The design and business of gaming from the perspective of an experienced developer

Category: Mobile Dev

Dungeon Boss

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Last Tuesday, I launched a game.  It’s doing quite well.

Boss Fight Entertainment released Dungeon Boss in a worldwide release on Tuesday in partnership with our publisher, Big Fish Games.  This marks my first foray into mobile gaming, and indeed my first serious work on a published title that was not an MMO of some sort.  So it was quite a novel experience for me, and quite frankly one that I needed.

The game has been doing exceedingly well so far.  Google featured it on their store on Wednesday, and Apple returned the favor and added on an Editor’s Choice award (and a really nice review) on Thursday, which has just resulted in our numbers shooting into the stratosphere.  It’s currently sitting as the #1 most downloaded RPG and the #2 most downloaded Free-to-Play game on the Apple store behind Happy Wheels .  Our revenue position still has a ways to go, but this publically available list here claims that we’re number 30, and we’ve been rising steadily as our population gets deeper into and more invested in the game.

According to AppAnnie, we’ve reached the #1 RPG spot for 70 different countries.  However, we’ve only taken the #1 game spot in one country – Latvia, oddly enough – though we’ve hit top 5 in 24.  While this is all incredibly heady stuff and the chart-watching makes for a pleasant way to spend the holiday weekend, when we get back it will be entirely about how to make the game even better, as well as holding our breath to see if the metric patterns we see extrapolate moving forward like they did in beta.  If so, Dungeon Boss is well positioned to be a huge part of the App Store landscape for years to come, and I’m very proud to have been a part of it.

iPhone Developers: “Quality is Irrelevant”

From Kotaku: a couple of top iPhone developers discuss their experiences developing for the platform. Their conclusions are interesting (and also touch upon web games and user-created content platforms, such as Metaplace and Whirled).

“I think quality is largely irrelevant,” said Saltsman, whose newest iPhone game is about popping zits. “I think the defining thing is how quickly you can describe your product to someone else.”

The example they used was Galcon versus Mood Touch. Mood Touch is “a crappy mood ring for your iPhone. . There, I’m done, that’s it,” said Saltsman. Galcon, on the other hand, took him 15 seconds to describe as essentially an in-depth, one-on-one real time strategy game. It’s obvious which one had the better quality — but Mood Touch made the top 10 in the App Store while Galcon didn’t even break into the top 100 (that Saltsman knew of).

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