Anyhow, here’s a teaser shot for the Isochron’s new website.

Isochron Website Teaser

Check out the progress here : game.jseuss.com

That’s why I’m trying out something different.  I’ve always liked isometric turn based games (XCom – UFO: Enemy Unknown being the classic) and now I’ve got some resources at my fingertips, I’m getting the team to put together an isometric strategy game made primarily for the iPhone.  But here’s the different part – I don’t want to develop this game in secret until the end.  I think it’s important to show what kind of things go on behind the scenes and to allow players to give feedback early and often.  And I’ll be letting some parts be totally influenced by the fans.

To start it off, a name has to be chosen for the new game.  All submissions welcome. Head over to http://game.jseuss.com/ for more info -it’ll be up soon.  The person who comes up with the winning name will get an App Store Promo Code for Pegs In Space, and also for the new game once it’s released.

With so many developers out there trying to find the magic ingredient to massive success, surely there are hundreds of services aimed at the little guy who doesn’t have a big name yet.

Well, there are options, and I’ve tried a few, but if ever there’s a gap in the market for an entrepreneur to fill, getting small time Apps noticed would be it.

Google Adwords

The first path for many may be towards Google Adwords. Surely a network of ads that spans the globe will easily reach into every home and spread the news of your new app.

Unfortunately, there are a few things halting your success.  Firstly (and this goes for all advertising) your app is usually cheap – real cheap.  Somehow the iPhone App market has been driven into the ground.  If one takes a purely economical rational approach to buying apps, only one thing has to be asked – What else can I buy with my $0.99? And for most of the Apps out there for $0.99, you’re doing extremely well compared to what else that $0.99 would get you.  But customers aren’t happy.  Your App is in a no-mans land where unless you make an app that’s worth much more, satisfaction will be hard to come by.  

But all that aside, cheap apps don’t do so well when advertising via Google.  To get good ad positions, with high sale rates, you have to pay up to 25 or 35 cents per click.  And that just doesn’t add up. I’ve tried smaller click costs ($0.01) but they end up going to the wrong customers and I get a whopping 95% bounce rate on customers coming in on the ads. So Google isn’t the answer.

Admob Ads

The next big things is Admob.  Here you can create ads that appear only on iPhones, so you know people will be able to download your app.  So what did I find?  Firstly, ad click costs are much higher here.  The lowest you can go is $0.03.  So given an input of $50, I managed to get some 1600 clicks in just two minutes.  I was stoked!  1600 iPhone users interested in my ad.  And so quickly too!  But what did the sales data show?  Nothing.

Not even a little spike appeared in the sales data following the ads being placed on the network. Is this due to fraud?  Or just people not wanting to buy?  

Other

There are of course other options to advertising.  Pick an iPhone app site and they’ll usually have advertising options.  They can be quite a hefty outlay with no assurance that they will increase sales, so it’s a bit of a risk.  I haven’t tried any of these options, but if you have, please let us know what you found.

Anyhow, what better reason than to share some things I’ve learnt along the way starting with …

Scope

Before writing any application you need to set a goal that is both realistic and achievable.  And this seems to be more important for games than any other genre. For some reason, people who like playing games, think that equates to liking/being good at writing games.  If you’ve never written a game before it’s probably no surprise that you shouldn’t try to write an epic FPS with realistic gameplay and story line.  But a lot of people fall into the trap of underestimating the effort to produce a simple turn based strategy, or even more common, some sort of RPG.  

If you’re completely new to the scene, try something a little easier.  Graphics and artwork will either cost you money or time (or both) so pick a game that’s both easy to draw and easy to write.  Many solitaire games are very simple and will give you an idea of how to process and transition between game states (I’ll talk about this later).  It’ll also allow you to play with visual effects without the need for high responsiveness.

 From there you can create board type games with a computer opponent, introducing AI, then perhaps branch into games with levels where object management comes into play.  The choice is yours really.  But remember to keep adding to your past experiences and release every app you build.  

But to get back to the point, keep your apps simple, with only a few features that are new to you and stick to the plan.  Release your app and start another rather than adding ‘one more thing’ until you have a big messy pile of code.  

Next post I’ll be talking about different ways to approach reuse so each app is much easier than the last.

Although incredibly simple to use, the Audio Services should really only be used for one off alerts or sounds, and never as the sound effect backend of a game or similar. 

Like most Apple APIs, they use the technique of lazy loading.  That is, don’t bother doing anything like setting up audio buffers etc until you actually call the API into action for the first time.  This is useful for faster loading apps, and a smaller average memory footprint. 

But the downside to this is that the first time you try to play a sound, the Audio Services will be initialized and your app will pause for tenths of a second.  After this, however, all will be fine. 

A better way to go is to use OpenAL to handle audio playback.  It is much more flexible, and allows you to call the initialize function when your application loads, to avoid delays when you actually want sound to be played.  

The best place to start with this is to look at the Apple ‘Crash Landing’ example.  It includes a ‘SoundEngine’ module that can pretty much just be copied into your applications for use.  Remember to include the OpenAL framework though.

If you’re not familiar with the new feature, it is just a simple pop up that appears when you delete an app from your phone and asks you to rate it out of five stars, or just say no-thanks. 

When analyzing data in any field from scientific analysis to reviews that others have made, you should always be on the lookout for confounding factors.  And what’s more confounding than skewing your data to be mostly from people who have deleted an app they paid money for?  

I’m sure the system works moderately well for free apps.  There’s less to loose if you delete a free app – you can always download it again (if it’s still free..).  And there are reasons why you wouldn’t want hundreds of free apps cluttering up your phone.  But if you’ve paid for the app then it’s a different story.  You’re either cleaning up your phone and it’s at the bottom of the ‘want-to-keep’ pile, or you just plain don’t like it and want it gone.  It’s just far easier (and economical) to keep an app if you like it. 

So where does that leave us? Now we have many reviews from people who don’t like your app or think it’s the worst one on their phone.  Personally I’ve noticed a decline in all my ratings with an influx of non-comment reviews.  

An obvious way around this would be to ask to rate after the nth running of the app.  It would be a nuisance but far less biased towards people who don’t like the app. 

Has anyone else seen this phenomenon? Any other solutions?

Largely it’s my fault.  I should have done my research upfront. But with all the talk of the OpenGL ES 2.0 standard, I started to assume that it was supported on the iPhone.  After three hours of learning about vertex and fragment shaders in OpenGL ES 2.0, and writing a few to render a 2D blob for my upcoming iPhone physics engine (more on this later..) I got stuck trying to make it work on the iPhone itself.  

Not surprising really.  The hardware in the iPhone only supports the OpenGL ES 1.1 standard, and as such the API has no calls to any vector or fragment program related goodness.  

Lucky for me, I was just trying to do some shadows and shading of 2D sprites, so I could kinda fake it using some blending and scaling, but I guess the more adventurous effects will just have to wail until the next iPhone generation or later. 

So before you end up crossed armed and sulking as hard as you can at your computer, only do things based on the 1.1 standard, not the 2.0.

From a developers point of view, the reviews offer a somewhat anonymous way for your customers to give you feedback.  It’s a valuable mine of feature possibilities and ‘bug reports’.  The problem is, however, that you can’t easily get the whole picture just by using iTunes. 

You see, all the review comments are kept contained to the separate stores around the world.  So US customers and developers can’t easily see Australian comments and feedback. 

Perhaps there’s a better tool out there (if there is I’d love to know about it) but currently if you rely on iTunes to read your reviews, you’ll never be able to read all your reviews at once.

To get around this problem, you’re going to have to be a bit shifty..

1. Start iTunes normally and go to Store->View My Account
2. Enter your password
3. Click on “Change Country”
4. Pick another country that will have reviews you can read the language of
5. Accept the next screen..
6. Accept the license agreement
7. When asked for a credit card in that country, hit Apple-Q and get out of iTunes
8. Now load iTunes again..
9. Ta-Da! You’re now browsing the other country’s iTunes store

To get back it’s as easy as going to Settings->View My Account again and as soon as you enter your password it’ll realize you’ve done something odd and put you back in your native store.

So there you have it.  Again, if there’s a better way to do this PLEASE let me know!

“When do I get paid?”, “When will Apple transfer my money?”, “Does iTunes Connect give me my money in one lump sum?”, “How long should I wait until inquiring about my money?”

Well, I can’t answer all of the questions, but I can shed some light with my experience with the whole deal.

Financial Reports

You must wait for these after the end of the fiscal month.  Note that this is not the same as the calendar month, so don’t assume that you’ll get paid earning up to the 30th or 31st. The reports will start coming in about 10 or 11 days after the end of the fiscal month and may take 3 or 4 days before all the reports are ready. 

You’ll get a report for each region.

• Australia
• US
• Canada
• UK
• Eurpoe
• Japan
• Rest Of World

Some have noted that they didn’t receive what they expected at all – some in the order of half of what they were expecting. My experience has been good though with differences only ranging in about +/- $5

Bank Payments

If a region reaches US$250 or more owing to you, then you can expect payment into the bank account you entered in iTunes Connect. Because each region is seperate, you will receive one payment from each of the regions that owe you more than US$250.  

Payment for me occured in 14 days after the reports were ready, but some have claimed that Apple only pays on the 2nd of the month (obviously not in my experience) 

Be warned that your bank may charge you steeply for incoming foreign currency transfers.  In my case I was charged $15 PER REGION.  So it really adds up if you’re not prepared.  Talk to your bank – if you’re rolling in cash they’ll be more than happy to come to an agreement

There are so many apps out there for the iPhone that are doing some pretty graphics/algorithmically intensive stuff.  Most are right on the money when it comes to responsiveness, but some are just woeful!    

Perhaps it’s the promises of fame and fortune that seems synonymous with iPhone programming, but many developers new to Objective C are doing straight ports or just writing plain ObjC code until their app ‘works’ then just release it.  There seems to be a feeling that if an app is slow, the device just can’t handle it.  

I’ve been stepping through the hoops of (relatively) computationally heavy apps at the moment with the creation of a generic physics engine for use in a bunch of 2D based games.  Because it was my first app with serious algorithms in it, I didn’t give optimization much thought. And if you believe most ‘Good Software Practice” guidelines, that was a good thing. (optimize last, or you’ll be optimizing things that need no optimization at all.)

But perhaps some thought is necessary.  At the beginning, it’s very nice to go down the path of using pure ObjC throughout your code.  Let’s face it – it has a nice set of design features that make you feel like you’re on a fluffy cloud rather than the hard stainless steel bench of C.  And if you’re particularly sick like me, [you setLovesSquareBrackets:YES]. But of course the nice features of ObjC come at a cost, and the biggest one is the passing of messages.  C/C++ programmers often forget that when invoking a method on an object in ObjC, you are actually passing a message to the object which has to be converted into a function call at runtime.  Great for flexible, extendable libraries – bad for speed.

So you can either start your development with core components using plain C calls, or you can do what I did and wait until the ‘end’ and use the profiler.  The ‘Instruments’ tool in conjunction with remote iPhone SDK debugging is great.  You can actually run the app on the device and get statistics about what you’re app is doing and when – without a huge penalty to performance.  

Take a typical recording and keep an eye out for the msg_send call, and how much time is spent there.  You may actually find that you’ve introduced a dependency lock that’s slowing things down or you may have an update timer that’s just being ridiculous and updating a billion times a second. 

But if you find out that a lot of time is spent calling msg_send, all hope is not lost.  You can still do some optimizations that help out.  For the other things I’ll talk about them later. 

In simple cases, you do some of the internal work of ObjC yourself and cut out the middle man (sourced from here):

-naive {
  for(i=0; i<50000000; i++)
    [obj hello];
}

-optimised {
  typedef id (*hello_t)(id, SEL, ...);
  hello_t ref = [obj methodFor:@selector(hello)];
  for(i=0; i<500000000UL; i++)
    ref(obj,@selector(hello));
} 

which will work in a lot of cases.

But sometimes, you just have to revert to C.  Go back to the profiler and see what’s happening.  If there are still a lot of msg_send calls clogging up your execution time, then you’ll have to strip out the offenders and just write C functions.  It’s really not that bad..