We're trying out a couple of different ad networks, these ads are mostly designed to work with Project Wonderful (targeting webcomics whose readers we want to aim for) although right now we're having problems loading cash onto Project Wonderful because PayPal is being annoying from SA :(
Oh cool you're using PW, yeah that worked out well for Ben & Danelle with its bidding system (though they were using it for a webcomic so it would be interesting to see what results you get), and I see they do allow bigger file sizes which is a bonus.
I'm being spammed by www.adbuddiz.com after my global success that is Glow Worm on the Google store... LOL
They claim:
"Our advertisers pay for each install you will generate for them, and it's most of the time its between $1 - $3 per download"
Wow, $1-3 dollahs per install? I think I managed to earn R0.50 total last month with Google's AdMob... I'm going to go buy a Wilson's toffee with the proceeds ;)
Always keen to hear how profitable ads are in games. Then again there was that Flappy thing...
We're ramping up a Streamer Challenge tournament type thing over the next few days in which streamers both compete in daily challenges for merit and audiences vote participate to each get keys to the game.
We're in that very special vortex of game breaking last minute panic FFFFFFFFF right now .Doing all the storefront things, trailer things, and new logo things while also doing the "it just stopped compiling and the debugs don't show up?" things.
We keep having our focus pulled inwards when we should be broadcasting. We would really appreciate any signal boosting you could help us with right now.
We've updated the game as well, Desktop Dungeons: Enhanced Edition which adds new classes, new quests, a new building and, finally, seeded Daily Dungeons.
We're also running a streamer challenge right now, pitting streamers against each other in their own unique daily dungeon pool. We give out steam keys to 10 random viewers that voted for the winning streamer (with the best time/highest damage/whatever the goal is for that day) with earlier (ie: riskier) votes being more likely to get picked. For the past few dailies a streamer called Tornis has been winning, but he's not the fastest ;) http://www.desktopdungeons.net/streamer-challenge
Also, we have a new trailer, thanks to @benjets and his crew! (We'd have loved to have the time to run this by everyone first, but we got owned by iOS pretty hard, so this was under horrible deadline stress)
Aaaaand we've had to delay our mobile release. Everything was initially scheduled to come out at the same time, but unfortunately the 64bit iOS switch meant we had to build using IL2CPP and that really only got (mostly) stable for serialization- and reflection-heavy code recently. We messed up on this though and assumed that we could get a build ready for submission right after GDC - while our codebase was pretty-much good to go, IL2CPP wasn't and that cost us nearly two weeks that should have been marketing push time.
So I'm a bit disappointed with our marketing efforts for this update, but it's probably still a bit better than the trainsmash of timing that was our original launch. We'll see how this goes :)
Thanks for helping us test our distribution stuff :)
We've dated ourselves in public now (that sounds so weird) - 28th May, 2015. iOS codes are limited and the Android version we're giving out is a temp-free review thing, but if anyone here would like access, PM me with your email address and device info/type.
And, before anyone asks, we're doing Android publishing through a deal with our friends at Finji.
@Boysano: The testing was pretty simple - does the executable get to you and does it run. We needed to test distribution and the new OBB download system we'd built so that press can get hold of the game reliably. UI and everything else has already been pretty resoundingly tested, so generally just bugs and weirdnesses are what we care about now. @Karuji already found a thing that was letting players mess with the resolution, so we nuked that.
Out of interest, why did you need to build an OBB system? We still had to with Unity 3.5, but I was under the impression Unity 4 had built in support for that? (If this is too OT, feel free to move the question and answer to the general Unity thread :) )
Out of interest, why did you need to build an OBB system? We still had to with Unity 3.5, but I was under the impression Unity 4 had built in support for that? (If this is too OT, feel free to move the question and answer to the general Unity thread :) )
Unity builds OBBs for you, but some Android version/device setups aren't guaranteed to download anything other than the executable. So we had to load up a scene to check if the OBB exists and download it if it doesn't, then let you play the game as normal. There was a problem with Java plugins not playing well together, so it proved easier to build our own solution in the end.
Yup, @dislekcia is 100% spot on there... it's especially the case with pre-ICS Androids don't always auto-DL the OBB and you need to cater for it happening on 1st launch with a loading screen/bar etc.
Oh good grief, Unity didn't build in handling of this? :/ It was a known issue when rolled ours. Oh well, thanks for the answer :)
Unity provides an OBB downloader plugin, but unfortunately we couldn't get that to play nicely with our other Android plugins. So we rolled our own downloader, which is actually fairly trivial, but it doesn't run in the background nicely like Google Play downloads.
Congrats guys, you're getting excellent reviews and hitting top 10 in paid all-category charts is a great achievement. Well done indeed :) I really hope you get picked up for an apple feature!
Thanks everyone :) We're super stoked to see how well this is going. I'll try to put up some numbers and conclusions once we have enough data to draw on.
In the meantime, we managed to hit 8th on paid iPad US apps (overall) today, and this made my day further:
@Zaphire it's a game that's taken five years to develop and is deep enough to provide you with over a 100 hours of game play. It's also cheaper than the PC version. Of course your value perception is one many others on the app/play store will share, but this game is definitely worth way more than 99c. ;)
Yes most definitely, I would just be interested to see how many South-African mobile gamers would buy this game on the google play store because I don't know many others that buy games for even R50. Would love to see stats within a months time :)
@Zaphire - Generally, I would say the market for mobile audiences is not in South Africa. In fact, I'm pretty sure the QCF team will tell you that overall, SA has probably made up a very very small percentage of sales across all the platforms.
@Zaphire: We're not aiming for South African mobile gamers. The number of people in SA that want to buy DD on a tablet is not even close to a single percent of the market size needed to justify us working on the port for a year and a half. I'm not sure anecdotes about SA players' buying practices is useful... Even if you could get every mobile player in SA to buy your game, you probably still wouldn't pay for much development time ;)
That said, we do love the locals that buy the game. Mostly because they tell us hilarious stories about it, and they've also been super positive about the game for ages and kept us going through the down periods.
Pricing DD took a lot of consideration. We contacted the FTL devs because they used the same price point and spoke to loads of other devs at different prices. Our meetings with Apple humans supported the $10 price a lot, they want games that are "worth it" and have a hard time seeing how DD isn't worth at least that. You also need to remember that selling something to 1 person at $10 isn't just the equivalent of 10 $1 sales, it's more like 12 once you factor in transaction costs on top of platform splits. So if we can motivate even a 10th of the sales we'd have gotten at $1, we're still coming out significantly ahead :)
All that said though, Android numbers are pretty disappointing... At least the Steam relaunch was good for us.
Congrats The Guardian mentioned you as one of the best Android games of the week!
Desktop Dungeons (£7.91) Available for Android tablets, this is one of the best roguelike games I’ve played on mobile: a well-balanced mix of hardcore dungeon-exploring and mobile-friendly session times as you explore its single-screen levels. There’s a lot to enjoy here: as good for newcomers to its genre as hardened looters.
Congrats The Guardian mentioned you as one of the best Android games of the week!
Desktop Dungeons (£7.91) Available for Android tablets, this is one of the best roguelike games I’ve played on mobile: a well-balanced mix of hardcore dungeon-exploring and mobile-friendly session times as you explore its single-screen levels. There’s a lot to enjoy here: as good for newcomers to its genre as hardened looters.
Comments
They claim:
"Our advertisers pay for each install you will generate for them, and it's most of the time its between $1 - $3 per download"
Wow, $1-3 dollahs per install? I think I managed to earn R0.50 total last month with Google's AdMob... I'm going to go buy a Wilson's toffee with the proceeds ;)
Always keen to hear how profitable ads are in games. Then again there was that Flappy thing...
There's a 33% off launch sale going at the moment as well, just in case you don't already have the game ;)
We're releasing the big things-we-made-during-the-mobile-port-and-other-improvements(TM) expansion on Monday.
There's a blog post about this here http://www.desktopdungeons.net/free-update-desktop-dungeons-enhanced-edition/
We're ramping up a Streamer Challenge tournament type thing over the next few days in which streamers both compete in daily challenges for merit and audiences vote participate to each get keys to the game.
you can read about it here and see the leaderboard and criteria for each day's challenge (resets at 2am for us) over here: http://www.desktopdungeons.net/streamer-challenge/
We're in that very special vortex of game breaking last minute panic FFFFFFFFF right now .Doing all the storefront things, trailer things, and new logo things while also doing the "it just stopped compiling and the debugs don't show up?" things.
We keep having our focus pulled inwards when we should be broadcasting. We would really appreciate any signal boosting you could help us with right now.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=426706892
Freaking awesome.
We've updated the game as well, Desktop Dungeons: Enhanced Edition which adds new classes, new quests, a new building and, finally, seeded Daily Dungeons.
We're also running a streamer challenge right now, pitting streamers against each other in their own unique daily dungeon pool. We give out steam keys to 10 random viewers that voted for the winning streamer (with the best time/highest damage/whatever the goal is for that day) with earlier (ie: riskier) votes being more likely to get picked. For the past few dailies a streamer called Tornis has been winning, but he's not the fastest ;) http://www.desktopdungeons.net/streamer-challenge
Also, we have a new trailer, thanks to @benjets and his crew! (We'd have loved to have the time to run this by everyone first, but we got owned by iOS pretty hard, so this was under horrible deadline stress)
Aaaaand we've had to delay our mobile release. Everything was initially scheduled to come out at the same time, but unfortunately the 64bit iOS switch meant we had to build using IL2CPP and that really only got (mostly) stable for serialization- and reflection-heavy code recently. We messed up on this though and assumed that we could get a build ready for submission right after GDC - while our codebase was pretty-much good to go, IL2CPP wasn't and that cost us nearly two weeks that should have been marketing push time.
So I'm a bit disappointed with our marketing efforts for this update, but it's probably still a bit better than the trainsmash of timing that was our original launch. We'll see how this goes :)
So: First person that PMs me with their email address and iPad version gets an iOS code for Desktop Dungeons ;)
We've dated ourselves in public now (that sounds so weird) - 28th May, 2015. iOS codes are limited and the Android version we're giving out is a temp-free review thing, but if anyone here would like access, PM me with your email address and device info/type.
And, before anyone asks, we're doing Android publishing through a deal with our friends at Finji.
Otherwise you can see on my tablet at EGE also and chat about it...
Glad it's working for you, catch you at EGE :)
Really like this one:
"defeat Aequitas the Warlock and sell his beard to your Taxidermist to afford an upgrade to your Blacksmith".
Congratulations!!!
In the meantime, we managed to hit 8th on paid iPad US apps (overall) today, and this made my day further:
That said, we do love the locals that buy the game. Mostly because they tell us hilarious stories about it, and they've also been super positive about the game for ages and kept us going through the down periods.
Pricing DD took a lot of consideration. We contacted the FTL devs because they used the same price point and spoke to loads of other devs at different prices. Our meetings with Apple humans supported the $10 price a lot, they want games that are "worth it" and have a hard time seeing how DD isn't worth at least that. You also need to remember that selling something to 1 person at $10 isn't just the equivalent of 10 $1 sales, it's more like 12 once you factor in transaction costs on top of platform splits. So if we can motivate even a 10th of the sales we'd have gotten at $1, we're still coming out significantly ahead :)
All that said though, Android numbers are pretty disappointing... At least the Steam relaunch was good for us.
Desktop Dungeons (£7.91)
Available for Android tablets, this is one of the best roguelike games I’ve played on mobile: a well-balanced mix of hardcore dungeon-exploring and mobile-friendly session times as you explore its single-screen levels. There’s a lot to enjoy here: as good for newcomers to its genre as hardened looters.