Price Seems Ok

I had a two day sale last weekend just to test the price. Sales didn't increase at all. This would seem to indicate that the price is not really a factor. The market is only small but the information is important enough to the market to buy the app at $3.99USD, so for the time being the price will not change. If the sales had increased, indicating that there was a larger market that was price sensitive, it may have been worthwhile dropping the price. But frankly, $3.99 in the overall cost of obtaining a blackbelt is nothing. The market seems to think its worthwhile and it gives me some sort of return on my development time/costs. I'm still out of pocket, but its been a worthwhile learning exercise.

I noticed one of my competitors has a Lite version of their app. I'm considering whether its worth doing the same and having an ITF Patterns Lite that shows the first 3 patterns. It shouldn't be too hard to implement. Again, would be done in the spirit of experimentation just to see what works and what doesn't.

I've given up on google for the time being. They don't want to budge on the iphone as a trademark issue, even though I believe it should be showing in the US with their recent trademark policy change there. I actually had a lady ring me from google the other day to tell me they had noticed my ad wasn't working very well and offering me training. Grr....

So now I am chasing Apple but so far they haven't been very helpful either. Its hard to believe that advertising an iPhone app can be this difficult...

Its Finished!

My first iPhone game is finished! Beach Rescue is a fun little game where you control two lifesavers who have to keep their beach safe. I've just submitted it to Apple for review. Hopefully it will be ready for sale in a couple of weeks.

Its been a fun little exercise. I've drawn the animations and I'm pretty happy with them. The screenshot doesn't really do them justice because you aren't seeing the movement. At the end of the day, its still just programming with the usual memory leaks and bugs. But playing around with the graphics, sound, gameplay, etc has been a lot of fun. Hopefully, others will find the game fun too play and the game becomes a bit of a hit.

The marketing for this will need to be different from the ITF Patterns app. I will have to contact a number of the review sites and see if I can get interest in the game. Its not something that you would expect anyone to google on. Mind you, google hasn't been very successful for me so far with ITF Patterns either. Google support has been quite pathetic. There is basically a five day turnaround for every question I ask them. At the moment I am getting hits on the content network but not the search network and I'm not getting satisfactory answers. Has not been a very pleasing experience at all.