1. Skate or Cry Going Strong

    Jul 16, 2012

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    Skate or Cry

    I never imagined the games I made in my 5 games in 5 days challenge to do well. However, one of them, Skate or Cry, is racing towards the top of my most downloaded games list. Since the data on Microsoft’s site is about a week old, it might have already taken the highest position. It’s already generating the most ad revenue: slightly more than Baby Balloons and over twice as much as my other games.

    Seeing how popular it is, I made an update to the game. Gameplay is improved a lot, I updated some of the art and I changed the sky color depending on what time you’re playing the game.

    If you want to see the game as I’ve made it in one day, I suggest you grab it now from the Marketplace.

    Fun fact: at the moment, Skate or Cry has the lowest rating of all my games… :)

  2. Making Money With Game Development

    Jul 13, 2012

    money

    With the (small) amount of Windows Phone users, and the relatively large amount of apps in the Marketplace it’s not that easy to make a living creating apps for the platform.

    I know I’m just getting started. In a few months, part-time, I’ve gone from not knowing how to create games at all, to having 8 games in the Marketplace already. They’ve all been tests of some sort and I’ve learned something new doing each and every one of them.

    But in order to make a living out of this, something needs to change. With 2 games out, I was making about €0.50 a day. Now, with 8 games, I’m making just over €1.00. The ‘income’ from the first 2 games went down. My games are being downloaded by new users daily. Even accounting for that people stop playing them, you’d think the ad revenue should be at least a bit higher. 

    So here are some ideas I could try:

    • Spend more time on a game, polish it more, giving it more quality,
    • 'Grow’ a game, where I start small and keep updating, adding a few features,
    • Market my games more - I’m not quite sure how to do that, I will need some community input,
    • Expand to other platforms.

    That last one was the idea of Elbert Perez, the Occasional Gamer before he stopped making games and started working for Microsoft. I’m looking into a few options to expand, but I’m not sure what direction I want to take it. 

    Elbert’s idea was to create HTML5 games. I have looked into that, too, but I just don’t like JavaScript that much. The advantage is, that you put your game on virtually every platform, from phone to web and possibly your internet connected fridge. You know… in the near future.

    Objective-C is becoming very popular, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good programming language. At all. Still, it’s good to know how to program it, with the popularity of Mac computers and iOS devices. 

    MonoTouch and MonoGame seem like a great option, too. I can keep programming in C# using the XNA framework and port my games easily to iOS, Android, Windows 8 Metro, Mac and more in the future. Still, I need to pay $399 for MonoTouch, which at the moment would take me 399 days to earn back. :)

    But first, I’ll try to spend a bit longer on a game. I’ve toyed around long enough to know how to make games. Time for a bit more quality!

  3. Featured By WP7.nl

    Jul 10, 2012

    A post has been made about my 5 games in 5 days challenge by the Dutch site wp7.nl. Creating apps for Windows Phone isn’t difficult (it’s in dutch). Thanks WP7.nl!

  4. All Five Games Approved

    Jul 7, 2012

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    All five games I build in my big challenge last week were approved by Microsoft the first time. Here’s where you can find them:

  5. My Productivity Last Week

    Jul 4, 2012

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    1 note

    I have big concentration problems. I’ll save all my productivity tips for another post, but I wanted to share some stats about my sprint of last week. 

    One of the tools I help me getting things done is RescueTime. Basically, it keeps track of what I do on my computer so that I can see what distracts me and when I’m most productive.

    Last week I spend 38 hours and 6 minutes behind my computer. That’s quite a lot, but that week I had no meetings or other distractions. The daily average was 7 hours 37 minutes with a productivity of 85%. My most productive hours are in the morning. My least productive hours were on Saturday and Sunday (because I didn’t work then, and only spend 1 hour behind my computer).

    Here’s a daily overview:

    Productivity by day

    The blue area, above the 0 line, is productive, everything below that line was distracting stuff.

    As you can see that later in the week I spend more productive hours in order to get the challenge done in time. On Friday I knew I was going to make it and could do a bit less work.

    The most distracting apps I used were MetroTwit for twitter, tumblr.com for blogging (you might wonder if that really is distracting, since it was part of the challenge), music apps and some tech sites. 

    My productivity was 85%, much higher than usual (76%), which is already quite a bit higher than the average person (57%) - according to RescueTime’s stats. 

    Mind you that these stats say nothing about efficiency. I could be working on a simple problem for an hour which the average person needs only 5 minutes. Fortunately, this works both ways. :)

    Some final stats: I spend almost 21 hours in Visual Studio and over 6 hours in Paint.net. 1 hour and 13 minutes were spend on Google, 53 minutes on mail and 50 on twitter. 

    RescueTime doesn’t track anything when you’re not using the computer. I’ve got a few pages with brainstorming notes and sketches which I probably spend another 1 or 2 hours on.

  6. Submitted

    Jul 1, 2012

    5g5d

    It’s been a busy weekend, but I finally managed to submit my 5 games:

    5 submissions

    The trouble is that you have to create 4 different sized thumbnails and a few screenshots for each game. When you have a game that uses the accelerometer for steering, it’s a bit harder to create a good screenshot, too. In addition to that, it took a little time to create the ads for each game.

    I would like to add a little disclaimer: all of the games can be more polished than they are now, but I want to show them as I created them in the past week, so everybody can see what can be done with XNA in such a short period of time. I’m sure this will hurt the review ratings a bit, but that’s a chance I’m willing to take. 

  7. The Games

    Jun 30, 2012

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    Four of the five games

    Math for kids

    Math for kids is a learning game where you have 60 seconds to solve as many simple math problems as possible. Four answers float from the bottom to the top and you have to touch the correct one. Selecting a wrong answer will cost you five seconds.

    The Ball Game

    Tilt the phone to move your red ball towards blue, yellow and special balls. Special balls include: extra time, less time and a ball that kills you. Get as many balls as possible in 60 seconds. Very addictive (for a game made in less than one day).

    Deep Diver

    You fall down into the ocean, but you’re running out of air. Get the air bubbles and the treasure by moving sideways. This game involved the most amount of graphics creation. I spend a little bit too much time on that.

    Sliding Puzzle

    I wanted to do a game that I’d definitely finish for my fifth day. As it turns out, a sliding puzzle is not that easy to create, since you can’t just randomly put the pictures anywhere. A puzzle is not always solvable. But in the end I’m happy with the result. It’s flexible in that I can add pictures without having to cut them up.

    Skate or Cry

    Skate or Cry

    Tilting left and right moves your skater on the screen. Tap or swipe up makes him jump, swipe down makes him duck. You’ll need that to dodge the stuff that’s coming at you over the ground and from the air.

    The Notes I Made

    Notes

    These are most of my notes. Not everything made it into the games due to time constraints, but it should give you an idea of how I worked this week.

  8. I Did It!!!

    Jun 29, 2012

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    I’m done! I just finished my fifth game this week! I’ll try to submit them all this evening, so everybody can see the result.

    For now I’m taking a little time away from the computer.

  9. Day Four

    Jun 28, 2012

    5g5d

    What a day this has been. By noon I had game three finished and started working on game four immediately. And behold: I finished that game around dinner time. I’m back on track to finishing all five games in a week! All I have to do is finish one more.

    To be honest, when I started this challenge, I didn’t know whether I could pull this off. With just two games in the Marketplace, and no prior experience in game development, I can’t say that I had enough game programming miles behind me to know for sure that I could do it. 

    But let’s not get ahead of myself, I’m not there yet. Tomorrow is the grand finale. After that, I’ll submit the five games so you can all see them as I made them in this week. I’ll probably do some small updates in the future, but they are all playable.

  10. Three Games Done

    Jun 28, 2012

    5g5d

    It’s Thursday noon, and I just finished game three. Two more to go in just over 1.5 days. This should be possible! :)

    Game three is a skateboarding game where you have to dodge small airplanes and tires rolling down the street. I’m quite pleased with it, but not so much as with game two, which also took the longest to create.

    On to game four, but I haven’t decided what it’ll be yet.