Over the weekend I attended an iPhone game development lecture/workshop, presented by the dudes from radiolaris, an indie studio focusing on iPhone games. Their first release Radioflare, a music shoot’em up, received an IGF nomination.
Besides “pure” development topics, we covered a lot of diverse ground, from the economics and politics of the AppStore, to development methodology (note to self: have to read on Scrum-ban, a crossover between Scrum and Kanban), compared various game engines and middleware, and exchanged opinions about “indie” and “commercial” games in general.
To summarize my key take-aways of those 3 days:
Not one, but two AppStores
The AppStore is split into two parts – one (“AppStore A”) contains games and apps that cost 99 cents, the other (“AppStore B”) contains games and apps that are more expensive.
Each of them attracts different users – games in AppStore A are appealing to impulse buyers who browse and download mostly directly from their iPhone (so the games must be <10MB in size). Users can always get new games very cheaply, and probably do not spend much time with a single game.
The other, AppStore B, contains “bigger”, more expensive games. Users interested in those games are the more traditional gamers, reading blogs, and expecting the game to be a service that has to be maintained by the developer.
An iPhone developer should chose wisely in which AppStore he wants to play, and take this into account when deciding not only on game design details, features, etc., but also on marketing. AppStore A is a difficult territory for professional game development studios, in terms of ROI.
2D is good (enough)
The iPhone download charts are dominated by 2D games; 3D is not a real factor whether a game is going to be a success or not.
Metrics
90k active apps (98k total apps seen in US AppStore), growing rapidly
21k publishers
29 game submissions per day to Apple for approval, vs.
138 non-games submissions per day
Current avg delay from submission to approval: 10 days (maximum: 43 days! yuck)
The profit margin is better for non-games:
Current avg app price: $2.80
Current avg game price: $1.39
Free/lite vs. paid/premium version – 3-5% of users downloading the free/lite version buy the premium version.
All metrics from 148apps.biz (highly recommended!).
Middleware
Facebook and Twitter integration is expected, not optional!
OpenFaint, Plus+, Agon and others make it very easy to integrate.
Also, Pinch Media offers a free (for now) solution for ingame tracking and analytics (though I have to check out whether it would make (more) sense to use the Google Analytics AJAX API for that purpose).
Input methods
Accelerometer (tilt control) should be used for one axis only (tilt left/right or up/down), as difficulty increases dramatically when trying to control 2 axis at the same time.
When using up/down, use an offset of 30° up as default, as users tend to use their phones tilted up.
Cocos2D
Cocos2D seems to be the primary open sourced 2D game engine for the iPhone. It has a ton of features (sprite actions, scene transitions, audio, 2 different physics engines, particle effects, etc.), and especially the many samples give a very good overview and can be used as a starting point for a new game.
My favorite quote of the weekend comes from martinpi:
“Memory Management am iPhone dürfte ziemlich intelligent sein, auf eine dumme Art und Weise.”
Overall, it was a very interesting and inspiring weekend – thanks to everyone involved!
