@Jimmy
Developers adapt of course, but typically upwards; i.e., as things get better, they upgrade their stuff. Even if they don't upgrade your game designed for an older computer will still (mostly) work on a newer computer. It's more difficult to downgrade developer expectation and experience. Once they make a game for a device, they want their game to work on that device and all future devices. With iOS, the guarantee is that all future devices will be fully backwards-compatible, and in fact, better than any former version. As a developer I agree with this. Even the 1st gen iPhone has floating point support. As such, I would expect my game to work on any new Android with the same resolution of iPhone right? Wrong. HTC Hero has no floating point support, even though previous Android phones did. Similarly, Droid came out, and all of a sudden, no more support for 'atitc' texture compression. This kind of stuff is VERY hard and costly to adapt to.

Yes he did say that but he wasn't talking about the Tab in that case.

The part about the Tab was:
"We don't think you can make a great tablet with a 7" screen; we think it's too small to express the software that people want to put on these things."
He also said that makers of such tablets should include sandpaper in the box so that users could sand down their fingers to the right size to be able to use the apps on such a small screen. (not in my article)

My latest blog post talking about Steve Job's criticism of the Galaxy Tab and his surprisingly accurate depiction of developers like me:

Steve Jobs taking shots at Samsung

Makani

I've written a new blog post detailing 10 things Google needs to address with their Android Marketplace, or face losing significant app share revenue to new Android Marketplaces.

http://www.midpointgames.com/developer-blogs/makani-gadzair/item/the-trouble-with-googles-android-market

Wow thanks Kepa! You made it all sound encouraging lol.


Yea; of the onces you mentioned, we were positively featured by slidetoplay.com (http://www.slidetoplay.com/story/new-app-a-day-red-card-ramapage), and have a couple other big reviews like crazymikeapps.com (

) and today appletell.com (http://www.appletell.com/apple/comment/iphone-appidemic-red-card-rampage/).

Anyhow, I've been posting on many forums, including soccer forums, so hopefully we'll slowly get a fan-base. At least they like it!

Thanks a lot!

Makani

3. The game isn't very pretty. I'm not saying the graphics are terrible, but look at the top Apps. While they aren't all Epic Citadel level of quality, they all have something in common; Their screenshots make you want to at least look them up. Fruit Ninja is colorful and has fun effects, Angry Birds has a fun style and Tetris has a great level of polish.  I'm not saying grahpics are everything (Doodle Jump is pretty ugly, but I doubt the people who bought that game just saw it; It was recommended or played on someone elses phone) but if your game isn't a brand new concept, it should at least be fun to look at.

Actually the game is gorgeous if you try on  your phone. See the review by CrazyMikesApps which praises the graphics quality.

. Also, the customer reviews also so far praise the graphics quality and effects.

On your advice though, I've updated the screenshots, so thanks for that! Messaging on soccer forums is a great idea, thanks, I'll try that!

bateleur: Reading your blog I see that, as suspected, you're still quite new to the flash scene, and you yourself are saying you're no iPhone expert. I understand your point, but what you're saying is still pointless, because at the end of the day, on iPhone, the main problem is getting the exposure. I'm not asking you whether the game is good or not or whether the game lends its way to sales or not. There is already a similar flash-game-turned-iphone-game that is pretty similar, called 'fragger', that has done very very well. See the review of my game on slidetoplay.com at http://www.slidetoplay.com/story/new-app-a-day-red-card-ramapage. "If you like Fragger and want to play something similar, give Red Card Rampage a shot." I'm really not asking about whether the game is good or not; I'm asking people to share their experience of what strategies  or marketing companies have worked for them on the App Store, or the Android Market.

Possibly the reviews are misleading you. This game (as "Soccer Balls") didn't reach 4/5 on Newgrounds, so isn't exceptional enough that I would expect it to be a mobile hit.

Well, in the Flash world the game, sponsored by Kongregate, got 10 million views in 3 months (http://playtomic.com/stats/490-soccerballs). That is a MAJOR hit from a Flash view-point. This actually happens to be one of the most successful flash games, by one of the most successful flash developers out there, LongAnimals.

Here is the all-time-best records at playtomic (EDIT: I noticed in your blog that you know of playtomic):

http://playtomic.com/games/?mode=alltime&rank=&sponsor=&developer=

It ranks 13, higher than many well known games like 'SteamBirds' and 'HOMERUN IN BERZERK LAND'.

On top of that, it has 41 reviews on iPhone, all 5 stars, none below. Plus, out of the 15 reviews on Android, 14 are 5, one is 4.

The issue I'm facing is not with the game, but rather getting exposure.

I have a game ('Red Card Rampage') for iPhone, iPad and Android which has excellent all 5-star reviews (e.g., App Store has 41 all 5-star reviews and none below), however we haven't been able to achieve visibility in the App Store or the Market and our sales are now pretty poor barely a week after release.

Can someone with experience in this please advise on what I can do? I have a great game, yet I'm unable to get the exposure. What can I do?

Makani

Hey guys,

I have released a beautiful new physics puzzler called 'Red Card Rampage' in which you have to beat up the referees with a football, available on now iPhone, iPad and Android. It is similar to Angry Birds in that it is a physics puzzler with a bunch of levels, but the cool difference here is that unlike Angry Birds, the trajectory line does not disappear; in fact you can position it as accurately as you want. It may sound easy, but try it out and you'll soon find that the levels surprisingly get quite challenging!



iPhone: http://itunes.apple.com/en/app/red-card-rampage/id388957922?mt=8&ign-mpt=uo%3D4
iPad: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/red-card-rampage/id389320744?mt=8
Android:


Let me know what you guys think of my first real game!

Makani

My name is Makani Gadzair. I'm currently a Software Engineer at a well-known company, but love to develop games. I've been making games ever since I was in the 5th grade, and my first project ever was to modify Gorilla on QBasic.



I printed out the entire source code of Gorilla.bas, which was something like 80 pages, and started reading it, and tried to replicate a game in vain. But eventually I got started on simple command-line QBasic games and then moved on to Visual Basic heaven; dipped in DirectDraw then Direct3D and eventually by the time I got to college I began developing my first 3d game project following Nehe's tutorials.

It was pretty awesome; we made a level editor, a model editor, and the game, and we re-made the game engine like 3 times. The final time we decided on making a proper game engine with several layers; there would be a core game engine, on top of which there would be a genre-specific engine, on top of which would sit the game. So then we began designing the core engine, which would have a sound engine, input engine, rendering engine, networking engine etc.. We decided to start with the rendering engine, and spent like 2 years just on that! It was a multiplatform engine that worked on Mac, Windows, Linux and XBox and supported both OpenGL and DirectX as well as all the latest and greatest shader languages. At the end we published a paper out of it, which eventually helped us great jobs.

However, nothing was ever commercial, until 2 years ago or so I decided to make a quick and simple flash game called Alien Paratroopers. I then got delayed due to marriage and stuff like that; I came back to it this February and decided to put it up for sale on FGL. It had no buyers and I soon came to learn that a LOT of polish is required to sell a game. So I spent 2 months polishing it and in the end I got an offer from ArcadeTown that was less than $1k lol. I thought to myself, screw this, I'm doing iPhone, and I found that many Flash developers wanted to port their games to iPhone after the whole Apple vs Adobe fall-out.

So as a result of that, I finally have released my first proper true polished game, called 'Red Card Rampage'. It is a port of the popular flash game by LongAnimals and RobotJAM called 'Soccer-Balls'. The game is now available on iPhone, iPad and Android, so please do check it out:



To download:
iPhone: http://itunes.apple.com/en/app/red-card-rampage/id388957922?mt=8&ign-mpt=uo%3D4
iPad: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/red-card-rampage/id389320744?mt=8#
Android:


If you guys try it and like it be sure to review it!

Makani Gadzair (not my real name)