

Show HN: My first iOS game, Hungry Henri - dcre
http://www.hungryhenri.com

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petesamrogers
I liked the videos, but it think it would be even better to show someone
actually playing it, ie. actually see the players fingers interact with game.
Without this, it's sort of hard to get a handle on what the actual game
mechanics are (unless that's the point and you want people to go and download
to find out for themselves??)

~~~
dcre
I appreciated and remembered this comment. Here's a new video showing what the
gameplay looks like. No fingers, strictly speaking, but you can clearly see
what the player is doing.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCUWbkzC6nI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCUWbkzC6nI)

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petesamrogers
What were your thoughts on the pricing model? I'm developing a game myself now
and the way it seems things are going is freemium with IAP purchases. Why did
you choose the 0.99/2.99? It's a tough choice to make

~~~
cclogg
Not the author but I thought I should chime in here. The app store is a
difficult beast these days... being free means you get a lot more downloads,
but you need 100's of thousands (if not millions) of users to make any decent
amount of money. And you have to be very careful with your freemium plan. You
don't want to end up like [http://www.penny-arcade.com/report/article/going-
broke-with-...](http://www.penny-arcade.com/report/article/going-broke-with-
success-how-an-app-with-200000-downloads-led-to-devel)

If you're a paid game, you're going to have a very hard time getting sales,
because you can't acquire users. The 99 cent 'race to the bottom' also means
you need a lot of sales, but it's tough to achieve that today without a brand
or big-name. Even Apple featuring you doesn't add up to as much as it used to.

So, you might have noticed a pattern amongst the more successful freemium
titles. Lots of wait timers, short gameplay bursts, unlimited purchasables,
etc... what hardcore gamers deem as evil, is actually what these companies
have determined is the most optimal way to make money. I'm not trying to be
depressing here lol, but before you make the decision to go free, make sure
you understand what you're up against. I personally hope we can head to a more
League of Legends type model where you make $5 on a lot of people rather than
the Farmville route of making $5000 on a few 'whales'. I personally much
prefer a great game that lets me pay when I'm ready to invest, than a game
that is trying to milk me the whole time.

Just an FYI, me and a friend built Stratosphere: Multiplayer Defense for iPad
and have gone through much of this dilemma lol. Good luck!

~~~
dcre
We had a similar thought process. The games that make money through IAPs
(Candy Crush is the obvious example) tend to be play-forevers with complex in-
game economies of bonuses and powerups, plus all those timers and limits to
get you to pay up, etc.

The more traditional games — games with more genuine depth behind them, from
the point of view of the "hardcore gamers" you mention — when they make money,
they tend to be pay-up-front. They're charging more for a significantly more
personal and higher-quality engagement, and can partially make up for lower
quantity that way.

But even then it's been really hard to know how to approach these questions.
My advice is to release something small quickly, because being in the
situation is the only way to learn what works and what doesn't. That's not
exactly what we did here, and though I'm really happy with how the game has
turned out, we sometimes felt like we were fumbling in the dark on the way to
this point.

~~~
cclogg
Yes, I totally get what you mean. The hilarious thing is making something
small ends up always taking longer lol =P

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fatty0011
Wonderful game - the music and artwork are really great! I'm looking forward
to playing my way through the whole game. What game engine did your friend use
to code it?

~~~
dcre
Thanks! It was Cocos2D for graphics with Box2D for the physics engine. The
hard part with Box2D (as with any physics engine, I assume) was tweaking the
coarseness of the simulation to balance performance against visual quality.

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yohann305
I like the originality in using light/absence of light as being part of the
game mechanics.

What have you found challenging during the whole process?

~~~
dcre
1\. Learning to code (not me, but guy who started the project)

2\. Making sense of feedback from playtesters who were not always in our
target audience

3\. Importance of having beautiful art

4\. Making natural-sounding effects

5\. Writing music to go along with an existing theme

Long version:

Well, my friend learned to code by starting this project, so that was the
first big obstacle. That meant that the development cycle of the game was much
longer than lean-startup, rapid-iteration ideas floating around here would
have it.

Related to that was the difficulty of making sense of the feedback we got from
playtesters. It would have been easier if we were still in college, but we had
a hard time getting feedback from people who were in our target audience,
namely people who play mobile games at all. We asked everyone we knew to play
the game, and it was psychologically difficult to separate out feedback that
was probably not relevant because it came from someone who would never buy the
game in the first place. For example, many people thought it was too hard, but
they were often not really people who play games in the first place. This was
made doubly hard by the fact that we've played the game so much, so we
couldn't trust ourselves to know what was too hard or too easy. We didn't do
anything special to solve this — no "7 Ways To Get Out of Your Own Way" blog
post is coming out of this. Essentially we did the best we could.

Another interesting thing was just how central it is to have beautiful art. It
sounds obvious but it's one of those things you don't completely grok until it
happens to you. Before the artist came on board, we had a well-designed
protoype, and we retained the majority of the original design (enormously to
the founder's credit). But perfect execution by a talented artist makes for an
incredible difference in emotional appeal. I wouldn't call this a difficulty,
since the art came out so well. But it was a lesson.

I was in charge of the sound and music, and that ended up being surprisingly
difficult too. You would never know without trying to do it yourself how hard
it is to come up with sounds that feel natural in context and aren't
distracting or annoying. I'd say we ended up with fewer sound effects than I
would have liked for that reason.

The music was hard too. I had experience with rock music, but I had never
written any piece of music to go along with a pre-existing theme and mood. So
writing the main theme to have a French feel but with the right amount of
levity took a lot of iteration. And the level background music has to be
catchy enough to be fun and motivating, but not so catchy that it prevents the
player from concentrating on the game. Furthermore, I'm not a great keyboard
player, but I used a keyboard to record all the tracks and in order to get the
timing right I had to do literally hundreds of takes and slice and dice the
music pretty finely.

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lcedp
Nice idea and lovely music

