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.

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:
Impressions	318,221	-23,263
eCPM	$0.38	+$0.02
CTR	0.81%	+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 :).

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.

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:
Impressions	341,484	-108,627
eCPM	$0.36	-$0.08
CTR	0.77%	-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.

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.

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.

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:
Impressions	450,111	+19,718
eCPM	$0.44	-$0.13
CTR	0.86%	+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.