Whats in a name?

Most importantly I want the name to reflect the gameplay inside it. Especially for Distilled games, as that is part of being distilled after all.

However with my new game Heroic Simon there is definitely a thought or two that this will be bad for me from a copyright standpoint. From what I can discern 'Simon' by itself is a registered trademark for the game/device. So I think I am safe.

A trick I tend to use to find out if I can get away with a game name is to research what games are currently out there with a similar name. There are several examples of simon this or this Simon etc on the App store, so once again this helps me not worry too much.

I also believe in a backup plan though. Mine is going to be that if I get a cease and desist order and it looks legit, then I will argue my case, and if in the end I must change my games name, then I will get the logo altered to include the small word of 'says' inside it, and rename the game to Heroic Simon Says. Pretty simple really. But I always like a plan.

Laters
Da Voodoochief

Heroic Simon will be distilled game #3

Although I have to bring my current games up to the 7.0 apple SDK standard (which means the Marmalade 7.1 SDK), I have decided after much designing which game will complete my series of three distilled games. It was a tough choice and I had 7 designs going into this last phase, only one could be chosen.

Here below is my mockup of the screen. this is what I gave to the artist who will be working on this game.

As you can see, this is my mockup, and the one that the artist will use to create something spectacular, something I am not capable of. We did discuss some ideas of how we could make this look not only interesting, but also make it alive, something I did in both the other distilled games.

But first I need to upgrade Heroic Buttons and Heroic Patterns, and then get Heroic Patterns through Apple testing.

Laters
Da Voodoochief

Heroic Buttons Post Release Thoughts

My first thought is that the game did not do as well as I had hoped. I really think my facebook friends helped me out a bunch and downloaded the game. Which I think is fantastic. However anyone can easily see from the number downloaded that apart from my direct connections I never managed to get many people to download the game.

That is a disappointment. It means several things.
1. Not enough awareness/advertising.
2. No anticipation of release.
3. Marketing copy/Game description is not working.

Now I think that number 1 and 2 are fairly obvious, and simply need more time and effort by me to make them better. But lets look at number 3 in a bit more detail. This is a very important one, as it will impact both of the other two reasons.

My copy was a straight forward push to attract attention in a non sensational way. OK, so I tried for sensational and came up way short of that. I really think the copy should be challenging and confrontational.. Only I was not able to write that and get those ideas to come across. I tried a few times and it was always wishy washy. Now if only me mate Paul had written it, I would bet it would be sensational and confrontational etc.. When I release the next update I will try hard to get a better copy and I will look forward to seeing how that will effect my downloads. I still believe that a lot of people will have seen my game and simply passed it up as it didn't come across as interesting enough to download.

Ok, that's it for tonight. I need to finish up some more work on my Heroic Simon design.
Da Voodoochief

Heroic Buttons Indicators and Sales data

I figured that today was time. Time to show and tell about the indicators for the sales of the game.

1. Silly promotional video on youtube. Viewed 19 times in 9 days.
2. Silly promotional video on vimeo. Viewed 24 times in 10 days.
3. GameCenter Leaerboards. 44 people on the leaderboard after 9 days.

You know I was really disappointed with the 44 people in the leaderboard. I dreamed of a hundred after the first day. I had visions of a thousand after a week. The reality is much more humble. This is after all a game made for Leaderboards, virtually wholly made for them.

As for the video views, I am of a mixed mind. If there had been more video views than downloads, then I would be upset that the video did not attract people to download the game. In this instance though I feel that people who viewed the video probably checked out the game.

I have been watching these indicators all week, and I did not go near the real download data on iTunes.Connect until today.

116 downloads, and 90 of them in the first 2 days. No longevity of advertisement, of notifying the downloading public that my game is now live and out there.

I will follow this post up another time with thoughts on this, only I wanted to keep this more informative than theoretical.

Laters
Da Voodoochief

Grouped iOS leaderboards, hmmm

I realized a few days ago I hadn't setup my other half of the Heroic Buttons game. By this I mean that I need to create an Ad free version that I charge money for. This has several main effects for me.

1. I get money for bought versions of the game.
2. I now get double the exposure for the game.
3. Prospective players can now see that getting the free version has some value. (compared to paid version).

After realizing this I decided I needed to make sure I can share the leaderboards and the achievements between the games, as they are quite separate games within iTunes. After looking into the iTunes.connect manage apps area it was easy to spot there is a way to setup the leaderboards etc as a group so the can be used by more than one game. BRILLIANT I thought. Let's do it.

This is where I had a problem.

Maybe YOU have experienced this and have an answer to my predicament.

My issue is that it informs me that it will convert my leaderboards into a group leaderboard, and that I should use the grp.Name to reference them. I don't know how I can do this without breaking the game I have in release now. Also if I create a new version I will have issues as that won't work properly until I change the leaderboard references. Bah!

So I am stuck, and not sure what to do about this right now.

Any ideas?

Thanks
Da Voodoochief

Downloaded Heroic Buttons for iOS yet?

I am asking everyone I know to download the game for any of their iOS devices...

So Have YOU downloaded it yet? then when ya have it if you bring up GameCenter you can rate it by pressing the stars. go for 5 I say :)

I will be doing a progress report on whats happening with the game possibly on Wednesday, though Thursday would be a better day to choose as then the game will be out a week. That will give probably more balanced information. So far all my indicators are very disappointment.

Download link is here!
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/heroic-buttons/id721031257?ls=1&mt=8

I hope you give it a try.

Good Night,
Da Voodoochief

Heroic Buttons Forum Postings #1

Today was the day I was going to start posting my game description to forums and iOS fan pages.

It started badly with me forgetting what my passwords are for a few of the excellent sites I had researched. Still how hard can it be to retrieve them? Not too bad, but still more time consuming than  I wanted. Then I had real difficulty trying to figure out one of the sites (www.toucharcade.com) handled new release posts, I saw several of them all nicely formatted. a bit of research tonight showed me how it is all done with some nice tags they have for posting such information. Still I struggled to get my ID setup correctly.. I have no idea why I suffered to be honest.

This morning I updated my Web pages to reflect the new release. That is here...
www.sorcerygames.com

Then I got the iFans post setup. This gets posted to a holding thread tank before someone in authority places it into the correct forum. Not a bad system if it is being monitored in a timely fashion. It is a nice site though that seems to help a lot of people with their questions. I hope my receives some notice.
http://www.ifans.com/forums/threads/heroic-buttons-is-released-and-free.403485/

Finally tonight, after a very tiring day at work I got to try out the toucharcade site once more. I failed first time as I wasn't allowed html to format my post and this confused me. Still I now know that the site is really well setup with scripted tags to make the posting job so much easier. This is a very popular and busy site that offers a lot. Check out the post.
http://forums.toucharcade.com/showthread.php?p=3096404#post3096404

And along with my Facebook page that is all I have managed to get done so far. More tomorrow I hope.

Laters
Da Voodoochief

Heroic Buttons is Released

Finally it is time for me to release my first Distilled gameplay game. The first one in my series of 3 games.

I hope you will download it and enjoy its simplicity and openly accessible gameplay.

FREE

Currently only available for the iOS devices. Here is the Link in the iTunes store.

Heroic Buttons on iTunes

and Here is the Silly Promotional Video.


Heroic Buttons Promotional Video from Robert Toone on Vimeo.

Hope you have fun and get to own your friends on the GameCenter leaderboards.

Laters all, I have a busy time ahead promoting the game now,
Da Voodoochief

Heroic Buttons Logo

This is the games Logo.

I think it looks pretty spiffy and it was created by my mate Paul. Nice one mate. This also allowed us to theme the game in a blue color, which I think was even cooler when I themed Heroic Patterns in Red.

This one was created by me mate Sean. He is a talented artist and it was good fun working with him on creating the look for the second Distilled gameplay game.

I am still expecting to launch Heroic Buttons tomorrow night. So be ready, i'll be tweeting and Facebooking (is it called that?). I really want a whole lot of downloads if at all possible.

Laters
Da Voodoochief

Heroic Buttons to be released this week

The kids go back to school this week, and that I am hoping will be my catalyst to getting Heroic Buttons published. I have been working on getting Heroic Patterns ready for Apple to give the once over and I think it is ready. I should get my Mac out I suppose and upload my latest Binary.. still no hurry, as I want to put out Heroic Buttons and have that out for at the very least 2 weeks before the new game is released. Still, having that already passed by Apples inspectors is no bad thing.

My plan now is to go over all my accumulated screenshots and copy and see if there is something else I should add. But in all honesty I think I am ready.

Ok, done now. Going to go check my stuff out...

Wait though.. I just realized that I have no advertisement for the other Heroic games. Such as Heroic Patterns. Hmm, what should I do? Not like I have the publishing info already for Heroic Patterns. So I reckon there will simply have to be a Heroic Buttons update when I go live with the Heroic Patterns game.

Laters,
Da Voodoochief