Thursday 24 June 2010

DarkFlow HD entering final testing

We're very excited here at nugames (that's me and the kids). We've prepared the release candidate of DarkFlow HD and it's entering final testing. We hope to submit it to the App Store later today.

Why is this significant? Well, hopefully this game will be our most popular so far. In total, TractorBeams and the original DarkFlow have notched up well in excess of 9,000 downloads (including updates). Not bad going as I basically did no marketing and the games cost nothing to develop (apart from quite a few evenings banging my head against xcode of course ;-).

My target is 10,000 downloads for DarkFlow HD, which takes advantage of the iPhone4's high definition Retina display (of course, it's also iPad optimised and backwards compatible with early devices). I'm hoping this blog will help me get the word out (especially in those crucial first 48 hours when it's essential to get noticed in the App Store - more about this in a later post) - but I also hope it'll be a great way for users to feedback directly to me and to suggest improvements and meet up with other DarkFlow fans.

This will be our first game featuring iAd, Apple's new mobile advertising service. Apple claim to have signed up $60 million in advertising already, and the hope is that small independant developers can tap into this revenue stream as 60% is awarded to the app publisher with Apple keeping 40% (up from its 30% stake in App Store purchases).

This means we can keep our apps free, but let's see how users respond. Your comments, as always, are positively encouraged.

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