Archive for January, 2009

Progress Report

Sunday, January 11th, 2009

I am currently working on:

1. Port of BANG2D / Mouse House to Wiiware the down load based Wii distribution system. Right now the engine has been ported to Code Warrior and is compiling for Wii. Next up I have to fill in a few abstraction layers for the Wii, example reading data from files. Right now I’m just a bit hung up on which APIs I should be using :)

2. Improving the engine.  There were a few features missing from the engine that are need for doing games past the scale of Mouse House.  Examples are a fast culling system for drawing and for hit detection. This week I implemented a 2D Spatial Hash Table that basically divides 2D space into a loose grid of cell based on a Hash value.  This results in like a x100 speed up for collision detection no matter how large the tile map or level size is.

3. We have a few more games in the works based on variations of the Mouse House engine. Alex has started work on levels and art for them.

4. Im slowly designing a number of data driven frameworks for different genres of games. This includes 1 for RPGs and 1 for games like that lawyer game on the DS.

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Mouse House Updated to 1.1.1

Sunday, January 11th, 2009

Changes:

  1. Sped up engine hit detection a bit.
  2. Removed the annoying confirmation boxes about using GPS location.

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January Sales Data

Sunday, January 11th, 2009

01/01/2008 - Units  95 - Price $.99 - Gross $94.05  - Profit $62.55
01/02/2008 - Units  110 - Price $.99 - Gross $108.90  - Profit $73.01
01/03/2008 - Units  87 - Price $.99 - Gross $86.13  - Profit $54.23
01/04/2008 - Units  75 - Price $.99 - Gross $74.25  - Profit $47.84
01/05/2008 - Units  64 - Price $.99 - Gross $63.36  - Profit $41.86
01/06/2008 - Units  46 - Price $.99 - Gross $45.54  - Profit $28.78
Last night I changed the price to 1.99$ and tonight an update was approved
So we will see what effect that has next.
01/07/2008 - Units  29 - Price $1.99 - Gross $0.00  - Profit $31.13
This day is off, from price raise
01/08/2008 - Units  52 - Price $1.99 - Profit $70.91
01/09/2008 - Units  37 - Price $1.99 - Profit $49.70
01/10/2008 - Units  52 - Price $1.99 - Profit $67.85
Even though MH is slowly dropping in rank world wide with the price rise and a actively visible update we are  making better money on par with some of hour better days with press coverage. The general conclusion for us is that shipping an update is as good as a press story for sales.

Anyhow we are now aiming to make $1000 a month on Mouse House using a combination of weekly updates and sales. 10 Day into January and we are 1/2 there.  If things go maybe we can bring in $1200.  Maintaining that for a year would generate a nice $12k-18K, Which might not sound like a whole lot for a full time developer. But living up here in Minnesota it is possible to live  happily on 35K a year.  Shipping 2 more products on par with Mouse House should get us past our break even point for 1 full time employee. Now that our engine technology and tools are completed and proven this should go fairly fast.

01/12/2008 -  01/24/2008
Settled down to a steady 40 copies a day at 1$ or around 30$ a day profit.
Raising the price to 2.99$ only made of lose a lot of ranks.
Lowering the price to .99$ has let us slowly gain ranks world wide.
MH is now 22 on the Adventure list in the UK for example.

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