《SpellCraft》收获及教训编辑本段回目录
游戏邦注：本文作者为Paul O’Connor，他是Appy Entertainment的品牌总监。
Appy Entertainment 2010年末开始制作《SpellCraft》。《Trucks & Skulls》于同年11月份发行，是款颇受欢迎的付费作品，获得苹果iTunes的头版推荐，虽然这段时间游戏的收益创历史新高，但我们非常清楚iOS领域已发生改变。事实证明我们的判断是正确的。在于假期获得突出表现后，《Trucks》掉出App Store的前100之列。至本文撰写时间，70%的美国App Store“高营收”游戏都是付费游戏，此趋势近期不会发生改变。
在短期范围里，我们采取的策略是将《FaceFighter》和《Trucks & Skulls》由付费模式转变成免费增值模式，但这些游戏就像二战中匆匆改装成航空母舰的战舰。玩家通过越来越多的评论和投入回馈我们所做的转变，但两款游戏都缺少由数据驱动的收集玩法（游戏邦注：这种玩法能够充分利用免费增值模式）。
我们需要基于特定目的的社交收集游戏——具有创新性、富有趣味性，同时包含丰富扩展空间的内容。我们是《僵尸农场》及《口袋青蛙》等游戏的忠实粉丝，而且在《FarmVille》这类的Facebook游戏中投入众多时间，但我们从未完整制作出一款社交手机游戏。
我们的首个构思有点像“龙与地下城”融合“Ravenwood Fair”，但我们很快发现，此构想过于宽泛，就首次接触此题材的情况来说，题材的焦点过于模糊。
我们立即决定缩小覆盖范围（只瞄准巫师，而非“完整”角色扮演体验），我们通过迎合富有幻想色彩的玩家及借鉴Zynga热门游戏的农场机制拓宽我们的市场。
因此结合我们的杀手级“哈利波特遇见FarmVille”理念，我们穿上自巫师袍，修复城堡，运用魔法，扩充内容。
表现突出之处
1. 外包
Appy是家年轻的公司，员工人数很少，《SpellCraft》遇到的一大挑战是，通过随时外包工作内容扩大我们的内部容量。《Truck & Skulls》也面临此问题，游戏的很多编程工作都外包给Quinn Dunki，但我们在《SpellCraft》中创造的新突破是，我们提高工作室的美工内容外包程度。
我们首次既着手资产外包，又制作前款作品的更新内容，所以我们从一开始就合理将人员分配于《SpellCraft》项目中。制作设计依然由内部人员完成，再来就是游戏设计、UI设计、动画、音效及某些资产的制作，但游戏65%的美工元素都外包给印度和中国公司，它们在我们的严格指导下完成工作。
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在将工作内容交付给它们前，我们有测试各公司的美工制作情况，确保它们能够遵照我们的要求，采用我们的独特风格，令我高兴的是，我们竟能够在没有于外包公司中安排内部人员的情况下获得如此高质量的成果。这对Appy来说是一大进步，我们通过外部资源提高工作室的艺术实力，同时又维持之前作品的高质量水平。
2. 加拿大预售活动
苹果很快通过我们的项目，因此游戏比原先确定的最终发行日提前10天完工。
这让我们得以在特定地区“预售”《SpellCraft》游戏（即加拿大），在面向全球发售前测试游戏的运作情况。虽然我们无法时时作用于游戏，但我们从中收获的数据弥足珍贵，我们决定要在未来的作品中开展更持久、更广泛的预售活动。
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3. 同W3i的合作关系
Appy清楚自己的不足，知道自己的在发行和分析社交/手机游戏方面缺乏经验。我们通过和W3i（游戏邦注：此公司有投资这款游戏）合作解决此问题，在《SpellCraft》的开发过程中咨询他们的意见。
W3i是家坐落于明尼苏达州的软件公司，在桌面软件方面拥有丰富经验，如今他们正大步朝手机领域迈进，我们已协商数月，商讨如何进行合作。W3i主要致力于应用营销和用户获取——他们在这两个领域经验丰富。W3i在将作品发行及市场测试阶段所起的作用非常显著，令我们得以通过成堆的数据将游戏变得更富趣味及“更富粘性”。
在后发行阶段，W3i指导我们如何有效营销产品，我们主要通过购买目标广告，让游戏得以锁定目标群体，从而获得新用户。在iOS游戏领域，当游戏发行后，你的工作才刚刚开始，这在社交/手机游戏中更是如此，在此我们非常幸运，顺利找到优秀的合作伙伴。
4. 用户支持
Appy在用户支持方面投入巨大，其在我们的博客、Facebook和Twitter中维持开放渠道，通过电子邮件及“Livebar”信息通知邀请玩家给予反馈信息。
同粉丝互动，聆听他们的意见几乎就是我的专职工作。现在我基本能够单独完成这项工作，但若要说《SpellCraft》回馈所带来的指示，那就是我们需要尽快创建自己的用户支持项目。
Appy就获得的所有反馈都给予回复——有时在几小时或几分钟内，有时甚至在周末或假期。亲自联系玩家是Appy的优势所在，能够同业内其他更大的公司相匹敌。
就《SpellCraft》来说，同玩家对话是个积极体验，既因为它有助于我们塑造游戏的发展模式，也因为它增进我们对于《SpellCraft》新玩家的理解。
《Trucks & Skulls》和《FaceFighter》的忠实用户有所重叠，但在多数情况下，《SpellCraft》玩家与我们的既有用户截然不同，我们首次获得众多女性和休闲玩家。
这些玩家所存在的期望和我们先前的用户不同，他们想要通过卡车重击敌人的脸庞或粉碎他们的头骨，向所有新用户开放触点令我们得以快速适应陌生的新空间。我的用户支撑渠道在清除《SpellCraft》发行时所出现的漏洞方面是个非常重要的方式。
5. 润色时间
我们有意推迟《SpellCraft》的发行时间，因为我们觉得游戏尚未做好准备。关于推迟发行的决定，我们内部出现不同意见，但最终达成一致看法，我们只有一次发行机会，我们寄予《SpellCraft》长远希望，这意味着我们不能在没有进行额外润色和平衡玩法的情况下将产品推向市场。
我们艰难地地取消自己的营销开销，通知预览过我们作品的网站，我们将变更发行日期，无奈地告知苹果公司，我们尚未做好准备，我们将推迟发行，处理更多漏洞，确保“发行”过程顺利进行。项目似乎总是能够从更多时间中受益，但在《SpellCraft》中，我们则是出于别无选择。
表现糟糕之处
1. 推迟的发行日期
其实，在整个过程中，《SpellCraft》都按期完成——据我们自己的估算，我们只推迟2-3周，虽然在iOS开发中，几周相当于几个月，但就包含众多活动要素的项目来说，我们已算是把握得相当精准。
问题在于，App Store的审核和暂停时间变化无常，因此我们的发行日期从11月17日推迟至12月8日，这将我们直接带入圣诞假期，同时使我们错过苹果的发行推荐机会。尽量推迟发行意味着我们也想在发行后直接迎接假期，这里存在许多问题。
2. 重新修复漏洞
我们制作这款游戏耗时5个月，内部测试花费6个月，实际市场测试花费10天时间，但最终成品依然包含糟糕漏洞（游戏邦注：若游戏一开始就出现崩溃，就会阻碍玩家继续游戏及购买游戏）。我们之前忽略这些漏洞。
事实上，我们在预售阶段获得两份漏洞报告，但我将其当作用户失误，因为信息由孩子提供。游戏发行后不久，有关游戏重置漏洞的报告就蜂拥而至。
我们周四发行作品，周六开始修复漏洞，周二就更新内容，但我们依然令众多用户倍感失望，致使我们收到许多有关用户支持的信件。
我们以最快速度做出回应，基于用户反馈信息调整内容，添加实时横幅信息，告知玩家漏洞情况及购买前如何更新内容，我们回复所有邮件，向所有受影响的用户提供替换宝物。幸运的是，我们的玩家非常通情达理，没有让漏洞影响自己对游戏的喜爱之情，给予游戏4.5颗星的用户评级（总分5颗星）。
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3. 火候不足的宠物
我们清楚自己想要在游戏中获得宠物；我们知道它们应该做什么；我们投入许多资金设计游戏，让其富有生命力；但在游戏刚发行时，我们并没有以完全成熟的模式呈现。
游戏具备所有元素——你在地牢中发现宠物，喂养它们，和它们玩耍，它们提高角色的防御能力，但我们无法从宠物于游戏中的呈现方式获悉这点。我们在更新内容中修复这点，但就制作半成熟内容所需的时间和精力来看，我们最好还是稍后再引入这些功能，将这些精力花在制作更完善的1.0版本上。
我们已投身iOS游戏制作3年，但我们依然会错误判断项目的覆盖范围，宠物元素无疑在其中之列。而玩家对宠物的喜爱之情则同我们的执行方式很不相称——宠物富有趣味，只是功能没有像预期的那般完善，玩家不清楚应该如何操作。这里我们显然把握到重点，若游戏没有在首版发行内容中引入宠物元素，我们就无法清楚把握游戏的发展方向。
4. 日常奖励功能
我们采取明智之举——鼓励玩家每天登陆《SpellCraft》，促使他们沉浸于游戏之中，但我们把游戏的“日常金币奖励”要求设置得过于严格，最终令大批玩家颇为不满，他们抱怨称自己无法获得金币。
我们的原始机制要求玩家打开《SpellCraft》，执行10个游戏活动，例如同怪物战斗或运用法术，这使得刚进入游戏不久，尚未收获作物的玩家无法参与其中。
玩家也对游戏的时钟感到困惑，他们不清楚自己得在特定的24小时内完成必要游戏操作——此特性在周二2:00 PM登陆游戏，周三1:00 PM重返游戏的玩家身上就无法呈现，他们会以为自己已满足“日常体验”要求。
总结：若你打算在游戏中赠送某物，那就直接赠送。若玩家试图进行机制博弈，别太担心。这些是创造留存率的工具，而非期末考试。
我们后来修复机制，连续10天给予每天都登陆游戏的玩家越来越多金币，但依然有用户报怨称，奖励没有送达，或时间应该设置多于10天。我们发现，若你承诺给玩家礼物，就不要只是兑现，而是应该出色实现。即使那样，做好接受不同声音的准备。不要通过拜占庭式的偿还要求将工作内容复杂化。
5. 令人困扰的商店（起初）
发行《SpellCraft》时，我们在制作虚拟货币及设定价格方面经验还很不足。我们将《FaceFighter》和《Trucks & Skulls》调整成免费模式的举措让我们得以提前制作商店代码，这所起的作用非常突出，但在建构游戏经济体系方面，我们依然相当盲目。
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《SpellCraft》采用双重货币机制，低价值的货币（金币）能够在玩法中获得，高价值的宝物则主要通过购买获得。在初期的商店中，宝物能够转化成金币，但玩家无法直接购买金币，这令玩家颇为失望，减少游戏所创造的收益。
我们还在绑定游戏购买包裹数量方面犯错，这意味着我们无法通过无线补丁临时调整价格，我们只有通过苹果重新提交游戏才能调整商店内容。我们后来将这些问题逐一修正，但游戏的发行方式明显限制我们的选择机会，不必要地推迟我们对玩家行为数据的处理。
总结
回顾《SpellCraft》会发现，我们所遇到的许多困难都和覆盖范围有关。就原始设计来说，我们极大降低整个项目的覆盖范围（游戏邦注：只锁定巫师，在编写首行代码前缩减辅助功能的数量）。但若重新来过，我们也许会从首版游戏开始就取消宠物元素和多玩家功能，特别是如果这能够让我们省下几周时间。
平心而论，这些元素让原本平庸的设计丰富化，宠物和多玩家元素在项目最后几周并没有给我们带来很大影响——我们的完善时间主要花费在游戏发行/指南部分。移除这些元素无疑能够缩短项目所耗费的时间，不会延缓游戏的发行日期。
此外，在我看来，降低覆盖范围并不能让我们更好地修复崩溃漏洞（漏洞并非源自于我们的匆匆完工），通过Appy最持久、最广泛的测试程序避开检测过程。
若游戏未出现重置漏洞，这对Appy来说将是个非常完美的项目。事实上，项目起初的进展并不顺利，但很快就恢复过来，玩家评级对项目而言非常重要，我们因此找到《SpellCraft》的用户群体。
虽然《SpellCraft》在发行初期没有得到苹果的推荐，但游戏的最初发展步伐依然比《Trucks & Skulls》更胜一筹，由于采用付费模式，游戏成为有利可图的长尾业务，这和《Trucks & Skulls》截然不同。
受此成功的鼓舞，我们现在变成专职的付费社交/手机游戏发行商，目前正在制作2款新的iOS游戏，二者充分利用我们在《SpellCraft》中所学到的经验。我们创造新魔法，更好地照顾我们的虚拟宠物，计划接受投资，扩充自己的人员。
工作室数据信息
开发商&发行商：Appy Entertainment（和W3i/Recharge Studios合作）
发行日期：11/28/2011（加拿大），12/8/2011（全球）
平台：iPad和iPhone/iPod touch的iOS通用应用
开发人员数量：6人
开发周期：6个月
开发工具：AppyEngine（Appy的专属游戏引擎）、Versions、XCode, Objective C、Ruby on Rails、Interface Builder、Motion和Photoshop
（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译）
Postmortem: Appy Entertainment’s SpellCraft School of Magic
by Paul O’Connor
[Appy Entertainment, the developer behind Trucks & Skulls and FaceFighter, recently launched its first free-to-play iOS game. Studio brand director Paul O'Connor picks apart the successes and failures in getting to grips with the casual and F2P space simultaneously.]
Appy Entertainment committed to developing SpellCraft in late 2010. Trucks & Skulls launched as a premium hit that November, enjoying Apple’s top banner support on iTunes, but even during that period of record earnings we knew the iOS market had shifted. And we were right. After a strong run through the holidays, Trucks would drop out of the App Store Top 100. The market was speaking with its wallet — it was freemium or bust. As of this writing, 70 percent of the U.S. App Store “Top Grossing” games are freemium titles, and there’s little reason to believe that trend will reverse any time soon.
Short-term, we responded by pivoting both FaceFighter and Trucks & Skulls from premium to freemium monetization, but these games were like battleships hastily converted to aircraft carriers in World War II. Players rewarded our changeover with improved reviews and revenue, but neither game had the kind of data-driven, collecting-oriented gameplay that best takes advantage of the freemium format.
We needed a purpose-built social-mobile game — something innovative, fun, and with plenty of room for expansion. We were fans of games like Zombie Farm and Pocket Frogs and had spent a lot of time on Facebook with Zynga games like FarmVille, but as a studio we had never built a social-mobile game from the ground up.
Our first concept was kind of like Dungeons & Dragons meets Ravenwood Fair, but we quickly realized the idea was too big and too ill-focused for our first foray into this new genre.
We simultaneously elected to reduce scope (by focusing just on wizards, rather than the “full” role playing experience) and broaden our market beyond D&D players by appealing to fans of the most potent fantasy property of our time and also embracing the farming mechanics of Zynga’s top game.
Thus armed with the killer high concept of “Harry Potter meets FarmVille”, we donned our wizard robes and repaired to our tower to brew spells and blow stuff up.
What Went Right
1. Outsourcing
Appy is a young company with a small staff, and a major challenge in SpellCraft was to amplify our internal capacity by outsourcing production wherever possible. As was the case on Truck & Skulls, much of the engineering was done out-of-house by Quinn Dunki, but where SpellCraft broke new ground for us was in the extent to which we outsourced our art.
We’d first started searching for outsourcing assets while producing updates for a previous title (Trucks & Skulls), so we had a running start in putting together our list of candidates to work on SpellCraft. Production design remained in-house, as did game design, UI design, animation, sound, and some asset creation, but 65 percent of SpellCraft’s in-game art was produced by outsourcing firms in India and China under our tight direction.
We vetted each firm with test art assignments before committing to them for SpellCraft, to make sure they could follow our direction and adopt our house style, and were pleased we could get such high quality results without having to embed anyone at the outsourcing studios. It was a significant step for Appy to increase our art bandwidth with external resources while maintaining the high quality of our previous (and mostly internally-produced) titles.
2. Canadian Soft Launch
An unusually fast approval by Apple (we got the green light on the Sunday of Thanksgiving Day weekend, hats off to the Cupertino guys for working the holiday weekend!) meant our game was available a full 10 days prior to our final launch date.
This let us do a “soft launch” for SpellCraft in limited territories — in this case, Canada — to test the game with real players before going worldwide. While we weren’t always able to act on it, the data we got from actual player behavior was invaluable, and we’ve already determined that a longer and more wide-spread soft launch will be built into our future games.
3. W3i Partnership
One of the things we know at Appy is what we don’t know, and we knew we had little expertise in launching and analyzing social/mobile games. We addressed this need through partnership with W3i, which invested in the game and consulted in SpellCraft’s development.
W3i is a Minnesota-based software company with a deep background in monetizing desktop software which is moving into the mobile space in a big way, and we’d been in discussions for several months about how we might do business together. W3i specializes in app marketing and user acquisition — two areas where we really appreciated their expertise. W3i was especially helpful in the run up to launch and our test market period, helping us sift through mountains of player data to make the game more fun and “sticky.”
Post-launch, W3i provided guidance on how best to market the game with targeted ad buys putting the game in front of the right audiences to find new players. It is true of all iOS games that your job is only just getting started when you ship a game, but it is doubly true of social/mobile games, and we’ve been fortunate in picking good partners to navigate these waters in W3i.
4. Customer Support
Appy’s made a significant investment in customer support, maintaining open channels on our blog, Facebook, and Twitter, and inviting player feedback via email and “Livebar” messaging in our apps.
It is basically my full-time job to interact with our fans and listen to their concerns. So far. I’ve been able to do it largely on my own, but if the response to SpellCraft is any indication, we may need to build out our customer support program soon.
Every single communication Appy receives is personally answered — sometimes within hours or minutes, even on weekends and holidays. Personally connecting with players is one of the ways Appy has been able to punch above its weight and compete with substantially larger companies in our space.
For SpellCraft, it’s been an immensely positive experience to have a dialogue with players, both because it has helped to shape the development of the game going forward, and because it has helped accelerate our understanding of the new kind of player attracted by SpellCraft.
We’ve had some crossover from loyal players of Trucks & Skulls and FaceFighter, but for the most part, our SpellCraft players are different than our existing player base, with more women and more casual players coming into our fold for the first time.
These players have different expectations than our pre-existing maniacs who want to punch faces or smash skulls with trucks, and having all those touch points open to our new customer base has helped us quickly get oriented to our strange new world. Our customer support channels would also prove a critical lifeline in sorting out a nasty bug during SpellCraft’s launch (about which more shortly).
5. Polishing Time
We made a conscious decision to delay SpellCraft’s launch (and possible support from Apple) because we felt the game just wasn’t ready for prime time. We were divided internally about the decision to delay, but ultimately decided that we only had one chance to launch, and that we were invested in SpellCraft for the long haul, which meant that we couldn’t go to market without additional UI polishing and gameplay balancing.
We swallowed hard, cancelled our marketing spend, informed the sites that had previewed us that we were slipping our release date, and reluctantly told Apple that we just weren’t ready, then extended our crunch to kill more bugs and make sure that our “onboarding” process (the tutorial experience and first three hours of gameplay) was nice and shiny. Every project, it seems, can benefit from more time at the end, but in the case of SpellCraft this was an especially difficult inevitability to accept, because of…
What Went Wrong
1. Late Launch
Actually, in the scheme of things, SpellCraft was on time — we were only two or three weeks late by our own reckoning, and while weeks = months in iOS development, for a project with so many moving parts we pretty much shot directly through the hoop of fire.
The problem was that, owing to the vagaries of App Store approval times and shutdowns, this pushed our release date back from November 17th to December 8th, which both put us square in the Christmas crunch, and also may have cost us an opportunity for an Apple feature at launch (they were engaged with us in the run-up to the 17th, but after that I think they had other priorities). Launching as late as we did meant that our guys were also eager to head off for the holidays immediately after we went live, which was problematic because of our…
2. Reset Bug
We developed the game for five months, tested internally for six weeks, and tested in a live market for a full ten days, but still ended up shipping our game with a nasty bug that erased player progress and purchases if the game crashed during startup. We just missed it.
Actually, we had two reports of this bug during our soft launch, but I dismissed them as user error because they came from kids (one of which was my own scatter-brained son!) Regardless, no sooner had we shipped the game and the team had crawled off to their caves to recover, reports started flooding in of our reset bug.
We launched wide on Thursday, fixed the bug on Saturday, and (thanks to an Apple expedited review) had our update live by Tuesday, but we still disappointed thousands of players, resulting in an avalanche of customer support mail (the answering of which became a full-time job, inhibiting our ability to promote the game at launch).
We reacted as fast as we could, made things right with the people who wrote us, added a 24/7 live bar message informing players of the bug and how to update before purchasing, and answered each and every email, giving replacement gems to all of our affected customers that contacted us. Luckily for us, our players were understanding and didn’t let our bug interfere with their affection for the game, giving SpellCraft an average user rating of 4.5 out of 5 stars since launch.
3. Undercooked Pets
Pet meat is stringy if you don’t cook it right, and the same could be said of our SpellCraft pets. We knew we wanted pets in the game; we knew what they should do; we spent a lot of money designing and animating the pets; but we didn’t bring it all together in the form of a fully-cooked feature for the game’s release.
The pieces are all there — you find pets in the dungeon, feed them and play with them, and they increase your character’s defenses — but there’s really no way to understand this from the way pets are presented in the game. We’re fixing this in an update, but considering the time and effort required to even under-deliver on pets, we would have been better off introducing those features later and applying that effort to a more polished 1.0 version of the game (and the same could be said of our multiplayer dueling feature).
We’ve made iOS games for three years, but we do still sometimes misjudge the scope of our projects, and pets definitely fell into this category. At the same time, our players have responded to pets with affection well out of proportion to our implementation of the feature — pets are fun, and polished, they’re just not as fully-featured as we would like, and players are confused about how to use them. We are definitely on to something here, and we wouldn’t have such a firm idea of where we need to take the game if he hadn’t included pets — in however imperfect a form — in our first release.
4. Not-So-Daily Reward Feature
We had the right idea — encourage players to engage with SpellCraft every day, to get them hooked on the game — but we made the requirements of our “Daily Gold Reward” too stringent, and wound up with a pack of unhappy players writing in to complain about not getting their gold.
Our original system required that players open SpellCraft and perform 10 game actions, such as fighting monsters or brewing spells, meaning it excluded players who just entered the game long enough to harvest a plant or two.
Players were also confused by our clock, not understanding that they needed to perform their required actions within a specific twenty-four hour block of time — a distinction lost on a player who opens SpellCraft at 2:00 PM on Tuesday, and returns to it at 1:00 PM on Wednesday, and really has every right to expect that he’s fulfilled the requirement of “daily play.”
Bottom line: if you are going to give something away… just give it away. Furthermore, don’t be concerned if players try to game the system. These are retention tools, not a final exam.
We’ve since patched the system to give an increasing bit of gold each day for 10 days basically for just entering the game, but we are still receiving complaints that the reward isn’t arriving, or that it should extend beyond 10 days. We’ve learned that if you promise players a gift, you must not merely deliver — you have to over-deliver. Even then, expect a few squeaky wheels. Don’t make your job harder with Byzantine redemption requirements!
5. Confusing Store (At First!)
Our experience with creating virtual currency and setting prices was limited when we launched SpellCraft. Our conversions of FaceFighter and Trucks & Skulls to free-to-play monetization let us develop our store code ahead of time, which was an immense help, but we were still flying pretty blind when it came to actually constructing an in-game economy.
SpellCraft has a two-tier currency system, with a low-value currency (gold) earned through gameplay, and high-value gems acquired primarily through in-app purchase. Our initial store had a means of converting gems into gold, but no way to purchase gold directly, which frustrated our players and limited monetization.
We also made a mistake in hard-coding the quantities of each purchase package into our game, meaning that we couldn’t adjust prices on-the-fly with a wireless patch, but instead could adjust our store only by resubmitting our game through Apple. We’ve since corrected both these problems, but launching this way limited our options by needlessly delaying our ability to act on the data we received about player behavior.
Conclusion
Looking back on SpellCraft, it might seem many of our difficulties were related to scope. We did significantly reduce the scope of the project from our original design — focusing just on wizards, and cutting dozens of ancillary features before writing our first line of code — but if we had it to do over again, we might have dropped our pet and multiplayer features from the first version of the game, particularly if it would have saved us a couple weeks at the end of the project.
In fairness, those elements help flesh out a pretty lean design, and neither pets nor multiplayer impacted us in the final weeks of the project — our polishing time was primarily devoted to the onboarding/tutorial portion of the game. Removing those elements would have taken time out of the middle of the project, and probably would not have moved up our end date in any case.
I also don’t think that additionally reducing scope would have made us any more likely to catch our crash bug, which didn’t originate with our crunch for completion, and eluded detection even with the luxury of the longest and most wide-spread testing program Appy’s ever had for a game. Sometimes the puck just gets past the goalie.
If we’d caught that reset bug (and launched on time with Apple support), this would have been a perfect project for Appy. As it was, we got our noses bloodied a bit at launch, but the game has recovered, player ratings are stellar and we have found an audience for SpellCraft.
Even without the benefit of Apple promotion at launch, SpellCraft is off to a faster start than was Trucks & Skulls, and thanks to freemium monetization, SpellCraft appears to have a profitable long tail that we can build upon, as opposed to Trucks, which basically crashed out of the charts following its “Elvis Month” of Apple favor.
Emboldened by this success, we are now a full-time freemium, social/mobile game publisher, with two new iOS games in development that fully leverage our learning from SpellCraft. We’re cooking up new spells, taking better care of our virtual pets and moving forward with our plans to accept investment and expand our staff as we stake claim to our part of this new gaming frontier.
Data Box
Developer & Publisher: Appy Entertainment (in partnership with W3i/Recharge Studios)
Release Date: 11/28/2011 (Canada), 12/8/2011 (worldwide)
Platforms: iOS Universal app for iPad and iPhone/iPod touch
Number of Developers: 6
Length of Development: 6 months
Development Tools: AppyEngine (Appy’s proprietary game engine), Versions, XCode, Objective C, Ruby on Rails, Interface Builder, Motion, Photoshop,
Other Interesting Information: Apprentices at the SpellCraft School of Magic have cast 58 million spells, cleared 20 million dungeon rooms, purchased 400,000 sacks of fertilizer for their magic plants, and pet their animal familiars 11 million times.（Source：gamasutra）
