Acorn Heroes

Wow, what a turbulent year!  It seems to have shot by so fast, in a maelstrom of activity.  I guess that having three young children, full time work and a full time side-line can have that effect .  Having a second App on the store makes the whole “business” side of what we’re doing feel more real, more legitimate.

This is a short post to look at what my plans and goals are for the next year:

• Push sales to the point where we get a payment from Apple every month.  It’s a small goal, but an important one psychologically.
• Release a free, ad supported, version of Acorn Money to help spread the word about this great little App Sam has put together.  Our plan is to release a fully featured version of Acorn Money – at least based on the version 1.0 feature set – free, but with ads and the occasional nag to upgrade.  No artificial limits that cripple the app.  Who wants a money tracking app that can only have 6 recurring payments?  It’s a common pattern for free apps, but one that makes it nearly impossible to make an informed decision about the value of an App.
• Make enough in sales to purchase a new MacBook and an iPad.  There’s a couple of projects ticking over in the back of our minds that make more sense on the iPad than iPhone, plus we like our toys .
• To release Faerie, in both paid and free with ads versions.
• To get back into regular blogging – being near the top of the iDevBlogADay waiting list should ensure this happens!
• To spend more time in the company of other iDevs.  The NZiDev conference was great.  I’d love to get to GDC or WWDC if it were feasible.  Something to aim for at least.
• To stop saying “No” and “I can’t” by default, and concentrate on “Why not?”.  In other words, to kick some arse.

So what are your plans? There’s a lot of potential in the coming year, as there is in every new year.

We wish you all a happy and fulfilling year to come!

This post is appearing on iDevBlogADay as a guest article while Owen Goss of Streaming Colour spends some special time with his wife and new born son.  To Owen – we wish you all the best for you and your family, you’ve joined a special club as a parent, life will never be the same again!

For a while now we’ve been keeping one of our projects under wraps.  Not out of any particular need for secrecy, rather just a desire to wait until Project M was ready to go.  And now is that time.  Our second App, Acorn Money, has just been submitted to the App Store.

And no, before you ask, it’s not a game.  Acorn Money is an App designed to help you track where your money goes.  The idea came from a conversation with our good friend Chris, who is full of great ideas.  He said that there was no App out there that made tracking your money simple.  Most financial Apps try to be high powered packages that can be everything and do everything for all people.  Such Apps typically end up bloated, confusing and unhelpful to the typical user.

What was needed was an App that just let you record one off and repeating payments to allow a person to get control of their finances.  And so Acorn Money was born.

Our goal with Acorn Money was to build an App that was:

• Streamlined – it just did one thing, and did it well.
• Appealing – there are a lot of truly generic financial Apps out there, we wanted something a bit more fun and friendly.
• Efficient – entering a new payment should be simple and fast – you’ve got plenty of other things you’d rather be doing.

Sam, the other half of Acorn Heroes, has put in a huge amount of effort to get Acorn Money ready.  It’s a Universal App for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad.  We’re really happy with the result, and think we have something that will help fill a need many people have.  This isn’t an App for a business school graduate, it’s an App for anyone that wants to have a better understanding of their financial situation.



I won’t go in to too much detail here – that’ll come once the App is approved by Apple.  Here’s a few key features though:

• Enter, edit and delete one off or repeating payments with a minimum of fuss.
• Modify individual payments on a repeating schedule, or alter all future payments.
• Graph your balance over time, including projections into the future.  Don’t ever be caught out by those once a year payments like vehicle registration again!
• Backup your data to your computer.

Acorn Money should be ready for sale within the next couple of weeks, Apple willing.  Rest assured, we’ll let you know as soon as it’s ready!

This post is part of iDevBlogADay, a group of indie iPhone development blogs featuring two posts per day. You can keep up with iDevBlogADay through the web site, RSS feed, or Twitter.

Note: No final article on Automated Builds this week – check in next week when I should have the final article prepared.

It must be the time of year or something, but obviously a few developers have been evaluating their progress and plans for the future.  Not afraid of being a slave to fashion, it seemded like a good time to have a look at the progress of Acorn Heroes over the past year.

In our case this navel gazing has been triggered by the fact that we’re due for our first payout from Apple on September 2nd.  Yep, you read that right, our first.  That may sound like a fairly mediocre result, and in some ways it is.  But there’s also a ray of hope there.  Read on…

Some context

Sam and I are both fully employed on other jobs.  We both have three kids, a wife and a mortgage.  The good side of this is that we’re relatively stable and don’t need to be successful on the App store just to survive.  The flip side is that anything we do is done in a spare hour here and there at the end of the day, family commitments allowing.

Past

Goo! (App store link) was released back in January, and is a fairly niche application for maths nerd who like playing with cellular automata, or possibly two year olds who like the pretty patterns (my youngest is a great example of this).  Despite that it’s been ticking over quietly averaging about 2-3 sales a day.  While it won’t make us rich, or let us quit our day jobs, it will cover the cost of our web hosting and dev license for another year.

iDevBlogADay has been (and continues to be) a wonderful experience – the requirement to write each week is a great motivator and has introduced me to an expanded network of great Indie developers.  If you haven’t subscribed to the iDevBlogADay feed yet, your missing a ton of great content.  Here’s a handy link.

Present

Sam (the quiet one) is doing wonderful things with Secret Project M. It’s only secret because we haven’t talked about it yet – but we should be announcing M officially soon.  We’re in what can probably be described as an ‘early beta’ stage – polishing features and UI and squashing bugs.

Faerie is a promising game idea that I’m looking to develop fully.  Basic gameplay is solid and we’re looking to build a solid, appealing game that will appeal to people of all ages.  Sneezies and Robot Unicorn Attack are great examples of the kind of experience we’re aiming to replicate.

In my day job, I’ve been part of a team working on data capture for high performance athletes – there’s a good story covering what’s been going on here.

Future

So, what does the future hold?  It’s busy, that’s for sure.  We’re aiming to finish M in the next month or two.  Having a second App on the store is a huge milestone for us, especially as Goo! was a proof of concept as much as anything.  To say we’re excited is an understatement.

Faerie is on hold for a little while, because I’ve taken on full time contract work until the end of the year.  I can’t reveal many details at the moment, but we’ll be creating a game for iOS that is linked to a major TV channel.  I’m hopeful that I can cover our progress over the next three months or so.  We’re aiming for a November/December release.

So, interesting times ahead with lots going on.  Sam and I would like to take this chance to thank everyone who’s bought Goo!, followed our blog or provided advice on working in the magical, mercurial world of iOS development.  Your words of encouragement mean a lot to us!

Hi everyone.

Just a quick note to say that I’ve switched our RSS feed over to Feedburner. The new feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/AcornHeroes.

What does this mean for you? Actually, nothing. The old feed will still work exactly as it has, this is just a behind the scenes, making it easier for ourselves sort of update.

So why am I saying this? Well, if your a regular subscriber (thank you!) then if it’s not a hassle, moving over to the new feed will make our lives a little easier, and helps make this site just a little better.

If you’re not a subscriber, then I’d like to offer you this chance to subscribe. We aim to offer useful, relevant information to independent game developers with a focus on iOS development in particular.

So, if you want to add or update our RSS feed, the new link is http://feeds.feedburner.com/AcornHeroes – but once again, nothing will break if you don’t, so feel free to do nothing at all

Back in March of last year, Sam and I began working on developing apps for the iPhone.  Now, nine months later, our first app has been submitted for review.  It’s a reasonably simple app, a pleasing on the eye version of the Game of Life, by John Conway.  It was originally our ‘proof of concept’, or ‘one day app‘, a chance to dip our toes in the waters of the App Store.  So what happened?  Below are a few thoughts (not excuses)…

• We’re both very busy people.  Having full time work and multiple children just takes up time.
• Tied in to the first point, at times when our lives have got busier than normal, one of us drops off the grid for a bit.  This can stall the other team member and when you come back to the code again there’s the problem of getting back up to speed again.
• We lost our way a few times.  The final app we’ve submitted is very different for the original plan.  Several times we’ve reduced the scope of the app to keep it more focused and manageable.  But each of these changes has meant re-examining and amending the existing code base.
• We started working at the OpenGL level.  Both of us are completely at home writing OpenGL code, and so we made the initial decision to write our own ‘engine’.  Eventually we switched to Cocos 2d and life became significantly easier.

There’s a bunch of ideas for posts mulling around in my head, but perhaps the best place to begin is, as they say, at the beginning.  So here’s a quick introduction.

Who?

There’s two of us, Sam and George.  ”Sam and George’s well designed and written software for the iPhone and iPod Touch” was catchy and, most surprisingly, available as a domain name, but it was perhaps just a smidge long for a company name, and so we settled on Acorn Heroes instead.  Between us we have over twenty years experience in the gaming and real time animation business, not to mention six kids, several cats, a dog, rabbit and two very understanding wives.

What?

We’re developing quality software for the iPhone and iPod Touch.  What do I mean by quality?  Careful design, consideration for the user and solid, reliable code that we will use ourselves.  While our primary goal is to bring to life some of the hundreds of game ideas floating around in our heads, we’re also keen to build useful applications that just help to make life easier, more organised, more fun, more meaningful, more… well, you get the idea.

Where?

Well ‘here’, obviously  Here for us being Dunedin, in the lower reaches of New Zealand.  It’s a lovely place, with a wealth of very talented people, beautiful scenery, and great beer.

When?

Weekday evenings, especially Thursday, because there’s nothing on TV.  And the odd weekend too.  You see, with families and mortgages, we can’t quite turn our back on ‘The Man‘ just yet.  And besides, in my case ‘The Man’ is a friend and good employer.  So this is a part time effort – although that doesn’t mean we’ll sacrifice the quality of our work, just that we need to ensure we work smarter, not harder.

Why?

Partly it’s the challenge, partly it’s the prospect of earning some extra money.  Oh, and it could be that the iPhone is one of the coolest toys out there.

So now that you know us so well, what can you expect from this site?  That’s one of the things we’re still figuring out.  So feel free to pop in and see what we’re up to, leave a note, or subscribe to our RSS feed, and we’ll come to you!