Neonscape 1.1.2

Neonscape 1.1.2, a mostly bugfix release, has hit the App Store – grab it while it’s hot.

In this release:

• I have adopted Rhys’ suggestion to improve the Calibration UI, and the high score UIs
• The calibration is more effective (shameful I know… but the previous calibration code had one rather large (yet simple) flaw which rendered the averaging useless).
• Non-latin characters can be submitted to the global leaderboard (congrats to ?? [ed: it seems however that they can't be submitted to WordPress! [ed: ok, fixed, just had to update my database]] 巴士 for the first user to utilise this)
• Anti-cheating methods have been implemented on the global leaderboard

The App is pretty stable now I think. Neonscape 1.2 is in the works which will have a pre-game options screen for the user to tweak the starting speed (amongst other things), and potentially a new graphics theme and new sound. The price will be hiked for the 1.2 release – so grab it while it’s cheap!

iPhone App Piracy – should I care?

Pirating iPhone apps is pretty easy – unfortunately for us developers.

In certain countries such as the one where I am now most iphones come preloaded with hundreds of games.

Neonscape’s pirated app was in the Google top 10 search results for a while.

Now it’s actually possible to detect the cracking – at least for now (until the crackers get better).

The question is should I care?  If my app dies after a few minutes on the cracked version will that help my sales?  Sure if *everyone* did this it might – but they won’t – so should I?  The guy who bought the iPhone preloaded with 200 games won’t exactly go and buy the game legitimately if it dies – he will just delete it and play another.

Creating a Lite version

very useful tutorial on creating lite versions of iPhone apps (dev forum thread here).

At first I thought a lite version would decrease sales because people would play the Lite version instead of buying the game. Turns out my logic was wrong. Sure people may do this – but it’s better to have 100 people play the Lite and 5 buy the game, than just 1 person buy the game! Plus when there’s a Lite version of an App I’m interested in I will always download it to try before I buy – if there isn’t then it forces me to do a little research first or punt $1-4, and I have to say I’ve punted a few times and been dissapointed.

Neon Lite is in the works… stay tuned.

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Neonscape

Announcing Neonscape – a retro puzzle/arcade game for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

This is my first foray into iPhone game dev.  I teamed up with my mate Ben Kosmina to create the game with me doing the coding, and him creating the original concept and doing many other aspects like the sound and sprites.  It was great fun to create; learning objective-c, workshopping the idea with Ben to add some cool goals and dangers (watch out for the dreaded über tanks!).

So far sales are a little sluggish – but the Neonscape publicity machine is just cranking into gear so hopefully the press will drive some sales and help pay for my RTW trip ;-)

Grab it on the iPhone store now for only US$1.99 (or your local equivalent).

5-stars

First review! First 5 star review!

5 stars – “mal wieder was anderes!!!” by jag64

gute grafik! geniales gameplay und klasse steuerung!!! absoluter geheimtip!!! mit suchtgefahr!!!!!

Hope this trend continues.