The Carter Jones Adventures Windows Phone release and before
It has been a long, long time since I wrote up something for this website. In the meantime, I became a proud daddy of a very beautiful daughter! Words can not describe how happy she makes me. The flipside, of course, is that I spend a lot of time being a daddy and that obviously has some effect on this website and my responsiveness in the big internet world outside there. However, last month things have began to settle a bit and I am finding some time here and there to work on expanding the Carter Jones Adventures to other platforms.
Let’s talk a bit about that, in February the game was released for the new BlackBerry 10 Phone that was just released back then. For the initial release I hoped to get the game finished before the imposed deadline (the Marmalade BlackBerry program gave me a free license if I submitted the game in time to BlackBerry World). I made the deadline, with the game including 30 levels. I had no time to implement In App Payments or something fancy like that so I just put up the game as a paid game.
The response has been good in the sense that the people who played it on their BlackBerry liked the game. However, the numbers were very, very disappointing. Not many people got to play The Carter Jones Adventures on their BlackBerry. You see, BlackBerry did a great job getting a LOT of apps in their store. Once the phones went on sale, people got to chose out of literally 10.000s of Apps. It’s pretty hard to stand out even if your game is great. We all know now that BlackBerry is struggling which probably didn’t help with sales either. In the end, that was a prettty disapointing experience. I kind of left the game and focussed on other stuff.
Then, in August a new incentive offer came from Marmalade + Microsoft: build a Windows Phone game, get a free Phone! Because of the great platform support Marmalade offers, doing that was pretty easy and so I did! I submitted the game in the second half of september and surprisingly it got approved really fast (like, in 3 days or something like that!). Because I had a little more time, I implemented an In App Purchase: anyone can play the game for free until level 6 – it requires a single In App Purchase to unlock the entire game after that.
Then the show started…within a little more than a week The Carter Jones Adventures got more than 10.000 downloads and we’re still counting. Reviews are mixed, either very good or very bad (most complain about the controls and the difficulty). The controls had some bad default settings, lesson learned and it is fixed in an update that will be live soon! In App Purchases are dissappointing just like BB but I like that a lot of people are playing my game and rating it! It’s a great ride so far and I can’t wait to release it for IOS and Android.
To Be Continued….
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