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.