Ball of Woe [RELEASED]

Community Showcases
1

It’s an exciting time to be alive right here, I tell you.

Our bold new game - “Ball of Woe” has just hit the App Store for iPad.

A promo video, of sorts

I thought I’d condense all of the interesting points into a list here - and follow it up with a development-styled video that has a more tangible walk-through of the game itself and some of its more interesting features.

Description:

It’s bizarre! It’s dark! It’s colorful! It’s cute! It makes you want to brush your teeth! It’s… Ball of Woe!

You - are God. A dusty God. A sepia God. A grittier kind of God.

The citizens of Nicetown are sad. And cute. And whiny.

But they’ve taken uncharacteristic initiative and rolled their sadness up into a ball.

Oh God - oh You - employ your salty finger, employ the magic of physics - and liberate them from their tribulations.

Over a lush soundtrack, over deliciously-painted landscapes, roll the ball away from Nicetown, interrogate the Woeful, liberate the Zus, engage in a little light mail tampering… and roll.

Roll through Forest. Roll over Mountain.
Roll through Volcano and through Cave.
Roll through the Clouds, roll into Space.

And then?

Roll into Heaven. A Heaven… of sorts.

Platform: iPad (staggered release: iPad, Android (Google Play), iPhone, Android (Amazon))
Price: Free
Website: http://www.ballofwoe.com
App Store link: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ball-of-woe/id550811932
Plugins used: Tidy TileMapper, Prime31 Social Networking, Prime31 Storekit, Prime31 Chartboost, PlayHaven, RevMob
Monetization: In-app purchases (virtual currency and ‘powerups’), Interstitials (from one of three networks randomly chosen at startup)
Team Size: Two.
Development Time: Five-and-a-half months.

That’s me, talking vaguely through a short play-through of the game

We made some moderately risky but calculated design choices - we’re hoping they’ll be well-received.

Thanks for stopping by! As always I’d love to answer any questions you might have and what-not.

-JFFM

2

Looks fun, gonna test it out. :stuck_out_tongue:

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You had me at “It makes you want to brush your teeth!” :slight_smile:

Had my first look at it last night and sat for a good five minutes just watching (and listening to) the cool little bouncing-ball menu. Looking forward to spending more time exploring this thing.

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@SteveJ That bouncing ball is hypnotic! When I first made it I looked down upon what I had done and said: “I have created a monster”.

-JFFM

5

This is great!

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Thanks Gene! We’ve been getting some pretty encouraging feedback. And people seem to be finding the video hilarious (mainly because “It’s so hyperactive. What did I just watch??”)

-JFFM

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And by way of a tiny little release log (because some people might find it useful)

Day One on the (iPad) App Store

Marketing: Minimal (establishing a baseline). A post to Twitter, Facebook and an update to our blog, along with this post right here.
RevMob: 402 impressions, 120 clicks, 1 install (CTR: 29.85% eCPM: $3.66)
PlayHaven More Games: TBA: See below
PlayHaven Interstitials: TBA: See below
Chartboost: 432 impressions, 14 clicks, 1 install (CTR: 3.24%, eCPM: $2.69)
Twitter shares from in-game: 15

Note: I disabled RevMob midway through the day, as it was opening ads even though users were clicking ‘close’; which explains the high CTR.
Double Note: Well - through my own stupid fault I messed up the PlayHaven interstitials for our release build, so they’ll have to wait for an update to go through. (Chartboost accepts an empty string as default placement, PlayHaven doesn’t - but in a test build, it will display interstitials anyway - so I forgot to add a proper placement).

-JFFM

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Don’t forget that TouchArcade thread…

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It’s on my whiteboard :wink: We’re spacing all of our actions out by a few days so we get a clean set of analytics and can (relatively scientifically) say:

“[×] generated around [y] downloads, [z] generated around [w] downloads…” and all of that.

I think we’ll likely do it tomorrow evening (and then next Monday start doing some paid promotions).

It’s all pretty exciting and frustrating stuff!

-JFFM

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I realised I sounded a little naggy there. Apologies for that… :slight_smile:

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@SteveJ no way man - it’s much appreciated! It shows that you care :smile:

Edit: Done. Boy, venturing onto new forums is like venturing out into the wilderness. I know the Unity forums. I can stretch my head around them. TouchArcade is a brave new world to me.

-JFFM

12

Congratulations!

Nice game you have there.

Could you comment on ad networks performance?

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Hi @hexdump,

I can comment on my inability to do a good job implementing ad networks :smile:

We launched with RevMob, PlayHaven and Chartboost.

I cancelled RevMob on the first day (about 6 hours after launch) because its 35% CTR seemed to be a result of very suspicious ad-opening behaviour.

I broke our PlayHaven integration on the day of submission by running a (very silly) Find and Replace all Debug.Log with //Debug.Log - which broke their event handling.

So we’re left with Chartboost. Which is excellent. Right now we’re getting about 3.5% CTR, which is pretty respectable, with maybe a 20% install rate (I’d like that to be a little higher, but it’s in the hands of the advertiser).

We’re submitting an update today that will fix PlayHaven and also add Vungle (video ads) - but will halve the frequency of ads and add a “Remove Ads” option.

I’ll keep you posted when this goes live and we get a better volume coming through the app.

It’s been an exciting learning process, I tell you.

-JFFM

14

Wow. Look at that negligent update frequency.

But in more exciting news; the Ball of Woe update has just gone live!

It includes:

  1. iPhone support
  2. Halved ad frequency
  3. Infrequent video advertisement (skippable, a full view is rewarded with virtual currency)
  4. IAP to “Remove all Ads”
  5. A ‘breadcrumb’ screen to say: “You are only [×] virtual currency away from unlocking [some item]”
  6. A new icon. Our old icon didn’t really scream “DOWNLOAD ME!”.

And now, have an anecdote about advertisements - because I think it will be interesting to you:

For the past two weeks we’ve been using Chartboost exclusively for our interstitials. Chartboost is nice, it delivers nice-looking ads.

So we decided (as an experiment) to do some advertising of our own with Chartboost.

We set a daily budget of $100. (That’s the minimum). For a two-person team, that’s not a trivial amount of money (although in the advertising world it’s peanuts).

Chartboost warns you “Your budget may be exceeded by 10-15% as our advertisements are delivered ‘at the speed of light’” - so we factored this and fed our account $150.

Within 1 hour and 7 minutes, that budget had been used up. Whoa!

During that time we received approximately 20,000 impressions, 3,000 clicks but only around 25 installs. This was expected - we hadn’t targetted the campaign to app or region (so the ad got displayed in a lot of shovelware apps).

As Chartboost operates within a different timezone, a few hours later the “next day” of the campaign launched.

Within 1 hour, our $100 budget had been exceeded… by $500. Yes, our $100 daily campaign had become a $600 daily campaign. We hadn’t had time to tune this campaign (as we were buying groceries - how banal). Once again, it delivered a very low install rate.

I spoke with Chartboost support about this insane exceeding of our budget (that’s a little higher than 10-15%) but it’s a “that’s how it works” proposition, which I understand.

Apps cache interstitials, and display them at some stage - and Chartboost budgets on clicks, not caching requests - so by the time the click budget has been reached, the ad may have been cached 6-times over the set limit.

So that’s a little learning experience for us all.

Chartboost is a great ad network, don’t get me wrong. But if you’re a minnow like us with shoestring budgets - be very wary. Seeing that sort of budget blowout is like being hit in the stomach with a brick.

That’s my anecdote!

Enjoy :wink:

-JFFM