It's been a little over a month since Spitballer began ambushing your office place, now it's time for an assault on the cafeteria!! You have your choice of Mayo, Ketchup, Mustard and BBQ sauce as your ammo...Thats right folks!! Ketchup splat to the face!!!! HAHAHA!! In this level you can run out of ammo and need to press and hold down on your choice of condiment until your ammo cups fill up. This has made the game much harder and more fun!!
I'm really excited about this release because it's the first update I've made to a game after gaining a decent install number. At the time of this writing, Spitballer FREE has just over 3500 downloads. I've been reading the blog by
Occasional Gamer, Elbert Perez,
about updating your games and how that drives your impressions/revenue in a positive direction, and have seen his numbers which are fantastic! Now I'm nowhere near there, but feel like I have a decent start and hope to get some kind of spike in the next few days from Spitballer. Really, it will give me some hope that this process does work over time. I'll post the results next week sometime.
On a good note, after the release of my second game,
Bubble Bee, the daily revenue has increased by 217%. Thats a great increase, but to bring it back into perspective we're talking about $1/day to $3/day. But hey! We all gotta start somewhere. Check back in a week or so, to see the results of the Spitballer update.
Let me chat about the spitballer.com website for a moment. I went with godaddy which may have been a mistake. I'm still not sure, but what I can say is that the cost of godaddy IMO is not worth it right now as I'm barely making any real revenue as it is. So I may be letting that go once it expires...In the meantime, I am meaning to take down the silverlight components which dont even work on the phone browsers (sorry about that). I should have known better when my customers are on phone and probably likely to hit that site with their phone. I had just learned silverlight and was eager to try it out.
I do want to eventually get a global leaderboard setup, so I'll need to figure the hosting issue out eventually. If anyone has a good idea about cheap or free hosting please let me know. I really just want the DB, not necessarily a web site.
And a huge lessoned learned about being in a huge hurry to release a game and getting too close to the submit game button. A few of my early Bubble Bee customers must have thought the game was broken or they were just really awesome when they popped their first bubble and moved all the way to level 4. That was one of those moments where it was late and I was testing the levels to make sure they did in fact advance, so naturally I had the levels set to move on after one bubble pop. Well, after testing and in my huge hurry I hit submit and sent the game on it's way. Sometime in the middle of the night while I was sleeping it hit me!!! NOOOOO!!!!! So I literally waited until the game was published and immediately resubmitted the correct version. Fortunately the testing was completed in a few short hours and the damage was kept to a minimum.
So this week I got to do a WP7 presentation at my day job on how to make a game. I demo'd the very beginning stages of Bubble Bee and gave a short tour of the App Hup web site. create.msdn.com. That was pretty fun teaching .NET developers who have years and years more experience than I how to make a game. I think I did pretty well answering all their questions, so it was a good experience.
So, now what? I'm always considering the port to Android as I already have Java experience, or perhaps just keep the momentum going with a new game for WP7. So many ideas and so little time!!!
