Yuckfu has been in the App Store for almost two month now and I got some good feedback from numerous people. The sales numbers however have been disappointing to say the least. The main problem was the lack of exposure.
When Yuckfu went live in the App Store, its release date was still set to the upload date a few days prior. Therefore the game appeared on page 6 of the "new Apps" in the AppStore – the chances of someone stumbling over the game without explicitly searching for it were pretty much zero. I also came to the sad conclusion that a price of $2.99 is much too high for a simple arcade game. I don't like this at all and I don't think this is a healthy state for the App Store to be in, but for now this is just how things work.
Getting my game reviewed was another challenge. Most bigger sites didn't respond to my emails, others required at least 3 promo codes to even consider reviewing. Some reviews were positive, while others failed to understand the concept of inertia - and I can't even blame them. Controlling a rocket powered robot isn't supposed to be easy. Learning to control the robot is the game, it's part of the challenge. It just takes some time to learn - time which most review sites simply don't have.
In the meantime I worked on the first update for Yuckfu, which has some minor UI improvements, but most importantly added the completely new Challenge Mode. This is something I thought of from the beginning – having pre-designed “container mazes” and spawn points. I also created some new animated backgrounds to have some more eye candy. One more advantage of the Challenge Mode is that the game now has a more shallow learning curve. The new version of Yuckfu (iTunes Link) is now available for only $0.99!
So, to gain some more exposure, I also decided to built a free “Lite” version of the game, which just cuts some of the levels from the Challenge Mode and the Highscore upload functionality. Let's see how this works out. Yuckfu Lite (iTunes Link) also made it's way to the App Store.
For some screenshots and more info head over to yuckfu.net.
After almost one year in the making, Yuckfu is now available in the AppStore (iTunes Link). For a short trailer and some more screenshots, head over to yuckfu.net.
Finally, Yuckfu is in (closed) beta! I managed to include all the features I initially had planned. This includes the online Highscore table and replays, original music, several background animations and tons of polish. I have to say, it worked out far better than I could ever have imagined. The game looks, feels and also sounds great.
So right now I have some friends testing the game, while I iron out the last bugs. I’ll probably submit it to Apple before the end of the week. I’m also working on a trailer and a minisite for the game, so there's still some stuff to do.
I also have a lot more technical details to share, but this will have to wait until after the game is released. First things first.
It has been a while since my last update on my iPhone game. I haven’t had much time in the previous month to work on Yuckfu, but development is now on full speed again!
As you can see, I refined the graphics quite a bit. The edges of the playing area are now colored to make it clearer where your robot is and where the walls are. I also added the effect for spawning containers which looks great in motion. It’s actually a real 3D model with a rotating spiral.
For the HUD, I wanted a clean and simple solution that is showing only the information you really need. I ended up with mainly two elements: the score on the left, your energy on the right. As your energy is decreasing over time, the energy bar tells you at a glance how much you’ve got left. The four little boxes next to the score shows the “multiplier”. If you collect several containers in a row your multiplier increases and you get more points.
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The nice thing of having a minimalist layout is that you can change the complete look of your site with relatively little effort. Still, this redesign took a while. I spent most of the time to come up with something I liked and then some more to throw it away and start over again.
One of my goals for this redesign was to improve readability. Since most of this Blog’s content is text – not images or videos – it didn’t really make sense to have a dark background like the old design in the first place. The result probably won’t win any awards for creativity, but it’s functional.
I learned a lot about typography and classical grid layouts in last few months, so I tried to apply some of it here (I'm still at the “I don't need InDesign; I can build my print layouts in Pages!” stage). The most obvious change is probably the font size. I'm now using a huge 16px base font that really isn’t that huge. I also switched to Helvetica/Arial which looks so much nicer on the headlines than Trebuchet-MS did.
There were also some bugs and quirks under the hood that were in desperate need of getting fixed. It should be all working now. If you still find something that looks odd, please let me know.
Sorry for the lack of updates. I’ve been quite busy with a huge project that I can hopefully show you in some weeks. And I can assure you Yuckfu isn’t dead either.
Another thing I finished up yesterday was my new portfolio. Not that I haven’t done any of these before, but this is one new! And fancy! Did I mention its new?
This time I spent much more time on the actual layout and functionality of the portfolio itself. The main feature is that you can pan the document, just like you would pan the map on Google Maps. This is all done with a small JavaScript, based on the wonderful jQuery library. While the new portfolio makes heavy use of transparent PNGs, the site still looks okay-ish and remains perfectly usable in IE6. It also degrades gracefully for browsers that have JavaScript disabled or the iPhone, which has no notion of onmousemove events.
I also made sure that the print version from all major browsers looks good. The Hartija Css Print Framework is a great starting point for creating specialized print Style Sheets. I only had to tweak some values and remove elements, like the menu, that make no sense in print.
We finally managed to built a website for our last years semester project Klangpong. I was mainly responsible for the programming and 3d graphics. The full Processing source code of the game is available at the site, but it’s a bit complicated to get it up and running.
We will present the game at the Mediale (Darmstadt/Germany) starting tomorrow – so if you want to play it, pay us a visit!
Avatars are important. They are everywhere and there is virtually no community driven website out there, where you can’t upload an image of yourself or what you want to be associated with. These images help us to immediately recognize our friends without even having to look at their names.
We don’t care too much about what is depicted, but how it looks: the overall color and shapes. Yet, all the default avatars of our beloved Web 2.0 sites look exactly the same. And while Twitter’s default Avatar can at least be considered cute, most others are dull and unimaginative.
Why not create a unique image, based on the users name, on the fly? This avatar could be temporarily used till the user can be bothered with uploading one by himself. This would give even the laziest user a chance to be instantly recognized by his friends.
My InstantAvatar PHP class does exactly this: it generates (more or less) unique avatars on the fly. Here are some examples of what it can do:
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