Having said that, what a great domain!
edit: typo
Now, developers.lv redirects to awesome page instead of doing nothing.
Also - congrats to OP on the launch and all the post-launch attention. Must feel good :)
- Why is there a pause symbol in the middle of every screenshot? - Terrible layout on the corner banners in the screenshot. Play head to head Against your friends!
[large top margin] Play with up [no leading between this line and the next] to 4 players on 1 ipad [no bottom margin]
- Random placement of text next to the circles in the 'How to Play' screen. Why aren't all of those lines of text centered above/below their circles? Be consistent.
And when I click the link to your website, hoping for maybe a video of the game in action, I get served nothing but "Cannot GET /AsteroidSmash/".
Wearing my "random browsing of app store hat" my reaction is "okay I'm moving on to another game".
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After finding the webpage for it and watching the video: Wow this thing looks confusing. I have absolutely no idea what's going on from the video. Blue things moving around in front of a blue background with no contrast of any kind, and four fingers rapidly tapping. And a couple of blocks of text that're close enough to being centered that they look amateurishly off-center.
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"Why is there a pause symbol in the middle of every screenshot?"
It looks like it is part of the gameplay. If you watch the video on his website, you can see the pause symbol right in the middle of the screen while gameplay is going on.
If you haven't, every iOS/OS X developer should sign up as an iTunes affiliate http://www.apple.com/itunes/affiliates/ and use affiliate links. It is more or less transparent unlike other link wrappers. E.g. a link to the same app with my affiliate account will be https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/asteroid-smash/id730150968&a.... (no you don't have to click on it) There's just 2 additional values.
The key thing about this is you can use the campaign tag to track click throughs. It's not about the affiliate revenue.
Plus, if someone buys something from iTunes/AppStore shortly after clicking your link, you end up getting 7% commission.
What has your experience been with this? I see that you are doing pay-up-front model. I'd be curious to get your sense of why you went with that as opposed to the freemium + IAP model.
I also released as a paid app initially, it almost seems as if there is an expectation that games should be free to try and then either progress via upgrades or IAPs.
This was the first time I've gone out and tried marketing one of my games, and I've learned a ton.
The number one thing I would recommend is to get eyes on the project as early as possible. I'd hit up TIGSource and start posting a dev log as soon as you can. Be sure to take it out to local events, and definitely start showing other game developers.
The game took a lot longer to make than I was originally planning for, and a lot of that was due to some design decisions that I struggled with. However when I took it out and started showing some local developers they had tons of ideas to help contribute, and actually helped me through the problems that I had been stuck on.
As for the pay model, The whole reason I made this game is because I love to make games. I don't think there was really any strategy behind the monetization. I just put it out there for a couple of bucks. Honestly I expected this to come out and maybe a few people play it, and then I'd be onto my next one; to me that was totally cool.
Actually this morning I had posted a thread on touch arcade and I got 1 response about how a mom had played the game with her daughter and they both had fun. Really if all the game amounts to is that, I'd be happy.
So far though I've been pretty humbled by the response, and all I can say is thanks!
one of their submission rules is not to mention other platforms in metadata - i'd also take that as a hint that "we like exclusives" - my interpretation of that is that you can't say "also available on Android" - for example.
this is not fresh news either, a quick google on the subject reveals a long history of people moaning about this particular problem... if you are shipping a game and do your homework then you will know this.
That sounds like bullshit.
Many iOS developers have a severe case of blinders on and don't communicate on their websites that their software is iOS only, ever. This does not only affect games, but also productivity software. The end result of that is that in the best case, a person gets to really like a product after having spent time on the marketing copy and when trying to figure out how to buy it for their platform find that they can't and end up despising the company. In the worst case the company uses some intermediary to sell the software, like humblebundle, which means the person can end up paying for the software, only to be told that they can only get an itunes version.
I don't know if that's the reason they do it, but in either case i applaud them for it.
Not sure if you want feedback but IMO - the text banners on screenshots feel a bit too low quality and detract from the actual screenshots. Always hard to get this perfect though!
I haven't deeply explored the game yet, but having an AI and the possibility of unlocking additional weapons/upgrades would be exciting. Also, I'd love to have online multiplayer or team play (me and a friend could get online and play against another two-player team).
I'll report back later tonight.
Edit: found an existing thread for your game, though it would really help if you posted in the release thread to let everyone know your story and that you're actively soliciting feedback. http://forums.toucharcade.com/showthread.php?t=209686
http://codeherdstudios.bandcamp.com/album/asteroid-smash-ost
