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.
The evils of advertising
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.
Ramp Racer Promotional Video
This is the video that you will [ fingers crossed ] see on a variety of games review sites. I think it shows off the game pretty well.
Get it here : http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ramp-racer/id494819371?ls=1&mt=8
Forest Level 6 - this time to get a bit of speed going we use a Dune Buggy, that’s great at jumping - and give it a 3 litre engine to really get things moving!
