Doodle Find continues to be updated regularly. Updated Cocos2D and have added support for French, Spanish and Chinese languages. Doodle Find Pro got a new game mode "Learn" - which allows children and those learning new languages to play.

In addition, Doodle Find has finally managed to crack the US and is currently sitting at #4 on the free app chart.

Just updated Doodle Find with V0.99.4-rc2.
Added support for iPad and the iPhone 4 retina display!

Price drops are tweeted, but not covered as extensively as "Paid to Free".

Nothing wrong with leaving your game free for 3 days. You'd probably need to do that to attain chart visibility.

And thanks arminrox!

Cute game klicktock :)

yes but mega jump was already in the top chart when they went to free (http://www.appannie.com/mega-jump/ranking/history/) and then go back to paid now (successfully because everybody love the game).

Yes you're right that the paid to free strategy is working since you've got free coverage this way. I've seen the same effect. I wonder that if you lower the price, it works the same way. I put my app to $1.99 yesterday and will put it back to $0.99 tonight to see the effects! Anyway, I've just seen I'm in 4th place in the new "In the Spolight" entertaintement section of the IPad in France, hope that give some visibility to my little fun app!

@Shemplock : when I went from free to paid (0.99$), my sales drop exactly by 10! But I think I've made a mistake and let it free for 3 days whereas I should have left it only for one day!

If I was to start over from scratch, I'd probably start it as a paid game with in-app purchase extensions, then drop the price of the main game to free, and then keep it that way. This is simply for twitter visibility. There's a lot of sites set up, that lots of people are subscribed to, that will announce to all their users that a game has dropped from paid to free. "Always free" games, just seem to disappear.

I think it's a bit rough that I can make a game like Doodle Find and not have any of these kinds of sites feature it. Like I said earlier I've had to work very hard to get the word out that this is a game worth playing. It's charted very well in a lot of countries, but I still don't have the visibility in the USA. It would do very well there if it managed to crack the Top 100 apps, but it just didn't seem to take there. If I'd started on paid, then dropped to free "a la" Mega Jump I'd be looking at an across the board #1 hit.

However, I wanted to be nice to my existing customer base and release a free sequel to Super Search 60.

I hope the situation improves and that great games are covered and promoted properly :)

Beware that when you move from free to paid, your sales will drop to like 10 a day

I'm happy for you! Hope that things continue like this for you...
thanks for the cross promotion tip, I will think about it

Now I continue with my strategy questions if you do not mind:
If I understand well you rely on advertising for you revenues since your game is free, and on people that will buy Super search Pro (that they will find thanks to your free games).
Or is your goal more long term and your goal is simply to build a user base so that you will be able to sell your future games more efficiently ?

I'm currently thinking about the strategy for my next app, and I think I'm gonna use "free + in app purchase". if it's free and there is some quality you can go to the charts, then if people love your software they do in app purchase. Of course, all apps cannot use in app purchase, but look at Mega-Jump, apparently new characters in-app purchases works pretty well...
As you said, if nobody knows you, the only solution is perhaps to go free (except if you have a fantastic app?)

Cocos2D games are #1 and #2 free apps in Australia at the moment. Doodle Find at #1 and Mega Jump at #2!

Hooray! This weekend Apple featured Doodle Find in "New And Noteworthy" in Australia, the UK and a number of other countries! Sadly however, did not make the list in the US. Ah well - there's always next week.

Doodle Find has been #1 game in Singapore, Hong Kong and Macau.
It's currently #3 game in Australia. #8 game in the UK and Top 50 and Top 100 in many other countries!

@klicktock Thank you for the marketing advise.

One other thing I wanted to mention is the AppZing promotional library. It caught me attention when I downloaded "Find The Differences" and saw an advert for AppZing within the description. They mentioned that they had used AppZing to promote their application to the top of the app store. This fascinated me so I've implemented that system into my game also (You'll see it each time you start the game).
It's a really clever system and looks like it's going to be great at getting exposure for your apps.
If you're interested in dipping your toes into the world of cross promotion definitely take a look at implementing PlayHaven and AppZing.
Zombie Farm also uses PlayHaven and I'm sure those guys have praise for it also!

Definitely important to build a strong base of fans. (See Donut Games)

For example, I almost 1000 fans on Facebook - which is amazing given they all joined in just a few weeks. When I started with Super Search 60 I was like "who's going to buy this game for $1 from some unknown developer". What I really wanted to do was to reach as many people as possible and hope word of mouth worked. Launching for free was really the only way to do that. Most Facebook players are used to playing for free.

I managed to get 4000 downloads on Day 1 of Doodle Find, 9000 the second day and 14000 the third day. I'm really happy with that, given that the US only accounts for a minor percentage.

Hard to know how else to market my game to the US at this point. I'm just praying that Apple feature Doodle Find this weekend.

I'm still beginning in the app marketing and always good to read some feedback as yours!

About going from paid to free; I read that most of people does not recommand to make your app free for some days. Anyway, I tested it and goes from 5 downloads a day to 3000 a day (6800 download in 4 days)! Then go back to an average of 10-15 a day- so better that at the beginning but I was doing no marketing at all (no mail, no ads, nothing!) Anyway I needed to do the test with my first little app, I also love to think that it creates a user base for future apps (as your user base helps you to boost download for your new game) ...

For Super Search 60 I did a couple of small ads then decided to splash out and purchase a slot of Free App A Day. That was a COMPLETE bust! I managed around 3000 downloads that day which fell off immediately. Definitely buyer beware with that website. I find it very frustrating that a game which has dropped from $1 to FREE gets featured on every twitter in the world, but releasing a game for FREE barely registers a blip! I've never worked so hard to give away something for free before!

There's no real budget, I just take a look at the site, see where it's presenting its adverts and how many impressions I'll get. Advertising is a good way to attract attention from review sites and from Apple themselves. I'm not sure how many actual clicks I get. Certainly nowhere near the number of clicks you get from in-game cross promotion where people are actively looking for a new game with their iPhone and it's only a click away. For the exact numbers, you can look up prices of websites on buysellads.com or direct from the websites themselves.

If any Cocos2Ders feel like doing cross promotion please give me a buzz! Especially the popular ones! Hah!

also if Apple features you, that might be a good time to also do an advertising blitz, even if you lose money initially, if you can push yourself on any of the top lists then you may get some longevity.

"And thanks for your help though the board Codemattic. Many Cocos2D problems have been solved by reading your helpful suggestions. "

thats really terrific to hear, thank you.

Good info here. Out of curiosity, how much do you spend in advertising per game, and how much would a campaign on one of those sites run?

Bought advertising at quite a lot of "smaller" sites that I tend to frequent regularly. Notably: http://freeappcalendar.com, http://greatappaday.com, http://appaddict.net, http://appsmile.com. There's a lot of new websites that do great coverage of games but may not have the traffic of their bigger brothers.

I'm also doing cheaper campaigns at http://toucharcade.com, http://appshopper.com and http://slidetoplay.com

Funnily enough I've been getting amazing results from redirecting all my customers from Super Search 60 to Doodle Find. Although Super Search 60 may not have "exploded" I've built a great game and have slowly build up a dedicated base of players over the world. Getting all of them to download Doodle Find on Day 1+2+3 has allowed me to get to #1 Game in Singapore with other countries doing well also.

I really wish there was more "burst" advertising available. Most sites offer slots for 30 days whereas what we really need is 3-5 days of heavy traffic.

PlayHaven is in beta and is featured in Zombie Farm has been good so far. They're a good cross promotional library that's getting their back end together. Once they allow people to roll over impressions from one game to promote another I think they'll have the no 1 cross promotional system.

Really though, I feel that if your game doesn't chart those first days, there's almost no point writing it in the first place (other than the satisfaction of making a game), so for me Advertising as much as I can afford is a no brainer. ie. Take the money I've produced from my first game and roll it into the second.

I'm really proud of Doodle Find, and would love it if the board can download, take a look and let me know what you think!

And thanks for your help though the board Codemattic. Many Cocos2D problems have been solved by reading your helpful suggestions.

Congrats - the doodle artwork is very cute.

Where are you buying advertising? Is it affordable / worth the money?

And it's OUT!

Climbing the charts due to a combination of keeping Super Search 60 users informed, AppZing, PlayHaven and advertising everywhere I could afford :)

Heya guys,

For our latest game I've decided to jump on the "Doodle" bandwagon and have adapted our previous game Super Search 60 into this new title (with all it's associated bells and whistles and polish that I've added over the last few months).

I'm not sure how many of you played Super Search 60 but this game expands on the concept by staggering difficulty throughout the 90 second game by slowly adding more and more objects. Hopefully people enjoy the concept! Well - I think people will enjoy the concept, Super Search 60's player stats were fantastic - almost everyone plays and plays, however the game just didn't have the reach I was hoping - but it did manage to go Top 5 in Singapore!

The game is coming May 15th, and it's going to be FREE (supported by unobtrusive advertising). So I hope you can all take the time to download it once it pops.

It uses Cocos2D (of course) and integrates PlayHaven to handle the cross promotional side of things.

Matt @

Ah ok - thanks!

The NSAssert triggered in my release build. I still think it might be better if - instead of crapping out - the engine simply ignores those chars?

Its a known issue, with a work around available:

http://code.google.com/p/cocos2d-iphone/issues/detail?id=770&colspec=ID%20Type%20Status%20Priority%20Milestone%20Component%20Owner%20Summary&start=100

Heya guys,

So I had a little piece of code to do in-app purchase. I'm using BitmapFontEngine to display text.

The code runs off, grabs the price of the in-app purchase for the territory and then displays it. The issue is that my game was broken for a bit as - displaying the Euro char using BitmapFontEngine causes an assert. I didn't realise as I didn't have any testers in that territory.

I'm not easily able to support display of the Euro without a bit of a rewrite of the BitmapFontEngine. The same issue means that I won't be able to support Chinese/Japanese, etc. For now, I just bypassed the assert - I now ignore any chars out of bounds instead of throwing an assert.

"NSAssert( c < kBitmapFontAtlasMaxChars, @"BitmapFontAtlas: character outside bounds");"

Are their plans in the work to allow display of Unicode characters using the BitmapFontEngine?