Awesome. I hope to see more hardware games by indies in the future. I've seen Narcissus on these forums (maybe on Twitter?). You speak of shipping & getting revenue very confidently.. how did you manage that, marketing-wise?
P.S.
https://alexvscoding.itch.io/narcissus in your sig 404s
Thanks for the heads up with itch! I'm currently doing some renovations, should be sorted within the week. Hardware wise, a great website to check out for that is
http://shakethatbutton.com/As for my shipping/marketing, I've been developing the game on and off for around 4 years and over that time have accumulated a decent number of reviews from press for the game, reviews that I can point the Apple team to upon submission as a stamp of quality. I'm heading to a mobile event next week where there will be reps from Apple and since the game is in a finished state, there's a good chance of it being picked up. Failing that, I've got a couple of other contacts I've picked up at Apple elsewhere that I can reach out to.
There's also the factor of regional features - By translating the game into 14 different languages, it increases my probability of getting a feature in these regions (The Apple Store is split into various parts of the globe).
After talking with some other developers who regularly release Apps to the store (Who've each had multiple features in the past), I changed my monetisation method from premium to Ad based since it massively increases your user base. To give a rough idea of the comparison, one of the teams had over a million downloads (From which to display Ads to) but only 400 purchases of the "Disable Ads" function.
Quite a few developers who take the paid option for their game do a "Free Game of the Week" feature and see their downloads balloon, but realistically they don't see any of they revenue from that feature. Possibly afterwards from the press/popularity of it, but it's a bit like handing out Steam Keys to your game as a feature to get people to buy your game - It does direct traffic towards your product but if you'd implemented Ad based options you could've made money from that traffic.
Finally, as a one man team, I don't need to make a vast amount of money to justify the next project - For every £1200 I make from Narcissus, that's a month of time I can dedicate to games development. My workflow is a lot faster than it used to be (Can kick products out on a 3 month cycle), so once I nail the first feature future ones should be easier and in turn I can make money from features more often.
Despite my thorough distaste for the result of Brexit, the pound is currently very weak against the dollar so I'll make more money than I would've if I'd stuck to my previous plan and launched earlier in the year:
Pre-Brexit = $100 I'd make £60
Post-Brexit = $100 I'd make £80
To be honest, the project still has a chance of flopping - The success of the project hinges on an App Store Feature, but having done the desktop release for the game (Which flopped catastrophically) I've learnt a lot of lessons (For one targeting the wrong platform, Narcissus is in my opinion a mobile game by design and a PC game second, despite it first finding it's ground on Flash Portals). I'll write an article on the comparison between the two releases at some point once the game is released for iOS.
Hope this answers your question!
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