Period of Absence

Well, after a long absence from posting on this blog I have finally returned to update on our recent progress!

What Has Happened:

 

Let's see.. for starters Android Market is no longer known by that name. So if you look at past posts making reference to it, Google has now dubbed their mobile market "Google Play Store". I know, not nearly as catchy. All the same, we still love Android as a platform even with their questionable name change. 

Our first game TwoD_mentia has a grand total of ~2000 downloads now which is pretty significant for not even being finished! But now onto the big news...

We released our new game we've been working on! Kitten Vs. Zombie!

I've already updated the blog with a new page for it as well as added media on the media page. Currently I have it up on Google Play and it should be up on several other markets in the next few days. Consistent with our older posts, I plan to give an in depth look at our download statistics with these new markets as time passes.

There's also an exciting new feature to document as our new game starts getting noticed! I've implemented Tapjoy, an incentive based download system which should prove to be an interesting look at alternate methods than Ads or charging for apps. The downloads cost no money to users and it is completely optional if you want to take a look at the offers (they aren't imposed on you like other ad methods). So you can look foward to the results being documented in the near future.

Download Stats I

Now that we've been on SlideMe, Android Market, Code.Google, and Indievania for a while now we've finally got some growth numbers to show off!

Downloads As of October 19th:

Android Market  :  211

Code.Google       :  43

SlideMe              :  63

Indievania          :  0                                             Total  =  320 downloads

**Some side notes*

• We have currently been on Android Market the longest (since October 1st) so we expected to see the largest number of downloads here. Something to consider about Androids' statistics; I'm not sure how often they are updated because the number of active installs on the first day was at 46 when I had 0 user installs showing
• Code.Google has pretty much been abandoned as far as downloads are going since the release of the market download (probably because we put a huge button that said "Available in Android Market" on that page) It's still interesting to track the page visits though as we get quite a bit of traffic
• SlideMe has seen significant growth since we put it up just a few days ago (October 13th) Overall this market alone accounted for 20% of the total downloads from the past 6 days alone. A viable alternative to any developer trying to reach a larger audience
• Indievania has been the least successful at 0 downloads since releasing. I think this site might be more focused on pc gaming development rather than Android at this point in time

Mid-October Update:

I know that not many people read this blog as of now, but I still think it's important to document my studio's work so far for future reference (like if we become popular later!).

So, Here's What's Been Going on This Month:

 

 

TwoD_mentia v0.1.2 was released bringing:

• New levels (and updates for old ones) to players  
• Minor bug fixes were made

 

 

Quite a bit of P.R. management has been going on:

• Initially I started the project on my DeviantArt profile, posting journals of my progress. I'm not sure I actually got anyone interested in my game here (my total page views are only 400), but I wanted to feel like I was marketing it somehow during development!
• Soon I moved over to code.google using our project page to market to other developers and the Replica Island coding community who were very helpful in giving feedback
• Eventually we forked over the $25 developer fee and uploaded our app to the Android Market! This officially gave us a label as an Android Development Studio
• In attempt to reach a larger audience, we have also uploaded the app to some third party distributors namely, Indievania and SlideMe. We have yet to see significant growth from these markets though
• Finally we created what you see here, our Studio Development Blog

We've reached 200+ downloads for the app in total and have a 5 star rating in the market!

Studio Description

You might already have some idea of who we are because well, you found our blog. For anyone who doesn't have any idea and somehow ended up here, we must be really interesting looking then!, here's our basic description:

• We are a game development studio created by Sean Kinnane when he developed his first game "TwoD_mentia". This page is going to be the main place we will be posting news on future releases, updates to our older games, and pretty much anything that relates to us that might be interesting to you, our audience. 
• While we aren't necessarily a "professional" studio by any means, we hope to release quite a few projects under this name in the near future. Really, we just needed a name to use as an identifier in the Android market and this seemed very fitting in relation to the name of our first project.
• If you have any feedback to what we're doing here let us know (things like suggestions to our older releases, what you would like to see next, etc.) We already have quite a few ideas for our next releases, but feel free to share what you would like to see us work on.
• Supporters and fans of TwoD_mentia: Don't worry, as ambitious as we are, we will be supporting all of our games until they are in a finished state and adding updates to fix problems / make changes as needed regularly.

• Ok, as of now I'm still the only one heading the studio, not sure why I keep saying we, but I do have some people that test my games consistently before each release, so I guess they could count as members, right?