Regardless of how this goes with Facebook's meddling, developers have left the platform.
Ask Ouya what happens when no one is developing for your hardware...
176 karma · joined October 17, 2012
Ask Ouya what happens when no one is developing for your hardware...
http://codeherdstudios.bandcamp.com/album/asteroid-smash-ost
This was the first time I've gone out and tried marketing one of my games, and I've learned a ton.
The number one thing I would recommend is to get eyes on the project as early as possible. I'd hit up TIGSource and start posting a dev log as soon as you can. Be sure to take it out to local events, and definitely start showing other game developers.
The game took a lot longer to make than I was originally planning for, and a lot of that was due to some design decisions that I struggled with. However when I took it out and started showing some local developers they had tons of ideas to help contribute, and actually helped me through the problems that I had been stuck on.
As for the pay model, The whole reason I made this game is because I love to make games. I don't think there was really any strategy behind the monetization. I just put it out there for a couple of bucks. Honestly I expected this to come out and maybe a few people play it, and then I'd be onto my next one; to me that was totally cool.
Actually this morning I had posted a thread on touch arcade and I got 1 response about how a mom had played the game with her daughter and they both had fun. Really if all the game amounts to is that, I'd be happy.
So far though I've been pretty humbled by the response, and all I can say is thanks!
Heroku forces you to use long polling instead of websockets, and long polling is not very good for keeping it speedy.
You play an alien life form that pollinates itself by shooting out spore that live for only 10 seconds. Some of your pods give the spore special powers!
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview...
At minimum it has made me more cautious with my decision to bring a title to iOS due to the overwhelming expectation now that the game be free. If you want an example of this check out the youtube comments of the official tiny thief trailer. A game that debuted at $2.99. When I last looked there were an overwhelming amount complaining about how "the game needs to be free"...
As a larger issue I'm a little more worried about how this might end in a deterioration of the quality of experience on the iOS platform? Looking at that image of top paid vs top grossing, one might ask the question in 5-10 years will we be talking about candy crush? hay day? conversely how about Minecraft? Plants vs. Zombies?