Thursday, September 5, 2013

Quick Update

Where are the reports?


If you've been coming here for the monthly reports, I'm sorry for them missing these last two months. The reason is that Jungle Jumper isn't doing all that great any more and it really isn't all that fun to write them when nothing new is happening. For now they will be retired until I release my next game.

What are you wasting your time on?


If anyone is wondering why no reports or blog posts or new games are coming. The answer is simply. I'm trying. I've started a new job. Once again one that doesn't leave me much free time and I've had trouble finding the time and energy to finish any projects while balancing my social life.

What are you going to do about it?


I really want to get another game out. I really want to be able to do this full time, so I will be making a few changes.

Treating development like a full time job. Through 2013 I've only been working on my games a few hours each week, feeling bad if I spent too much time on it because I neglected my girlfriend and my friends. This is simply not getting the job done. So I've made a deal with my girlfriend that I'll have two full time jobs for a while. My office job and my game development job when I get home. Hopefully I will not have to do that for too long.

Onward to greatness!!!

Hopefully that gives you guys a bit of a idea of the status of things and hopefully I'll be able to have some more interesting news to share soon. 

Saturday, July 13, 2013

50.000 Jungle Jumper players

Jungle Jumper got past 50.000 downloads on Google Play today.

I don't know how big a percentage of Android games get to 50.000 downloads, but it feels like a pretty big achievement for my first ever game.

Not much more to say other than... This is pretty cool.

Friday, July 12, 2013

June Report

And the June report makes its late entry. Lets get down to business.

Total installations end of June 2013:
Google Play
48,203
+7,797
GetJar
???
+???
Amazon
1,511
+323
Handster
696
+56
TOTAL:
???
+???

Active installations end of June 2013:
GOOGLE PLAY ACTIVE
11,631
+419

Admob stats June 2013:
Impressions318,221-23,263
eCPM$0.38+$0.02
CTR0.81%+0.04%
REVENUE$122.32-$0,15

Conclusion:


The numbers from June were very similar to the ones from May. I implemented Google Play games services in the game and I think that is awesome, but it did not improve my download numbers at all. This is obviously not the $400 which has been my next goal for a while now, but I'm hopeful for several reasons. The reason for the missing numbers is that GetJar's developer console is down. I'll go back and fill in the remaining data when it is back up.

Next:


My long term goal is still $2000 to make a full time living of my games. I'll keep my next month goal on $400 until I reach it.

So I think that Jungle Jumper is more or less done, it will keep earning a bit, but I really don't think it will suddenly start downloading and earning like crazy. I will keep improving the game, but I think it's safe to assume that it's glory days are behind it. Jungle Jumper will however be passing it's 50,000 download mark on Google Play very soon which is a bit exciting.

It's all about new games... I've talked about working on other games and one in particular several times, but I still don't have anything to show for it. I can only say that I've had very little time for it and that I have not really hit upon the right recipe for my next game.

But my situation is changing, I should be getting considerably more time to work on my games soon and there are several other things going on that will hopefully make it easier and make my games better.

I'm not going to go into any details because I'll be doing a big status update about it all in a few days.

It looks like July will be a really bad month and that I won't make it past $100 which is quite sad since that will be a first since getting above it. Maybe it's all the nice weather making people go outside and play in real life. But I'll keep my $400 goal just to spite everyone :).

Friday, June 21, 2013

Jungle Jumper 1.30 - Google Play games services

Jungle Jumper 1.30 is out, or will be very soon at least. I finally managed to get an online leader board implemented in there by using Google Play games services.

If you're wondering why I didn't mention this in my monthly report, it is because I didn't know I would get to do any work on Jungle Jumper. I've just had a weeks vacation and it turned out I suddenly had the energy and time to do some really productive programming at the end of it.

I've wanted to have an online leader board from the moment I made Jungle Jumper, but I've been hesitant to implement other peoples' middle ware to do it. I was seriously looking at doing a Facebook integration, but it never really felt right.

Then Google announced Google Play games services at Google I/O and it seemed all my prayers had been answered. It took me quite a bit of time to figure out how exactly it all worked, but when I finally did, it turned out to be a very simple implementation (good work Google). The leader board looks good and the login flow is easy and problem free. I also set up five online achievements and that part is looking good too.

I'm really excited to see how many people will log in and how high peoples' scores will be and whether it will make more people play.

I actually fixed a lot of other small issues with this update and I believe that I got rid of the rendering bug that has been plaguing the game ever since update 1.2.

Sunday, June 9, 2013

May Report

Here comes the May report. Again a bit late, sorry about that, but again the numbers are not so good and it makes it a bit less fun.

Total installations end of May 2013:
Google Play
40,406
+9,465
GetJar
31,884
+2,421
Amazon
1,188
+245
Handster
638
+29
TOTAL:
74,116
+12,160

Active installations end of May 2013:
GOOGLE PLAY ACTIVE
11,212
+1,120

Admob stats May 2013:
Impressions341,484-108,627
eCPM$0.36-$0.08
CTR0.77%-0.09%
REVENUE$122.47-$76,82

Conclusion:


May was not so great, but actually in some ways it was better than April. All the way through April the amount of players and the daily revenue was falling. Through May the numbers have been steady, going neither up or down. But I'm obviously not reaching my goals at the moment which sucks.

Next:


My long term goal is still $2000 to make a full time living of my games. I'll keep my next month goal on $400 until I reach it and who knows maybe something good will happen.

I still need to do a good update of Jungle Jumper, to fix some issues and hopefully get Google Play game services in there, but I don't have much programming time and what I have is being used on the new game.

The new game has stagnated a bit, I'm trying to figure out how advanced I want to make it and whether I want to port it over into a newer version of libgdx. But I still feel good about the game, it is just not coming as quickly as I hoped.

More programming time. So a big reason that I haven't gotten all that much done, is that I really don't have all that much free time at the moment. I'm working a full time job and I have a bad work schedule and very long commute times. So I've quiet my job, I'll stay through my current project, but then I will be looking for another job. Hopefully one that will give me more time to work on my games.

Monday, May 27, 2013

Now It's Even More Official!



So I set up an official homepage for Lonely Giant Games a while back and have updated it a few times since, but the homepage has been at the domain www.lonelygiantgames.co.nf. Now I finally took the leap and bought www.lonelygiantgames.com. The homepage is live and I'm busy making sure all links are now pointed at the new homepage. I'll leave the old one up for a while as I guess quite a few things have crawled it and they need a bit of time to find the new one.

I've also finally gotten around to printing out the registration form to register as a sole trader and hopefully I'll get it filled out and filed soon. There are quite a few things that need doing when that goes through, like getting a business bank acount and figuring out how to file my taxes when the time comes. I'm thinking that when I get a bit further in the process I'll do a bit more of a practical post on starting your own business.

Saturday, May 11, 2013

Iron Man 3 & Star Trek Into Darkness

I mentioned I was going to see Iron Man 3 and that I was very excited, I never got around to giving my opinion on it, since I'm going to see Star Trek Into Darkness tonight I though I could use this opportunity to mention my thoughts on Iron Man 3 and talk about my excitement for Star Trek Into Darkness.

Disappointed




I must say that Iron Man 3 was a bit of a disappointment. I heard really good things about the movie before seeing it and it had a really high IMDB score, which it seems was very inflated early on and has dropped quite a bit by now.

The Good


So before I go into what I did not like about the movie, let me mention what I liked. I liked what they were trying to do with the Tony Stark character. Having him more or less have post traumatic stress after the events of the Avengers and be thinking of quitting because he is worried for Pepper worked well. Him loosing everything and having to rebuild was a really good choice. Giving him some good buddy moments with his friend Colonel Rhodes was also great.

The Bad


The movie was a bit of a mess. Now what do I mean about that? Well the new director, Shane Black, seemed to really want to set his own mark on the movie and he did that with a style that really didn't do much for me. The movie starts without any indication that the movie is starting with voice over of Robert Downey Jr. talking directly to the audience. Now this is a big departure from the earlier movies, which is a bit jarring, but I understand the idea of trying to make it more into Tony's story, the problem is that instead of having him serious and intense, which would have immediately caught my attention, and made sense since he is telling his story rather than showing off for other character, but he jibs away and completely undermines the dark style that the movie also tries for.

Enter the Mandarin. The movie gets interrupted early on by a minute long video that the Mandarin is sending out to the whole world, showing them how crazy and powerful he is. This is handled by the entire screen being taken over by this video montage. Rather than it being shown in the movie being displayed all over the world. This was another strange stylistic choice that simply didn't float my boat. It felt like someone was trying to be artsy and impress and failed miserably. This whole thing happened several times through the movie and didn't do anything for me other than throw me out of the story.

Spider-man 3 syndrome. Now I know I might be overly harsh with comparing Iron Man 3 to the train wreck that was Spider-man 3, but I feel that in the same was as Spider-man 3 tried to do way to many things, so did Iron Man 3. I won't go into to much detail about the different story lines, I don't want to spoil it for anyone who haven't seen it yet, but I felt that the main story arch of Tony finding himself, got way too muddled by the many side stories that are supposed to make for interesting opposition for Tony.

And the Ugly


Weak antagonist and weak ending. In the end the antagonist who was built up to be very interesting is just another crazy megalomaniac who gives away his grand scheme in a one liner to one of his henchmen. The ending is horrible as a big surprise at the end completely undermines Tony's entire rebuilding journey.

Iron Man 3 was a fun action movie and Robert Downey Jr. is still a lot of fun as Iron Man, but I think that looking forward I'm going to be more excited about seeing the character in more Avengers movies rather than more Iron Man movies.

Into Darkness


I don't have all that much to say about Star Trek. I'm not huge Star Trek fans, but I have seen some movies and one of the newer series. I saw the reboot and thought they did a good job setting up the universe and having a fun action movie as well, so I'm hopeful they can really stretch their legs in the second movie. I'll probably do a post about my thoughts on that to when I have time.

Tuesday, May 7, 2013

April Report

Here we have the report for April. Sorry it's a bit late, it's not quite as fun to write the report when you do not reach your goals as when you do :P.

Total installations end of April 2013:
Google Play
30,941
+10,671
GetJar
29,463
+4,322
Amazon
943
+161
Handster
609
+62
TOTAL:
61,956
+15,216

Active installations end of April 2013:
GOOGLE PLAY ACTIVE
10,092
+1,836

Admob stats April 2013:
Impressions450,111+19,718
eCPM$0.44-$0.13
CTR0.86%+0.03%
REVENUE$199.29-$70,39

Conclusion:


April was a bit of a let down compared to March. Downloads went down, impressions went down, and the big reason for the downturn in revenue, the eCPM went down. My goal for this month was of course $400 so I didn't even hit half of that. I can't control the eCPM of course, but the downloads have gone down rather than up. I'm not completely sure why. GetJar really seems to be loosing a lot of steam and Google Play has lost quite a bit as well. I think part of it was my bad judgement In-App Billing update which is now luckily over and done with.

Next:


My long term goal is still $2000 to make a full time living of my games. I'll set next months goal at $400 again. I don't really think I will reach it, I might not even reach $200 as the game still is doing poorly, but things might turn around.

I need to make another update to Jungle Jumper to get rid of the bug that is plaguing it and causing quite a few bug reports, but I'm spending all my programming time on my new game at the moment. And after my two last updates which really haven't added much of value I would like the next update to actually add some content to the game.

That content might come in the form of the infamous high score system that I've never gotten in there. I hear rumours that Google will be announcing a game platform for multi-player and social aspects for Google Play and if they do that I would love to use that system as opposed to a Facebook implementation. We should know more about that soon at Google I/O on May 15.

New game! I'm still not ready to disclose anything on my new project. But it is going really well, it will however not be coming out in May so it won't have any impact on this month.

Thursday, April 25, 2013

House Cleaning

This update will be a bit of a housecleaning, so bear with me if it is a bit rambling.

Jungle Jumper 1.23


So I didn't get around to doing a post when I did the 1.23 update a week ago. It wasn't a huge update, I just removed In-App Billing, fixed a texture and set the AdMob banner to only show on the game screen. So I'm really pleased I removed the In-App Billing, it was a mistake to put it in their in the first place and I already sleep better at night. I have wanted to only have the AdMob banner show up on the game screen from the beginning, but I've never really been able to figure out how to do that. It turned out to be very easy and it makes the game seem way more professional that the ad is not blocking the title of the game in the menu.
Jungle Jumper is not doing so great though, it's not being downloaded at all as much as it was a few weeks ago, but hopefully it will go back up again. This means that I won't be meeting my $400 goal this month which is a bit of a shame, but that's fine.

There is a Bug in my Soup


So there is a nasty bug in Jungle Jumper that is causing around 10 crash reports a week. The bug seems to have been introduced after update 1.2. But I didn't realise it was their until a few days ago because I had hidden the bug early on as I thought it was a one time issue. The problem is that the stack traces don't really tell me anything other than that it is a rendering issue. I'm guessing that I made a mistake with all the improved graphics. It looks like I'll simply have to go through my renderer class and clean up all the code and hope it makes a difference.

Portfolio

You might have spotted that an extra tab has appeared on my blog. There isn't much in there yet, but I plan to have it bursting with links and images for different projects down the road.

Sick


So I've been pretty sick the last couple of days and have had to stay home, it seems I've gotten influenza and I'm coughing like a chain smoker. It has however been a bit of a blessing in disguise as I have been able to sit and program a bit, which leads me to my next point...

A New Dawn


I've finally gotten started on my new game. I'll play it close until I'm a bit further along, but I can say that it is going really well and that I now have a really nice alpha version of it, that looks like crap, but has the basic game play elements in it and is already quite fun. Hopefully I'll be able to share some more info about it and possibly some screenshots soon.

Iron Man 3


So I warned you I was going to be rambling a bit and I just wanted to mention how excited I am for the next Iron Man movie. I'm planning on going too see it on Friday with my better half if I'm well enough. So far I'm hearing very good things about it, such as people comparing it to The Dark Knight movie.

Feedback

So I'm beginning to get a decent amount of traffic here on the blog and I'm wondering if I have any regulars out there. If I do please write a comment, I'd love to hear whether anyone finds my ramblings of any interest and whether there is anyone in a similar start up situation who gets any info out of my monthly reports. Any feedback would be very welcome.


Tuesday, April 16, 2013

The Lure of In-App Billing

So since I updated Jungle Jumper with In-App Billing, my download numbers have gone down, my bug reports have gone up, it has become way more difficult to use one code base for several app stores and I have not sold a single "Remove Ads" product in the game.


I don't like In-App Billing. When I originally wrote out my values for Lonely Giant Games, one of them was "Make games without hidden costs, e.g. In-App Purchases." I since changed that to "Make games without hidden costs, e.g. pay to win." I did this because I thought it would be nice for people to be able to upgrade Jungle Jumper to an ad free version with an In-App Purchase - and I still do to some extent, but it is a slippery slope.

As soon as I decided on this, I though that I could also make the new world, that I'm planning to build for Jungle Jumper, something you could buy, and maybe you could buy a few extra costumes as well.

So what's the problem with that you might ask? It's not like you can "pay to win" by doing that. No, but you are making your game into something that it is not supposed to be: A shop. Games are suppose to be a place where you go to have fun and you're transported to another place. What you are basically doing is smacking the users in the face with reality, when you are suddenly interrupting them by asking them for money. In the end you are breaking their suspense of disbelief, and that is simply one of the worst things you can do in any form of entertainment.

There is also the fact that Jungle Jumper is a game for kids as well. And I'd like for parents to not have to worry when their kids play my games. I know you can set up parental control stuff to avoid kids buying from the Play Store, but I think a lot of parents still don't know that.

"Let not the lure of the dollar signs lead you astray from good game design my children." 

We've seen some beloved game series like Diablo and Dead Space flirt with variations of In-App Billing with bad results. I truly hope that this is only a phase while publishers are enamoured with the idea of micro-transactions everywhere. I think it's important to have higher aspirations than to just make a game that earns as much money as possible.

As for myself, I'm going to take In-App Billing back out of Jungle Jumper as soon I have time to make the next update.

In-App Billing is crap, whether you're a gamer or a developer. But it's easy to forget that when you're on the end that will receive the money.

Wednesday, April 3, 2013

Jungle Jumper 1.22 is out

I put up the new update yesterday here's what's in it:

Improved jungle vine texture: The jungle vine texture has always been a bit crappy and blurry, now it is sharp and crisp :).

Improved spider texture: The spider texture was also a bit poor, I redrew each frame and made it a bit more nasty looking with some fur. I also added an image for when the spider is dead. Before a vertically mirrored image was simply used.

Improved chameleon texture: Much the same as the spider. The lines were not as sharp looking as I wanted so it had a once over and I think it improved quite a bit.

Implemented In-App Billing: There now is a button at the bottom of the screen saying "Remove Ads" and if you press it you are asked to pay a one time $1 to remove ads. We'll see if this works better than my paid version of the game.

Other: I cleaned up a bunch of code, which is always nice.

Conclusion

This update ended up being quite a bit smaller than I had planned. I had a bunch of things I wanted to put in there, but when I have as little time as I do at the moment to program, it very easily becomes difficult to keep track of a lot of different changes that are halfway implemented. I'll try to keep the updates smaller.

I'm not really sure what the next update will be, there are lots of things that I want in the game. The music, a new world for Jorvis to explore and maybe some silly extra costumes that you can buy through the In-App Billing. Not to mention the elephant in the room. The Facebook implementation to get a high-score system.

At the same time I also really want to get another game out. So much to do and so little time ;).

Monday, April 1, 2013

March Report


Here we have the report for March.

Total installations end of March 2013:
Google Play
20,270
+11,983
GetJar
25,141
+10,488
Amazon
782
+174
Handster
547
+64
TOTAL:
46,740
+22,909

Active installations end of March 2013:
GOOGLE PLAY ACTIVE
8,256
+5,941

Admob stats March 2013:
Impressions469,829+211,422
eCPM$0.57+$0.16
CTR0.83%+0.04%
REVENUE$269.65+$162,58


Conclusion:

March was an incredible month. I did not think it likely that I would reach my $200 goal, but I far exceeded it. I didn't do any updates. The only thing I really did was to update the description on Google Play, which seems to have really had an effect.

Next:

My long time goal is still $2000 so I can make a full time living of it. Next month's goal will be $400 dollars. Which seems pretty possible, if the game keeps doing this well and possibly improves a bit when I update it. Which I hope to do very soon. What I really need is more games, but that seems very far away at the moment. I'm simply not getting enough work done. I have way too little time for it, being back in a full time position at work. I'm hoping that I can maybe take a week of work and work full time on the games and get my next game into shape.

I still have not managed to get the Facebook implementation to work, so I have taken it out for the moment, hopefully it will return for the next update. The big features in the new update, will be a few improved textures and an In-App Billing button to remove the ads for 1$.

I also found out that the game no longer works on Android 1.5 and 1.6. This was because of Google Analytics. I have remedied this issue, which is why I want this update out soon so It works correctly again.

Wednesday, March 20, 2013

The Importance of Being Earnest

Just a little update of how it's going with Jungle Jumper.

I haven't gotten any work done on the update recently, what little free time I've had recently I've been spending with my girlfriend and on playing games a bit - something I haven't really done in about a year (the game playing part, not the spending time with my girlfriend - she's patient, but not that patient).

I did however spend a bit of time updating Jungle Jumper's description on Google Play. I read up on how to make Apps more searchable on Google Play. They mentioned repeating search words and making sure that popular words were in the description.

I really didn't want to put in a line of comma separated search tags as I have seen some people do. That seems amateurish and everyone is just putting in the names of all the popular games.

Instead I made sure that the title of the game was repeated a few more times in the text and then I included quotes about what people had said about the game. Especially DroidAppOfTheDay.com had a long nice description of how the game was similar to Temple Run and Agent Dash.

This was apparently a very good idea ... My daily download numbers from Google Play have gone from around 100 per day to around 600 per day. This has also meant that the game has gotten a bunch more +1s and reviews on Google Play and that I'm earning quite a bit more money every day. At the moment I'm earning $5-10 per day and yesterday I earned $12.22.

The game also came past 10,000 downloads on Google Play a few days ago and is now on 13,730. It looks like I might make my $200 goal for this month, but we will see in ten days time.

Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Debug Scmebug



So I finally got some programming done this weekend. I created a debug for Jungle Jumper. It probably took around an hour and ever since I made it I've been kicking myself for not doing it earlier.



So it's quite simple as you can see. Simply three buttons. One for unlocking everything, one for resetting the settings and one for making the feedback screen appear. All this appears and works and the AdMob ads go over to the test ones when I change my debug setting to true in the code. This is really nice. Earlier I would be changing all the settings in the code to test different things; having things I had commented out that I could bring in. This is way better and I definitely recommend to anyone making games to take the time to build a little debug.

As you can also see in the screenshot I now have a string saying "Remove Ads" in the bottom of the screen. When you press it, you are presented with an In-App Purchase to permanently remove the ads. The In-App Billing stuff was a bit of a mess to implement, but it went way more painless than I had thought. It seems to work, but I haven't run all the tests on it yet.

I'm almost done with this update now, I think I'm pushing the music and better sounds for the next update. The only thing really missing now for this version is the Facebook implementation. I'm having some issues with the Facebook SDK. When I run Facebook's own test apps, they do not seem to connect correctly with Facebook, I don't know if this is an issue with the sample apps being deprecated or maybe it's simply an issue with my test device and account.

I hope to get this update out soon, but I probably won't have any time to work on it again until the weekend.

Friday, March 1, 2013

February Report

Here we have the February report and it is awesome :).

Total installations end of February 2013:
Google Play
8,287
+4,647
GetJar
14,653
+6,906
Amazon
608
+155
Handster
483
+58
TOTAL:
23,831
+11,566

Active installations end of February 2013:
GOOGLE PLAY ACTIVE
3,894
+2,315

Admob stats February 2013:
Impressions 258,407 +120,368
eCPM $0.41 +$0.02
CTR 0.83% -0.09%
REVENUE $107.07 +$53,08

Conclusion:


This was a very good month. I reached my goal of $100, which I really thought was unrealistic, especially taking the short month into account. Early in the month I did the update that asks people to review the game. It really hasn't done much in the form of reviews though. But it seems like more people a plus one-ing the game, which is great as well.

Next:


The long term goal is still to get to around $2000 a month which should enable me to do this full time. The goal for March is $200 which I think will be quite difficult to reach unless something big happens this month. I really have not gotten much work done on Jungle Jumper or my new game this past month. Mainly because I'm back at working a full time job, but also because I have had quite a bit of computer trouble so that USB debugging would not work.

I've gotten started a bit again now and I hope to release an update to Jungle Jumper this month, with quite a few improvements. I've taken down the paid version of Jungle Jumper, since no one bought it and I plan to instead have a button saying "Remove Ads" at the bottoms of the game that allows you to pay $1 to remove the ads permanently. I have not tried setting up In-App Purchases before though so it will take a bit of research. I'm also working to implement the Facebook SDK. I really wish I didn't have to, but it seems that is the only way to get sharing to Facebook working. Hopefully I'll be able to set it up as a Facebook app where you can compete on a leader board, which would finally realise my dream of a universal highscore list. Other than that, I've improved the jungle vine texture, the chameleon texture and the spider texture. I'm also thinking about brightening the whole game a bit as it is a bit dark. The final big thing is music. I have a version working with music, but I'm still working on my little composition trying to make it resemble something with a decent melody.

My other game is still a bit in limbo, I actually don't think it will take all that long to make it when I get really into it, but I've mostly been setting things up and doing tests and drawing different graphics for it so far.

Monday, February 25, 2013

Catching Up

So it's been over a year since I did an update about books and movies and a lot has happened since, so lets get caught up.


Well Harry Dresden returned in Cold Days, this was yet another great read. I think this series is still going as strong as ever, though I really feel more and more that you get the story in too small chunks, I wouldn't mind waiting two years for the next installment and getting twice as big a book.


The Wheel of Time came to an end with A Memory of Light. I can't say enough good things of Brandon Sanderson's work finishing this series. It's almost impossible to end a big series like this without letting people down. It's very difficult not to have very high expectations, but I think that they managed to go out with a bang. I think it's impossible to tie everything up into a need bow that satisfies everyone and still surprises with something like this. I think it's much more realistic to deliver a huge dose of what people have loved about the series with a twist and I think that is what A Memory of Light did.
I have probably also gotten better at not having too high expectations. I remember being very disappointed with the last Harry Potter book, the last Codex Alera book and even the last The Sword of Truth book, though my expectations for that weren't all that high to begin with.



With regards to TV-Series Game of Thrones is still running strong and it will be exciting to see the third season soon.
A couple of other new series started up that I though would be interesting; Arrow, was a bit interesting, but it didn't take many episodes to realise that, that was a waste of time. Revolution seemed promising, but the characters were thoroughly uninteresting. Last Resort had an awesome pilot, but should probably just have been a movie. Alcatraz was a huge disappointment as well.
Fringe has ended, but I haven't watched the last episodes yet. Fringe has been the best supernatural show on TV for years in my opinion and has generally kept a very high standard, so I look forward to seeing the conclusion when I find the time.


With regards to movies there have been so many since I wrote last. I think I'll keep it to the really big things I enjoyed.


The Avengers. I've been a huge fan of Josh Whedon ever since I saw Firefly and seeing what he was able to do with the Marvel universe was awe inspiring.


The Dark Knight Rises. Great movie and managed to tie up the trilogy nicely, it was however not quite as good as the second one, and it did seem a bit rushed and half baked in a few places which was suprising.


The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. As you might imagine I have read the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings and I've watched the movie adaptions of the latter countless times. I was very dissapointed the first time I saw the Fellowship of the Ring. I thought it strayed away from the book way too much and the book was very clear in my mind. I was also younger and in general had way too high expectations. This time around I had way more realistic expectations and on purpose I did not reread the Hobbit before seing the movie. And I thoroughly enjoyed it. I just had fun with it, and the things that are in the movie that are not in the book was actually very interesting too, as it is things taken from the Lord of the Ring apendencies. It's great to see good fantasy on the big screen again and it's awesome to have the next two movies to look forward to.

Well that's it for catching up, I think I'll end the post here, before it get's any longer. I'll probably do a post about what to look forward to in 2013 soon.

Saturday, February 23, 2013

PlayStation 4 Announcement


So the PlayStation 4 was announced and though it might not have much to do with my business as a game developer at the moment, as a gamer and tech geek it really got my juices flowing.

I'm not gonna go over all the things they announced as it has been done lots of times by people more eloquent than me, but I did want to mention a couple of things that made me excited as a developer.

The system will be based on PC architecture.
This will probably mean that it will be very similar to writing an openGL game in C and C++ to PC hardware, probably with some kind of Linux architecture in between. This is of course great as it is way more simple and close to standard PC development than the proprietary Cell architecture the PlayStation 3 used.

More downloadable games with different payment options.
It seems Sony has smelled the roses with Apple and Android markets and the upcoming Ouya console. Free games and games with in-app purchases will be something they support. It sounds like we will have a much lower bar to entry, giving a lot more developers a chance to play around with this platform.


Hopefully all this will mean that independent game developers will soon have more great options for making and distributing games.

Thursday, February 14, 2013

$$$

I'm past $100 in Admob!

So hopefully soon I'll get the first money transferred  $100 is not much when you consider how much time I've put into this by now, and that I've also spent $25 on getting a Google Play developer account, but its a big thing for me and hopefully it's only the beginning.

Tuesday, February 12, 2013

Jungle Jumper hits 5,000

Well not quite yet, but soon.


Jungle Jumper finally got past 5,000 downloads on Google Play. It also had the most downloads on a single day from Google Play ever with 333 downloads.

The game has done even better on GetJar, though it has slowed down a bit lately, it is very near to 10,000.

The game seems to slowly be climbing and since the 1.2 update I am seeing that people are not uninstalling as much either. Since none of these downloads are based on ads or the game being on the new list, I see no reason it should slow down, I expect and hope that it will keep going up at an accelerated rate.

It will be exciting to see how long it takes to get to 10,000 on Google Play.

I'm still working on my second game and I also have a version of Jungle Jumper with music and a few other improvements, that I'm playing around with which will probably come out pretty soon. But I'm back at having a full time job now so I don't have all that much time to work on the games.


Another big milestone will be coming up very soon as the Admob earnings have almost surpassed $100 which will mean my first paycheck from the game.


I've only been talking about my games for a long time here on my blog, but this is the place where I like to talk about all the things that interest me and all the stuff I'm working on, so I'll probably be doing a few posts about books, movies, TV-Series and maybe some other little projects I have cooking.

Sunday, February 3, 2013

January Report

So as discussed in an earlier update I'm gonna start doing monthly reports on downloads and Admob stats.

A few caveats about the numbers. I was hoping to get good numbers of my entire install base from Google Analytics, but the numbers I'm getting are not making much sense, so I'll write the total number of downloads from Google Play, Amazon, Handster and GetJar. I have by far the most downloads on Getjar, about twice as many as Google Play. I'll also display the Active device installs from Google Play as that is the only number I really have on active installs.

Total installations end of January 2013:
Google Play
3,640
GetJar
7,747
Amazon
453
Handster
425
TOTAL:
12,265

Active installations end of January 2013:
GOOGLE PLAY ACTIVE
1,579

Admob stats January 2013:
Impressions 138,039
eCPM $0.39
CTR 0.92%
REVENUE $53.99

Conclusion:


This is of course my first report so I can't really compare to earlier reports. But this has been a very good month. Almost all the GetJar downloads are from this month. And in the three months before the game earned $14.87. The big two things that have changed is that I published the game on GetJar and released the big 1.2 update.

Next:


The long term goal is to reach around $2,000 a month as that would really allow me to make a full time living off of my games. But my next month goal will be $100, hopefully the game will continue to do better and better on it's own, I'm also doing a small update that will ask people to rate the game when they've played it for a bit. More ratings will hopefully help with the games listing in Google Play. It also shouldn't be too long until the game get's past 5,000 downloads in Google Play which will hopefully help too.
I'm also working hard on my next game, but I doubt that will be out before the next report.

Sunday, January 20, 2013

Jungle Jumper Status, Improved Homepage and a Gameplay Video

Jungle Jumper has been doing great since the update. Just yesterday the game was downloaded more than  1000 times. The game has now been downloaded 6931 when you put Google Play, GetJar, Amazon and Handster together.

I've wanted to do a better gameplay video and maybe a real trailer for a while, but I've only been able to capture video by physically filming the game being played until now. I discovered AMD's bluestack emulator which runs great on my computer so I was finally able to capture some good footage.


I've also given the company homepage www.lonelygiantgames.co.nf a once over. I hadn't done much work with HTML5 and CSS3 when I made it, so the first version of the page was a bit of a mess. It has been greatly improved in my opinion.

Thursday, January 17, 2013

Jungle Jumper 1.2 is done

Jungle Jumper 1.2 is finally done and out in the wild, I didn't manage to get everything in there that I wanted, but it is a huge improvement compared to 1.11 which was out before. Let's start with some screenshots.


This shows a comparison of the main menu. As you can see the entire thing has gotten an overhaul.

I got rid of the blurred look of the backgrounds, which I think is a big improvement. I drew a new jungle vine, which I'm really pleased with, I always thought the old one was pretty bad.

I also improved Jorvis a bit especially his face and tipped his hat back a bit. I also made his tail a bit thicker. I also made three more versions of Jorvis hanging here wearing different costumes which I'll explain shortly.

As you can see the buttons also got an overhaul. Before it was simply a box with rounded corners and a bit of bevel and emboss. Now it is instead to slightly offset squares, they also shrink slightly when you press them. This also goes for the menu items. The start item is also wriggling back and forth a few degrees to entice people to press it :).

The new button on the right with the mouse changing pants appear when you unlock a costume, you can then switch between the different costumes by pressing it. This will change both the Jorvis in the game and the Jorvis in the menu so you can see the outfit you will be wearing.

There has been added a menu item "objectives" and here is a screenshot of the objectives screen and you can also see the improved highscores screen.


You can see the new objectives screen displaying all the objectives and the gifts you earn by earning the starts. When you earn the different gifts they show up on the main menu around Jorvis making him look more and more badass.

Lets look at another screenshot.


Here we have a comparison from inside the game. and you can again see the improved background. You can also see the improved mouse in one of the costumes. More on that in a moment. At the bottom you can see the new GUI that holds the current score and the objects you are are collecting at the moment. It also houses a new system. There is now an experience tracker and a multiplier, you loose your progress if you loose your hat.

Here is a look on the improved mouse:


As you can see the animation was only two frames and is now four instead and has generally been cleaned up. I'm also showing another of the costumes underneath.

Conclusion

The game is now way better and way prettier in my opinion. There is a lot to do in the game with all the achievements and gift so I hope people will enjoy it. But there is still room for improvement. The biggest thing still missing is good music in the game, I still hope to be able to compose that myself at some point, so people will have to do without until then. 

The other improvement I want to make is something you can't see in the screenshot as I took them in the ad free version. The Admob banner is in the top of the game in all screens and it is really blocking some things. I planned on getting it set up to only show in the game, but this update had taken so long that I decided to fix that in a small upcoming update instead. 

But now that I have been playing the game I realize how much the banner is slowing down the game. Whenever the banner animates, the whole game stutters, I'm also in the annoying situation that I have to change the position of the spider for the ad version of the game so you can see it lurking, but it will end up looking different in different games because the banner is different sizes on different devices. I'm seriously considering removing the banner from everywhere, except the pause and game over screen. At that point people have time to look and click the banner and it won't block anything.

I might not be completely pleased with Jungle Jumper yet, but I'm still very proud and happy with this update. I think I'll leave Jungle Jumper alone for a little while and work on a new game as I'm feeling a bit worn out about it.

A last note before signing off, I finally have Analytics in the game so I can get good numbers on how many people have the game in total, so I think I might start making a weekly or monthly report here about how many people are playing the game and how much I'm earning.