Artpunk's Forum Posts

  • I haven't had any decent games with 50.000+ downloads yet, so my numbers are not really a good model.

    Every 20-30$ I earn from ads, I earn about 1-2$ from an IAP to remove those ads. Nearly all those games had endless levels so the players don't really 'finish' the game. I'm sure a quality game will earn way more with IAP, in the form of currency or in-game-items.

    But like I said, I don't have any popular games with a lot of dowloads so I can imagine that a good game will earn more from IAP.

    I only recently started experimenting with Rewarded Interstitial Video's too, looking good so far, but I can't give any numbers yet.

    Thats interesting. Sounds like you easily make more revenue from ads than from the IAP to remove them. I had thought the revenue from each would be more even.

    Yes Ive heard that IAPs are a profitable way to monetize, but for my current game I am not aiming to add that level of complexity. I'm following the advice to keep my first game as simple as possible, I think for the first attempt its more important to just try to finish something, try to make it a good game, with good mechanics and fun to play, get it out there and try to generate good reviews and a following. Then afterwards, ill try to make future projects with in-game currency and IAPs for upgrades etc. Thats the mid - long term plan anyway.

  • saiyadjin Well, I haven't settled on a name for it at the moment. Still thinking about that. Its a simple platformer where you burn through the levels, dodging obstacles, killing enemies and collecting items. Levels will be short and fast, but as the game progresses the difficulty ramps up, hopefully making it challenging.

  • So basically I missed this post.

    I swapped over to using the new XDK proj format and I am now getting 60fps and <50% CPU usage on my iPhone5 with iOS builds from XDK!

    Super happy with this!!! Onward to make 60+ levels for my game!

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  • Hey tunepunk, on a completely unrelated topic for a second, did you notice our user names are similar? All we need is to find a guy called 'codepunk' and we could team up together and make a game studio called 'GamePunk' Ill do art, you do tunes, codepunk does the code.

    Maybe we'd need 'marketingpunk' too.

  • For that type of short game i would probably just sell it cheaply let's say 1-2$, nobody is gonna feel ripped off from a couple of hours of entertainment and no annoying ads. Most marketplaces have option to try the game first or refund within some time if you don't like it.

    Or .... you just release 2 versions which I've seen some do. One free with ads, and one for a small fee without the Ads. Release one without ads first, if nobody buys it, release a free version with ads.

    Anyway, I'm not sure what would best fit your game, but my guess is that you would earn a bit more by just charging for it.

    Ok so it sounds like the style of game I am making isn't really long enough to benefit too much from ads. So I should focus more on trying to get a one-off payment... either by Option 1: to remove ads from an otherwise free game OR to make it a paid game and charge a small fee right from the start. In both cases I would charge either 0.99c or 1.99c.

    I do option 1 in all my games, but don't show too many ads, 1 every 5 min or so, or only on certain events

    Hi Wishy. So you've had success with Option 1? Would you mind if I ask you some questions about your experience? I totally understand if you dont want to give away specific numbers, but just answer in general terms?

    -How much do you make from ads versus IAP to remove ads? Do you make more from ads or more from the fee to remove ads?

    -Roughly what % of your players bother to pay to remove ads? Like do most players finish your game in the free version, without bothering to pay to remove ads? Or do you find most of your players actually go ahead and pay the fee to remove ads?

    Thanks, only answer if you feel like sharing

  • if you are new on the market and you want to collect players for your games - option 1. maybe even start with no ads games / no money games to get some people to play your things. also marketing yourself around helps. once you have at least 100 000 players on each game.

    add ads. then add ingame items. then maybe make a pay once game (with ingame shop, no ads)

    ...ignore fully option 3....

    Yes its my first game so I have no following whatsoever!

    I dont think I could give it away for completely free at first. I want to generate *some* income from the game initially, even if its only a small amount.

    And yeah.. Option 3 might have the potential to annoy players and generate bad user reviews. Like, I think Id be annoyed to buy a game and then find I had to pay again to get rid of ads.

    Option 1 for sure, but depends the lifetime of the game.

    Are you sure about the ads model for the game? How long does the game last? How many levels? From what i heard, short games that you finish very quickly generally does better if you just sell it at a fee. Games that last long or has MANY levels usually does better with ads/IAP. If you plan on constantly updating with new levels etc, ads can also be good.

    Ads usually pays off best for games that players play often but little with longer lifetime, ie. Candycrush, Angrybirds. If someone finishes your game in a few days or a week then deletes it Ads/IAP usually is not a very good monetization.

    No Im not sure about the ads model at all. Ive only just started thinking about monetization.

    Its a very simple platform game and I'm aiming for something like 60 - 80 short levels. Each level might take between 30secs to say 1 - 2 minutes roughly. With levels getting longer and harder as the game progresses.

    So ads should be an ok way to generate income I hope.

    It sounds like Option 1 has more support for a first game. Seems like in the beginning its more important for a developer to just get as many players as possible.

    I think the trick with Option 1, would be to set it up so that the ads aren't too intrusive so the player doesn't delete the game on first play or something, but by the time they get half way through the game, the ads eventually become annoying enough that, the player opts to pay to remove them. But by that point you hope that the player likes the game enough to pay, and keep playing...

  • Im wondering what the best strategy is when it comes to game pricing and utilizing ads with mobile games. Im considering the following alternatives:

    Option.1

    Full game is Free, game has ads, in-app purchase (e.g. 0.99c) to remove ads.

    Option.2

    Lite version of the game is Free, only has 25% of game's levels, free version has ads.

    Full version of game is e.g. 0.99c, has all levels, full version has no ads.

    Option.3

    Lite version of the game is Free, only has 25% of game's levels, free version has ads.

    Full version of game is e.g. 0.99c, has all levels, full version does have ads, in-app purchase (e.g. 0.99c) to remove ads.

  • Ah that's what I'm doing wrong then. I'm not using the new XDK project format. Ok that's the first test tmoro morning.

  • Ok so WKWebView does work with Intel XDK as well? I read in the construct2 release notes for v224 (I think?) that Ashley hoped to get WKWebView working with XDK 'soon' but at that point it only worked with PhoneGap. So I wasn't sure if that had been achieved.

    Hmm I wonder what I'm doing wrong in XDK? Are there any tricks to get WKWebView working in XDK?

  • Well I took a pretty massive step forward with performance of my game on my old iP5 today. Check this out.

    iPhone5 now getting 55 - 60fps and around ~50% CPU usage.

    Improved from 40 - 50fps and 80 - 90%+ CPU usage.

    This improvement was made by swapping from building in Intel XDK to PhoneGap Build (using WKWebView).

    Boy did that make a difference!!!

    I spent most of yesterday and this morning trying to improve performance on my iPhone doing things like reducing the number of events in my game (mainly culling disabled events that were early attempts that didnt work etc), and trying to improve how I was using tilemaps... and these changes made incremental improvements, but nothing to write home about. But exporting with WKWebView ticked, and building in PhoneGap eclipsed any small optimizations I had made!

    One thing though, it didn't improve the load time for the levels, well perhaps a fractional improvement. But I still get a lag of ~4 seconds when going from a menu screen to a game level. A problem that doesn't happen on my Android test devices.

    Anyway... after getting this performance result I feel confident to continue on with building my game, knowing I should be able to get solid performance even on an older iPhone5..

  • Hi thanks for the reply. Yes I was stupidly testing mostly on my current phone. I knew the iP5 would be weaker than my Nexus5X but I didnt think it would as weak as that... live and learn.

    Thanks for the tips. I'm pretty certain I can get the number of events in my game down. With collisions, below is a screen shot showing collisions in the debugger. Is 5643 (209 p/tick) high? Could that be causing a problem? This reading was taken at the same point in the game as shown in the previously posted screen shots.

    Ashly, re what you said about the CPU measurements not matching. The screenshot showing 95% CPU usage was taken on the iP5 running the game as an app (built in XDK). I never mentioned CPU usage in my initial post (first post of thread). I only mentioned the FPS for iP5 (40-50fps). When you quoted me as saying 47%, which part of previous post(s) were you referring to. Let me know and Ill try to clarify. Thnx

  • Here are some screen shots I took on my two test devices. This is with the games running as apps built in XDK (not testing locally in a browser).

    Nexus 5X: 60fps, roughly 50% CPU usage (Is that good? I dont know how good that is).

    This is smooth game-play, snappy menus etc. V happy with this performance.

    iPhone5: fluctuates between 40-50fps, CPU usage fluctuates between 80 - 90+% (looks pretty high right?).

    Another problem with the iPhone not reflected by these numbers is that each level in the game takes a long time to load. 4-5 seconds compared to about 0.5 - 1 second on the Nexus. The game-play is 'playable' but not great. But I really want to fix the lag with levels loading. Thats a problem.

    I did an additional test. I had a suspicion that it could be the way I was using tilemaps in my game. Each level has 5 layers dedicated to tilemaps. I built the levels that way because I wanted to layer the background to have a foreground, midground and background. And I have two layers for collision tilemaps, one being solids and one having the jumpThru behaviour.

    So I wondered if all these tilemeaps might be causing slow performance on the iPhone, so I deleted out the layers with artwork in them (highlighted red in the image below) and just left the two collision layers (which are invisible in the screen shot).

    This seemed to have a small effect on FPS (45 - 55fps) and CPU utilization (80 - 88%). But it improved the load times of each level a lot! The levels now load in about 1 second without those additional tilemaps.

    So if I want my game to run nicely on lower end iPhones, Im going to have to improve the way I make my backgrounds and use tilemaps differently. Otherwise it will only be people with decent phones that can run my game

    ... Id like to test on an iPhone6... and Id also like to know how many people use iPhone5 and below globally...

  • Well. When I preview locally, The CPU usage is the following :

    Nexus 5X: 50 - 52%

    iPhone5: 55 - 58%

    Im not looking at the debugger to get those values though, rather I am running an event that displays FPS and CPU Usage on the screen every tick while the game is running as recommended in the manual: just setting a text object top say (fps & " FPS, " & round(cpuutilisation * 100) & "% CPU (" & renderer & ")"

    I find that if I look at the CPU usage and FPS with the debugger open I get very different values, I think thats due to the debugger itself using system resources right? So I am working on the assumption that when testing locally you get a better measure of FPS and CPU usage by using the event above.

    Also, the same event tells me the FPS and CPU usage for my game when running as an app on my two test devices. And I get different values again in that case. Ill post some screen caps to illustrate.

  • I am quoting those values from the Profiler tab in the Debugger.

    So those values are when previewing my game in browser over local network. I just thought the values there might be indicate a reason for reduced performance in the game on iP5 when built in XDK and installed as an app. Hope that makes sense... I'm muddling my way through a bit. This is my first game.

  • Silhouettes?