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Quickly Convert Your Game Music to AAC on OSX

A Post With Numbers In

Update (April 6, 2011): Hit 4,000 sales last month, and well on the way to 5k!

I haven’t made a real substantial blog post in a while but with my trip to GDC rapidly approaching and Red Nova being featured by Apple in “What We’re Playing” as well as a fairly significant milestone in sales of the game I figured it may be interesting to some to post some numbers, and talk a little about where Celsius Game Studios Inc. (oh yeah, I also got incorporated!) is headed in the near future.

First of all, the bit you’re probably here for: The Numbers™. Many developers are hesitant to discuss specific sales figures, either for fear of being seen as unsuccessful or because their sales are directly tied to their income, which I suppose is why these sorts of things are still generally interesting. I feel that Red Nova has been relatively successful so far and because sales of the game do not directly tie into my own income I think I can safely say that the sales of Red Nova are… *dramatic pause*… larger than a breadbox and smaller than an exotic super-car.

Okay, in all seriousness, and this is pretty exciting for me: as of this weekend Red Nova handily sailed past 3,000 sales. All over a period of just over 2 months.

While some of you may be looking at that and saying “big deal, Angry Birds sells that many copies in, like, thirty seconds” understand that the average iPhone app will see approximately 100-200 downloads over its entire lifetime. Sales-wise, Red Nova is already in the top 7% of games on the App Store! While I’m not popping any champagne corks just yet, considering that with no money spent on advertising, relatively poor circumstances surrounding the launch over the holidays and the fact that up until recently I was pretty much unknown as a game developer, I think I’m doing quite well for myself.

As I mentioned in an earlier blog post, Red Nova still hasn’t hit its stride, and I don’t expect it to right away. Ultimately my plan all along was to release the game in episodic “chunks” to help make it easier to develop the game and grow its audience at the same time, especially seeing as, at least in the short term, I’m still limited in the time I can spend working on it. Also early sales help support the development of future episodes not unlike how Minecraft‘s sales model works, where the people buying the game now are getting an already good game for a low(-low!) price as well as a bunch of new content for free. So, I’d just like to take a moment to thank everyone that has already gotten the game so far for helping me realize my dream of becoming a game developer!

That being said over the next few months I’m planning on expanding Celsius beyond just myself, continuing development on new episodes and feature updates for Red Nova and, closer to the end of the year, beginning work on an exciting new game project I (cryptically!) hinted at a few weeks ago on Twitter which I think will be pretty damn awesome, and when I’m ready to talk about it in more detail I hope you’ll agree with me

So, here’s to the future… it may still be up-hill, but it’s looking bright!

Red Nova: The Week That Was

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Despite my tendency to not frequently post to the blog here as much as I’d like, I figured I should probably post something about the launch of Red Nova seeing as it’s been out for a whole week. This isn’t exactly a post-mortem, but it’ll be nice to talk about how the launch went.

Cutting to the chase, the launch exceeded my expectations with the game racking up a number of impressive reviews from a bunch of review sites including TouchArcade, 148Apps and AppSpy (which I shall present at the end of the post). Sales for the first few days were also suitably impressive but due to a number of big-name launches on Thursday (expected) and EA lowering the price on over 60 of their games to $0.99 (unexpected!) enough noise was created to effectively put a damper on things. I knew I could probably weather Thursday’s big launch announcements because not all of those games would be at the same price point, but I’m fairly certain between pushing other apps down the ranks along with Red Nova and the $0.99 price point the EA sale had a negative effect on the launch.

In the below graphs, green represents Arcade, red Action and blue All Games.

US iPhone Chart: This is a graph of both excitement and disappointment

Backed by a number of positive reviews the game shot up the charts, even briefly hitting 156 (or so) in the Top 200 iPhone Games on the US App Store. It hit 44 in Arcade and very nearly hit 50 in Action games as well. I even suspect if this wasn’t such a volatile time on the App Store those rankings would have probably been a bit stickier, and with hindsight being 20/20 there are definitely some downsides to launching during the holidays. However it’s entirely possible that had I not launched when I did things may have played out differently in other unpredictable ways and I can’t exactly take the launch back, so there’s no sense wasting time wondering what could have been. Also, the holidays aren’t even over yet, Red Nova is moving around in quite a few iPad charts, is seeing some good movement in Germany and Japan on the iPhone, and I may have an ace or two left up my sleeve so who knows what could happen in a week’s time

US iPad Chart: The term "rollercoaster" comes to mind here

All that being said, I knew the risks of launching this time of the year and even if you could potentially call the sale an unfair move, business is business and I’d rather focus on all the positive things that came out of the launch instead of things I can not change. This is definitely a beginning, and a pretty damn good one at that.

Special thanks, as always, to Dave Frampton for the ever-awesome (and free) MajicRank.

Red Nova Review Roundup

Red Nova received a number of reviews in the first week. Most of which were overwhelmingly positive, and even the more negative reviews hit a lot of the good points so I think in this respect I’m off to a great start. I think my favorite part is how most of the sites caught on to the different things I was trying to bring to the table with the game’s unique control scheme that I designed for the ground up to be less frustrating (though by its nature less intuitive) than what we’ve seen in action games on iOS thus far.

TouchArcade – I’d call this one overwhelmingly positive. I couldn’t have hoped for a better review. “It has an interesting premise, one of the smartest control schemes I’ve seen, Game Center integration for high score bragging rights, and above all else it’s just a blast to play.”

AppSpy – Can’t go wrong with “almost flawless”. Also I believe this is my first video review ever, which was pretty exciting. “Red Nova may only be limited to the single gameplay mode, but its execution is almost flawless and perfectly suited for all iDevices.”

148Apps – A mostly positive review but Ben definitely put the game under the microscope. I don’t think that’s a bad thing as the only way to improve is to know where your flaws are. “From the superb control scheme to all of the small enhancements mentioned earlier in the review it is clear that Red Nova is, indeed, a very professional product.”

Slide to Play – Slide to Play gave the game a 2/4, which is not awful, but I have it on good authority it was very nearly a 3. A goal to strive for with future Episodes I think! “Red Nova has some interesting ideas, but they don’t always work out the way they should.”

Simple-Reviews – Definitely can’t go wrong with a 4.5/5. “Red Nova is a must have game for anyone who loves space shooter type games!”

Oaggle – Definitely seemed to really dig the game! “It’s well worth the $0.99, and I’d even say that it is a must have.”

Wifivoltage – Short but sweet review. “I’m not into making big gaming reviews, all I know is that I only bother to do some when I find something I really like and well… I did this one so, go get it!”

Meet – A pretty big Japanese website that gave the game a 3.5/5. I had trouble translating it but it seems that they had some trouble getting the shields to work correctly but otherwise they appear to like it! I suspect the control difficulty could be chalked up to the language barrier, but that’s only speculation at this point.

Touch my Apps – Not exactly a review, but Touch my Apps included Red Nova in a list of “10+ New App Store Games To Watch” which is pretty awesome, I’d say!

Chromodyne: A Successful Failure

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I’ve been thinking for a while about writing up a postmortem of my first crack at making a Real Game, Chromodyne, for a while now. The worry is, of course, that someone may look at this as some sort of horrific waste of time and tell me I’m mad for trying to break into the App Store when… oh my god it has how many apps? However in all honesty, despite the less than stellar sales leading to what one might declare a failure on the App Store, for a number of other reasons, I feel Chromodyne has been incredibly successful and I wouldn’t have it any other way (well, except maybe the whole not selling well part).

What the hell are you talking about?

What I mean when I say “successful” I mean that on the whole, even considering the time I spent working on it only to have it sell a few hundred copies so far, I still learned a lot of valuable lessons, met a lot of awesome other developers, and it helped prove to me that I had what it takes to develop an entire video game from start to finish and to kick myself in the ass and finally decide that I should follow my dream of becoming a game developer.

What went wrong?

There were a few key things that I feel went wrong that, hindsight being 20/20, I would have done differently. Here they are in no particular order:

Not enough exposure – I didn’t enter into this whole App Store dealio completely blind to the fact that in order to become successful people need to know about your app. I definitely made a decent stab at it, but my relative newness to the whole scene plus working a full-time job at the time hampered my ability to really get the word out.
Poor branding - I fretted a long while over trying to give the game a neat and catchy title, as you should try to do, however I really didn’t think this whole “Chromodyne” thing through. After trying to explain the game to others in person, it’s definitely a clumsy name when spoken and makes it difficult for that whole “word of mouth” thing to work when people don’t know how to spell it to look it up online. Also, in retrospect, the icon could probably have used a bit more work to make it pop more on device and on the app store.
Fiddly controls – One problem you can not ignore in game design is how your players interact with the game. If the player is constantly fighting with the controls they will never truly get to enjoy the game and you run the risk of them abandoning it for something else. In the case of Chromodyne, I was well aware of the issues with the controls and tried to minimize their impact as much as possible, but by the very nature of the game field layout it meant that the inner-most rings were difficult to touch accurately. As well, I felt that with practice people would become better at the game and that’s what many of the reviews revealed. However, as the cliche goes, the first impression is the best impression.
Choosing an over-represented genre – Approximately 105% (or so) of the games on the App Store are match-3 games. Even though one cynical critic (the only bad web review I received, I might add) accused me of trying to jump on the App Store Gold Rush Bandwagon(tm) the reason I decided to try my hand at a match-3 game for my first game was because I felt it would be much easier for me to complete a game with a smaller scope in a reasonable amount of time. Speaking from experience, I have a tendency to come up with grand designs which would take a large team a couple of years to complete, so I had to learn to work within my own ability to actually make something.

What went right?

Learned a lot about game development – If anything I took away from this whole experience, it was a lot of experience about the game development process, including learning things about the iOS platform, the App Store, and various new programming techniques that helped make it a lot easier when I started work on my second game, Red Nova.
Made something I’m proud of - Despite all I’ve said about Chromodyne so far, it’s my creation and I’m really happy that I made it. It may not be perfect, but it has gotten some good reviews and on balance it may not be the best game in the world but it’s still pretty darn good. As well, I think the thing I’m most proud of are the story and characters I created for the game and maybe some day in the future Gary and Zarlax will ride again
I’m following my dream – As I’ve mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve struggled over the years trying to figure out what direction I was going to take in my life. Games and game development have definitely been a passion of mine, and it’s something that I’ve always wanted to do professionally, but ultimately I had to make Chromodyne first to prove to myself that I had the ability. So Chromodyne was the catalyst of this at times scary but entirely exciting new path I’ve taken in my life. Also, it helped to show the people at the Genesis Centre, the startup incubator I’ve been accepted into, that I have what it takes to, as they say, do this thang.
Met a lot of amazing people – Through all of this I’ve met and connected with some really great people in the game development community on the internet at large and it’s really helping me feel like I’m a part of the industry now, however small my part is at the moment.

What’s next?

After six months in development, I’m on the verge of submitting my new game Red Nova to the App Store, and from all I’ve learned and all I’ve worked towards I’m confident it will be more successful than Chromodyne. How successful, I have no idea, but hopefully enough that it will allow me to keep working on adding updates to Red Nova and to start making other even more complicated games in the future. That being said, I’m currently working on getting into a position where I’ll be able to hire a 3D artist early in the new year. In addition to taking Celsius Game Studios from “one guy hacking on games in his living room” status into “if you squint hard enough, it looks like a real company” territory, it’ll help me focus solely on game design and development and allow for the creation of a larger variety of and even better looking art assets than I can eke out with my meagre art ability.

Finally, in celebration of Chromodyne being on the App Store for a little over a year (since October!) I am going to, tongue firmly in cheek, declare Chromodyne and Chromodyne HD Celsius Game Studios Not-Quite-Greatest-Hits and drop the price permanently to $0.99. You can learn more about them at the game’s page.

A More Robust Game Center Availability Check

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I just wanted to share the small addition I made to the isGameCenterAvailable() function Apple provides for checking to see if Game Center is available/supported by a particular device.

The reason this is necessary is because the iPhone 3G supports iOS 4.1+ however it does not support Game Center, therefore the Apple-provided isGameCenterAvailable() will say GC is supported, when it is in fact, not.

Enjoy!

Edit: Some people have questioned why I should do this, especially when Apple themselves recommend against it. This is because the current Game Center login dialog as presented in-game when calling authenticateWithCompletionHandler has absolutely no information as to the purpose of the login. While most people will rightfully assume it’s for Game Center, there are still a number of reports of users getting angry at developers thinking that they are trying to steal their login information. So the idea here is to use this code in conjunction with a friendly dialog explaining the impending Game Center login and how awesome it is, thus reducing the potential for user confusion. The reason you want to check for the 3G is so you don’t present your “I’m about to log in to Game Center” dialog and then… not log in to Game Center.

If the situation with the dialog improves, or the 3G is ever graced with Game Center support, it is easy enough to update your game to take out the check for the device.

#import <GameKit/GameKit.h>
#import <sys/utsname.h>
 
bool isGameCenterAvailable()
{
	// Check for presence of GKLocalPlayer API.
	Class gcClass = (NSClassFromString(@"GKLocalPlayer"));
	// The device must be running running iOS 4.1 or later.
	NSString *reqSysVer = @"4.1";
	NSString *currSysVer = [[UIDevice currentDevice] systemVersion];
	bool osVersionSupported = ([currSysVer compare:reqSysVer options:NSNumericSearch] != NSOrderedAscending);
 
	if(gcClass && osVersionSupported)
	{
		struct utsname systemInfo;
		uname(&systemInfo);
		//iPhone 3G can run iOS 4.1 but does not support Game Center
		if(strcmp(systemInfo.machine, "iPhone1,2") == 0)
		{
			return false;
		}else{
			return true;
		}
	}else{
		return false;
	}
}

Red Nova Beta Testing

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Edit: Just wanted to say thank you for such an amazing response and beta testing is now nearing completion! Thanks for your interest, and hopefully Red Nova will be out soon!

I have a few more device slots that I’m able to set aside for beta testing of Red Nova, so I’m wondering if there’s anyone else out there who wants to help me make the game as awesome as I possibly can.

I can’t offer much in compensation right now except for a “Beta Tester” credit in the credits for the game and the satisfaction that you’ll gain in knowing you helped me make sure Red Nova doesn’t cause people’s iPhones to explode violently when adjusting the in-game volume (I promise I’ll try really hard not to explode your iPhone, violently or otherwise, during the beta). Also, you get to be among the first people ever to play Red Nova which I think, despite my obvious bias, is pretty damn cool.

Anyway, that being said what I’m looking for is both feedback on the game itself as well as help in finding any bugs in the code.

If you’re interested you can email me at colin[at]celsiusgs.com (after replacing the [at] with the appropriate symbol ) or @reply me on Twitter with whatever devices you have and when I’m done compiling the list of potential beta testers I’ll get back to you if I’m able to add you to the beta or not!

As for the beta itself, I’m planning on making a pre-beta build available sometime this week for those that are interested in trying out the gameplay. I’m still in the polishing stage, so there are some rough edges and things that are just plain missing. I’m pretty excited though and I really want to share the game with others to see if they feel the same way.

The plan after that is to seed the first full beta in a week or two, once everyone has had a chance to play around with the pre-beta build and I’ve had a chance to take a grinding wheel to the rest of the code

GameFontMaker

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GameFontMaker

July 9th Update: GamefontMaker is now at 1.0.0 beta 2 and it’s also been released under the GPLv2. You can find the latest version and source over here!

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything to the blog, so I figured I’d do something a bit special to try and get into the swing of things. So, I present to you what I think may be the first native Cocoa bitmap font creation tool for games, GameFontMaker!

At least, I think it is… Maybe… I didn’t do a lot of research, but I have seen a lot of fellow iOS devs wishing something like this existed for OS X, as the only other alternative runs under Windows.

Even if it isn’t, I was getting sick and tired of my really awful bitmap font creation tool that used FTGL, SDL and duct tape and generally produced hideous bitmaps without a lot of fudging of numbers. This is much, much better than that.

Anyway, GameFontMaker is currently in “beta” so don’t come crying to me if your computer explodes or anything. Though in my defense it hasn’t caused my MacBook to explode, and it was way less stable when I started it about 12 hours ago!

This is also my first Cocoa app, so forgive me if it’s a bit rough around the edges.

That being said, if you do find a bug or have a suggestion you could always drop me an email at: colin[at]celsiusgs[dot]com.

So, you’re itching to create some decent bitmap fonts for your game? Well, GameFontMaker is pretty easy to use. From the main window:

GameFontMaker Main Window

You can select the font by clicking on the “Fonts” toolbar button, doing so updates the preview. Once you’re satisfied with your selection, click “Export Font” which opens a file dialog. Choose the file name here, it will automatically choose a .png extension. Once you make sure you’re not overwriting an important system file or your taxes or what have you, click “Save”. This will invoke an ancient spell designed to end the world (and generate fonts) and will cause GFM to spit out a PNG file with all the printable ASCII characters in a line, also it will produce <filename>.png.xml which is an XML file that describes all the character dimensions. It has the following format:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<fontdata>
	<glyph>
		<character> </character>
		<width>7</width>
		<height>25</height>
		<offset>0</offset>
	</glyph>
...
</fontdata>

Right now the output isn’t ideal for using directly as a texture atlas, but hopefully the PNG plus the XML file can be put to some good use. Once I get some more time I will add support for defining the PNG size and altering the XML output.

Anyway, GameFontMaker is free to use for all sorts of purposes, however if you do find it useful you could always have a look at my games or maybe follow me on The Twitters. Enjoy!

Chromodyne Lite

Thoughts on the iPad

A Trio of Reviews!

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More shameless horn tooting lies ahead! *toot toot*

DIY Gamer implores the world to “Buy Chromodyne, Now!” I couldn’t agree more!

Touch iPhone Games gets so addicted to Chromodyne that they kill their iPod battery after playing it for longer than expected!

And finally, Keri Honea from Examiner.com says “Fans of this sort of puzzle game should all give Chromodyne a try.” Difficult to argue with, I say.

I’m so excited that people seem to have mostly good things to say about Chromodyne, and that the few negative points will eventually be dealt with as I continue to hone Chromodyne into the best puzzle game I can deliver.