Author: Carsten Schwartz

After having my first real worked through game on Google Play for more than a year know, it is time for a retrospective.

I knew it would be a tough call to market the game alone, but I do not regret trying it, it has been fun and educational. I still think $3 for a game is cheap, and I will stick to my guns, but I guess I have to try something else regarding marketing of the Game. I have used a lot of time refining and strengthening the game and it is quite stable currently. My conclusion is this:

Even though I have not sold that much, working with the game gives me peace of mind and is quite fun and that is price less!

So I will continue developing the plot in my own pace, because it is fun and keeps me sharp. I feels like back in the Commodore 64 and Amiga days when the IT game world was relatively young and yes I am an old nostalgic man but I like it 😉

I’ve had a TF700T for some years know resting loyal but idle in the top drawer of a cabinet in my bedroom. I gave up on it because it was turned into a snail by an update from Asus. Slower than running against the wind uphill on a suface of melasses. I had tried earlier to flash it with an alternative rom but to no avail.

Then the other day I succeded in rooting the tablet and got Cyanogen Mod installed. I was full of hope as the blue icon of the Cyanogen Mod showed up on my tablet screen. But to my horror the tablet seemed to work, but was still a wimpy crawling shadow of its former glory.

Then I started searching the web for things like fastest rom for TF700T, and fell over a writ by a guy that praised a specific Rom called TechFusion+ V4. Words like smooth and the be fastest rom ever where all over the page.

I went to the site he had described in so many positive words and found a how to guide and links to downloads for the Rom and Special developed google apps for the TF700T. This guy, it seems had made an optimized set of files to make the TF700T great again.

Since I already had installed clockwork recovery, I quickly copied the downloaded rom and google app zips to the tablet and fast booted into recovery. I wiped the tablet from CWR, installed the zips and rebooted. Shortly after the TF700T returned from the dead, it is now faster than when I bought it and have started using it again – great stuff these custom roms I say!

A note of caution though! Do not, and I repeat – Do not update Any Google Apps like Chrome or Gmail. I say so because the updates are not developed specificly to perform fast on a specific device. You will end up with a slower device, I updated these and got very unresponse when running Gmail, Chrome and Google Play. Then I went into recovery factory reset, reinstalled the rom and reinstalled google apps and the tablet was fast again. So do not update Google Apps like Chrome, Gmail and Google Play once you have made your device faster with a rom and a special set of Google Apps…

Use your refreshed device for browsing, writing text and playing games, do not update the core google apps. And you will be tempted by the apps themselves, the Chrome browser for example has a nasty habbit of asking you to update saying something along the lines of There is a better version of Chrome, do you wish to up date? when you browse certain pages on the web. Be carefull what you click on out there I say! 😉

After releasing my newest App on Google Play, I sat down and checked out the prices of similar Apps the other day. There was a lot of pricing set at $1-$2. A lot of them with inlaid commercials and in game purchases, my newest game do not have any of this.

Have I priced my newest release to high? Well, a lot of Apps spouting commercials and in game purchases, sells at around $1.5, free at first becomes an annoyance of commercials popping up and repeating questions asking you to buy this and that extension. These infinite requests for buying extras or reading commercials seems to be the business model of the day. Many people think that this is the normal order of things, and I started thinking I might have priced ro high…

But recently when I was having break at a café reading magazines it occurred to me that you easily buy a cup of coffee for more than the $3 I charge for my recent release and I had just bought two magazines at $7 a piece, with out thinking of the price. So buying a game at $3 where you will not get pestered by commercials and where the App won’t be acting as a salesman for in game purchases is kind of cheap in my book.

So when things are very cheap, they are in fact annoyingly so…

Now I’ve made a Video showing the starting of a new game in A Dungeon Horror Deed Pilot it took me a while and I’m still not fully satisfied but it is OK as a start. Marketing a game is not easy but I knew that

This week I have refactored a lot in the engine of ADHD!. There was just to much repeatable code, now it is simpler and easier to maintain. When I have more than one solution of equal quaility to a problem I always opt for the one that will be easiest to understand and maintain. And this helped a lot and I only had a couple of minor bugs that I fixed in the transition.

So the newest release contains this and a graphical enhancement to give the users something, a refactoring is often not seen on the user side even if it makes a product more robust and easier to maintain…

Oyezz – Oyezz!

Just got a wake up call from Google after updating the description of the shop for A Dungeon Horror Deed Pilot. I added that the game was inspired by old RPGs like WFRP and board games like Arcadia Quest which it is. Google responded that this was against their metadata policy. Fair enough, you are not supposed to use existing trade marks to promote your App.

So I had to change the text back to avoid the used of the registered trade marks, and then send in a new APK and everything went back to normal. So here is a tip:

Do not use registered product names in your shop description if you want to avoid your updates being rejected…

This evening I launched the game ADHD! aka A DUNGEON HORROR DEED on the Google Play store. And to make a first update I changed some of the graphics and uploaded a new APK.
It’s great that this first installment is finished, so now I’ll take a well deserved nights sleep and see what happened to my entry in the morning.

Beware when you have some code that draws in a graphical context of some kind that can be called from two different places at the same time or called twice so that the first call not is finished when the second is called.

I have been hunting for a bug that crashed my game and simply closed the App with no warning due to a construction like this. Use Locks objects combined with synchronize in your renderers, handlers or whatever to indicate if they are active and not must be called to create some kind of race condition. Anyway bug solved and the App has been enforced and is now more robust…

I got the solution and improved it at stack overflow.

And during this fixing process I revisited and fixed another annoying bug that have been irritating me, even though it is a small thing, that players not will see unless they where told. So all in all I’m almost ready…