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.

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.

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.

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.

Jungle Jumper jumps past 1000 downloads

Today Jungle Jumper passed the 1000 download mark on Google Play. The game has also been downloaded 583 times on Amazon, Handster and Getjar.

The big 1.2 update is still on track and should come out soon.

Jungle Jumper 1.2 Status

Done:

It's going great with the update. I got a bit stuck trying to figure out how to implement a few things so I took a little break for a week or so.

I really got back into it a few days ago and things that I couldn't figure out in hours, I implemented in minutes.

I've now gotten Shared Preferences implemented and working. The book I read on Android game programming used the system of writing a file to external storage and saving the data in there. There were several issues with this. It used the WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE access which looks quite scary and I don't want any unnecessary accesses on my games and it also meant that you could just go into the file on your device and change the data manually. Theoretically setting your high-score to whatever you wanted.

I've also gotten Google Analytics implemented. I have wanted this implemented all along to get better numbers on my total install base and get feedback on how much people play the game and how high high-scores they can get. For some reason I got it in my head that this would be really difficult, but it turned out to be a breeze and only took 20 minutes. So far Analytics is only set up with the default statistics being tracked so I'll have to set it up so it can record high-scores as well, I hope this doesn't turn out to be too difficult.

I've also set up an achievements page. At the moment it has 12 achievements and I've set up the game so you can actually achieve them. The plan is to have 24 achievements that you can get and for every time you unlock three you will get a gift like a costume or a bonus you can use in the game.

I've also gotten rid of the WAKE_LOCK access. It was in the game originally because the game example I used as my basis for Jungle Jumper was one of the endless jumping games where you use the accelerometer to steer the character, meaning that you won't touch the screen while you are playing and the screen might fall asleep. In Jungle Jumper you touch the screen to jump constantly so it was completely unnecessary  I'm down to only having the INTERNET and ACCESS_NETWORK_STATE accesses now, which are used for the Admob ads and the Google Analytics.

I've given the menus a pretty big update to make them look better and give better information.

To Do:

There are still a bunch of things to do. I am in the middle of updating some of the jungle graphics and I plan on updating Jorvis himself so he has better animation.

I have to figure the remaining achievements and what all the gifts will be and implement them. Some of them will be new bonuses in the game so that will take quite a bit of work and might mess with other systems.

I have to go through the sounds and rerecord some of them, as a few are really bad.

Wish List:

There are two major things on the wish list that I feel almost certain wont be in the 1.2 update. New music and a global high-score list.

The new music won't get in there because I simple don't know how to compose good music myself yet and I want to make it myself rather than hire it out. I plan to spend quite a bit of energy in the new year leaning to write some simple melodies and synthesize them on the computer.

The global high-score list I could get in quite easily if I implemented some middle-ware, but I really don't want that. There are quite a few free system you can use for this, but that would mean bundling their SDK in my game and having to ad extra accesses. I'm planning on building my own little web-service to deal with these things and have my games connect with it. But I don't have the hosting for it yet and I'm not sure how much work it will be, but it will come eventually.

Conclusion

The update is going great and I'm quite certain I'll have it out before the new year. I'm not getting everything in there that I want, but with 1.2 Jungle Jumper will be very close its final full form I think.

Bah, Humbug

I've created a small Android game for my niece as a Christmas present. Give it a try here: