Monthly Archives: June 2013

AMTM Ratings and Reviews

19 Replies

162-100Airport Madness: Time Machine has just passed the 3.5 star rating on kongregate.com, one of the leading free flash game portals on the web.  Gotta savor the small victories in life!

Is 3.5 stars any good?  Kongregate says “4.0” is the magic number.  Once you break 4.0, you are something truly special.  A 3.5 is good enough to get you featured in their Top Games section (although I didn’t see mine there – sad face).  Hopefully achieving this benchmark will get the free version of this game found by portal owners.  Fingers crossed as usual, for a viral flash game.

We launched AMTM for iPad last week, and so far it’s done well.  5 star average (although that’s from only 4 votes 🙂 ). The free version will be in the app store some time next week, hopefully.

I have high hopes for this game, as I do for all of my releases.  And believe it or not, the creative juices are already flowing for our next version – Airport Madness: World Edition.  Start pelting me with your favorite real-world airport suggestions, please.

AMTM for iOS

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amtm_ios_iconI am pleased to offer you Airport Madness: Time Machine for iPad.  This will be coming to Android devices soon, hopefully.  One thing I’ve learned about mobile game development – make everything huge, especially buttons.  This game doesn’t fit on smaller devices, such as the iPhone, unfortunately.  The game has a lot of tiny details, and after testing it thoroughly on an iPhone 5, I just couldn’t bring myself to sell that to customers. This game does, however, look stunning on all versions of iPad.

One tricky thing about selling on different markets is choosing a price.   I remember paying $30 – $40 for a decent PC game 10 years ago.  Nowadays, it’s hard to charge over $10.  And on the app store, you are surrounded by hundreds of thousands of games, all just 99 cents – or even free.  So how do I choose my prices?  I sell niche games.  There are not a great deal of ATC apps out there.  They are difficult to sell, as not everyone has an interest in aviation.  So I generally charge a bit more than one might expect to pay for a basic game.  Obviously, it needs to be worth my time to make these apps or I would have stopped long ago.  AMTM was one year of development, roughly 700 hours of coding, plus the cost of art, music, software and a decent web server.

I owe my loyal customers a huge thank you for their continued interest and support over these past five years.  I hope to keep doing this!

 

What Would You Change?

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clip_1807Allow me to apologize for not responding quickly to some people’s posts.  It’s been a bit crazy around here lately, as it always is after a new game release.   And it’s just me here.  Indie Game Developer Extraordinaire.  I have customer support on one screen, and raw game code on the other.

Airport Madness: Time Machine has received plenty of feedback.  I’ve heard the good and the bad.  All of it via email, telephone, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Kongregate.  The people have spoken. The game is an experience.  A journey.  It’s worth the ten bucks.  But it’s not quite Airport Madness 4.   It’s my goal to get this game where it needs to be.

Using Kongregate’s feedback ratings as a measuring stick, here are the scores given to all of our games thus far.  Kongregate says a 3.0 is “fair”, a 3.5 rating is “good”, and a 4.0 rating is “great”:

  • Airport Madness 1 – 3.57
  • Airport Madness 2 – 3.59
  • Airport Madness 3 – 3.31
  • Airport Madness 4 – 3.68
  • Airport Madness 5 – 3.45
  • Radar Chaos – 2.66
  • Radar Chaos Hawaii – 2.66
  • Sky Madness – 2.78
  • Will It Fly? – 2.57

Some find the process of working through 60 years long and painful.  Some say that certain levels are painfully hard.  Others painfully easy.  I suspect that the levels are too long.  They need to be shortened, from their current 4-minute duration, to about 2.5.  The levels also need to be unlocked, so that users can jump to any year, any time they feel like it. These types of tweaks are easy for me.  I just need to be pointed to where the game is boring, or where it feels impossible.  Game duration and intensity are easy.

With some minor changes, I can get this game above the ‘good’ mark.  So please, shout out the feedback to me if you have it!

Airport Madness: Time Machine Lite

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IconWe’ve created a free version of our latest game, Airport Madness: Time Machine.  Please rate the game.  You can Play it here!

It is always difficult to decide how much to give away for free.  Give away too much, and you will have angry customers, who paid big money for the premium version.  Give away too little, and you irritate a would-be customer.

The free version gives customers an honest taste of the game.  The years 1925 through 1935 are unlocked.  So 11 free levels.  Fifteen clams gets you the other 46 years.