All our games are on sale or free for a limited time

Today is a happy day at Godzilab, and we decided to have all our games on sale or even better free.

iBlast Moki 2.99$ –> FREE
Stardunk Gold 1.99$ –> FREE
iBlast Moki HD 4.99$ –> 99c
iBlast Moki 2 2.99$ –> 99c
iBlast Moki 2 HD 4.99$ –> 2.99$

Have a happy Godzilab day!

iBlast Moki 2 – The level creation process

Building complex and beautiful levels with iBlast Moki 2 was not an easy task. Here is how we achieved it.

The painful level creation of the first iBlast Moki

In the first iBlast Moki, the level creation and iteration was really painful. We were using the tools illustrator and Xcode, and just getting the level into the game took probably 2-3 minutes (saving, rebuilding the binary on the Mac, transferring the game to the iPhone and launching the game). A small change was really long to implement and test. Some changes were even done blindly as some of the objects were not at the right scale between illustrator and the game, so we were moving things around hoping that it would be at the right location.

Only late during the development, we added the in-game level editor but it was not used to create the story levels. It was only meant for users to create and share their levels once the game was released.

For the second one, we knew we wanted to build more than 90 levels with only 2 persons and all of this in less than 6 months, we had to revisit this process and create a really fast and iterative level design flow.

Fast iteration is the key

The first thing was to use the game to build and iterate as fast as possible on the levels. We used the first iBlast Moki editor as the base, but took everything apart to rebuild a fresh and solid physics editor. We added a new button play at the top of the screen in the editor, and you could just edit your level, do a modification, press play and be in the game in less than 1 second, test your change and press the button edit again. This entire process was only taking less than 15 secs compared to the old 3 minutes for the first game. On top of that, working on the iPad and using your finger to build a level is really a fun and intuitive process.

This really allowed us to have a better level design in general but also be more creative as we were not slowed down by the iteration and we could just try something quickly and if it didn’t work, remove it.

The toolbox

The first editor was still missing some major features that we really wanted in this game, such as the bezier curves, the joints and all the new gameplay items. The first 3 months of the development were spent only building the editor, we knew it was the key and it had to be robust and easy to use.

The Bezier Curves

The bezier curves is one of the biggest addition to this sequel, all the levels were built using the curve tool to create the static ground. We took some inspiration from the curve tool in illustrator and implemented the same feature. So you can create freely any vector form, by placing the key points and adjusting the tangents at those points to smooth more or less the curves.

Once the shape was built you could select its material, it could be the ground and be static, or it could be dynamic with different physical materials such as wood, stones or metal.

The Joints

The joints were the second biggest new feature we added. We really wanted to be able to build more complex contraptions, such as vehicles, boats, or any other thing we could think of. To achieve this, we added 6 different joints, a pivot joint to be able to have dynamic objects rotate around other, a motor to build motorized vehicles and a few mechanical joints with a springy or stiff connection.

In the example above, the cart is built with 3 wood logs, 2 glue joints to hold the logs together, 2 wheels and 2 pivot joints to have the wheel rotate freely.

Other gameplay items

We have a lot of other fun physics elements such as explosives, water, balloons, cactus, wheel which are unlocked as you progress through the game. I’ll let you play with the game and the editor to avoid revealing too much here!

Sharing

When we had the level built with all the functionalities in place, Thomas and I were both iterating quite a lot on it. To be able to achieve this iteration, the key feature was to be able to share those levels online, so we didn’t have to send a new build to each other every day. As soon as we made a change to the level, the other was able to download it and iterate on it. We were lucky to have this feature from day one and this gave a lot of richness to our levels as we both have different ideas and level “styles”.

Decoration

Once we were happy with the gameplay of the level, we had to make it pretty. We have a special decoration mode in the editor, where you can choose and place the props. Those props are just used for the decoration and the mokis don’t collide with them.
We also added some stickers we could place on top of every objects, we were using them to add some variety to the ground and break the repetition of the main motif (such as the mushrooms and small rocks in the image above) or even give life to some of the dynamic elements by adding a mouth and eyes.

Conclusion

With all this new features and the fast iteration process, we were amazed by how fast we went through creating all the 90 levels. And we even had a few beta testers helped us in the level creation, some of them were so good that we added their levels to the story levels.
With this tool released into the wild we are seeing some amazing levels being built every day, and we are super happy to see how creative the community is. Here is one of the level which was recently built, and in the top 20 of the best rated level. You should definitely check out the top 10, I am just blown away every day.

We are thinking of doing a contest where the best levels will be included in the next update of iBlast Moki 2, stay tuned for more information about it.

Stardunk on Android – Commercial suicide?

Coming from the iOS world, the Android Market was a big unknown between the device fragmentation, the poor visibility and the lower monetization. We decided to do the jump and release both our games, Stardunk and iBlast Moki to Android. We released Stardunk 2 months ago, Stardunk reached the top #20 Free, has passed one million downloads and has a perfect rating of 5 Stars with around 28000 ratings. It was also featured by Google and here is what we learned.

The power of polished apps

Quality definitely pays on Android and players are more willing to give 5 stars than on iOS. We were amazed to see a perfect rating of 5 stars for Stardunk, which was not an easy task between the featuring from Google which was bringing thousands of players who might not be interested in the game and the device fragmentation causing some issues on a lot of different devices.

One of the key thing is to listen to your customers and fix those issues, at the beginning you might be spending a lot of time replying to emails and fixing bugs, but this pays and makes your customers happy and translates to a better rating and great reviews. One thing we did quite early was also to remove the device from the list of supported device, when we knew for sure that Stardunk was crashing on those. And as soon as we had the bugs fixed, we were adding them back to the list. This avoids quite a few one star!

The ranking algorithm

We launched Stardunk first on the android market where it started slowly to raise in the charts with around 10k to 12k downloads per day to reach the top #50 after a few days. From what we learned Google’s ranking algorithm is really not behaving the same way as Apple’s ranking. With Apple’s algorithm if your number of downloads increases, it takes generally a few hours to see your app moving in the charts. On the Android Market, it’s a slow process which takes several days, even a week to see the impact of the number of downloads on the ranking. Google seems to have included other factors such as the number of active installs (player still having the game on their phone), ratings and probably other factors.

After 4 weeks at a ranking of ~#50 in the free apps, Google featured Stardunk, which is the best thing that could have happened. The # of downloads was multiplied by 3 to reach around 50k downloads / day and once Google decided to feature your app, they leave it 2-5 weeks in the featured section, which is like winning the jackpot. Stardunk rose to #16 in the free charts.

Since its highest, Stardunk is slowly falling in the charts and is currently #90. One thing I am still not sure to understand, is even after getting more downloads than before the featuring, the ranking is getting lower and lower. Stardunk was at a steady position of #50 for days with around 12k downloads/day and today even though Stardunk is downloaded more than 18k times a day, the ranking is falling down. Which would mean that they might include a trend or a recent app criteria in their algorithm.

The different distribution channels

The Android Market is the biggest channel and the one you need to focus on. We received tons of emails from unknown channels and had Stardunk published only on Amazon and Getjar. Amazon is driving around 10-30 downloads per day which really doesn’t worth the hassle of changing your app to match their requirements and going through their slow review process. So my advice would be to only focus on the Android Market and have publishers for China and Korea where your game can’t be distributed through the Android Market.

The fun of developing for Android

Releasing a game on the Android Market is super easy, it’s one click and 15 min later the game is visible on the google market. This is just amazing, you can iterate really quickly, we had an issue reported by some users and a few hours later we were releasing an update with the fix in it. This allows a really fast iteration that we don’t have on iOS.

The other great thing is you can send you apk (binary) to anybody and they can install it just by clicking on the link from their phone, you don’t have to worry about the provision profile or anything else. This allowed us to test a build easily with players reporting issues and testing that it was fixed.

Other advice, that bit us really hard at the beginning, do backup of the player data on your own servers. There’s no backup of the user data to a PC or a Mac such as iTunes does it for iOS, so players are getting crashes which could just wipe all their data or they might also reset or change of device. To avoid having really unhappy customers, I strongly suggest you implement as early as possible a feature where you save the data of the players on the cloud and you allow the users to download it anytime they want.

Conclusion, is it a commercial suicide or not?

For Stardunk which is a free app and thus monetize the usage and not the download, the average revenue per daily user is 3x lower compared to the iOS version. But this is compensated by being downloaded by more users on Android. As of today both versions have about the same revenue, and we covered our initial development cost really quickly.

Maybe we were lucky with Stardunk, a free app which corresponds to the criteria of what people like on the android market, a free and quality app.
We are going to release iBlast Moki on Android next month, iBlast Moki will be a paid app, so it will be interesting to compare those 2 markets. That might be the subject of another post. If you want to check out Stardunk here is the link

First music preview for iBlast Moki 2

Hi there! (by the way it’s spring already, yay!)

I’m Romain, and I’m in charge of creating the music for iBlast Moki 2. I’ll be posting a series of blog entries here to keep you informed of the progress of this task. I’ll also try to describe what goes through my mind while I’m making the music, providing that I manage to filter out the irrelevant thoughts  (“what do puppies dream about?”, and other stuff like that with which I won’t bother you).

Well, let’s start!

So, as you know music is science, and as such it is made in a lab. In iBlast Moki 2′s case, it’s the Godzilab. This is me in it, working on some intoxicating melodies:

I will post the results of such dangerous experiments here, once they are publishable in a safer form that we scientists call “music clips”.

To conclude a proper introduction, I’m going to show you what popped out of the first test tube. Oh my, it’s the future title music! It’s not quite there yet, still a (test tube) baby. There’s room for improvement for sure, but you’ll certainly agree that it’s kind of more ambitious than what we went for in the original iBlast Moki!

Loves and kissesses,

Romain