We haven’t done an update to this page for a while…sorry about that…but when a threshold of 4 million games played is reached it just has to be mentioned

It’s all been busy busy busy at foo factory HQ.  We have an additional 16 levels of chaos winging their way through the Apple App Store approval process.  Desert scenes have been added with a cool new game element of a boulder chasing you along the course in a “Indiana Jones” style which quite frankly, freaks you out!

Also added are the Lunar levels.  You’ll need to grab yourself a set of gravity wheels from the garage otherwise you’re going to hit a ramp…and then hit an asteroid belt!  The Lunar levels also have gravity zones where your vehicle will be sucked up and flipped over so that you’re driving upside down.  Takes a bit of practice to get the hang of it.

We’ve also added a new feature as requested by @cphelan a long long time ago.  When you’re ripping along at a fair old clip we now zoom out so you can see what’s coming up ahead.

Finally, we’re releasing a paid version to complement our free/IAP version which is called Ramp Racer Extreme.  We’re pricing it at £1.99 which comes with all garage items unlocked and the ability to skip levels without payment.  The paid game represents over £5.00 or in-app purchase.  Yeah man, we’re sharing the love.

1,000,000 plays bwahahahahaa.

Ramp Racer has passed 1,000,000 games played.  Quite an accomplishment.  We’re just preparing a further 16 levels of mayhem.  Eight levels are based in the desert with boulders chasing you down the course and a further 8 levels are based on the moon with gravity inverters, asteroids and all sorts of dangerous stuff.

We’re also releasing a paid version that comes with all the garage items ready to go, and it’ll work out cheaper than the equivalent In App Purchase too. 

The Americans have barely woken up yet and our daily downloads have gone from 240 per day to 1600.  Praise be to the good people at freeappaday.com.  I’ll do another post in a few days and we’ll see how the curve goes

Now if all those people would like to make an IAP I’ll be a happy little boy.

So we got approved by Apple at the end of last week and our Universal Binary is up there for all to play with.  We also inserted advertising which means a trickle of ad revenue is now making its way to the foo factory xmas party fund.

The big news though is that we finally managed to get a release on the market timed nicely to be promoted by freeappaday.com.  Not too sure how successful this round of promotion will be but fingers and toes are definitely crossed.  I’ll be making a post here in a week or so with some pretty graphs to evaluate whether the FAAD promotion was really worthwhile.

We haven’t yet received the anticipated backlash from adding advertisements which is good news, but it’s early days yet.

The Arctic levels are all done….the advertising has been added…books stuffed down the back of pants ready for users backlash from adverts.

:)  We’ve uploaded v2.2 of Ramp Racer to the itunes store.  We’re just waiting for our chums in Cupertino to approve it and then we’ll finally have iphone support along with the superior gameplay on iPad.  

Given the negligible revenue through In-App Purchases we’ve just had to go down the advertising route.  This will piss people off….but not as much as 6 months hard work on a game for pretty much no revenue has pissed me off.  Seriously - if you don’t like advertisements…buy some coins and the adverts will magically disappear.  If you don’t like ad’s and are unwilling to make a purchase of coins…feel free to uninstall Ramp Racer.  We’ll be sorry to see you go…but not that sorry.

300,000 games played in under 2 months of being on the market place.  Yay.  I’m happy with these numbers.  

We’re currently putting the finishing touches to the next update of Ramp Racer and as you can probably guess from the title of this blog post we’re adding advertising.  Those obnoxious ads are popping up all over the god-damned place!  

Thanks to the really useful tools of flurry.com we’ve found that people are just playing earlier levels over and over and over and over again to get enough coins to buy something.  This is fair enough and we actually anticipated this happening but the time has come to try and [ yes he’s going to use that word ] monetise it.  The only way to do this is with annoying ads.  To remove the evil players have to make a single in-app purchase.  Just 69p and the evil all goes away!

Other changes in the upcoming release are that the app is now a universal binary so we can address the iphone/ipod touch market.  We’ve also de-linearised the game by making it possible to play any scene [ forest, city, arctic ] without completing earlier scenes.  

We’ve added 8 new levels of racing through a snowy arctic wilderness featuring submarines, icebergs and an arctic research centre.  Players are not going to get too far unless they pick up a set of snow tyres though..ooh that’ll be an IAP that makes the evil ads go away!

And finally there’s an option to post your scores to facebook.

I’ll post again when the game hits the market…and there should be another milestone post tomorrow that I’m quite proud of.

150,000 games played and counting…

Ramp Racers has passed 150,000 games played which is great news.  The IAP rate is on the increase too which is pretty cool.  We have an updated version of the iPad app trickling through the app review process that we’ve made a few changes to.

1) We now give the nitrous away for free….yes FREE!  We decided it was more important that people actually enjoyed playing the game rather than trying to force people into giving us their money…it would be nice if people still gave us money as it’s really rather difficult to run a company without income.  We believe that people who enjoy playing the game will want to buy bigger engines and tricked out body-work to show their thanks for all the hard effort that’s gone into the game.

2) We’ve put an option in the game to “buy” your way past a level for 50 coins.  It’s really frustrating to be stuck on the same level for hours on end so for a few coins it’s now going to be possible to get to the next level and come back to a problematic level later.

3) To help people get through the trickier levels we’ve also included links to video walkthroughs so players can see how we finish the levels and get 3*

It’s a very delicate balancing act getting people to enjoy a game whilst also generating enough income to pay for developers, graphic designers…and you know…food!  So we’re going to be making a series of tweaks in the coming weeks to fine tune the playability v revenue generating aspects of the game.

I desperately want to avoid In-App advertising but it’s something that we’re considering.  I suspect the plan will be add advertisements, but a single In-App-Purchase makes all the evil just go away!

For a “soft” launch on iPad only we did pretty well.  The game has been played over 120,000 times and we’re currently running at a 4* rating which is nice.  Following on from the soft launch we’re about to do an update to tweak a few bits and pieces and also release our iPhone version.   This will then be promoted by Free-App-A-Day on 22nd May when we will see a big surge in downloads and games played.

Quite happy with the number of games played so far…less so with the number of IAP - but this is something we will tweak as the game matures.