How a hobbyist game dev broke into the App Store's top 25
gamasutra.com
gamasutra.com
This makes total sense, and I hadn't previously considered the effect of pricing on potential reviews. He was able to focus his audience (by raising the price), knowing that it would encourage more motivated gamers that were less likely to get frustrated by the mechanics. Thus avoiding the annoying 1-star reviews that can tank a rating.
If you race to the bottom, you will sell your soul to do so.
Lots of quality apps with normal prices have proven otherwise. So anybody should take your advice with a sack of salt.
Personally I'd much rather pay $5 or even $10 for a good game if it's going to give me a few hours of entertainment.
Unfortunately there's so much crap on the app store that it's a big risk paying that much for something unless you know (based on reviews/recommendations etc) that it's good.
"I ended the first day at no. 27 in the UK charts, no. 21 in Australia and no. 20 in Latvia (the winners of the Olympic BMX racing)."
That's still quite an accomplishment, but not quite the same thing.
To reach #25 in the U.K. AppStore, it takes only 21% of the of downloads that it takes to hit #25 in the U.S. AppStore.
Still, very impressive for an amateur developer in such an overcrowded channel.
Getting any traction in the US though seems to be much more difficult (and the scale difference is enormous).
This is a great tale of the hard work and perseverance required to launch a game as a solo dev - and I would call it a success. "New car money", though, is not the success so many devs (and would be devs) seem to think comes easily.
You might make a few $K in on the first day, but if it's all downhill from there, you don't have a sustainable business.
That's not to say this guy hasn't made an impressive accomplishment (which getting any game in the top 25 is) - just be wary of the stories of "overnight success" that we hear now and then on the app store.
I recently broke top 50 in the Productivity category with my first app, which brought in over 5,000 downloads and counting. I didn't receive "new car" money, but I have already received a few freelancing clients because of it, which surpassed my goals.
Fantastic execution, and good luck with all of your future projects!
He learned by following tutorials for Corona SDK[1] for a couple months, learning what he could of Lua[2] and making a very simple game.
Then, he switched to Cocos2D[3] and had to learn Objective-C and Xcode. He bought the books Programming in Objective-C[4] and Learning Cocos2D[5] and started reading and coding.
He also regularly visited the Cocos2D forums[6] and Ray Wenderlich's site[7] to solve problems as they came up.
[1]: http://www.coronalabs.com/
[2]: http://www.lua.org/
[3]: http://www.cocos2d-iphone.org/
[4]: http://www.amazon.com/dp/032188728X/
[5]: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0321735625/
For single platform 2D, research the platforms standard development kit. For cross-platform 2D, find a library exposing an API supporting all available platforms[1]. For cross platform 3D, create a list of hardware you wish to support and find the maximum common OpenGL\GLES version and GLSL shader version.
This should give you an idea of the graphics API you will be working with and need to learn.
[1] http://www.libsdl.org/ is one such library if you go this route, I believe it's used in Angry Birds and Valve's Linux port of Steam.
I understand that my success is another man's failure, and that's fine with me. The 'success' of Pumped 1 is funding the development of Pumped 2 - I actually have a budget this time! But it's definitely not a bootstrapped multi-million pound startup - just me making games about grown men on kids bikes! :)
I didn't go in to this to make money, so the financial benefit has been a hugely pleasant surprise!