Comments for Gamedev Coder Diary

Comment on How I sold 22 copies of my game in 3 weeks on Android by foljs

foljs — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 00:51:26 +0000

“”"Keep in mind though that unlike iOS version which is paid at $0.99, Android version is Free with $0.99 in-app purchase that unlocks full game. According to my statistics, Android version has been played on more devices than iOS version and yet the sales have been roughly 50 times lower! “”"

Android was always a much much worse market compared to iOS.

Comment on How I sold 22 copies of my game in 3 weeks on Android by CAV

CAV — Sun, 17 Mar 2013 23:23:32 +0000

Im curious about what changes/tweaks/etc you made since this post and the results. I’ve found your experience pretty helpful as it has given me a better view of the commercial process involved in making a game.

Comment on How I sold 22 copies of my game in 3 weeks on Android by Maciej

Maciej — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 05:27:42 +0000

I never said IAPs don’t work on Android. It’s just that some game types don’t work well in Freemium model – in particular level based puzzle games like Monstaaa! Link to gamasutra article shows that this kind of games is not popular (on Android); they’re all paid.

Comment on How I sold 22 copies of my game in 3 weeks on Android by unlying

unlying — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 05:11:19 +0000

Where you read about IAP works bad on Android?
I have rather good payments in my game “Mobile Dungeons” on google play. However gamers can pass through game even if they’ll not buy anything. But they do.
I think that it depends from type of your game. It is possible that gamers have enough fun with free version and decide that it is enough.

Comment on Practical C++ RTTI for games by sebastiansylvan

sebastiansylvan — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 07:54:26 +0000

Oh, and it’s worth noting that this isn’t a million miles away from what Unreal does for “native” unrealscript classes. So at least the practice of generating code for game objects is pretty common.

Comment on Practical C++ RTTI for games by sebastiansylvan

sebastiansylvan — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 07:42:17 +0000

We just rolled our own. It was based on xml and a gui editor, but I’d probably use something more readable and just use text specification if I were to do it again. You get a lot of mileage from having “blessed” types too. Common types that occur all over the place that you write special code to handle instead of using the data description language to “all the way down” to ints and floats. This way e.g. a 4×4 matrix is a single data member to load/save/visit not 16, which gives a huge constant factor reduction in schema processing and generated code density.

Comment on Practical C++ RTTI for games by Maciej

Maciej — Sun, 17 Feb 2013 22:46:35 +0000

Thanks Sebastian for your input.

Yeah, it’s definitely worth looking at. I’ve heard about this method but didn’t mention it because my impression was it wasn’t very popular. Do you recommend any particular tools or did you roll out your own implementation?

Comment on Practical C++ RTTI for games by sebastiansylvan

sebastiansylvan — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 23:46:44 +0000

Another option is to generate the C++ class from some other data description. I like this because of its simplicity and robustness. You can easily do serialization, deserialization, inspection and all sorts of debugging stuff because all you need to do is generate plain old code to do this based on the data description.

Generating code is easier than parsing. If anything ever crashes or doesn’t work right, it’s just really simple code to step through. It’s not generic, or template, or using any kind of runtime void-pointers or anything like that. All the code you’re ever looking at is special-cased for that specific type and as dumb as you could possible imagine.

Also, your source format can be as limited as you want – no need to worry about some obscure corner of the C++ language being added to a class.

This does assume that only a subset of your classes need RTTI (you really don’t want *every single class* to be defined in some weirdo JSON-like asset format), which is generally true.

You’d also want some simple “escape hatch” mechanism where the “managed” object type simply has a pointer to runtime data that gets loaded through some custom mechanism (i.e. associate the field with an “asset identifier” that gets loaded through custom code). This would be for things where the format of the data matters (like precompiled shaders, or vertex buffers) and it’s easier to just store them as binary blobs and do the patch up on a type-by-type basis.

Comment on How I sold 22 copies of my game in 3 weeks on Android by jjandmrorange

jjandmrorange — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 02:20:15 +0000

Like developers, we are not really interesed in android. Maybe like prommotional channel, but not like commercial objetive. Over all other things, to buy it’ s an habit. Same people who tap “buy” with his iPhone download the app from an android, because this is what is expected. Not so simply like this, but android is becoming a no-commercial platform, try make the same game next time, but i think android only sell less units every time.

Comment on How I sold 22 copies of my game in 3 weeks on Android by Maciej

Maciej — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 22:27:19 +0000

There is indeed small increase in downloads on Google Play just recently but the problem is it doesn’t really translate well into purchases. And no, I haven’t done anything but I’ve noticed some gaming portals listed it recently on their websites – maybe that is the reason.