Rod and I have learned a lot in the past week.  Its the culmination of two years of hard work.

We learned that chart boosting is rampant on the iTunes store.  It’s something I had known about, but thought was a freak occurrence, especially since Apple supposedly cracked down on boosting.  It’s something that consumers have no idea about, but when you’re a developer and your game releases, you’re looking at the charts on an hour to hour basis, everyday.  You notice when an app jumps 100 places out of nowhere, and you see the hundreds of bogus 5 star reviews that comes along with boosting.

I also learned that Brainsss doesn’t draw the mainstream crowd, otherwise our sales would have been higher and we would have maintained our slot much longer.  We received a lot of exposure from Apple’s feature and the reviews for Brainsss were generally, positive.  Our style is very light-hearted and cute, which should appeal to the casuals, and other zombie games were charting high on the list.  Pricing wise, we costed more than 99 cents, but quite a few other games like Angry Birds Space and Fruit Ninja were priced the same.  There were even a number of games that costed more.

What I’m getting at is: what went wrong?  I can only assume that the screenshots turned off a lot of consumers.

So what’s wrong with the screenshots?  Besides not being flashy, I noticed that our game looks very 3D, even though the game actually plays very 2D.  Just about all the other top 20 apps were 2D, unless it was a big franchise like Lego Harry Potter.  So it’s only a hunch but I’m sticking with casual players are turned off by 3D as the reasoning for our market meltdown.

We found out that the iPad market is much, much smaller than the iPhone/iPod Touch market.  I knew there were more handheld devices, but I just always assumed that iPad users would buy a lot more apps for their premium device.

We also learned that piracy was really low for some reason.  It was about a 1 to 1 ratio, which is much lower than the 10 to 1 ratio for Tec-G.

Anyways that’s it for now.  Time to figure out what to do next.

We’re very excited and hope that everyone loves the game!

P.S. if you live in New Zealand, Australia or any other country in a timezone that is already experiencing the 3rd of May you can download it now!!

Why did the ship date slip?  Of course with game development, a lot of little things come up last minute.  These could be features like stat tracking, leaderboards, etc.  We did encounter a serious memory bug last minute, and it took us nearly a week to solve.

That being said, I admit, there’s been a little bit of last minute feature creep.  This isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  Rod and I have put a solid 2 years into this project, so if something comes along that makes the game ever so better, it makes sense to dedicate another couple days to get the feature in.  After all, what’s a couple days compared to the years of development time.

One quick example of a feature.  We just added a left handed mode to Brainsss, where all the GUI items are flipped for left handed users.  It’s a feature that I’m sure a lot of lefties will be thankful for when they play the game, but as simple of a feature as it sounds, this could potentially break the game.  Even so, I still feel it’s worthwhile to add.

Cliffy B mentioned the difference between professional games and amateur games is polish in this article: http://penny-arcade.com/report/editorial-article/the-ugly-side-of-kickstarter-why-the-risks-in-backing-gaming-campaigns-are-

I wholeheartedly agree, unfortunately, polish means more development time.  Sometimes, it’s not even the actual work going into the implementation, it’s giving the game enough time to sit and tell you what features it needs.

And yet I believe Brainsss is a great game.  The game has taken awhile to create, but production has gone relatively smoothly.  The hardest part so far seems to be the marketing, exposure side of things.

Currently, Rod and I are sitting with a great game that’s almost finished, and it’s difficult to get people to take the time to look.  It’s been a pretty frustrating and exhausting process.

Rod and I have been trying to get people early builds of the game, and people just aren’t interested in putting the time in to even install the game, let alone play it.  I feel like a guy out in public trying to hand out fliers, while everybody ignores me.

Part of the problem is that I really hate doing things like that too.  I’m an introvert by nature and hate placing a burden on anybody, and yet, I need people to see and play the game.

It’s not like I don’t get the response either.  Journalists, gamers, and even everyday people are busy.  They don’t have the time or interest to check out every indie iPad game that comes their way.

The question is, how do we breakthrough to the audience?  The general consensus is to just release and wait and see.  Maybe it does well, or maybe the game sinks.  Unfortunately, that seems like a random roll of the dice for something that I’ve invested two years of my life into.