6 ms·

How a hobbyist game dev broke into the App Store's top 25

150 points by Impossible 13y ago

krelian 13y ago
These things are always motivation boosters. I've had a gaming idea for a long time now but I feel that I know close to nothing about graphics programming to make it work.
- ianterrell 13y ago
  Graphics are easier than you'd think (triply true with library support). Just dive in!
  - ozataman 13y ago
    Care to point at some resources?
    - applecore 13y ago
      The article mentions some resources in the Engine and Learning Materials sections. He learned by following tutorials for Corona SDK[1] for a couple months, learning what he could of Lua[2] and making a very simple game. Then, he switched to Cocos2D[3] and had to learn Objective-C and Xcode. He bought the books Programming in Objective-C[4] and Learning Cocos2D[5] and started reading and coding. He also regularly visited the Cocos2D forums[6] and Ray Wenderlich's site[7] to solve problems as they came up. [1]: http://www.coronalabs.com/ http://www.coronalabs.com/ [2]: http://www.lua.org/ http://www.lua.org/ [3]: http://www.cocos2d-iphone.org/ http://www.cocos2d-iphone.org/ [4]: http://www.amazon.com/dp/032188728X/ http://www.amazon.com/dp/032188728X/ [5]: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0321735625/ http://www.amazon.com/dp/0321735625/ [6]: http://www.cocos2d-iphone.org/forums/ http://www.cocos2d-iphone.org/forums/ [7]: http://www.raywenderlich.com/ http://www.raywenderlich.com/
    - davidhollander 13y ago
      Start by deciding whether you want to target a single platform or a list of multiple platforms, and then choose whether you want to work with 2D, fixed pipeline 3D, or programmable pipeline 3D. For single platform 2D, research the platforms standard development kit. For cross-platform 2D, find a library exposing an API supporting all available platforms[1]. For cross platform 3D, create a list of hardware you wish to support and find the maximum common OpenGL\GLES version and GLSL shader version. This should give you an idea of the graphics API you will be working with and need to learn. [1] http://www.libsdl.org/ http://www.libsdl.org/ is one such library if you go this route, I believe it's used in Angry Birds and Valve's Linux port of Steam.
    - Egregore 13y ago
      You can develop for multiple platforms with http://www.haxeflixel.com/ http://www.haxeflixel.com/
- percentcer 13y ago
  Just use an existing rendering engine and you'll be fine
- reedlaw 13y ago
  It's motivating from a hacker/programmer perspective, not so much from a business one. 8 months full-time effort for new car money? Unless he means a new Tesla Model S, it's not very encouraging, especially considering so few reach this level of success.
  - chii 13y ago
    yep. what i want to read is an article about failure, or stats about rate of failures, where failure is not earning above average wage over the time it took to make the app.
    - wnewman 13y ago
      Well, even he probably has only an imprecise idea how many hundreds of hours he spent on it, but I'll speculate it's comparable to how many hours he'd spend getting a master's degree in CS (at night, while working full time during the day). I don't know how the job market works in his specialty in his country, but in some job markets in the US, I estimate that being able to list that game and its sales performance on a resume is worth rather more than a master's degree. So from that side effect alone, this sounds at least as good as him taking a generous fellowship to get an exceedingly good master's degree. It's not vast wealth in one fell swoop, but it doesn't seem like a failure. And if he wants never to send out another resume in his life, instead writing and selling his own software, it's harder to quantify the benefits of business and tech experience on a first app, but ramen profitability on one's first less-than-a-year-in-development app sounds OK to me. The title oversells the achievement (top 25 ... in some smaller countries) but your term "failure" undersells it even more.
    - adamthats 13y ago
      Hi, I'm Adam, the guy that made the game. I completely see where you're coming from, but in the article you'll read that my measure of success was making back the few hundred dollars I spent on art - so as far as I'm concerned I've succeeded beyond my wildest dreams! I understand that my success is another man's failure, and that's fine with me. The 'success' of Pumped 1 is funding the development of Pumped 2 - I actually have a budget this time! But it's definitely not a bootstrapped multi-million pound startup - just me making games about grown men on kids bikes! :)
pkfrank 13y ago
>I released the game at £1.49 / $1.99. My rationale behind the pricing was that it was a niche game, and therefore anyone who wanted to play it wouldn't mind paying the slightly higher (but let's be honest, still very low) cost, and I wanted to make back the money I spent on art (around £400/$600). Secondly I think even the modest increase from £0.69/$.99 rules out a lot of impulse purchases, which would have no doubt increased the number of "it's too hard!" and "I don't understand!" reviews no end - this was a game made for BMXers after all. This makes total sense, and I hadn't previously considered the effect of pricing on potential reviews. He was able to focus his audience (by raising the price), knowing that it would encourage more motivated gamers that were less likely to get frustrated by the mechanics. Thus avoiding the annoying 1-star reviews that can tank a rating.
- soup10 13y ago
  It doesn't, App Store is all about impulse purchases. Anything remotely casual should be .99c or free, use ingame purchases to capture extra value. If the game plays half decent and is shiny(has non-amateur art), it should have a pop up sometime ingame reminding players to review and it will have no problem getting a 4-5 star rating. All of which doesn't actually matter if you get right because you still need a hook or angles that gets people playing YOUR game instead of the 1000s of other similairly polished and entertaining games(many of which are going to be better known, by virtue of branding/bigger marketing budget/connections/whatever)
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - eropple 13y ago
    As a game developer what you describe is painful. Your description should serve as a warning to anyone trying to get into mobile games. If you race to the bottom, you will sell your soul to do so.
  - coldtea 13y ago
    >It doesn't, App Store is all about impulse purchases. Lots of quality apps with normal prices have proven otherwise. So anybody should take your advice with a sack of salt.
simantel 13y ago
I think saying that he broke the Top 25 list is a bit misleading. Here's what actually happened: "I ended the first day at no. 27 in the UK charts, no. 21 in Australia and no. 20 in Latvia (the winners of the Olympic BMX racing)." That's still quite an accomplishment, but not quite the same thing.
- trentmb 13y ago
  Mean ranking of ~22.6, I think I'll allow it.
  - chj 13y ago
    Great job nonetheless, but still, when you talk about top 25, everybody assumes you're referring to US top chart. Very different thing.
    - adamthats 13y ago
      I kind of agree with you, but being a UK citizen I was watching the UK app store by default. Bearing in mind that I was hoping to make a few hundred quid / dollars being in the top 100 in any chart was a result! :)
  - ryandrake 13y ago
    http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/27/how-do-you-break-into-iphone-app-store-top-50-try-23k-free-daily-downloads-950-paid-or-12k-in-daily-revenue/ http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/27/how-do-you-break-into-iphon... To reach #25 in the U.K. AppStore, it takes only 21% of the of downloads that it takes to hit #25 in the U.S. AppStore. Still, very impressive for an amateur developer in such an overcrowded channel.
    - beagle3 13y ago
      Well, the UK has about 20% of the population of the US, so it is proportional
- gdeglin 13y ago
JacobAldridge 13y ago
I'll be sharing this article with every person who comes to me with a "great app idea" because "that's where the money is". This is a great tale of the hard work and perseverance required to launch a game as a solo dev - and I would call it a success. "New car money", though, is not the success so many devs (and would be devs) seem to think comes easily.
- tunesmith 13y ago
  That was my first thought... if the motivation is monetary upside, "new car money" in exchange for someone's eight-month bootstrap is not quite enough for a lot of professional programmers. Fine if it's for the love and enjoyment of it, though.
ap22213 13y ago
I know a person who has several games consistently in the top 10. And, him and his team also started out as 'hobbist' game devs. To me, it seemed like they took several years of taking risks, perseverance, dedication, creativity, trial and error, and of course luck to make it big. But, eventually, a blockbuster emerged.
- sillysaurus 13y ago
  Which? How? Did they do a writeup about their experiences?
diziet 13y ago
Said app in question: https://sensortower.com/ios/us/yeah_us/app/pumped_bmx/527173191 https://sensortower.com/ios/us/yeah_us/app/pumped_bmx/527173...
tagabek 13y ago
These successes are always great to read about! I recently broke top 50 in the Productivity category with my first app, which brought in over 5,000 downloads and counting. I didn't receive "new car" money, but I have already received a few freelancing clients because of it, which surpassed my goals. Fantastic execution, and good luck with all of your future projects!
- rfctr 13y ago
  Working for a year almost full time and get "new car" revenue is not a financial success. Sorry.
so898 13y ago
I think there was one game which is similar to this one on Plam. And there are some similar flash games on web.
mynameisamir 13y ago
...why was he afraid of XCode?
- adamthats 13y ago
  Because it was a huge black box before I started - I'd never touched an IDE before.
peterkelly 13y ago
The most important thing to note in that article is the revenue graph near the end. You might make a few $K in on the first day, but if it's all downhill from there, you don't have a sustainable business. That's not to say this guy hasn't made an impressive accomplishment (which getting any game in the top 25 is) - just be wary of the stories of "overnight success" that we hear now and then on the app store.
- adamthats 13y ago
  I think 'all downhill from there' is pushing it a bit far - I certainly don't want my story to put off any potential developers! If I wasn't such a sensible / boring fellow I could still (a year later) be comfortably living off my monthly income.
bluekite2000 13y ago
How does a game end up on top 25 for this country and that country upon launch? Is it luck? Are there things I can do to prep?
adamthats 13y ago
I'm a bit of a long time lurker, but I just have to say that I'm genuinely incredibly proud for there to be a discussion about my game on hacker news - I'm not sure it's really the right place for it (I'm no startup), but I've screen-capped it nevertheless.

150 points by Impossible 13y ago

These things are always motivation boosters. I've had a gaming idea for a long time now but I feel that I know close to nothing about graphics programming to make it work.

ianterrell 13y ago
Graphics are easier than you'd think (triply true with library support). Just dive in!
- ozataman 13y ago
  Care to point at some resources?
  - applecore 13y ago
    The article mentions some resources in the Engine and Learning Materials sections. He learned by following tutorials for Corona SDK[1] for a couple months, learning what he could of Lua[2] and making a very simple game. Then, he switched to Cocos2D[3] and had to learn Objective-C and Xcode. He bought the books Programming in Objective-C[4] and Learning Cocos2D[5] and started reading and coding. He also regularly visited the Cocos2D forums[6] and Ray Wenderlich's site[7] to solve problems as they came up. [1]: http://www.coronalabs.com/ http://www.coronalabs.com/ [2]: http://www.lua.org/ http://www.lua.org/ [3]: http://www.cocos2d-iphone.org/ http://www.cocos2d-iphone.org/ [4]: http://www.amazon.com/dp/032188728X/ http://www.amazon.com/dp/032188728X/ [5]: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0321735625/ http://www.amazon.com/dp/0321735625/ [6]: http://www.cocos2d-iphone.org/forums/ http://www.cocos2d-iphone.org/forums/ [7]: http://www.raywenderlich.com/ http://www.raywenderlich.com/
  - davidhollander 13y ago
    Start by deciding whether you want to target a single platform or a list of multiple platforms, and then choose whether you want to work with 2D, fixed pipeline 3D, or programmable pipeline 3D. For single platform 2D, research the platforms standard development kit. For cross-platform 2D, find a library exposing an API supporting all available platforms[1]. For cross platform 3D, create a list of hardware you wish to support and find the maximum common OpenGL\GLES version and GLSL shader version. This should give you an idea of the graphics API you will be working with and need to learn. [1] http://www.libsdl.org/ http://www.libsdl.org/ is one such library if you go this route, I believe it's used in Angry Birds and Valve's Linux port of Steam.
  - Egregore 13y ago
    You can develop for multiple platforms with http://www.haxeflixel.com/ http://www.haxeflixel.com/
percentcer 13y ago
Just use an existing rendering engine and you'll be fine
reedlaw 13y ago
It's motivating from a hacker/programmer perspective, not so much from a business one. 8 months full-time effort for new car money? Unless he means a new Tesla Model S, it's not very encouraging, especially considering so few reach this level of success.
- chii 13y ago
  yep. what i want to read is an article about failure, or stats about rate of failures, where failure is not earning above average wage over the time it took to make the app.
  - wnewman 13y ago
    Well, even he probably has only an imprecise idea how many hundreds of hours he spent on it, but I'll speculate it's comparable to how many hours he'd spend getting a master's degree in CS (at night, while working full time during the day). I don't know how the job market works in his specialty in his country, but in some job markets in the US, I estimate that being able to list that game and its sales performance on a resume is worth rather more than a master's degree. So from that side effect alone, this sounds at least as good as him taking a generous fellowship to get an exceedingly good master's degree. It's not vast wealth in one fell swoop, but it doesn't seem like a failure. And if he wants never to send out another resume in his life, instead writing and selling his own software, it's harder to quantify the benefits of business and tech experience on a first app, but ramen profitability on one's first less-than-a-year-in-development app sounds OK to me. The title oversells the achievement (top 25 ... in some smaller countries) but your term "failure" undersells it even more.
  - adamthats 13y ago
    Hi, I'm Adam, the guy that made the game. I completely see where you're coming from, but in the article you'll read that my measure of success was making back the few hundred dollars I spent on art - so as far as I'm concerned I've succeeded beyond my wildest dreams! I understand that my success is another man's failure, and that's fine with me. The 'success' of Pumped 1 is funding the development of Pumped 2 - I actually have a budget this time! But it's definitely not a bootstrapped multi-million pound startup - just me making games about grown men on kids bikes! :)

pkfrank 13y ago

>I released the game at £1.49 / $1.99. My rationale behind the pricing was that it was a niche game, and therefore anyone who wanted to play it wouldn't mind paying the slightly higher (but let's be honest, still very low) cost, and I wanted to make back the money I spent on art (around £400/$600). Secondly I think even the modest increase from £0.69/$.99 rules out a lot of impulse purchases, which would have no doubt increased the number of "it's too hard!" and "I don't understand!" reviews no end - this was a game made for BMXers after all. This makes total sense, and I hadn't previously considered the effect of pricing on potential reviews. He was able to focus his audience (by raising the price), knowing that it would encourage more motivated gamers that were less likely to get frustrated by the mechanics. Thus avoiding the annoying 1-star reviews that can tank a rating.

soup10 13y ago
It doesn't, App Store is all about impulse purchases. Anything remotely casual should be .99c or free, use ingame purchases to capture extra value. If the game plays half decent and is shiny(has non-amateur art), it should have a pop up sometime ingame reminding players to review and it will have no problem getting a 4-5 star rating. All of which doesn't actually matter if you get right because you still need a hook or angles that gets people playing YOUR game instead of the 1000s of other similairly polished and entertaining games(many of which are going to be better known, by virtue of branding/bigger marketing budget/connections/whatever)
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- eropple 13y ago
  As a game developer what you describe is painful. Your description should serve as a warning to anyone trying to get into mobile games. If you race to the bottom, you will sell your soul to do so.
- coldtea 13y ago
  >It doesn't, App Store is all about impulse purchases. Lots of quality apps with normal prices have proven otherwise. So anybody should take your advice with a sack of salt.

simantel 13y ago

I think saying that he broke the Top 25 list is a bit misleading. Here's what actually happened: "I ended the first day at no. 27 in the UK charts, no. 21 in Australia and no. 20 in Latvia (the winners of the Olympic BMX racing)." That's still quite an accomplishment, but not quite the same thing.

trentmb 13y ago
Mean ranking of ~22.6, I think I'll allow it.
- chj 13y ago
  Great job nonetheless, but still, when you talk about top 25, everybody assumes you're referring to US top chart. Very different thing.
  - adamthats 13y ago
    I kind of agree with you, but being a UK citizen I was watching the UK app store by default. Bearing in mind that I was hoping to make a few hundred quid / dollars being in the top 100 in any chart was a result! :)
- ryandrake 13y ago
  http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/27/how-do-you-break-into-iphone-app-store-top-50-try-23k-free-daily-downloads-950-paid-or-12k-in-daily-revenue/ http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/27/how-do-you-break-into-iphon... To reach #25 in the U.K. AppStore, it takes only 21% of the of downloads that it takes to hit #25 in the U.S. AppStore. Still, very impressive for an amateur developer in such an overcrowded channel.
  - beagle3 13y ago
    Well, the UK has about 20% of the population of the US, so it is proportional
gdeglin 13y ago

JacobAldridge 13y ago

I'll be sharing this article with every person who comes to me with a "great app idea" because "that's where the money is". This is a great tale of the hard work and perseverance required to launch a game as a solo dev - and I would call it a success. "New car money", though, is not the success so many devs (and would be devs) seem to think comes easily.

tunesmith 13y ago
That was my first thought... if the motivation is monetary upside, "new car money" in exchange for someone's eight-month bootstrap is not quite enough for a lot of professional programmers. Fine if it's for the love and enjoyment of it, though.

ap22213 13y ago

I know a person who has several games consistently in the top 10. And, him and his team also started out as 'hobbist' game devs. To me, it seemed like they took several years of taking risks, perseverance, dedication, creativity, trial and error, and of course luck to make it big. But, eventually, a blockbuster emerged.

sillysaurus 13y ago
Which? How? Did they do a writeup about their experiences?

diziet 13y ago

Said app in question: https://sensortower.com/ios/us/yeah_us/app/pumped_bmx/527173191 https://sensortower.com/ios/us/yeah_us/app/pumped_bmx/527173...

tagabek 13y ago

These successes are always great to read about! I recently broke top 50 in the Productivity category with my first app, which brought in over 5,000 downloads and counting. I didn't receive "new car" money, but I have already received a few freelancing clients because of it, which surpassed my goals. Fantastic execution, and good luck with all of your future projects!

rfctr 13y ago
Working for a year almost full time and get "new car" revenue is not a financial success. Sorry.

so898 13y ago

I think there was one game which is similar to this one on Plam. And there are some similar flash games on web.

mynameisamir 13y ago

...why was he afraid of XCode?

adamthats 13y ago
Because it was a huge black box before I started - I'd never touched an IDE before.

peterkelly 13y ago

The most important thing to note in that article is the revenue graph near the end. You might make a few $K in on the first day, but if it's all downhill from there, you don't have a sustainable business. That's not to say this guy hasn't made an impressive accomplishment (which getting any game in the top 25 is) - just be wary of the stories of "overnight success" that we hear now and then on the app store.

adamthats 13y ago
I think 'all downhill from there' is pushing it a bit far - I certainly don't want my story to put off any potential developers! If I wasn't such a sensible / boring fellow I could still (a year later) be comfortably living off my monthly income.

bluekite2000 13y ago

How does a game end up on top 25 for this country and that country upon launch? Is it luck? Are there things I can do to prep?

adamthats 13y ago

I'm a bit of a long time lurker, but I just have to say that I'm genuinely incredibly proud for there to be a discussion about my game on hacker news - I'm not sure it's really the right place for it (I'm no startup), but I've screen-capped it nevertheless.