As a huge fan of Episode One, and as a fellow developer, I've gotta throw my two cents in: Do not make it DLC! Seriously! Firstly, you will be isolating yourself from a huge audience of iPod Touch owners who haven't upgraded to 3.0. Secondly, you will be isolating yourself to only the audience from the first game. Let Episode Two stand on it's own. Thirdly, if you do the idea with a DLC version AND a stand-alone version, you'll be splitting up your sales, and you'll only go half as high in the paid charts. That's bad! Fourthly, you can put out an update to Episode One that notifies those people that a new game is out, and links to it in the app store. You don't need DLC to do that. Fifthly, having two icons is NOT a big deal, in fact, it's a good thing. If I want to play Episode One, I'll click on Episode One, if I want to play Episode Two, I'll click on Episode Two. I don't wanna have to click on Dark Nebula, and then have to choose Episode Two. -Matt
ElectricGrandpa: Thanks for the input! Very valid points indeed. eXistenT: Our free weekend certainly attracted some much needed attention to the game, which has resulted in a significant increase in sales. In fact, it is not until now that we have recouped the money spent on developing episode one.
im glad you guys have finally managed to breakeven! hopefully the profits will help you develop dark nebula 2!
I can't see how ElectricGrandpa feels DLC is not the right way to go with this game. So say you develop 10 episodes; are we going to keep 10 separate apps all entitled Dark Nebula? I don't think so. In all honesty, if 1 million copies have been downloaded, who's not to say that at least half of these people will purchase the DLC from within the game? I understand that you want to boost sales through getting your App in the Top Apps, but still, you have to think about it logistically. Consolidate each episode into one App; I guarantee you'll still make a bundle. I can't stress how important this is.
hey hey, hows this game comin along? Is this one still in progress or what? I just gave episode one a whirl again and man, i love these types of graphics, plus the gameplay is top-notch. comon!
Sorry for being out of touch for quite a while, but I've been busy working on the second episode Things have not progressed as fast as we had hoped, but on the other hand the results have been very good. I've just hired two more programmers to speed things up, and that has helped tremendously. We are currently working on some boss fights and some nice graphical features, and I hope the extra time we've spent on this will really show in the end. Here are some images from the intro movie that we finished a few weeks ago.
ah yeah, great to still see those science fiction type elements in the screenshots there. The first episode was the best ball rolling game of its kind, but a little short. the jungle stuff submitted earlier looked good, but i hope theres still alot of machinized graphics and gameplay going on with this new one. Looking forward to the release date!
The first game was extremely sick. It doesn't matter how long this takes to finish, just make it even better than the first!
I think DLC is clearly the wrong way to go. People can easily overlook DLC, but when someone hears of a sequel with new gameplay elements to a previous game they already like it becomes a must buy. Honestly if you tried to charge me for dlc I would probably not get it, but offer me a new Dark Nebula and I will purchase it day one.
