iCombat

2 Rejections and 42 Days of Waiting

Last week we received an e-mail from Apple’s App review team notifying us that after 14 days of review, our latest update to iCombat Lite would not be accepted because of “inappropriate keywords.” The offending keyword was “wii tank,” and we had chosen this because many of our users have told us that our game reminded them of the tank mini game that is part of Wii Play.

While we knew not to use current iPhone app names as keywords, it had never in a million years occurred to us that “wii” might be problematic.  In Apple’s words, they “cannot post applications that contain irrelevant keywords in their search criteria” and suggested that “it would be appropriate to remove ‘wii tank.’”  Interesting since they: 1) had already approved our iCombat paid version with the same keyword, 2) have approved an app with Wii in the title, and 3) they had already rejected iCombat Lite two weeks prior for some other reason without mentioning any problems with the keywords.

What is so frustrating about this latest round of trivial rejections is that the app review “feedback” seems to always come on day 14 (at the earliest), and happens serially.  To give you an idea, we first submitted iCombat Lite update 1.1 on September 8th, 41 days ago!  After being rejected for an issue Apple reported with the code on September 22nd, and spending several days working on replicating the bug (which we never even managed to), we resubmitted the exact same keywords and code on September 28th.

On October 12th (14 days later) we received notice that the entire update would need to be resubmitted because of the “wii tank” keyword.  Had anything changed from the approved iCombat Paid version or the previously rejected lite version?  Nothing at all…and so we deleted the words, resubmitted and for the third time started another 14 day approval cycle.  All in all, if we are lucky we expect the iCombat Lite update to be approved on October 26th, just 48 days to get to market (42 if we subtract the days we took to work on the first rejection).

Reasons to Avoid Developing for the iPhone

Ignoring how illogical this last keyword rejection has been, the real damage of the current app approval process is that it has created a slow and arbitrary development environment that does nothing but discourage indie developers.  The biggest issues with this setup are:

1. Slower development cycles – As if figuring out what users wanted wasn’t hard enough, now add a 14 day approval delay which quickly turns into 1 month with any rejection and you have a buffer that really starts to isolate developers from their users and this constrains the feedback – iteration loop
2. Product/ Market fit is replaced with Product/ Apple fit – To use Andreesen’s advice (worth a read), entrepreneurs should “do whatever is required to achieve product/ market fit.”  Here the only thing that matters is finding what users want and giving it to them.  Yet with Apple as the gatekeeper success is not determined by the market but first by whether Apple will LET you play in its garden. This perverts the goals of the developer and ultimately reduces the chances that an efficient product/ market fit can occur.  You could even argue that on the off chance that you find an exceptional product/ market fit you are at even a higher risk of being cannibalized or pulled or copied by Apple itself.
3. Impossible ROI calculations – If you are trying to run a business based off of App development, how can you possibly calculate the return on your investment when you have no control over your launch to market? Unless you are ngmoco with funding from Kleiner Perkins then how can you build a business on top of such uncertainty (market and execution risks should be more than enough to contend with without having to worry about the d-bag app reviewer risk)
4. App approval amnesia and the lack of a fast track system – What seems to be happening all too often is that previously approved apps, after waiting weeks in the queue, get rejected for features that had already been approved in past releases.  This approval amnesia combined with being lumped in with new app approvals creates a developer disincentive to work on refining applications.  Does it make sense when iCombat Lite, having been live for 3 months with 100k installs and no complaints, suffers a 40+ day delay because it is being forced to the back of the line over and over again to wait amongst what is new crapware?  The sooner these apps can get updates out the sooner they can deliver high quality experiences to Apple users.

All of these factors serve to undermine developer confidence, reduce the quality of apps in the store, and ultimately choke app development activity.  Developers are already looking to other platforms and are limiting investment as the environment has simply become too unpredictable to work with.  Sure Apple has its reasons, namely pushing its 85k or 100k or 250k apps commercials to prove it has the most evolved app ecosystem versus its peers.  But if Apple doesn’t fix these problems soon, those numbers will begin to mean less and less, and at some point the number of apps in the App store will be about as meaningful as the number of videos uploaded to YouTube.

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There is a great post in ngmoco’s blog from several months ago that talks about the complexity behind tuning games.  Specifically referring to Star Defense, Allen Ma talks about how any one factor when changed impacts the entire flow and resulting difficulty level of the game:

“For example, if the game allowed you to pause it while you placed towers or if there were a few more seconds between wave launches, Star Defense would lose its fast pace. If we altered the strength of the towers or how much it cost to upgrade them, it would influence how you played the game. If we handed out more credits for each enemy unit killed, it would change how you managed tower purchases and upgrades.”

Players underestimate just how difficult it is to design a game with a nice balance between being rewarding to play but challenging enough to want to continue playing.  Even with iCombat, which has a very simple game mechanic, it took several weeks to refine the level design and lay them out in a way that provided a steady progression from level 1 through 60. And this initial design has been refined and tuned throughout every update.

Aside from the level design which is the most visible factor that can affect game play, there are things like enemy AI (firing frequency, movement paths, speed, etc), the scoring mechanism, the frequency of power-ups or bonus items, the number of lives, upgrade prices and so one that are crucial to getting the game right.

An example of just how intentional these design elements are can be seen in iCombat’s score system, where many users wondered why we chose to go with a countdown (Enigmo style) method where each level begins counting back from 10,000.  The decision was focused at creating a scoring mechanic that rewarded speed, thus creating a nice interplay between playing it safe to preserve lives or playing fast to get points.  The result is that no 2 scores are ever alike.  This might seem like a small detail, but for the avid users it creates an entirely different decision tree when facing the harder, more involved levels.  Do you hide to preserve life, let the time expire, and then execute a level safely?  Or do you go guns blazing to finish with as many points as possible?  To extend this decision tree further and equalize players across difficulty level we made the countdown 12,000 for Hard mode, 10,000 for Medium and 8,000 for easy.

Another great example of where we made a decision to point the user behavior a certain direction came from the fact that one shot equals a player kill.  Here the logic was to force users to play more conservatively, pushing creative calculations with ricochet’s and bonus items.  And by limiting the map size, we managed to create a campaign mode that could be done in bite sized chunks, 5 minutes here and there.

So the next time you play a game think about how every single detail in the game was deisgned intentionally that way.  There are no default game layouts or settings so if it is in a game then the developer wanted it there.  Whether it was the right choice or not is a separate issue, but sometimes it helps to remember just how difficult it is to get the balance right.

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Our new pirate game, Silver Skull, just went live last night so please try it out and let us know what you think!  Submitted two weeks ago…we were worried that it would not be approved in time for “Talk Like a Pirate Day” which is the 19th of September every year (today).  Luckily the approval wait was shorter than expected so we managed to be out just in time.  We hope you like it!

See some screenshots of the game below:

You can check it out in iTunes here or visit our Silver Skull site here

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When I initially launched iCombat in April, I decided to wait on releasing a lite version to first see if I could manage to get up the charts without one. My fear was that a lite version would cannibalize my potential user base if I accidentally put too much of the game’s “secret sauce” out there for free. Looking back, I realize now I was so afraid to get the feature mix for the demo wrong that I irrationally avoided the option much longer than I should have.

And while part of my hesitation had to do with my optimism about iCombat’s potential and my marketing ability, it also had to do with the fact that I rarely buy full versions of games (although I do occasionally). After just launching my lite version yesterday I can say that my concerns about the lite version were misplaced and might have cost me quite a bit in lost income. Below are my main takeaways from having waited on launching the lite version and why I think too many indie iPhone developers wrongly steer clear of lite versions:

1. Know your Apps Core value and its core user: This sounds douchey but it really is harder than it sounds to have the discipline to know the profile of your core user and then choose that feature you think will resonate most.  For example, if you are making a game it is easy to think kids and adults will like it and they will all get hooked on the game play AND the graphics AND the story equally.  Odds are your app will not resonate with everyone, and one salient feature will be the hook so the sooner you figure it out and admit it to yourself the better. You may be wrong, but better to know your target than water down your strategy by pursuing too many angles.  Needless to say once you have your app’s core value outlined it will also be that much easier to design your lite version.
2. The App store is not a lemonade stand: The App store is one of the largest, most seamless content delivery platforms ever and when it comes to pricing most of us fail to understand just how fundamentally different this is from anything we have ever seen.  As a result we apply our personal conceptions of scarcity, value or what it means to transact with someone to something that is totally different.  If you have released an app you will agree that pricing decisions or the debate about a lite version are often more emotional than rational.  I am sure more than one developer has though “I don’t want to give it to someone for free when I worked 3 months on it every night after work while my wife was screaming at me because I was never around.”  That would be okay to think if you toiled on a model airplane or a painting for that period and were selling the one unit you had created, but in the App store you can divide that effort across 40MM+ people so who really cares if 5MM users get your app for free if in the end 250k of them buy it? Read more…

Some readers who read my post “My Experience Getting Owned by App Store Pirates” criticized my approach to handling piracy so I thought I would explain my point of view by sharing a recent encounter I had with an app pirate.  About a month ago someone posted a comment to my “You Jacked My App” page (all pirates were sent here after 5 levels of play if using a cracked copy) that said the following:

WTF man. Nobody does this. Ever. And the damn point of Installous is to let you try before you buy. And you just f—– up the whole system. So f— you dude, I would have bought it after trying it out, IF it was any good. I think it probably sucks so you don’t want people to test it out first…Nice job man. Way to suck at life. And I hope that nobody will buy from you just because of this.

I was in customer service mode when I saw this post so I quickly fired off one of the most unnecessarily nice e-mails of my life:

Hey dude,
Thanks for the post.  I disagree with you that most people use Installous to try before they buy.  So you know, I spent the last 3 months on this project and currently over 60% [of users] are not paying.

I get your point…and what I was trying to do here was convert the type of people you are not talking about (those that pirate everything with no intent to buy) as opposed to letting it just go unchecked.

I would like you to try the game though…would you download it if I sent you a promo code?  Let me know.
Thanks.

Now me sending this e-mail was crazy I know but from my point of view iCombat had just launched and I didn’t want to have anyone be negative on my app.  What followed my e-mail was surprising, the pirate responded in a very conciliatory tone, apologizing and so I sent him the promo code.  His response several days later was enthusiastic, saying “I love the app dude, it’s awesome.”  And this is where the craziness begins, he then proceeded to make a YouTube clip of the game and he even offered to host a contest and do a more serious quality demo. I even found a comment of his on YouTube where he actually attacked a pirate who linked through to a piracy site.  This pirate had gone from cursing me out to cursing out other pirates, defending my interests and helping get the word out about Combat.

Now maybe this pirate was emotionally unstable or just a kid, but either way I learned quite a bit from the experience.  Key lessons below: Read more…

For anyone interested in creating an iPhone app but wondering where to begin, I think the best thing you can do is just sit down and lay it out.  I have always been a big fan of whiteboards and as of late the huge Post It Easel Pads but these are impossible if you travel a lot and are of limited use when trying to collaborate over long distances.  The answer for me has been to use Balsamiq, a tool that allows you to quickly create mock-ups of both websites and iPhone apps.  With Balsamiq I can work through the mechanics of how an app should work, and visually see the flow from action to action.

In previous posts I have suggested to first time app developers the importance of creating proper specs when planning to create an app.  I think mockup tools like Balsamiq are even more useful than making great specs and writing out usage scenario examples.  Not only does it help you better develop your idea but it also gives you the ability to share your mockups with other people instantly.  For example, if you are thinking about outsourcing development or are talking to other team members, Balsamiq will let you share your mockups and convey clearly what you want to do (for info on how to protect your idea with outsourced developers read this post).  And by visually demonstrating the flow of how you want your app to work developers will have a much better idea of what you are looking for.  This will pay off in terms of the quality of developer you manage to get and it will also improve the accuracy of the time and budget estimates you get from developers.

Even if you plan on developing the app yourself, you can benefit from working through the fuzzy parts of your idea.  A mockup tool will give you the simple tools you need to work through EVERY aspect of your app structure before you begin the development process.  This is important because it can alert you to fundamental flaws in your idea or logic before you put the time and effort into building it.

In addition to the sketches of the iPhone and its main interface tools you also have sketches of dozens of buttons, switches, icons and other items that you can customize.  For example, when you drag an iPhone image to the drawing area, a box pops up where you can select whether to include the status toolbar at the top, change the orientation, the background look, etc.  You can even drag call out boxes into the picture as well to insert commentary about your mockup.  Check out this video for an example of what is possible.

Balsamiq includes a free trial version so you can test it out today…give it 5 minutes and you will see how quickly you get the hang of it.

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Before launching iCombat I wrote a post discussing the question of what to do with App store piracy.  The options basically boil down to either: A) doing nothing, B) using RipDev or a comparable solution to make the app more difficult to crack, or C) implementing an info.plist check that allows the developer to see which users are using a cracked version and then altering the app for those pirate users (see Beejive IM’s response as one of the more decisive moves you can take with this approach).  See description of how to do this here.

As a first time developer I wanted to protect my effort but did not want to pay an upfront fee to Ripdev without having made a dime so I opted to go for the more benign yet not totally passive option.  I chose to detect when they cracked the application and then have a pop-up screen say something inoffensive along with a button routing them away from game play after 5 levels.  The button redirected the pirate to a hidden page I created on my site called “You Jacked My App” where the text read:

“Hi if you have been directed to this page it’s because we see that you have a pirated copy.  While we are glad you are interested please understand that we want to continue making it better, but to do that we need people to each pay for their copy.  If you want to continue using please purchase today.”

The idea was to get the user to empathize with my cause and maybe convert a tiny fraction of those users into sales.  While it was a cheesy move and probably a bad idea I figured it couldn’t hurt to try (maybe I should have just rickroll’d them all!).  For a great example of a better executed version of this strategy see developer Ben Chatelain’s pop-up here which mentions needing the sales to help feed his 1 year old!  I just found this but had I seen it pre-iCombat 1.0 I would probably have implemented something similarly guilt evoking.

See below some stats to give you an idea of the scope of the problem for iCombat as well as some conclusions I have drawn from the experience: Read more…

I came across an interesting post on “How to use Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to market your mobile games” and it reinforced what I have noticed since readying to launch iCombat – there are too many channels to manage when it comes to reaching the end user!  This may sound like a high class problem to all of the game and content developers that have faced the gatekeepers of distribution over the years but the sudden blossoming of dozens of channels to reach users has created its own set of problems.  Now the burden of brand management and marketing has fallen into the lap of the developers, where they must become “marketers” of their product if they hope to get noticed.

The rise of the fractured, multichannel market has created dozens of sites that developers now need to visit to build goodwill and help gain exposure, something that is fundamentally different from what they probably want to be doing. In my case this translates into 18-20 hours a day since launch to manage the marketing effort and frankly it is still more than I can handle. While I have enlisted friends and an intern to help, most developers don’t have the luxury of dedicating all of their own time to managing their launch.

I have compiled a list of some of the tools and sites I think necessary to use today:

Top Down channels – kissing the ring

1. Bloggers – what some refer to as the “digital influencers” – sites with major traffic like Gizmodo, Techcrunch, GigaOM
2. Targeted review sites – Touch Arcade, 148Apps, Pocket Gamer, etc. – I have counted 60+ serious ones in all

Bottom Up channels – connecting with your users

1. Facebook – both personal status and group page
2. Twitter
3. MySpace
4. App/ Development/ Gaming Forums - Touch Arcade, maybe iPhonedevSDK, etc.
5. Product website & blog – here you need to have a demo, maybe a news section and your blog
6. YouTube – a great way to communicate with avid gamers
7. iTunes App store summary

Analytics Tools – monitoring usage, downloads, buzz

1. User downloads – iTunes Connect – Heartbeat App or AppViz (super easy to use but less flexible than Heartbeat)
2. Usage behavior – Pinch Media – gives you uniques, geo data, version & device stats, as well as unique data by action in your App (very cool)
3. App ranking – AppRanking by Michael Dorn or Mobclix
4. Web traffic - Google Analytics or Wordpress Stats
5. Affiliate data – Linkshare – here if you are an Apple affiliate you can earn back 5% of your 30% cut that goes to Apple – and monitor clickthrough conversion data from your site
6. Brand management – ScoutLabs or Google Alerts – Scout doesn’t really seem to work for small apps or early on in a campaign as it is, for these smaller apps Google Alerts is a great basic filter

While this list is not comprehensive this is basically everything I am using for the marketing of iCombat. I didn’t realize just how many channels and tools this involved until trying to post an urgent piece of news.  When iCombat was reviewed in Gizmodo’s weekly roundup of iPhone apps I quickly wanted to update every channel I was using. Read more…

After 8 days waiting to be approved by Apple, iCombat is accepted and “Ready for Sale.”  I was pretty patient during the wait but by today I was starting to get worried.  I shot off a few e-mails to Apple, posted my scenario to a couple of websites and waited, and late this evening I found out that we were approved.  When I spoke to the team they thought it was an April Fool’s joke, which thankfully it wasn’t because we are now in the App store.  You can check out our description and buy it in the iTunes store here.

While I have been vague about what iCombat would be until now, I wanted to give you some background as to why we chose to do a classic arcade style tank game.  I grew up in the mid 80’s playing a beat up Atari 2600 – it was behind the times even then (let alone now!) but the good side of having the outdated console was that I could buy old Atari games at used book stores for under a dollar. I didn’t have the money, or need, back then to buy a newer console and it didn’t matter because the Atari had some of the best game play design of any console I have ever played.  Simple rules, easy to use controls, a fast learning curve, all of these things helped make it much easier than picking up today’s games (except maybe the Wii).

The game that captured my attention most was Combat, a 27 game in one combo pack that included the Tank game.  There were many variations of play, one of which was Tank pong – here you fired missiles (squares) at the other tank (a rectangle) and they could bounce off of walls and hit the enemy.  For me the bouncing missiles and fierce 2 player versus mode hooked me, and so when the iPhone launched we saw the opportunity to bring a similar type of game play to the younger generation of gamers.  The idea was to stick to simple game logic but utilize the powerful features of the iPhone to create something great.  Truthfully, we just created it also because we wanted to play it – and we tried to stay true to the game play fundamentals that made the original games so addictive.  And while there are half a dozen tank style games in the App store, we hadn’t found one that scratched our itch for this classic arcade style play.

We hope, after playing, you will start to share our enthusiasm for tank games and that you will become a fan of iCombat.  We also want to make iCombat better in future updates, so please send us your feedback at icombatgame@gmail.com or post something here.  We are planning to offer prizes of some sort (maybe t-shirts or something) to anyone whose idea is implemented in future updates so send us your best suggestions for future changes such as new weapons, levels, enemies, etc.  If your idea is good and others support it in the comments we will do our best to make it happen.  I will be posting some ideas of my own in the coming days so don’t be shy to shoot them down if you think they are weak!

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With all of the media hype success stories like Pocket God, iShoot, and Trism receive it is tempting to think that App store success is right around the corner.  All it should take is to make something and launch it, and then just watch the bills come rolling in.  While all of us developing apps would like for this to happen, the reality is that success, if it comes at all, usually takes much longer than expected.  Take for example iShoot, where Ethan Nicholas had his game in the app store several months before releasing the lite version that pushed his paid version to No. 1.  Or Pocket God, that launched after only a week of development but took 6 (or 7?) weeks of updates and community building to get it to the No. 1 spot.  These were not overnight Sound Grenade or iFart gimmicky successes, but took a long term perspective and a prolonged marketing effort. Read more…