Ripple Sales

I have sales data on Ripple's first 5 days on the marketplace.  It's part good news and part bad news.  The good news is over 1700 downloads occurred in those 5 days, which is over 340 downloads per day.  Bad news is less than 5% of those downloads were actually purchases.  Here are my theories on why the conversion precentage was so low. 

1) The game uses all primitives for graphics and does not look particularly stunning.  People often don't admit it but graphics can often times be a big reason why people buy a game.
2) The dual analog shooter genre is very crowded on indie games.  There are many to choose from and several of them are superb.  I feel that mine was of good quality but if your only going to buy one there are several others that well executed.
3) The difficult is rather steep and may turn off some casual gamers.  I consider myself a casual gamer but better than average at this type of game.  I still found it difficult to beat the game, I only did it 3 times during my weeks of play testing.

There are probably a miriad of reasons why this did not perform great from a sales standpoint but decent download numbers and a solid 3 star rating are not bad for never having programmed a game before.

Here are the actual sales figures
10/22/2010
Downloads: 643
Purchases: 22
10/23/2010
Downloads: 496
Purchase: 21
10/24/2010
Downloads: 276
Purchases: 15
10/25/2010
Downloads: 178
Purchases: 11
10/26/2010
Downloads: 131
Purchase: 3

On the Barrage front I am still making good progress.  Much of the ground work has been laid and I will continue to add to the game.  I think that one lesson I learned from looking at other top games online is polish.  I will have to spend a lot of time ironing out the fine details of the game and making all aspects as smooth as I can make them.

Ripple has landed

Today, Ripple was posted on the Xbox live indie games marketplace.  It only came out with one other game today so that means it will be at the top of new releases for longer which will hopefully boost sales a bit.  I will post some sales data when it becomes available.  As for my next project I have been toying around with a few ideas and I have it narrowed down to either a bullet hell type game or just a standard side scrolling shooter like Gradius.  I still like the idea of integrating some kind of music driven gameplay into it but I am struggling getting a method that works well.

Down time

The XNA creators club website has been taken down till Monday for updates.  I decided that I could use this time to start a blog for my small (nearly non-existent) game company.  I started writing games out of curiosity.  My background is in finacial programming but I have always been interested in game programming.  A few friends of mine had created an XBLIG awhile back and I thought I could use XNA and its tutorials to learn how to program a game.  I started just dabbling and messing around with a dual analog shooter as I felt that would be a good game for a beginner to learn with.  Over time, the game evolved and began to feel like a real game.  I added what I felt were unique elements and thought that I might have a chance at selling a copy or two on the Xbox marketplace so I decided to go for it.  This is how "Ripple" was born."Ripple" is my first game and is currently in review status.  As stated before it is a dual analog shooter.  The twist is that enemies cannot be killed with projectiles but rather with ripples.  The enemy is first tagged with a projectile and is then vulnerable to a ripple attack.  The more enemies killed with a single ripple the higher the score multiplier becomes.  This rewards players who leave more enemies on screen with more points but is also riskier.The game sports retro style vector graphics.  There were two reasons for this design choice: the game is akin to an old school shooter so I felt that it fits that vibe, I also lack the artistic talent or know how to create more complex graphics.  Sprite effects and animations are still new to me and I have a lot to learn about them.  Perhaps the next game I will incorporate some more complicated graphics I did have a good time working with one of my buddies from work on the music.  I had no idea he was so talented on the guitar but his stuff was great.  I originally didn't have any music driven gameplay in Ripple but after I heard his music I decided that it was one of the strongest things the game had to offer.  So, I changed the game from stages to surviving two songs.  Each song is about six minutes in length so that makes the game from beginning to end about 12 minutes.  It isn't easy to make it though the 12 minutes but if a player does then the replayability will have to come from wantiing to achieve a higher score.Speaking of my next game I'm not really sure what it will be at this point.  I guess my front runners are a 2-D brawler or a platformer; however, until I figure out how I'm going to create better graphics I'm not really sure what my next game will be.In any case I will just have to wait for Ripple to make it on the marketplace.  I don't anticipate it being a huge seller but I will hopefully re-coup the cost of the XNA membership and memory card I had to buy for testing.