I liked the videos, but it think it would be even better to show someone actually playing it, ie. actually see the players fingers interact with game. Without this, it's sort of hard to get a handle on what the actual game mechanics are (unless that's the point and you want people to go and download to find out for themselves??)

I appreciated and remembered this comment. Here's a new video showing what the gameplay looks like. No fingers, strictly speaking, but you can clearly see what the player is doing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCUWbkzC6nI

Agreed. I did grasp it... but I gave it more mental processor time since it came from HN than I ordinarily would have. If I had just stumbled across it, I may not have bothered to work out what was going on in the vid.

What were your thoughts on the pricing model? I'm developing a game myself now and the way it seems things are going is freemium with IAP purchases. Why did you choose the 0.99/2.99? It's a tough choice to make

Not the author but I thought I should chime in here. The app store is a difficult beast these days... being free means you get a lot more downloads, but you need 100's of thousands (if not millions) of users to make any decent amount of money. And you have to be very careful with your freemium plan. You don't want to end up like http://www.penny-arcade.com/report/article/going-broke-with-...

If you're a paid game, you're going to have a very hard time getting sales, because you can't acquire users. The 99 cent 'race to the bottom' also means you need a lot of sales, but it's tough to achieve that today without a brand or big-name. Even Apple featuring you doesn't add up to as much as it used to.

So, you might have noticed a pattern amongst the more successful freemium titles. Lots of wait timers, short gameplay bursts, unlimited purchasables, etc... what hardcore gamers deem as evil, is actually what these companies have determined is the most optimal way to make money. I'm not trying to be depressing here lol, but before you make the decision to go free, make sure you understand what you're up against. I personally hope we can head to a more League of Legends type model where you make $5 on a lot of people rather than the Farmville route of making $5000 on a few 'whales'. I personally much prefer a great game that lets me pay when I'm ready to invest, than a game that is trying to milk me the whole time.

Just an FYI, me and a friend built Stratosphere: Multiplayer Defense for iPad and have gone through much of this dilemma lol. Good luck!

We had a similar thought process. The games that make money through IAPs (Candy Crush is the obvious example) tend to be play-forevers with complex in-game economies of bonuses and powerups, plus all those timers and limits to get you to pay up, etc.

The more traditional games — games with more genuine depth behind them, from the point of view of the "hardcore gamers" you mention — when they make money, they tend to be pay-up-front. They're charging more for a significantly more personal and higher-quality engagement, and can partially make up for lower quantity that way.

But even then it's been really hard to know how to approach these questions. My advice is to release something small quickly, because being in the situation is the only way to learn what works and what doesn't. That's not exactly what we did here, and though I'm really happy with how the game has turned out, we sometimes felt like we were fumbling in the dark on the way to this point.

Yes, I totally get what you mean. The hilarious thing is making something small ends up always taking longer lol =P

That's really helpful (and a little depressing, reading the 0.67% conv rating for Gasketball), thanks. I was thinking of going freemium and wanted to offer IAP just for skipping ahead, or unlocking bonus features, nothing that's needed for the actual 'normal' gameplay, but seems like not the way to go to stand a chance of making decent sales. Will try and balance it I suppose.

And I'm downloading Stratosphere now! Always looking for good on screen two player games

I am planning to release my 1st ios title in December. There are no IAP and it is not a side-scroller :-) Do you have any advice for new apps on initial pricing, how to determine it, etc?

It's tough to decide, but don't hesitate to be over 99 cents. People will pay for quality, but look at similar games and their costs. If your game is a 2D puzzle game, you don't want to be priced with Call of Duty etc...

Also, December is a busy month because EA and the big guys all do a lot of sales. January is much quieter, but up to you :)

Thanks for the reply. I am hoping to get it out before the iTunes submissions cease but it might be January. I am off for 6 weeks!

Just checked out Stratosphere — those are some spiffy trailers! Did you do them yourselves?

Yeah mostly by my partner, thanks for the kind words :)

Wonderful game - the music and artwork are really great! I'm looking forward to playing my way through the whole game. What game engine did your friend use to code it?

Thanks! It was Cocos2D for graphics with Box2D for the physics engine. The hard part with Box2D (as with any physics engine, I assume) was tweaking the coarseness of the simulation to balance performance against visual quality.

I like the originality in using light/absence of light as being part of the game mechanics.

What have you found challenging during the whole process?

1. Learning to code (not me, but guy who started the project)

2. Making sense of feedback from playtesters who were not always in our target audience

3. Importance of having beautiful art

4. Making natural-sounding effects

5. Writing music to go along with an existing theme

Long version:

Well, my friend learned to code by starting this project, so that was the first big obstacle. That meant that the development cycle of the game was much longer than lean-startup, rapid-iteration ideas floating around here would have it.

Related to that was the difficulty of making sense of the feedback we got from playtesters. It would have been easier if we were still in college, but we had a hard time getting feedback from people who were in our target audience, namely people who play mobile games at all. We asked everyone we knew to play the game, and it was psychologically difficult to separate out feedback that was probably not relevant because it came from someone who would never buy the game in the first place. For example, many people thought it was too hard, but they were often not really people who play games in the first place. This was made doubly hard by the fact that we've played the game so much, so we couldn't trust ourselves to know what was too hard or too easy. We didn't do anything special to solve this — no "7 Ways To Get Out of Your Own Way" blog post is coming out of this. Essentially we did the best we could.

Another interesting thing was just how central it is to have beautiful art. It sounds obvious but it's one of those things you don't completely grok until it happens to you. Before the artist came on board, we had a well-designed protoype, and we retained the majority of the original design (enormously to the founder's credit). But perfect execution by a talented artist makes for an incredible difference in emotional appeal. I wouldn't call this a difficulty, since the art came out so well. But it was a lesson.

I was in charge of the sound and music, and that ended up being surprisingly difficult too. You would never know without trying to do it yourself how hard it is to come up with sounds that feel natural in context and aren't distracting or annoying. I'd say we ended up with fewer sound effects than I would have liked for that reason.

The music was hard too. I had experience with rock music, but I had never written any piece of music to go along with a pre-existing theme and mood. So writing the main theme to have a French feel but with the right amount of levity took a lot of iteration. And the level background music has to be catchy enough to be fun and motivating, but not so catchy that it prevents the player from concentrating on the game. Furthermore, I'm not a great keyboard player, but I used a keyboard to record all the tracks and in order to get the timing right I had to do literally hundreds of takes and slice and dice the music pretty finely.

Nice idea and lovely music