Progress Report

It's been a while since my last post. Since then progress has been slow, there are too many distractions at home. Despite this I have been working. In my last post I told you that I had updated Sparks and it now contains ads. I have also now done the same to Squares V Circles. Which took much longer to integrate than in Sparks(damn my horrible habit of hard-coding screen coordinates). I have noticed a slight increase in the download numbers for Sparks since the update, very slight but still worth noting.

I've put Cubes Vs Spheres on hold for a little while and started working on another project. A tower defense game. I love tower defense games they are my favorite genre of mobile games so I thought I try my hand at one. Squares Vs Circles TD will be path based i.e. the enemies follow a particular path through the level. There will be a number of waves in a level. Screenshot time.

Pre-Alpha Gameplay

In the screenshot above you can see the easiest enemies in the game appearing at the beginning of the track and disappearing at the end. The gun turret simply shoots the nearest target, the rocket seek its nearest target and the slow turret slows the nearest enemy. This screenshot is missing a few layers of polish which I will add when I get all the basic game mechanics working but I'm very happy with the progress I've made so far. I hope to finish it up in about 2 weeks. So keep an eye out for it in the windows phone marketplace in the future.

App Downloads

There seems to be a lack of information about the amount of downloads apps are getting on windows phone marketplace(apart from over at the occasional gamer. Those download numbers are amazing). I did not market any of my games and I think the download numbers reflect that but I'm pretty happy with them.

Click to get a better look

Here you can see all 2.1 of my apps(0.1 being the BMI Calculator). The BMI app I made and released just to developer unlock my phone. The first tiny spike is the release of the BMI app. The first large spike is the release of Sparks. The first day it had around 300 downloads. Within a week it had dropped completely off the radar and after that averaged around 3 or 4 downloads a day. The next large spike is the release of Squares V Circles. First day it had around 200. and again like Sparks dropped off within a week for what I hope is the same reason. I had hoped that Squares V Circles would receive more downloads because it was actually a game unlike Sparks which is essentially a particle sim. Total downloads for all the apps is 2,103.

One thing I learned from releasing these apps is that you can't just release your apps and expect them to get tons of downloads beyond the initial release. To this end I have started to experiment with AdDuplex. AdDuplex Gives you 8 free adverts for your app for every 10 you show. Its only been a week and I will have an update in the future on whether it has helped or not.