Acorn Heroes

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

One of the weirdest / hardest things to do when starting iPhone development is setting up the connection between your development machine and your iPhone / iPod Touch (known as provisioning).  I’ve done it once, but it’s fair to say it happened in a blur and I was following instructions fairly blindly.

Dan Grigsby over at Mobile Orchard has put together a screencast that explains the process of provisioning an iPhone / iPod touch.  It’s well explained, simple to follow, and a very handy resource to have around.  It’s a free download for the next week, after that it’ll be US$5.  So if you’re a new developer, or if this is something that you’re a bit unsure of, grab the screencast while it’s free.

My long suffering wife knows that I get addicted to things easily.  In the past there’s been Magic the Gathering, numerous computer games, war games of one sort or another, certain authors, watching my auctions on Trademe and all sorts of other things.  I’ve managed to avoid World of Warcrackft so far but it may only be a matter of time.

So it’s no surprise that there’s a new contender for my time.  Although what it is may seem a bit odd.  I was recently reading Cliffski’s blog and came across a piece he wrote about Google Analytics. Finding out what was possible was a pleasant revelation.

In short order I’d signed up on the main page, dropped the relevant script onto our site.  A tip for WordPress users, log in as admin, add a new Text Widget and put the script in there – simple.  Then came the hard part – waiting for up to a day to know that it’s all working properly.

The depth of information available is astounding.  The fact that we actually had people visit our site was comforting!  But beyond that we can see how visitors came to our site, roughly where they came from, what pages on the site they spend time reading and a whole heap more.  I’m hooked.  There’s no need to check the data several times a day, but it obviously tickles the nerd centre of my brain in a good way, so I check in regularly.  

After a week there’s not enough evidence to draw any real conclusions, but here’s a few interesting snippets:

• We’ve had 48 unique visitors.  When we hit 100 I might make a cake to celebrate.
• Those people typically view a couple of pages, of which my font rendering post is a clear favourite.
• Hello to the USA, Australia, UK, India, Hungary, Poland, Latvia, Singapore and South Korea!
• There’s a reasonably even split between people arriving directly, finding us via a search engine or being referred from another site.

The main thing that has stood out for me is that the technical posts are the most popular, so I will endeavour to get more out as soon as I can.  Current candidates are articles about texture atlases and  particle systems.

On that note, I can say that the particle system I’m working on is coming along slowly but well, stay tuned I’ll post more details,screen shots and code when there’s enough to be of interest.

As we’ve been setting up this company, a lot of thought has gone into how and when we need to do things so that we can maximise the (spare) time we have to devote to it.  We wanted to enrol in the developer program as a company, rather than as individuals, so we set up the company first.  Then came the part we were a bit worried about.  Searching the web, you find plenty of stories of one or two month waiting times to become enrolled on the program.

Here’s how it went down for us:

• Create company on the 9th of May.
• Submit for application for developer program on the 10th.
• Email from Apple asking for our Certificate of Incorporation on the 12th.
• Finally get a chance to fax off the Certificate on the morning of the 14th.
• Get a phone call / email from Apple about noon.
• Purchase license about 5 minutes later.
• Prepare to wait ‘up to 48 hours’ for activation code.
• It turns up 4 hours later.
• Go to the Apple’s iPhone Dev Center and remember to log out and log back in again to see the update.
• Done, we have the keys to the Magic Kingdom.

That’s right, the bulk of the process happened in a single day.  Start to finish was only five days, two of which were a weekend, and one of which was lost due to my inability to get close enough to a fax machine.  Thank you Apple, you’ve made my week, possibly my month.

Now admitedly we haven’t sorted out all the financial details yet, but we don’t have an application to sell yet either, so I’m not too worried.  What we do have is the ability to deploy applications to an iPhone or iPod Touch now, and the first time you do that is a little magical

Sam and I also had a design session last night where we started seriously planning our first two applications.  More on that later.

Sam and I find ourselves relentlessly marching towards becoming grown ups one day.  Some would say that having children, wives and mortgages would do the trick, but it hasn’t yet.  But the latest step has been for us to create a company for our iPhone work.  So Acorn Heroes has now become Acorn Heroes Ltd, a limited liability company.  We’re still getting to grips with what this means, what we pay for and what the company pays for, but to date it’s been a remarkably easy process.

Setting up a company in New Zealand is a simple process.  There’s a useful (though not particularly pretty) web site that guides you through the whole process.  The site guides you through a bunch of steps; reserving the company name, nominating contacts / directors, allocating initial share parcels, getting a tax number and of course paying your NZ$160 bozo filter.  At the end of it you get a Certificate of Incorporation that you can print out and use to bolster your ego and impress your friends.  It was all done in about half an hour, and the only thing you need is your tax numbers.

We wanted to get the company up and running before we joined Apple’s Developer Program, as we’ve heard that starting with a personal license and migrating it to a company one is a real pain.  Once we had a company registered, the next step was to see the nice people at KiwiBank to sort out a bank account.  Once again, it couldn’t have been easier, and now we have a business account that can accept all the millions we plan to make – or at least enough to help cover getting a new stove.

Our enrolment in the Developer Program is underway, a process which is apparently taking up to six weeks at the moment.  No doubt there’s a blog post to come from that process too!