How to get your iPhone App into the Top 100

So iSkat has launched and after 3 days we are around position 30 in the overall AppStore (Top 12 Games). Since we do not have a considerable budget for Marketing, we consider this to be a great success for us. Yes

How did we do this? Unfortunately we havent found a magic trick to boost sales Still the best way to boost your sales is to have a great app. It certainly helps if you have an app people search for. I guess there are a lot of Germans out there who just search for “Skat” on the AppStore and find our game.

However it helps if you marketing and therefore here are some useful links I found:

• http://searchengineland.com/how-to-seo-for-apples-app-store-18063
• to be continued ..

Also very interesting is this presentation:

iSkat for iPhone AppStore released (an we are already in the Top 100)

Great stuff has happened in the past few days: iSkat and iSkat live was officially released and is availaible in the AppStore. Looks like it was worth reading the stories about “how not to get rejected”

So please go and download/buy or wonderful Skat-Games:

• Skat (full version) for only 0,79 EUR / 0,99 USD as a starting price
• Skat lite for mind-blowing free/zero/niente money

Help us come along in the charts – we are already in the german Top 100 of sold applications – thanks a lot!!!

How your iPhone App does not get rejected

We are approaching the first release of our super-duper-secret first iPhone game and therefore I have been scouting the web for information about “how not to get rejected”.

Here are a few good sources and important infos I found:

• adhere to the Apple Human Interface Guidelines (http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/MobileHIG/Introduction/Introduction.html)
• http://www.mobileorchard.com/avoiding-iphone-app-rejection-from-apple/
• http://www.mobileorchard.com/avoiding-iphone-app-rejection-part-2/ (Part 2)
• Avoid Splash – Screens (which are not placeholders while loading up)
• Demo-Versions are not allowed to have “grey” buttons or other “incomplete” limitations .. Apple only wants “full” versions in its appstore. (thats why most apps are called “lite” and note “demo”)

Good luck

Update 29.06.: http://www.drobnik.com/touch/2009/06/all-that-can-go-wrong-all-the-rejection-reasons/ has an excellent overview!

Update: 29.07.09: http://appreview.tumblr.com/ also has a great overview about inofficial rejection reasons.

There still seems to be more Windows Mobile Developers than everything else

Just saw this poll (and voted myself for iPhone, but I have done some Windows Mobile development in the past too):

http://www.codeproject.com/script/Surveys/Results.aspx?srvid=930

Currently about 3 times as many developers are working (or plan) with Windows Mobile than iPhone. Android is getting more popular, but is still behind. Please note that this site is mostly visited by C#/C++ and Windows developers, but since they have 6mio members I would guess that it is not totally off (there are just not 6 mio iPhone developers on other sites ^^)

Interesting Stats of the Gaming Business: Bigpoint and Flight Control (iPhone)

We havent updated for quite a while – time to give some inputs over the Browser Games Market:

Link:

and there is also a great article about Sales in the AppStore of the game “Flight Control”: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/29/flight-control-sales-stats-offer-fascinating-look-at-inner-workings-of-the-app-store/

FlightControl-SalesNumbers

I’m a PC

If you ever thought about what machine to buy, this might help making a decision

I’m a PC

Increasing performance on the iPhone

After finding our game not running as fast as we expected, I dedicated the last 3 days of work on finding ways to increasing the performance.

There are 2 issues which have a heavy impact on the framerate. Drawcalls and Physics.
Both have several roots and solutions.

For the graphics part you should decrease the drawcalls as much as you can. Since every object has its own drawcall it doesn’t take too long to have several hundreds of themm, which is by far too much. What you want to do now is combining them. Basically telling Unity to draw them as one object. This only works for objects that share the same material, so you might consider using the same texture with some fancy UV layouts for several objects. You start by creating an empty gameobject and assigning the desired objects as its child. Next you need the CombineChildren script, which is found in the Standard Assets.unityPackage and assign it to the gameobject you created earlier. Tadaa, all those objects will be drawn in a single drawcall now.
If you’re working on a 2d game you also might consider using the SpriteManager class, which is a convenient way to draw lots of sprites in a single call. It supports UV-Animation, Billboarding and other goodies you might enjoy.
You can optimise your lightning by creating lightmaps for your meshes in your 3d composing tool instead of using dynamic lights, since Unity has no baking function.
Another rather unlikely scenario is a too high polycount. But remember just in case: it’s an iPhone, it has a tiny display, you won’t even see that much of a difference between 500 and 2000 poly characters, and even if, it’s still just a phone.
That said you should be fairly well if you stay within this stats:
Drawcalls < 30
Polycount < 10k

As for the physics, if you’re using a lot of physical objects, you should consider using the simplest collider you can (e.g. enabling Convex mode on MeshColliders, using SphereCollider instead of BoxColliders)
If this doesn’t help, you have the possibility to decrease the precision, or increase the collision checking interval. Head to the Menubar>ProjectSettings>Time and increase the Fixed Timestep. Remember that decreasing the physics precision can lead to penetrating objects, objects getting stuck in each other, and other graphical impacts, so you should thoroughly test which works best for you. If you still want to get more out of it you can consider slowing down your gameplay. While doing this you can increase the Fixed Timestep even further.

Fixed Timestep Defaultvalue: 0.02

That sums it up. You can find more detailed explanations and help in the Unity Forums and the irc channel #unity on freenode.org

Happy coding

Fun: Apple Compatibility

Just in case you are bored like I am right now .. ups, getting back to work ..

iPhone 3.0 will finally allow copy+paste

Lol, I had to laugh when I read about this:
iPhone 3.0: Push Notifications, Copy and Paste, MMS, and More

Our game is coming along quite nicely btw, we solved most performance issues and are testing on the iPod and iPhone heavily (prior to this we could only test on the simulator, which ran much faster .. strange).

iPhone/iPod testing

So we eventually got our distribution keys after ~1month of waiting. Apple really disappointed us in that matter. And after figuring out how to get our application run on the iPod took us half a day. The setup is not exactly intuitive. You have to go back and forth from the Developer Portal on apple.com, the XCode IDE, Keychain and whatever else.

So now we can actually Build & Run our game from within Unity3D on our iPod, and not a second to early. Lots of issues showed up, some of them being casual freezing, not switching to wide-view, frame dropping, and not running as fast as we expected. Hopefully they will all be sorted out by the end of the next week as the deadline draws nearer and we dont plan to push our release back.

Also, for some reason, the live preview feature doesn’t work at all, i’ll have to dig into that, because compiling and running the application everytime is pretty slow and bothersome, and doesn’t easy the process of debugging in any sense.

So far so good,… i’m glad it works at all.