Progress report

I've had some tiny amounts of success with my recent projects, but really only enough to frustrate me. I added the some paid features to Fan of the Week and made one sale in the first week, however it was worth $59.90 so not that shabby.

The Japanese candy subscription service Candy Japan has 40 subscribers now.

I managed to find a direct advertiser for my site MemeFace. It is a company selling Meme Stickers online. The owner is very cool.

Still everything I mentioned here put together would not be enough to support my modest Japanese lifestyle. I estimate I would need something like 1200 eur / month to pay for rent, food, taxes, health insurance etc. For now I'll be ok from what I have saved from my previous projects, but I better have some hit soon again, just for my sanity.

I took another look at my iOS game project Valley Story and am considering putting in the final touches to finish it. I got burned out mostly on memory management issues when developing it before and missed my launch date and then just started doing the above mentioned other things. Now I could run the game again and look at it with fresher eyes and it doesn't look that bad really. If I could just release it I could probably sell a few copies.

Japanese Candy Club

Today I finally made a homepage for this "candy club" I've already been running for a while. I was inspired to do this after finding that ideal domain, candyjapan.com was available. So if you'd like to join the club, click over to Candy Japan.

Fan of the Week for Facebook Pages

Fan of the Week is an add-on for Facebook Pages. It makes fans use your pages more actively, encouraging them to like your page, its posts and to post on the wall themselves if you would like to encourage that. Because of Facebook's EdgeRank, when fans interact with your pages more, your page updates will also be more likely to appear on their news feed. So in short, you should really go add it to your page right now.

Here is one example of how people are using this add-on on their pages. Club D'Ville is a nightclub in Ireland. They have been using Fan of the Week to not only pick a fan to get the honorary title, but also give them free entrance tickets to the club. Every week the app automatically picks a fan and announces them as that week's fan. The announcement is customizable, as you can see here:



Below you can see what the add-on page tab looks like. It is also completely customizable. Fans are picked based on not just random chance, but also on how much they interacted with the page. Each page interaction is like a lottery ticket that gives the fan a chance to get picked.



If you have a Facebook page and think Fan of the Week would be a nice addition to it, you can add it to your page here.

To Shanghai from Shikoku, boat or plane?

Found out that at lowest it costs 17360 yen to fly from Takamatsu to Shanghai and back (return ticket), by china-sss. Their homepage advertises "4100 yen". So kind of like Ryanair, all kinds of hidden fees you only see after going further in the ordering process.

Boat return ticket for Osaka - Shanghai for comparison is 33000 yen at Shanghai Ferry.

Brainstorming #1: Fan of the Day for Facebook Pages

I want to brainstorm a few ideas today with the goal of releasing at the end of the week, start working on something in the evening. So here's #1.

- Which page owners the app is for:

Any pages which want to grow their fanbase.

- What benefit those page owners get from adding the app:

Encourages more people to fan your page by daily picking a random fan as "fan of the day".

- Rough sense of how the app might make money:

Basic version free, enabling extra options costs something, custom tier for big companies that costs more and provides email support and custom features.

- A somewhat scalable way of reaching those page owners

Default feature in free version will be to post "fan of the day" message into the page feed and that message will also include a link to the tab, that should make the app spread quite nicely even if I just put it on my own pages. I might get some friends to add it and could at least mention it on HN or some forums to get the initial amount of users.

- Rough screen sketches of how it would work.



Update After some searching, I found out that it's impossible to get list of page fans so this idea is actually impossible in the described form. Maybe I should add "is possible" to the list of idea requirements :)

Update Figured out a way to make it possible after all. Can't pick a totally random fan, but can pick one if they interacted with the page. Coded up the app, read more here.

Ways I could reach owners of Facebook pages

In my last post about Facebook pages apps I wrote about why I feel they are a nice opportunity and defined what I mean by an idea for such an app, so this time I want to come up with one such idea.

I feel the most difficult part is a way to reach page owners. Therefore I should start brainstorming from that part, because it's the best filter for unworkable app ideas.

Page owners I might be able to reach:

- A tiny number of iOS app developers through my Chrome Extension iTunes Connect Fix.
- Startup founders due to being an active participant on Hacker News and #startups on Freenode. Many would have their own Facebook page, but many seem to be a bit anti-Facebook, so there would be a bit of backlash if I try to promote to them.
- Agents for movie stars probably could pay something to enhance the actors' Facebook pages, there are also some good keywords to target them.

Obvious places to get constant streams of users with $$$: Facebook / Google ads. A bit more involved but possibly better bang for buck: contacting bloggers to try to reach their audiences. "You are always renting someone's audience, if not a blogger's audience, you are paying Google to rent the audience of their search", as someone clever said on Hacker News.

Promoting the page app on the page app itself would also be useful, but probably only doable well if it's freemium, I doubt people would tolerate very overt advertising in a paid app. It might work really well if it's something you could put on any page. Hmm... actually I think I just got an idea!

Now should I go ahead and just code it in a mad spurt or try to brainstorm some more. I'm entering that "ooh new idea, me loves" phase.

Facebook pages apps

Strangely the only project I currently have that is showing any growth is Memeface, a site where you can mimic popular rage faces with your webcam. I enjoy improving on it, because I'm a big fan of rage faces myself and I feel more comfortable making big changes to the site because it's not a very serious project. However that project will clearly never reach the kind of pageviews it would require to make money on a low CPM site like that, so I'll have to think about other things too.

Currently the most accessible opportunity I see for a sole developer is apps for Facebook pages or perhaps apps that somehow work over email as it is a very powerful but maybe a bit underappreciated channel for growth. It's a lot easier to come up with ideas for Pages apps, so I've mostly been thinking about those. It seems not every niche is filled yet. There don't seem to be that many apps for them yet. Bar is a lot lower than for game apps, because Pages apps usually don't require a lot of content (graphics/sounds/scripts). It's a lot easier to see how to monetize them. Probably a freemium model would work very naturally and from a Facebook pages app designed for a company it is a lot easier to charge for features.

I worry about marketing the apps. For games / entertainment it's easy to let the word out, as almost anyone is a potential user, but an app only useable for people that have pages about certain things is relevant only to a much more limited group. Last week I spent making a Pages app for Airbnb Listings, only to realize after pushing it to the production server that I have no idea how to naturally reach Airbnb hosts to get them to make use of the app. I found a few dozen hosts on Facebook and tried to send them direct messages about the app, but couldn't really do it in away which would feel natural.

So my definition of an "idea" for a Facebook pages app should cover at least:

- Which page owners the app is for.
- What benefit those page owners get from adding the app in the form of a pitch for those people.
- A somewhat scalable way of reaching those page owners!
- Rough sense of how the app might make money.
- Rough screen sketches of how it would work.

Airbnb Listings

Released the first version of my "Airbnb Listings" app. It lets you list your Airbnb properties on your Facebook page, so that more people can find them easily. You can install it here.

Neverending Valley Story #7 + memeface

To take a break from coding Valley Story, released an initial version of MemeFace, a site where you can mimic popular memes with your webcam. Going back to coding Valley Story, I discovered memory leaks and problems with sound working on the actual device, also choppy animation. Blergh.

Neverending Valley Story #7

Neverending Valley Story #6

Neverending Valley Story #5

The dorm room, first environment in the game. It's difficult to draw areas where walls would overlap the view, have to draw cut-out walls. Also I want to add more stuff here, maybe discarded red bull cans, a corkboard in the college hallway etc.

Neverending Valley Story #4

I'm having a problem with the design of this game. This was supposed to follow quite closely how "Game Dev Story" works, but instead of depicting life in a game company, it is supposed to be about life in a web startup. Well, there's one thing about startups that really isn't suitable for this game: the fact that there is only one product!

The fun part of Game Dev Story is the cycle of developing products. Initially you are excited to see how many points the product gets for different attributes. Then you watch the developers churn away, adding attributes to the product, here especially exciting is when one of them gets into the zone and adds a ton of points to some attribute (or a ton of bugs). Then you get to launch the product and can excitedly anticipate what kind of scores it will get from reviewers and how well it will sell.

Apart from the zone, none of these best parts of Game Dev Story can apply to Valley Story, because there is only one product! There is no product cycle. A startup is about working on one product, that seems to be difficult to change, and if I did change that then this would no longer really be about startups and would be a much more direct clone of Game Dev Story, not what I really want. But not having that makes this significantly more boring to play. Auugh!

There need to be exciting points to this game. Now it's about just looking at the screen while the usercount and money gradually increase. No exciting points at all. Bleh. There is nothing here that would make the player think "wow I wish I had enough Y to reach X".

Now I must depart from looking at Game Dev Story, because none of it applies to this game any more. The only part that ends up being the same is just the visual look.

Neverending Valley Story #3

Drew a sheet for the character walking.. well it turned out to look like he is walking to the left. It was supposed to look that he was walking southwest isometrically.



This took 4 hours to draw. I can't believe I'm still working on this. Southeast should be matter of mirroring. For northwest and northeast I have to draw an entirely new set.

I haven't found any good pixel drawing tools. GIMP doesn't really have the best workflow and working with animations is cumbersome. Pixen crashes constantly and is buggy with colors. Grafx2 doesn't support animations.

2.5 hours pass ...



And after some polishing...

Neverending Valley Story #2

Sprite knows how to move along the graph now. I didn't ask for it, but seems that subpixel accuracy rendering is enabled by default, so when the character is moving between points it appears blurry.

Neverending Valley Story

Realized I need a graph showing where the points of interest in each map are and how the players should walk there. Decided to just hardcode the coordinates, since manipulating data with objective c seems so cumbersome compared to Python.

Valley Story continues

Yeah, still working on Valley Story. Harder than I thought this would be.

Right now I'm trying to get the graphics working on iOS. My previous prototype was in Javascript, so now I have to take what I learned from my JS code and write equivalent in Objective C. One big thing I learned was that I probably don't need a full isometric engine for this. Instead I can just have sprites for the player characters and for anything that might be in front of them, which isn't very many things since I can control the paths of the characters to avoid getting too near any obstacles.

I'm planning on totally isolating the game logic from the graphics. The game logic will just spout out commands like "Drew walked in the door", "Drew sat in the chair" and then my graphics code will show that. This lets me prototype the gameplay as text while I still don't have graphics for everything.

Sprites I'm going to show by just creating UIImageViews and moving them around on the screen. So when the graphics code gets a message like "Drew walked in the door" from the game logic, it will first see if we have this "Drew" guy already on screen. If not, then it will look at character definitions to see which sprite sheet Drew should be using. Further which sprite in that sheet, cuts out that UIImage from the sheet and updates Drew's UIImageView using that. Then it keeps updating the graphics and location while Drew walks around, sorting the UIImageViews properly so that it appears in front of / behind other stuff.

Here's another shortcut that I came up with from my prototype. In the prototype I had a "sort point" for each sprite that signified the point in the texture that should be used when deciding if this character is in front of / behind something. I don't really need that, instead I can align all sprites such that the sort points would overlap by just positioning more carefully in my art.

I know UIImageView already has "animationImages" and "startAnimating", but it seems more convenient to do it myself each frame as I have to update the view location there anyway. Also my graphics in the sprite sheet might not be in the order I want to animate them in and the ordering might depend on what the character is doing. Like if they are sitting down I have to show some sprites in the opposite order than if they are getting up.

Valley Story

I can reveal the name of the game now since I registered the domain, it will be called "Valley Story".

Isometric progress #8

1.1.2011 - now, looking back

Wow, it's already the middle of March and still no revenue to speak of. Where did this time go? Skimmed through my older blogposts since start of the year, and it seems that I've spent all my time learning the details that go into an isometric engine, learning how to do pixel art, thinking about game design and studying iOS development.

I do feel I really know more about these things than I did back then, but I'm prone to judging my progress more based on revenue rather than some improved knowledge, just because I can't buy ramen by having more potential that doesn't materialize anywhere.

I did release 1 iOS app, 1 website, 2 chrome extensions and made a significant revenue-increasing tweak in Coolest Friends, but still this hasn't been a very successful three and a half months. Besides the revenue tweak none of it mattered much. I'm starting to feel increasingly disappointed in my progress and need to have some measure of success soon.