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.