or 3G that Game Center was causing a long ‘pause’ between games. This was something that didn’t turn up in our internal testing because we’re always on Wifi. Turning over to 3G to test still didn’t give me any hang ups. So just the knowledge that a good portion of people were getting a significantly slower response from GC prompted me to investigate better ways to mitigate this and ‘hide’ the response time delay so users weren’t met with an unresponsive UI.

Downsides? It’s a bit cumbersome to create a build for wireless distro as you’re required to do a ‘build and archive’ from XCode. I have an automated build process for the old-school ad-hoc way. I wish there was a way to automate this as well. I feel that there might be a way, but not sure if ‘build and archive’ is doing any magic behind the scenes. If anyone’s got any info on this or whether xcodebuild has some way of doing this all through the command line please let me know!

A quick guide to build a wireless distro game or app

1. Choose Build->Build and Archive

2. If it already isn’t open, open the Organizer window (window->Organizer) and choose ‘Archived Applications.

3. Highlight the build you just archived and click on “Share Application”

4. Select “Distribute for Enterprise”. The correct provisioning profile should be automatically selected. If not, correct it.

5. At this point you’re presented with a form (pictured below) that you need to fill out.

• URL: You need to decide beforehand what the name of the ipa and the location on a webserver the file will reside at. For this example we’ll use ‘http://www.onemanleft.com/tilttotlive/Tilt_to_Live.ipa’
• Title/Subtitle: self explanatory.
• Large/Small image URL: not needed. But since I had this on hand I just put them in the same folder on the web server as the ipa file.

Now when you click ‘OK’ it will ask you to save the file. Be sure to save it as the same file name you gave it in the URL (in our previous example it was ‘Tilt_to_Live.ipa’).

Now upload both the ipa and plist file to the URL you put in the form. Drop the index.php file created by Jeffrey Sambells in this post to the directory you uploaded the IPA file and you’re good to go. This index file will generate the links for both the provisioning and ipa files.

Now any user that is in the provisioning profile can visit that link in safari on their device and download the app directly. Or more conveniently, you can just copy and those links into an e-mail .

Gamezebo was kind enough to host the post mortem I wrote up for Tilt to Live. You can find it here.

Sometimes being able to ‘unplug’ is exactly what I need to recharge my motivation. This past weekend I did just that. Adam and I headed up to DC to attend the “Rally to Restore Sanity And/Or Fear”. I use to live in DC so ti was great visiting and meeting up with old friends and just exploring the city.

I tweeted maybe 1 or 2 times the entire weekend. My laptop never came on, and I actually didn’t randomly browse my RSS feed or facebook until I got back home in Montgomery. It was pretty close to unplugging from the internet…

…Ok I couldn’t get on twitter or SMS for the entire rally because the network was overloaded. But it was more of a desire to truly ‘share’ something special happening rather than habitually check the net.

In any case, I think much clearer after being away from a computer for a few days. I certainly don’t stop thinking about work but it definitely helps me reflect on upcoming tasks and projects much more clearly and with a clearer ‘big picture’. Sometimes I’m so close to the monitor and keyboard I have a hard time standing back and looking at where I’m going.

I should maybe do this more often…

The downside? While being mentally recharged I’m still somewhat physically ‘recovering’ from the late nigh traveling :p. If you’re wanting a few minutes of amusement, check out my flickr gallery of some of the humorous signs I saw at the rally. More general pictures I took of the rally can be found here.