Digital Dave

Yes, I was working on a game but I was having a brutal time designing it. The complexity started to enter a not-so-fun zone and I refuse to release something that doesn’t raise the bar above Colorflys and meet my goals for depth/fun. I’ll get back to it, or a different game design, after the following project.

I’ve been interested in finance for quite some time. It started when I came back from deployment in Iraq in 2003 and instead of spending the savings haphazardly, like many ended up doing, I jumped on board with Morgan Stanley and had a financial advisor manage it since I was new to finance and I had very little time to devote to learning it. When I left the corps in 2004 I took the money out and began managing it myself through Scottrade.

I’ve always had a problem plaguing my trading — a solid way to track how I was doing. These days my primary goal is not to make money- it’s to trade well. Study, make solid decisions about why you enter a position, set a reasonable risk/reward scenario and then execute the plan. After the plan is executed figure out what went right and what didn’t. Study more. Reduce mistakes. Visually see how you’re performing. Become a better trader. If you solely focus on making $X/day you will be in a huge bucket of pain in a market that is currently accepting plenty of prisoners.

So that brings me to YieldKeeper. Many folks, myself included, keep track of things through reports via a broker and/or an excel spreadsheet. Neither method is conducive in doing the things that I wanted. You can do some fancy things in excel but it’s going to take a lot of time to refine a solid experience and even then it’s not really good enough – I’ve done it several times and have never been happy. I wanted something that I can wedge into my process with minimal impact while allowing me to keep track of each position I go in/out of, track how I’m doing overall and give me the ability to study from my prior trades.

So in the next few weeks I’ll start introducing you to YieldKeeper. Right now I’m more concerned with tailoring a great experience than releasing it so I have no ETA on a release. Sign up for my newsletter and I’ll let you know when it’s ready. Toss me an email if you’re a trader and would like to provide some user testing. Finally, yieldkeeper.com is live.

Q. Will this be coming to iOS?
A. I’m primarily developing this with a specific flow in mind. I remain open-minded about iOS but that isn’t the current goal.

Q. [yours here] – Feel free to contact me with any questions or things you’d like to see

After a few weeks of piecing together designs and prototypes I’ve isolated in on the next idea that will release under the iGotIt Games hood. It can be difficult to balance an idea with what is possible realistically. I can’t start a project without having a clear goal in mind and a basic idea fleshed out within several pages. I was working on a design/prototype called Monkey Vine that I was really excited about, but the more the design evolved, the more I realize it was going to be difficult to do financially – so I had to put it on the back burner. I can only invest so much into these projects, and every decision matters a mega-ton, so I need to find a design that doesn’t require so much outside work and is smart. You are measured by the decisions you make so try and make them with the best judgement that you can given your experience. Try not to beat yourself over with a hammer and make sure you’re applying what you’ve learned from your past endeavors.

A blog post I read recently enforced the idea of not chasing current trends. Well, Monkey Vine was chasing a current trend (distance games). If you can’t do something that is meaningfully different than a current trend it doesn’t make sense to follow it. It’s unlikely that you’ll ever be better or even at the same level. Monkey Vine was going to be an expensive project and I didn’t feel like it was going to offer significantly more than what was currently out there.

So, insert, -the new project name-. Back when I was in grade school I created this game with a friend on paper and played it with him all of the time. Well, during a recent run I began thinking about that paper-based game. Since we made that around 20 years ago there have been games that echo similarities, but nothing that is the same. The game will utilize the iOS 5′s turn-based multiplayer API, along with a pixelated art direction. I have adapted the game design to a couple of games that I admire (Angry Birds, Battleship) and also games that echo a simliar goal (Advance Wars). I developed a basic prototype that revolved around the core gameplay mechanic and had a few folks playtest it locally. The general consensus was that they saw potential and were excited about the future possibilities so here we go.

Today iGotIt Games signed Will Olthouse who provided an awesome pixel art concept for the game. I’m really excited to see how this game turns out with his style.

I really hope to be far more open about development of this game so feel free to follow along and throw a grenade my way if I slack off.

I’ve finally isolated a new idea worth pursuing. Megan approached me a few weeks ago with a idea revolving around a big theme on the app store right now – how far can you go? I liked the theme a lot but had a hard time pulling out interesting gameplay mechanics. I do not want to just simply create a Doodle Jump or Canabalt. I also do not want to create a shallow game. I’ve learned quite a bit through my last three projects that have given me insight that I can pull from. I feel like I have a fun design that should finally introduce some depth which I’ve neglected to implement far too much in the past. We’ll see once that early playtest session hits.

For far too long I’ve neglected ‘What makes this game good, even great?’ Normally when I play video games I don’t sit and analyze them as I play. I play them for what they are and I either enjoy the experience or I become bored and quit. I don’t moan, cry or berate the developers. I don’t sit and say, “I love this because I’m doing x, y and z!” If I become bored and quit I rarely ever touch it again. If I really enjoy the experience I might play a few more sessions over a week or two and then drop it. It is a rare case that I play a game for any serious amount of time – only a couple of MMOs (not these days, sadly) and Starcraft 2 fall into that category.

Needless to say, in the past few months I have been paying more attention to the games I’ve played.

Most recent example, Velocispider. I played this over and over because it feels smooth, the weapons are really cool, the creatures various are interesting, the graphics are easy on the eyes and I am a pretty competitive person. This game lasted a week! I don’t play it much any longer mainly because I hit a high score wall where I found it too tough to get past (after 4-5 plays of failing at the same high score spot).

The other day I came across an article, What Makes Games Good, which is an outstanding read.

Two weeks from today I launched Colorflys into the arena at $1.99 and I find myself looking at some pretty awesome things.

• Featured as New and Noteworthy and What’s Hot
• Featured as Games for Kids
• Top 10 in Kids and Top 20 in Family Games
• 1 Critic Review

It’s hard to not be excited about the list above but I find one element of it really concerning. I’ve received very, very little love from the press. I don’t know if it’s that my e-mails to them are not captivating enough, the game itself doesn’t appeal to their demographics, or that it just takes a fair amount of time to get to reviewing a game. I made the huge mistake of passing out a promotional code in the intro e-mails I sent a couple of weeks ago. The convenience that offered has provided me with nothing but concerns. So, that is, by far, the low point of the release.

Sales have been solid as far as I can tell- it was enough to keep the attention of Apple, which feels great. The sales have blown away my prior projects, which is fantastic. For the most part I just look at the numbers and ask, “Well, do I need to go get some contract work?” Yep. Not quite there, yet.

The only time the support inbox flared up was when people were having trouble playing the game because they were running an old iOS version. I completely forgot about weak linking Game Kit… I patched the issue and pushed a fast update into the store (less than a day or two after I discovered it). I also offered those affected a free game from the app store.

Some Session Stats

• iOS Version: 35% (4.2.1) | 28% (4.3.1) | 24% (4.3) | 9% (3.2.2) | 3% (3.2) | <1% (3.2.1) | <1% (4.2)
• 23% have looked at more games and 9% selected a game
• 13% have viewed the News
• 10.7% have muted the audio from within the main menu while 3% muted the audio from the game
• 9% have launched Twitter and Facebook from main menu

How is More Games working out? This is the current list of games:

• [Added 3.26][Free] Flower Garden: Launched 703 times
• [Added 3.26][Paid] Sneezies: Launched 291 times
• [Added 3.26][Paid] Cooking Dash: Launched 231 times
• [Added 4.4][Free] Pocket Frogs: Launched 191 times
• [Added 4.7][Free] Solar Spirals HD: Launched 51 times
• [Added 4.4[Paid] Big City Adventures: Launched 32 times

Out of those launches almost $600 have been purchased within the window of opportunity (with a very small base). I rotate games through as I find new ones that I like so hopefully that will keep players coming through the section.

A Little Test with the News Section

While my numbers are growing, my reviews have come to a halt. To aid the user I added a link in the news section that they touch that takes them directly to rating the game in iTunes. I put this in there a couple of days ago and of the 45 people have opened the link there have been 0 ratings.

What’s Next?

Colorflys SD is currently being put together for the iPhone/iPod and will go into playtesting soon. I’ve had my concerns with implementing Colorflys for the iPhone/iPod, but I’m going go through with it. It probably won’t be the exact same experience. I won’t find out until I playtest it.

For now I’ve opted to go through with 2 different versions instead of a universal application. I will likely price the SD version at $0.99 and keep the iPad version at $1.99. So picture $2.99 for a universal app. Boom. The core advantages I get from doing it this way is that the players will have their own domains within the leaderboards and, possibly, the experience.

This obviously can create a headache for me since I have to maintain 2 different versions, but I think the players deserve their own experience since it’s 2 completely different worlds. I QA the hell out of my projects so I’m not too concerned about duplicating bug fixing between both of them.

So that’s a little about the launch. Time to get back to it.

And we’re off to the races! I submitted the final build to Apple earlier today. So now I sit and wait for more folks to return my e-mails in regards to setting up reviews.

In the meantime I’ll start thinking about the next project.

Before heading into the independent realm I worked in the visual effects industry with a Disney owned company, ImageMovers Digital. Today one of our final projects hit the big screen! We had an amazing crew of artists, developers, support and managerial staff that made the company, not only thrilling, but a unique place to work. It’s surreal to say I worked under Robert Zemeckis and I really hope he is able to find a way to bring our other projects to the screen.

Incredibly passionate, dedicated, and extremely talented. The people I worked closely with in engineering were extremely bright and I’m humbled that I was able to work with them. There will never be a place like ImageMovers Digital.

Colorfly’s has officially transitioned to Beta.

It’s exciting to cross this point in the project life-cycle. The idea spawned mid-2008, but I wasn’t comfortable executing it on such a small screen (iPhone). So I decided to put the idea in my back pocket and when the buzz around iPad began to surface I knew exactly what I wanted to do.

October of last year I began designing the game and hunted furiously for an artist to help me execute the vision. If it’s one thing I learned from my other projects it was that the art direction within them didn’t help at all. I actually had a company approach me at the GDC10 that wanted to bring Project Void into Facebook and one of the things they were going to give me was an artist…

In a mobile/social market it makes sense that you really need to bring a lot of attention to the visuals. If you can tease people with visual eye-candy which leads to a sale you’re much more likely to spark a social storm.

“Hey! Check this out!”, “Oh man, that looks sweet! *download*”

It just so happened that all of this was built during a rocky road. The studio I worked for shut down and Megan wanted to move back home to the midwest. All of that that will probably make the game much better. For better or worse, it tends to be your life experiences that shape a game to be what it becomes.

So right now I’m finishing up the game and will begin slamming the marketing throttle down hard. If all goes well I will submit Colorflys sometime next week.

Cheers *raises a glass.*

I just received the completed Icon for the game and am incredibly happy with how it turned out.

Not a lot to report this week.

I began implementing Stage 3 yesterday. I wanted to wait until I completed a deep QA pass on the game, and had stage 1 and 2 balanced. Right now I don’t know of any bugs so I went ahead and began adding stage 3.

Thankfully adding a stage to the game is extremely simple. For the most part the game is data driven. I create a plist file with level information (how many butterflies, what breed are they, what goal [collection, mix, etc]) and dump it into the game – viola, I have butterflies roaming around. Once I add a specific feature into the game, I modify a meta dict which will give a specific level a feature.

The other thing I decided to do was switch the analytic package. I jumped from Flurry Analytics to Localytics, but sadly Localytics is having some issue with their data updating. Ah well, I’m going to hold out a bit. Their UI is much clearer than Flurry and the package take a fraction of the space that Flurry did.

So. GDC is next week. It’s a bummer that I’ll be unable to go, but sadly I’m not right around the corner this year. If only Disney waited a couple of months before shutting my studio down… The artist for Colorflys, Tanna Tucker, will be at the GDC this year and she’ll be passing out some postcards. Go find one!

Over the last week I’ve been spending time polishing up the user experience while going through each level and balancing the requirements for medals. In other words, I’ve been trying to keep my eyes from bleeding while playing the same level over, and over, and over again. Finding bugs definitely enhances this experience.

The other exciting part of development is handling the marketing side of the house. I like spending time trying to spread the word about my projects, but, it is incredibly time consuming. When you’re juggling programming, audio, fixing art while figuring out why your artist hasn’t sent you the latest revision, etc, dealing with marketing can be hard to stomach. But, it has to be done.

On Sunday I started a little brand awareness campaign on Facebook. My goal was to get over 100,000 impressions, around 20 fans for colorflys, see what demographics the game attracted, and to figure out what creatives gained the most attraction.

Facebook is a great way to experiment before you decide to plunk down ads on a gaming website for far, far more money. You don’t want to be experimenting when your CPM is $3.00. But if you know you have a creative on Facebook that has a specific %CTR you can assume your %CTR on an actual gaming website will be equal to greater than that. At least that gives you a basis to determine if even running the ads would be worth it.

I currently have 7 different creatives up. I’ve branched each creative into 2 or 3 different ads that focus in on specific demographics. In all, 17 ads (7 were added after Sunday).

If you run an ad for your fan page you will pick up some fans. In the early stages I think fans hugely outweigh sending somebody to your actual webpage. Build a good fan page, with photos and a welcome page. 1 fan instantly connects you to a network of 130 on average. From Sunday until Thursday I’ve picked up 23 fans (after 150k impressions, 40 clicks), expanding my reach to 2990 people.

Unless your ads start having huge success, I’d just start with CPC ads. Be shown as much as possible and pay for the rare moment someone clicks your ad. If it works out right you’ll rotate your next ad saying you’re released and people will remember seeing it (as long as you don’t have huge gaps in time). Considering Facebook is only tracking around 90,000 iPad fans under 23, my ads are probably shown a few times.

Other than ads, I’ve been preparing a list of websites so I can start knocking down the doors to as many editors I can find. I’d like to get at least one preview, introducing the game+trailer, out before I release the game. As much as I really want to get this thing out there I really need to do it in a sane way.

This last week I put emphasis on exposing Colorflys to a lot of fresh eyes. Right now I am so embraced by the development cloud that I can’t reliably answer questions like, ‘Is this game fun,’ ‘Is there anything confusing about the game,’ ‘Does the user interface work.’ It’s sad, but when you devote all of your time solely looking at a project, you’re point-of-view becomes severely twisted. The only thing you can do is stay focused on the design and let people play your game.

Here is some insight into some of the playtest sessions.

The older generation(s), gaming experience (Wii), touch screen experience (None)

Here, I noticed that my subtle hints were not working well at all (outlined text on the screen, sometimes pointing to things). This was probably because the hints were not front-and-center. As they played I envisioned how I would redesign the help system and I expressed that to them. Once they had a clear idea of what to do, they progressed fine.

After a few levels I noticed that they really didn’t think about the score, progressing happily by capturing butterflies one at a time. This is an error on my part. There is no clear indication of success between capturing one or capturing 5, also the curve went way too high, so capturing multiple butterflies was a risky move.

And finally, my objectives window (and user interface, in general) was not clear. You can see in the image above that I have a popup view with that level’s goals. Despite putting text on the first level, pointing to that view, they really didn’t pay attention to it. I knew this because when you get to Stage 2, you absolutely have to look at your objectives.

Overall, these people really enjoyed the artistic direction of the game and enjoyed the game once they figured things out.

My generation (~25), gaming experience (Wii, Android), touch screen experience (Android)

These folks really seemed to enjoy the direction of the game despite some of the problems I mentioned in the previous section. They didn’t get too frustrated. Many of them, including the males, enjoyed the artistic direction as well.

I had one female in this category who really excelled at the game. She figured out most of the challenges and was being bold by trying to capture a lot of butterflies at once.

Younger Teens and Kids

This is a game that should fare well with this group, but with the obvious mis-steps I took above, I didn’t want to test these folks yet. I could easily imagine that they would run into the same problems.

Developers

I wanted to reach out to several developers that I follow on Twitter to see if they would like to look at the game. I figured this would be a good move considering that these people know exactly what I’m going through.

Sure enough, I received an incredible amount of feedback here. A lot of folks had the same confusion as those above (bad hint system, user interface unclear in places, no known incentive to capture more than a 1-2 butterflies). They were positive about the game, and Markus Nigrin sent this gem:

“The graphics are drop-dead gorgeous, my wife was watching me and asked what I played, which happens very(!) rarely”

Time for Change

For the past couple of days I’ve spent time fixing the obvious issues. I re-wrote the objectives view to be front-and-center and now each level includes extra butterflies that are not part of the objectives. So there is no getting around it. The player needs to look at the objectives otherwise they’ll strike out on the level for catching the wrong butterflies.

The old, really crappy in-game menu

Hopefully, more pleasant, and obvious.

I’m currently playing with blurring the background to make the UI stand out (the butterflies will be hidden above while the menu is up).

I’ve also put point indicators in the game for when you capture butterflies. This should invite players to capture more butterflies. After the player captures something, the point value pops up, does a 360 and fades away.

Testflightapp.com
I decided to give this a whirl for the remote players. Overall, it was an absolutely pleasing experience. Add your testers to the provisioning profile, upload your build, select the testers and fire away. The testers receive a link and download it. To sign up potential testers, they simply visit a link. Sure beats dealing with the sometimes painful alternative (installation issues anyone?).

Another huge pro from this is that I can easily see who has downloaded the app. The UUID for your tester is easily available for you to click on (copies to clipboard) or you can export out the entire list. I highly recommend it.

You can follow me on Twitter @dlmcgraw