Disqus - Latest Comments for jefftunn

Re: Review of Surface Pro 3 For Game Production

Jeff Tunnell — Sat, 04 Apr 2015 15:46:56 -0000

I know I should not be the first person to comment on my own blog post, but I had to blow the cobwebs out of the Disqus comments pipeline.

Re: Steam Distribution

Jeff Tunnell — Fri, 17 May 2013 19:49:41 -0000

I love Steam. This is such an exciting development for us!

Re: Old Team, Exciting New Product - Contraption Maker Dev Blog

Jeff Tunnell — Fri, 10 May 2013 11:52:38 -0000

I'm already having a blast with it. Amazing how much better it is in high definition with hundreds of parts on the screen!

Re: Nine Things That Could Make the App Stores Better

Jeff Tunnell — Fri, 10 May 2013 10:21:19 -0000

Ted has it right. The app store would still handle the back end, billing, hosting, downloading, etc. The front end is all that would change. You could imagine maybe adding some additional data for the new stores. They might make it way easier to compile reviews for instance.

Re: Things Spotkin Learned That May Help You In The App Store

Jeff Tunnell — Wed, 08 May 2013 23:13:11 -0000

Strange. We have three Galaxy Nexus devices that were the main devices we played on during the entire development process. It is not actually a port, but was developed more on Android than iOS. I have to admit that we didn't think of the OS as having fans like OSX vs. PC. We did get reamed for overlooking the back button, but I still think using it in a game feels like a kludge. Thanks for the feedback though. We have a new game coming up and we would love to have you look at it before we release it. Simultaneous development again, but like I said launching first on Android.

Re: Things Spotkin Learned That May Help You In The App Store

Jeff Tunnell — Wed, 08 May 2013 19:19:28 -0000

I answered this above, but to repeat, AdMob and TapJoy. Like I explained in the article, TapJoy users are pretty fleeting, basically coming into your game long enough to collect hard cash for their latest Bahamut, Puzzle and Dragons, or whatever. However, they can still be used to get your game far enough up the charts to get organic installs. When we launch our next game on Android, we will use TapJoy again.

Re: Things Spotkin Learned That May Help You In The App Store

Jeff Tunnell — Wed, 08 May 2013 19:16:50 -0000

AdMob and TapJoy. TJ was what got us into the New Trending Android games that resulted in organic installs. On iOS we used Flurry, Playhaven, and others.

Re: Things Spotkin Learned That May Help You In The App Store

Jeff Tunnell — Wed, 08 May 2013 13:54:33 -0000

Unity is an awesome technology, and it is taking over the world. I thought it would be a no-brainer for us to use it, but it ended up not being so. Here are the main drawbacks in our opinion. I don't want debate, so please don't hate on me.

1. No source code. This is important. I have seen too many developers get to the end of their game, and are begging four source code. Having access to all source code allows us to control our own destiny. There are commercial solutions out there that include source code.

2. Executable is 8M in size before you write a line of code. When we started, downloadable size was much more important than it is now.

3. It is expensive. By the time you purchase all of the version and upgrade to pro it becomes a significant expense. We did not want to send $5,000 Unity licenses to our programming partners half way around the world.

4. It is overkill. We wanted to do simple games for cell phones, so we did not need terrain, 3D animation systems, etc.

There are more reasons, but those are the main ones that I have time to cover right now.

Re: Things Spotkin Learned That May Help You In The App Store

Jeff Tunnell — Wed, 08 May 2013 13:46:30 -0000

Hi Ryan. What phone are you using now? We had a bunch of native resolutions supported, I wonder if we missed yours. We are using 3D graphics and they should scale for what ever resolution you have. Maybe there is a bug.

I may be naive, but I don't recall seeing native Android menu items in many games. Can you point me to some? What is an action overflow button? I live on Android as well, and have been on it since G1, but I am not aware of lot of things you are talking about.

Again, I am not saying our game was great. In fact, we didn't believe in it and that is why we dropped it. I hope the main point of my article was about different things that we tried that worked and didn't work for others as they put their games in the app stores. Bottom line is, if we had made a great game, none of the issues I wrote about would matter, and we would have had better results.

Re: Things Spotkin Learned That May Help You In The App Store

Jeff Tunnell — Wed, 08 May 2013 13:38:46 -0000

JD, I didn't realize it was you on HN until I clicked on your name. I don't think we have met in person, but you used to talk to Ben Garney (my partner at PushButton Labs) quite a bit, and we also have being acquired by Playdom in common :)

Being an Indie has always been difficult. For a brief time, the early adopters putting their games on iOS had a nice situation where they got free users, and it caused some out sized success stories. I am afraid you are right that we are going to end up back in a situation where publishers with a lot of money will control large chunks of the app stores because they will be able to move their users around to prop up their titles.

Thanks for posting.

Re: Things Spotkin Learned That May Help You In The App Store

Jeff Tunnell — Tue, 07 May 2013 16:18:01 -0000

I would love to hear the post mortem on your Win8 game. We are not looking at that market yet, but someday I hope they do well enough that we can. More places to sell our games is better :)

Re: Things Spotkin Learned That May Help You In The App Store

Jeff Tunnell — Tue, 07 May 2013 16:16:55 -0000

Like I explained in the comments on Hacker News. I wasn't as clear in the article as I should have been. The ads we purchased were enough to push us onto several Google featured areas, so most of the installs were organic.

Re: Things Spotkin Learned That May Help You In The App Store

Jeff Tunnell — Tue, 07 May 2013 16:15:33 -0000

The Spotkin Network is actually tied in with a much bigger network that we and some of my ex-partners at GarageGames are working on. It is a much bigger deal than I made out of it in my post. I hope to be able to talk more clearly about it in the near future.

We would have used OF if it still existed, but it doesn't. We did support Game Center on iOS, but there is really nothing like it for Android. Our implementation is really in the background, and not evil. We'll keep pushing forward on this. I believe in it. Even if we only get several hundred thousand users, it is still much better than launching with nothing in the future.

Re: We Can’t Make It Here Anymore

Jeff Tunnell — Sat, 04 May 2013 10:13:44 -0000

Making games is fun. Getting people to play them is even more fun. If you are just doing it for fun, you should consider making a Flash game and releasing it on Armor Games. At least you will get a lot of plays. If you make something that breaks out, then port it to Mobile, ala Kingdom Rush.

Re: We Can’t Make It Here Anymore

Jeff Tunnell — Sat, 04 May 2013 10:12:13 -0000

It is funny because Google built their business around discoverability, i.e. discovering any little bit of information you would ever want. You would think that the Play Store at least would do this well, and that would make Apple have to improve to keep up.

Re: We Can’t Make It Here Anymore

Jeff Tunnell — Fri, 03 May 2013 13:39:40 -0000

Markets want to be open. This will get fixed someday, somehow.

Re: We Can’t Make It Here Anymore

Jeff Tunnell — Fri, 03 May 2013 13:38:44 -0000

I'm not asking for guaranteed success from the app stores. If I release my turd on the Internet, there are no guarantees, but at least I have a fighting chance of getting people to look at it before it sinks.

Like I said, I am going to keep playing the game too, but maybe speaking out will help get the situation changed.

Re: We Can’t Make It Here Anymore

Jeff Tunnell — Fri, 03 May 2013 10:17:39 -0000

You are right. Many, many of the game flooding into the app stores are crap, knock offs, and shovel ware. But, how are the users of the stores supposed to know the difference? In fact, without being featured how does a user even know a game is released? Apple has dropped their new games by date feature (You can still get it if you have not upgraded to iOS 6) and Google does not have it.

Thanks for the tweet about this article.

Re: We Can’t Make It Here Anymore

Jeff Tunnell — Fri, 03 May 2013 10:06:40 -0000

In order to really fix the problem, I believe the App Stores should actually share back some kind of affiliate fee with the entity running the store. We pay the App Stores for distribution, storage, and bandwidth. They should be willing to pay some of that back to the "retailer", and there is precedent for this as Apple pays a small affiliate fee for links into the store.. I think a bunch of people would be willing to run a store for somewhere around 10% because there are many more opportunities for making money in a store once you have it set up (selling virtual "endcaps" to developers for instance).

I totally agree with you on the need for building community around the store. If you remember what we did with Great Games Experiment, I think we were on the right track, but never had enough time to really figure it out. We were trying to build up groups of people around specific kinds of games, but ended up selling GarageGames, and the experiment was over.

Your mention of using a publisher is interesting. So far, I have not seen the rise of publisher much for mobile, but I think they will become more important. Getting access to their networks of players, money for ads, and eventually, even money for distribution may eventually be the game developers only hope. Deja vu all over again!

However, when I think of publishers on mobile, the ones that come to mind are Chillingo and Crescent Moon, but their steady stream of better than decent games and their lack of making them into hits is one of the data points about why I am worried about how developers are going to make it in the mobile market the way it is currently set up. They have not figure out how to do anything more than get Apple features, and their games do the normal two week swan dive in the charts once the feature wears off. So, it appears they are not really publishers, but feature getters.

Re: The Allison Inn & Spa – Luxury Lodging in the Heart of Oregon Wine Country

Jeff Tunnell — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 19:29:58 -0000

For non-wine writers, how much does it cost to stay there?

Re: The Frugal Wino: Anne Amie Vineyards Cuvee A Amrita 2011

Jeff Tunnell — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 10:31:53 -0000

That wine sounds great for Summer. Where can you buy it in the Eugene area?

Re: The Day the Google Music Died

Jeff Tunnell — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 12:13:30 -0000

Damn, my Disqus comments were turned off for this article. I just turned them back on. Please leave your thoughts now.

Re: Blogging In A New Gaming World

Jeff Tunnell — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 16:34:47 -0000

If anybody reading here has any idea how to turn off comments in RSS in Disqus, please point me in the right direction.

Re: Blogging In A New Gaming World

Jeff Tunnell — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 16:28:49 -0000

Wow! Awesome, that worked. Thanks.

Re: Blogging In A New Gaming World

Jeff Tunnell — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 16:27:18 -0000

Crap. That is why I was asking for debugging. Hmmm. Now to figure it out.