snctlnSoftware

Device Seeding Yay!

So I received my free Nexus One from Google 2 days ago.  I received this as part of their Device Seeding Program for Top Android Market Developers, unfortunately I already have a Nexus one that I enjoy very much.  So I figured I would try and sell this new Nexus One on eBay, I have never sold anything on eBay before.  I used to buy random computer components on eBay about 5 years ago or so when I was in college, but I just have had no interest in it, until now.  So I listed the phone and it sold via buy it now… to a Nigerian scammer, /sigh.  Oh well, at least I could figure the whole thing out before I even considered sending them the phone.  So I tried my luck and listed it again and had success.  Now I am trying to decide what to do with the proceeds… The majority of negative comments I receive are from Droid owners, The Motorola Droid that runs on Verizon here in the US.  The Droid does have a unique screen resolution and it might be the most popular Android device, I don’t know any numbers to back that up but in my opinion it is the only Android phone that has had a decent marketing campaign (have you seen the latest Luke Wilson AT&T ads?   eck, seriously a month ago his ads were ripping on Verizon phones because “all of my cool apps are gone” and now this guy showing how “awesome” an Android  device can be while playing basketball, don’t make no sense to me…).

Well anyways my current dilemma:

Do I suck it up and buy a Droid even though I have no intention of ever using it as a phone?  It is CDMA and I highly doubt I will pay another Early Termination Fee this year to go to a carrier with higher prices than what I have now (and if I were to change carriers it would be to go back to Sprint for the oh so nice looking HTC EVO 4G and very nice and affordable rates)

OR

Do I buy a Milestone (GSM Droid that I can put my simcard in and actually use as a phone) and be content that I now have a device with the screen size I need to test, but the actual hardware and configuration is different than that of the actual users that are leaving feedback.

Yesterday I was convinced I should buy a Milestone, but now I am kind of leaning towards the droid.  I doubt I woulg want to replace my Nexus One with the Milestone as my daily use phone anyways, but it might be nice to have that option (even if there is no US T-Mobile 3G support).

Well besides all of the fun with devices I also managed to finally find the time to update WordWrench Lite.  The Lite version has had the same 20 puzzles in it for the past 10 months and the commenters were starting to revolt.  I have added Google Adsense ads into WordWrench Lite and put 50 new puzzles in the game.  So now the free version plays for more than twice as long .

Also I updated BreakTheBlocks Lite and Full and WordWrench Lite and Full to include a “Splash Screen” on startup.  Thanks to a blog post by Fred Gott I was reminded that I have been meaning to do something about the 1-4 second black screen that users see when starting my games.  So a little bit of Inkscape and GIMP work and now I have some splash screens.

In my res/values directory I added a themes.xml files that contains the following

<resources>
<style name=”Theme.SplashScreen” parent=”android:Theme”>
<item name=”android:windowNoTitle”>true</item>
<item name=”android:windowBackground”>@drawable/splash_screen</item>
<item name=”android:layout_width”>fill_parent</item>
<item name=”android:layout_height”>fill_parent</item>
</style>
</resources>

I of course added a 320×480 png image name splash_screen.png to my res/drawable fodler.

And the last part was to add

android:theme=”@style/Theme.SplashScreen”

to the activity node in my Manifest, and that was all it took.  Now when starting these 2 games users are presented with a graphic that is displayed until the Activiy finishes initializing and actually draws to the screen.

Replica Island

Just wanted to comment on a new Android game Replica Island I found out about this game via Gizmodo and am very impressed, not only is this a high quality Android game that is free it is also Open Source I initially assumed that the game must have been using the ndk because of the smoothness of the gameplay but after browsing the source code I see that this game appears to be implemented in pure Java, once again I was very impressed.  According to their project page they are even working on abstracting the game engine from the source and releasing a sample using the engine.  I am excited to dive into the code, I feel like there is a lot that I can learn from such a well put together product.  Plus I have really been wanting to expand my OpenGL knowledge, all of the experience I have with OpenGL is from my college days of CS334 at Purdue Univeristy (Go boilers, beat Duke in the sweet sixteen).

Well other than awesome open source Android games I have been doing a lot of work with BreakTheBlocks lately to try and ease the “lag” issues that the comments seem to complain about so often.  Basically gabage collection is killing me and trying to track it all down is definitely not easy work.  BreakTheBlocks and BreaktheBlocks Lite have both been extensively updated for performance and theupdates include new shiny flat icons inspired by the Android 2.1 icons on my Nexus One.   PingPong Lite got an update of a new shiny icon and Adsense ads rather than Admob ads, and PingPong Pro got an update of a new shiny icon.  I am working on a update for WordWrench Lite to use Adsense ads and now offer gameplay of 50 random puzzles (6 letter words), up from the same 20 that have been out for months.  The full version will still have 8000+ puzzles (6 letter words).  I truly believe that WordWrench is one of the best products that I have made and I want to continue to support and improve  it even after a year of being available on the Market.

Other than that I am brainstorming new ideas and trying to learn some new skills to put out even better content.

scum of the earth

scum of the earth @androidwarezcom ripping off independent developers like me who use the 70 cents I get from a sale to support my family… thanks @alsutton for getting the word out

Yeah I visited the site to see if anything of mine was on it, but I didn’t get the chance to find out, upon entering the site you have to turn off your ad blocker, then once you get in the site you have to take a “free survey” in order to view the warez… seriously, not only are they ripping off Android developers but they are profiting off of it, truly the scum of the earth

Cancellations Blah

Just wanted to post a quick note that some people may be curious about.  About 20% of all orders I receive are canceled.  Yup, 1 out of every 5 at least.  I don’t fully understand why considering I have rather functional free versions of my games, but I still see cancellations quite often.  I am glad that Android Market makes the cancellation / refund process so easy for users but I definitely get annoyed that it seems to be such common practice for users to buy a game, play it for 36 hours then refund it.

I updated break the blocks lite again tonight.  I am working on reducing lag and the amount of battery power used.  This fix should help on both of those issues.

BreakTheBlocks Lite Updated

Hello all,

I released an update for BreakTheBlocks Lite this past weekend.  The main update was switching advertising providers from Admob to the beta for Google Adsense for Mobile Applications.

I have received some feedback regarding “lag” in this game.  The main thing that can be done to prevent this lag is kill unneeded tasks with a task manager like Advanced Task Manager or Taskiller.  Applciaitons that run in the background are still doing work, and creating new Java objects, so the Java Garbage Collector has to perform its duties more often.  When the garbage collector runs it essentially blocks anything that my games can do, so there is a lag while my games wait to be able to run again.  I am currently reviewing some enhancements to further help this problem from appearing so often, but the best thing to do for now is to kill unneeded tasks.

Backupify scares me now

So I have heard of the service offered at backupify.com, free backup of gmail, google docs, and a whole slew of online services.  I would definitely like to be able to use this service, but after my first night I am now very cautious of it.

I opted for gmail backup, it is listed as “beta” on their site and there is even a little link to an article of theirs explaining that they had problems with gmail previously but that it has all been cleared up.  So I signed up and went to bed with a warm fuzzy feeling thinking that all of my emails from 6 years of gmail would be backed up finally.

Well that warm fuzzy feeling drastically ended when I woke up this morning.  My Nexus One had an error dialog up telling me that my google account username and password was incorrect.  As a person that pretty much relies on Google for the majority of my business and personal life online this was extremely alarming.  I attempted to log into gmail from my laptop as soon as I could and I was prompted with a screen informing me that my account had been flagged for suspicious activity and that I had to set a new password in order to clear my account.  I obviously changed my password and updated all of my android phones with the new data and things were back to normal.

This was an easy enough problem to take care of, but for those 5 minutes of not knowing what had happened and thinking the worst (maybe my account was hacked) it was just a very unpleasant experience overall.

I look forward to the day when gmail backup can be easy and automated, but for now I have canceled the gmail backup from backupify until it leave beta.  I guess I just want to put my experience out there for any Android developers that have thought about the service.

PingPong Lite hits half a million downloads :)

Tonight PingPong Lite hit half a million downloads

PingPong Pro is the paid version of this game.  It is mostly the same game but has no ads and allows for fullscreen play.  PingPong Pro sits in the 500-1000 downloads category on the market which is a 0.2% conversion rate from users of the version.

Thanks to all of the users who downloaded this game, hopefully we will see the million mark by the end of the year.

Day 1 of ads…

Day 1 of ads on two of my most popular free games and all I can think is why did I not do this sooner?  Seriously the amount of money brought in today is only a fraction of what I make daily from app sales but will definitely be significant over time.  I should have done this months ago when I first heard of AdMob, integrating the ads was much simpler than I expected.  I was very pleased to learn 2 things during that process.

#1) The only permission that you HAVE to add to your application is android.permission.INTERNET, which is very common for all apps.  I was under the impressions from their initial sdk that they released that it required the receive MMS permission as well as the gps location permission.  The location permission can still be used for targeted ads, but I don’t feel it is necessary to add such requirements to simple games.

#2.) The ads don’t have to be static spaces on the screen.  I never really bothered to try their initial SDK so I wasn’t aware of this.  I just assumed that the ads were like banner ads on websites, that they would take up a static space on the screen.  I just recently started using an Android phone as my main phone and have seen apps that do this.   I was very pleased to learn that you can choose when to display ads, for me it is at the pause and “game over” screens.

I also was fully expecting user backlash, I was under the impression that the users of the Android Market despised ads and would down vote applications with ads and voice their opinions in comments, it has now bee 24 hours and I haven’t heard a single piece of negative feedback about the ads at all.

My only gripe is payout, I very much like the Google Checkout integration with the Android market, when someone buys an app I receive the money about 4 days after they purchased the app directly deposited into my checking account.  I get deposits 5 days a week and this has proven to be a very nice and very convenient system.  The AdMob payout structure is like this, at the end of the month your balance is noted, a the beginning of next month they process that balance, and within a week they will cut you a check and mail it to you or directly deposit it into your paypal account.  So in other words if you make $500 in January it will be processed at the beginning of March and you should expect to receive a check by mid March.  It is nice to know this up front, but after being spoiled by the convenience of the Android Market payout system it does seem a little long.

So yeah, it has only been one day, but I definitely feel like I should have implemented this months ago and I will be sure to implement ads on all of my “Lite” software that I release form here on out.

Updated PingPong, testing ads

Tonight I uploaded updates for PingPong, both the pro($0.99) and lite(free) versions have been updated being built with the Android 1.6 sdk but with the MinSDK set to Android 1.5 so that the majority of Android users will now have access to these games again including users of the HTC Tattoo.

Also I’m trying out serving ads in PingPong Lite and BreakTheBlocks Lite from AdMob to try and monetize these popular free programs some other way than just selling full versions.

1 Million Downloads (and a new web site)

On Sunday February 14th, 2010 I had my first application ever to reach over 1 million downloads, BreakTheBlocks

Here is what my developers console shows as of today (Tuesday Feb 16, 2010)

Over 1 million people have downloaded this game, and half of them still have it installed on their phone

Yes, this is a free version of a paid game that sells for $1.99, but no, 1 million free downloads does not equal a super phat paycheck that I can retire off of.  I won’t release the specific number but BreakTheBlocks Full has sold between 5,000 and 10,000  copies, which are the numbers that you would find if you were reading the information about the game on the Android Market on an actual device.  So in other words less than 1% of the people who downloaded this game, and less than 2% of the install base, have decided to pay for the full game.  That is fine, I appreciate all the people that have bought the full version and welcome any and all new users.

Last week I also managed to quit cold turkey one of the most addictive substance on the planet, World of Warcraft, and in celebration of these 2 achievements I decided it was time to update my website and start working on some new Android projects.

I have already started on my next Android game, expect it to be coming out late March/early April.   What is it?  Well you will just have to wait to see.

Thank you to everyone who has downloaded this game, I hope to continue to bring fun games with mass appeal to the Android platform.