Screenshots of game play in 5 different sizes and orientations, screenshots of title screens, about 50 different sizes of the same icon are just a few of the hassles of the publishing process. Google Play Store and Amazon App Store are about the 2 easiest ones to publish and it took about 1 day of work for each of those the first time. Apple App Store was a different beast completely, having 20 years of experience in the IT industry with 10 different versions of Unix, 5 versions of Windows and nearly 15 years of working with digital certificates, signing and encryption didn’t help with the Apple architecture at all, in fact I believe that knowledge may be a disadvantage. I spent about 4 days getting Bumbling Bee submitted.
Google and Amazon take a couple of hours, sometimes 1 day to approve apps. Apple, at this time, takes 7-9 days to review an app, in my case it took about 10 days before they started reviewing it. Why the long queue for a review? We all know that Apple, and the others are cash rich right now, able to pay cash for billion dollar companies they want, so one might ask why they don’t add a few reviewers to their staff. Even if we had the answer to that question it wouldn’t help us. At over 500 million apps on their store, 1 indie publisher probably won’t make it on their radar.
Bumbling Bee is published on all 3 stores.
Isaac is progressing and I have to put the horse back in front of his cart. He wants to just build levels, much to his chagrin we outline his game with scope details per level so he has direction and goals. It’s up to Isaac to change his outline but I required him to stick to his outline. If his levels varied from the outline description then he had to either change his outline or change his level. Seems easier to change the outline, right? Not according to Isaac. Keep in mind, his outline is written on a whiteboard about 3 feet from his computer.
By the end of March, Isaac now has about 3 or 4 levels of his game built, has integrated art work from an Art work pack and is building new levels on his own and building the logic behind each level on his own. I usually sit with him or at my desk right behind his while he’s working in case he has questions. Oddly enough, while Construct 2 has tons of advantages, they make programmatic loops much more difficult than they need to be.
We now have Batty Cave published everywhere except for Apple, who rejected it because of an orientation issue. According to Apple, the portrait orientation runs off the screen however across all of our devices (which include many versions in addition to the exact same hardware/software that Apple uses to test) we were unable to reproduce the error. After a couple of adjustments to screen geometries and dimensions and resubmissions to Apple we gave up on Apple.
Originally I setup MoPub Advertising space in all of our apps and fed AdMob through it. I setup a couple of others to put into the mix, but AdMob was exponentially better in fill rates and eCPM than all of the others so I gave them 90% of the requests. Up until 3/25, we were making about 1.50 eCPM from AdMob, then they shut our account down. Come to find out, my younger kids weren’t able to hit the “X” very accurately on the ads to close them so they had clicked on the ads an unknown number of times, I’m guessing 20-30 ad clicks which was more than enough to raise a red flag since they all originated from the same IP address.