snctlnSoftware

Staying Competitive

The Android Market, like any other market, is a competitive one.  I attribute the success of BreakTheBlocks and WordWrench to the fact that I was the first developer to bring what I consider to be worthwhile versions of the games to the market.  I published free (read Lite) versions of both games before you could even charge for downloads.

That was about 15 months ago and a  lot has changed.  Once paid apps went live on the market BreakTheBlocks had at least 3 competitors offering games with similar gameplay.  I did my best to make sure that my game wasn’t lacking, and kept the free version functional enough to be fun to play in 5 minute increments, because in my own experience that is about how long I ever play a game on a phone.  The free version of BreakTheBlocks has been going strong and holds a top25 spot (when listing all free game by popularity) for over a year.  What exactly goes into the rankings that make popularity are a mystery to me, all I know is that I have over 1.2 million downloads and over 600k active installations.  It definitely drives sales for the paid version which offers 50 levels, up from 10 on the lite version.  The main complaint that i receive is performance issues from Droid owners, I personally don’t think the performance is bad on my ADP1, Nexus One, or HTC Tattoo, but there is always room for improvement.  I currently blame the “lag” that people see on garbage collection, as the lag only occurs when garbage collection happens.  Currently only Strings and Integers are allocated on the fly in order to display score information and such.  I am hoping to abstract that out and use a StringBuffer in its place so that these allocations don’t take place every second or 2.  Other than that there is always performance work to be done via threading and I am thinking that will be my next project.

My 2nd best selling paid game is WordWrench.  When the Android Market first allowed paid applications a free “trial” version had been out for nearly a month, but since then there have been at least 2 other games offering the same gameplay.  Up until recently I haven’t changed WordWrench much from its initial release, just small tweaks here and there every few months.  In the past few weeks I really felt the need to make some changes to try and offer more to existing users of this game as well as future users of the game.  The free version only contained 6 puzzles for quite a long time.  The ides was that it would give you 10 minutes of gameplay and hopefully that would be enough to make you want to buy the game.  Well sales were alright, but considering that 6 puzzles is not very much I changed it to offer 50 puzzles, and after more thought I just released an update today offering 250 puzzles.  250 puzzles should be enough for a few hours of gameplay, if you played all 250 for the default 2 minutes then it would offer over 8 hours of gameplay.  I am hoping that offering such a long playing “Lite” version helps keep people interested.  The full version contains over 8000 puzzles which at the default 2 minute game length offer over 133 hours of gameplay, not bad for $1.99 in my opinion.  Another thing I addressed in this latest updated is variety, previous versions were set up so that you would not encounter the same puzzle in a single session, but it would be possible to encounter one puzzle twice before seeing every puzzle.  I have changed the way this works and now a user will have to run through all 250 (or 8000+) puzzles before ever having to worry about seeing a duplicate puzzle.  The last thing that I wanted to address was the fact that users would sometimes write to me and tell me that the words that I was using were made up.  I figure the only way to combat this is to offer dictionary lookup support.  So now at the end of every puzzle you have the option of seeing all of the solutions and the ability to visit a webpage containing the definition of any word that you would like to see.  This was a somewhat enjoyable exercise as I had never had to use a WebView before, but now that I have used one I can see integrating more online content into my applications and gamesw.

So this afternoon new versions of WordWrench and WordWrench Lite were released.  They offer dictionary support, more puzzles in the free version, better laid out ads in the free version, a fix for people that use the auto rotate feature for their phones, and plenty of behind the scenes code cleanup.  I am happy with this release and currently there are only 2 things that I would like to still work on… but you will have to wait to find out what those are.

It is important to stay competitive and do your best to put in any features your users and potential users might want, but there is definitely a fine line between “release early and release often” and releasing too often ,hopefully I stay on the good side of it.  So look for updates to WordWrench and BreakTheBlocks coming in the next few weeks, after that I have a few ideas for my next Android project, I just have to decide which one to do

In other news, I am looking forward to my new Motorola Milestone, it doesn’t have US 3G, but I don’t think that will be a problem.  I should receive it on Thursday and hopefully I will be able to figure out what problems droids users complain about.  Once I have that I will have a device at every available screen resolution and density but one (WVGA medium density).  I am waiting on the Archos 7 Home Tablet to be released before getting a WVGA Medium density device, I see it being a great movie player for my 2yo daughter and cheaper than the current Archos 5 Internet Tablet with the same screen settings.

Thanks for reading and feel free to let me know your thoughts in the comments.