You are right, I made a correction now. Game design AND PROGRAMMING concepts.

If you are working on a game, try to understand some game design concepts

Once you start working on some games you will notice there are many concepts and techniques you will need to apply to make the developer’s life easier. You should get familiar with how to work with frame-based animations, tilemaps, seamless textures, naming conventions,etc.

IMHO none of these is a "game design" concept. It's technical stuff that has nothing to do with gameplay directly. I'd consider concepts like "having a boss monster" or "powerups" to be game design concepts/patterns.

Just my two cents :)

Hi!
I've put together a few tips for designers that have to deal with programmers in their everyday life. Most tips are what to do to avoid annoying developers or how to have a better communication and workflow.
Here is the article.

If you have your own tips, I'd like to hear them as well!

- Pablo

Also with the reviews. You only get good reviews when you prompt people. I wrote the app for UEFA and on a champions league match night they have several million people hitting the servers just through the iPhone app but only around 2 or 3 bad reviews and no good ones. This went on for a couple of weeks until we added appirator and started getting around 100 5 star reviews every couple of days. (I haven't worked at this company for nearly 2 years now and it looks like the app hasn't been maintained for a while so if you check it out and its rubbish. It isn't my fault).

At my current company we did a survey and found out there were still users running on OS 3.1 so every time they uninstall an app they get the popup telling them to rate the app with the default being one star.

@RevolvingDoor I don't think the size of the company has anything to do with how successful an app is. I think it has more to do with the knowledge of the company. A big company comprised of former games industry veterens just released a game similar to mine and it tanked and dissappeared off app annies chart in lest than two weeks. My game has been out for 4 months and has had continuous sales since launch.
By the way I'm not even sure if my app has been reviewed anywhere whilst the other app has been featured in Edge.

I think the #1 reason most indie apps don't sell is because they're competing with high-budget apps that are entrenched in the Top 200s of their categories. I released Towers into the RPG and Adventure categories about a week ago... After a decent little run it started going down the RPG charts rather fast, because a few good sales shot much older games up to the top. The game has received a lot of positive feedback and a few really good reviews (iFanzine gave us a 4.5, higher than any game has scored there for quite a long time!) but it's really hard competing against bigger companies... With their fancy employees and salaries and whatnot.

You need few "Not Helpful" to bad reviews to put them down the list ;) I've done many times, even the "Report Concern", not too helpful.

@itlgames You can go to itunes and click "Not Helpful" to bad reviews. Then they don't show up at the top. I do it once in a while if a bad review is just one word or if it's not really an issue with the game. One guy have one star because he downloaded but could not find it on his device,lol. I didn't even bury that because it was funny.

@jd that's what I mean, you get 1 star reviews when free, whilst when paid usually you don't (unless the app really sucks!), and just a few negative reviews usually stand over the positive reviews and they put down your average rating. But we can live with it, since we put free our last game our number of downloads went up, like hundred per day, and still getting few 1 start reviews from time to time, even if a 80% or 90% of users rate 4 or 5 stars.

@itlgames and @toadkick I was expecting to get lots of bad reviews when I went free. Surprisingly, I get very few 1 star reviews that say they don't like the app. I get several reviews where I end up checking the username to see if it's a friend or a relative because they are so positive. Most of my lower reviews are from people with older devices that don't have Game Center. I pretty much get penalized for making an app that still supports old devices with offline modes even though my game is Game Center Multiplayer focused.

I feel the reason I get mostly positive is because I spent lots of time on testing and not compromising on rushing things out the door or taking shortcuts. The bugs are very few and far between; and when there are bugs they are extremely minor. (I'm now crossing my fingers on my "Waiting for review" update since I may have just jinxed myself.) Whereas I see major games with releases that have users up in arms about major bugs that crash or lose data. I did have an issue where Apple servers messed up and would not let users download my app once they deleted it - something out of my control. This lasted 3 months and resulted in several 1 star reviews daily. But other than that, I feel the focus on balanced gameplay and lack of bugs and crashes keep reviews positive even with a free app. I'm not saying my game is the best or the highest quality but the time we spent testing was considerable. Not just bug/crash testing, but how was gameplay and was it enjoyable? Was it a chore to test or did we have fun doing it?

So, if users are gonna complain - don't let lack of testing be the reason. In fact, seek out potential reason and eliminate them all before going to market.

I also think that free games get more low star ratings than paid ones.
I am not against "rate this app" dialogs, although i think there should be a better system, but that is up to Apple to implement.
Maybe a points system like in stackoverflow, where you can rate a question negatively, but that affects your total points too. That way you prevent people from rating 1 star just for the sake of it.

The whole "Rate us 5 stars and we'll keep updating" thing is total BS, and instantly turns me off from an app. 5-star ratings don't pay the bills, sales do. If I like an app, I don't need to be coerced into giving a good rating. Work on making your app the best it can be, and work on getting exposure. Stupid little tricks ultimately won't get you nearly as far as putting out something that is high quality.

And yeah, being free doesn't give you better reviews. People who get things for free seem to feel more entitled than those who don't, and since the barrier for entry to leaving a 1-star review is non-existent, you will get tons of complainers.

@THX-101 free apps won't give you "nice reviews", if most, you will get bad reviews just because it's free and lots of people will get the app, even if is not their cup of tea. Paid apps do actually get a higher percent of good reviews.

Imagine Rovio saying something like that

I have seen many high profile apps use the technique, "Rate us 5 stars so we can continue to bring free updates"

It seemed to be the standard for quite a while and probably still is.

I am not usually moved by the "Please write a nice review so we can continue the development..." phrase, except when I loved the game really much and I know the dev is struggling with sales.
Of course this can be said only if you are really in bad shape. Imagine Rovio saying something like that :p

@Duckwit - There are no rules, and you should not say "Give us good reviews or we'll cease to exist" - now that is a strong threat. But rather just be indirect and as I said give a slice of a "threat" i.e. "Please write a nice review so we can continue the developerment...". That works around in the readers mind causing them to write a nice review because they want the development to continue... Always write in a positive sense, never negative.

Anyway, if your product or company is dieing or suffering, unprofessional is what may save you! Because professional just didn't work.
Like I said, there are no rules. It is very tough out there, kill or be killed. You should ask your self, are you doing this just for fun wasting so much time - or are you doing it for money?

I'm doing it for the both, I wan't to have fun doing it while making lots of money.

@THX-101 - I would totally be put off if a company said 'Give us good reviews or we'll cease to exist' - it seems very unprofessional.

Free app in the beginning or now and then = lots of nice reviews
Push your users to write nice reviews, with a small slice of "threat" saying that the app will stop to exist if bad review are written ;-)

Thanks guys! Your feedback is really appreciated. If you have your own tips i'd love to hear them!

Great - I love it!
It covers a lot of the main points a lot of people miss out on when they publish their app(s).

Awesome post man! Loved it.

Hi!
I just published a new blog post and i thought it would be relevant for many of us. It is about identifying why your app is not selling out there.

Hope you find these tips useful.

- Pablo

https://github.com/cjhanson/Objective-C-Optimized-Singleton

That singleton macro can be easily used in any exiting Objective-C class and to do the serialization and de-serialization process you can still use the +alloc and -initWithCoder: methods if you so wish.

@Mustafa: you're welcome. I'm glad (and amused) to see this is still helpful to some people.

Just wanted to send my thanks to @clain and to @NatWeiss for their code samples - they were exactly what I needed to get going with my Game State code.

-m

Oh and LEVEL CREATION!!! Thats got to be the one thing that im having the most difficulty with - dealing with SVG files (cause i dont want tilemap styled levels) to easily create multiple levels effectively and efficiently without having to roll my own solution.

(IT WOULD BE AWESOME if this was part of the cocos2d framework in fact i think ill post it)

Any chance the presentation that was the original starting point of this thread can be found online anywhere?

Personally, the issues that I have faced are the following:

- Cocos2d Game Architecture best practices
- How to best logically divide layers (HUD, Touch, Player, Level, etc), and how to get layers to communicate with one another (im using boolean switches which I KNOW is not the best way to do it but is simply the easiest lol
- Moving from proof of concept (that you can build from a simple tutorial) to a full game -
- The steps you should take in architecting and designing your game for future extensibility and so you dont have to refactor your code if you want to add new features.

Would LOVE to begin a wiki holding all of the insights that I have gotten just by reading this thread

This isn't cocos specific, but I do wish I had thought about it prior to the start of my project. I use one coordinate system to represent a linear non-manipulated grid (such as a tiled map, or non-isometric representation), and another for the screen displayed coordinates. Thus any transformations need only go from one coordinate system to the other, rather than copying complicated code or having inconsistencies.

I use UV for the pre-transformed, and XY for the screen display, so it becomes easy to know which I am dealing with by naming my properties: UVPosition and XYPosition, or similar.

Does anybody know why when an achievement is unlocked in open feint , the picture / unlock layer (that shows when you unlock an achievement) is not shown correctly. Its supposed to go along the bottom of the screen but its stuffed into the left corner. And when open feint starts up and says "USER ID" logged in at the bottom of the screen the fps drops to like 3 then continues?
Thanks Jason Chitla

Looks like you have many things going on that could be the culprit depending on implementation. You need to narrow it down by temporarily removing one thing at a time and then noticing the effect.

If you remove something and it has no effect, put it back in and remove something else. Once you narrow down the bottleneck post some of the code so we can figure out what the issue is.