

Sneak Peek of My 3d Scheme Game (and request for support) - jlongster
http://jlongster.com/blog/2010/02/03/iphone-game-update/

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jlongster
What I'm most interested is people's experience with selling successful iPhone
apps. What have you done to gain more exposure? My marketing plan essentially
includes creating a cool one-page website that is simplistic and sells the
game with videos/screenshots (I've already a hired a designer to design it).
Also to talk about it on twitter/facebook/reddit/HN/etc. Also to get my
friends and a few local businesses to talk about it. Maybe contact some
companies like Appular to see if they'll support it. I fear that none of this,
except maybe the last one, has any chance of getting me wide exposure. Are
there good app review websites I should submit it to? What else would be good?

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z8000
For me, I looked at the market in July 2008 and saw an opportunity in a darts
game of all things. I'm not an avid darts player but I had just installed a
dart board in my basement a few weeks prior to the start of the project.

My thought was something like this:

"I see no good darts games for the iPhone. I bet you I can create one and get
all those 20-something guys from the UK to download a copy"

And that basically worked. Darts went #1 in the UK in December 2008 and in the
US shortly thereafter.

Part of the answer for me was to just make a good app with good gameplay
mechanics and 3D graphics that didn't look like a toy, and hope that my
concepts of the marketplace were right.

The app going #1 got me a lot of exposure, enough to leave Yahoo and work on
iPhone consulting and secret big projects (way too big -- I need to ship the
thing already).

The ad revenue (I hate ads and am very sorry I have to put them in the app)
also helps _a great deal_ to help fund my foray into self-startup mode.

For the curious, the app has 40K games played daily, about 10K downloads a
day, and about 12MM downloads since day 1 in October 2008.

<http://fictorial.com/darts/>

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NickPollard
One thing you could try is sending review copies to game journalists on the
web - I'm not sure which ones are best for iPhone or mobile games, but these
days most have at least a passing interest. If you can cold-email some of the
reviewers with some kind redemption code for the game, and if you can sell the
premise to them in a couple of lines (the good sites probably get a LOT of
submissions like this, you need to grab their attention QUICK), you might be
able to convince them to post a review or at least a news item.

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mark_l_watson
I like that it is written in Gambit-C Scheme, which has been one of my weapons
of choice when I want to code in a high level language and produce small,
fast, standalone executables. As of last year, Marc made it very easy to
compile and link executables, and portable across OS X, Windows, Linux (just
do a rebuild on each platform). Recommended!

~~~
mark_l_watson
BTW, I wrote an article for DevX last year on Gambit-C (pardon the self-plug):
<http://www.devx.com/opensource/Article/42778/1763/>

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olalonde
I thought you could only write iPhone apps in Objective-C.

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Daemmerung
Gambit is a Scheme-to-C compiler; Objective-C is a superset of C. Hence all
the iPhone sees is a regular subset of Objective-C.

[http://jlongster.com/blog/2009/06/17/write-apps-iphone-
schem...](http://jlongster.com/blog/2009/06/17/write-apps-iphone-scheme/)

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pgbovine
sorry to sound snarky (i think scheme is awesome as well), but you probably
shouldn't advertise this as a "scheme game", since your potential audience
probably doesn't care what technologies you use to write the game. i'd suggest
to focus on your target demographic and focus on pitching it to them.

~~~
jlongster
You're totally right. The audience for my personal blog though is techy
people, and I'm advertising it as a Scheme game to get some attention from the
tech crowd. However, when I actually publish the game, I will dedicate a
website to the game and market the heck out of it to the casual consumer never
mentioning Scheme.

~~~
ambulatorybird
I think it would still be worthwhile to add a note in the game and on the
game's website saying that it was made with Gambit Scheme. Somewhere in the
credits, or copyright info, or a similar place.

~~~
jlongster
I could do that. It might still be good for any tech company looking at my
app. We'll see.

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pvg
Hah, so there _is_ a secret cow level after all!

