At the moment every 7 days more than 100’000 users are downloading my apps, every month I get around 400k to 500k downloads.  Here is a chart how my downloads developed during the last months:

So the big question is: How did I manage it to improve my downloads so much without any marketing and advertising.

Well, the popular app stores like iTunes, google Play or amazon are complex, very dynamic ecosystems.

It’s very hard to make good predictions. Often you’ll hear things like “Make a quality product and you will make money!”.

I’m very sorry to disappoint you but in my experience this is NOT true.

I’ve seen so many developers that worked hard on their game for many, many months. They created a fantastic end result. They released their amazing game and…… NOTHING happend. No Downloads. And “no downloads” equals to “no revenue”. So sure, quality is important, but it doesn’t guarantee you anything.

With this in mind I choose another strategy. My assumption was: Make more apps and you will get more downloads.More downloads = more revenue.

So with this in mind I focused to improve my workflow and tried to cut down the development time of my apps. I don’t want to get too technical but what I’ve mainly did to achieve this was:

• I’ve created a “framework/codebase” for fast prototyping and developing games (reusable components, cross platform, data driven, a scripting language for easy customize existing games/components, tools/editors that integrate well into the workflow)
• An easy workflow with lots of automation to create, maintain and publish an app as well as maintain assets and marketing material (description, keywords, screenshots, icons, resolutions for different stores etc.)
• Re-Skin existing apps for another target audience (with no or less coding involved)

It was the best app start I’ve ever had and people seem to LOVE this little gem.
Here is a short demo song of how this app sounds. Get ready to be blown away:

And here are the first user reviews I received:

As you can see, some users complained about the virbation feedback and it’s already fixed in the current version.

First of all I was in holidays in Mallorca with some good friends for 10 days. It was planned to stay there for 7 days but we missed our plane back home (note to myself: never book a return flight again that starts off early in the morning). Here is a picture we took in the Megapark:
Mallorca 2011 – I’m the one with Dennis’ hand on my face.

Back home I first analysed and organized the feedback of the nearly 200 beta-testers. The feedback was great, but it was also a lot of work to put every bug report and every feature idea into my issue tracker.

Then I worked on a lot of minor and major bugfixes and thought about which features and ideas I wanted to implement into the final game. On the map screen the player now has two paths he can select from.

The main path contains the path to treasure and fame. During game progression the player can collect hidden coins and catch some bananas. With those the player can buy/unlock levels on the second path, where he can rescue Captain Backwaters big love Mary’o'Malley.

I also worked many, many hours on level design. The final game will contain 100 levels (80 + 20), but I will hopefully release level-packs later on and I also hope that the players will create lots of cool user-generated-levels using the easy-to-use level editor.

Whats left is that I have to design the 20 bonus levels, then re-balance some of them and whats left after that is some polishing.

Last but not least Emmanuel from Graveyard Dogs is working right now on the last missing graphics.

Ok, so if you have a problem with facebook, that is not listed in the help area – you have a REAL problem. It seems impossible to reach a support person of facebook who can help you or, at least, can tell you if the problem will get fixed or not. I guess if you use the contact forms in the help area your message is put directly into trash.

So, okay let’s try to use the community boards. I found a few people having the same problem as I, so I also posted a message in the relating threads. The results are the same: Facebook is not interessted in my problems. Probably because they still have another 500 millions users if I have to leave their network because I can’t use my account anymore.

So, what’s next? Facebook has a bug tracker, where you can post issues. I found the exact problem already reported, so I added a comment, that I’m also facing this problem. Guess what happend? Nothing! Thank you, Facebook!