Flying Past The 10,000th Download Milestone!

Image by Pete Reed via Flickr

Every day, at random intervals (what can I say? I'm not that organised), I take the numbers down, put them into a spreadsheet. From these I can then draw pretty little colourful graphs to show, in essence, what you guys have been up to with regards to my apps.

From around the 16th September 2011, the download statistics on all of my apps simply got stuck (a widely ranted about bug that I'm sure most of you already know about). Their graph lines just flat-lined. I had heard that this happened from time to time and it usually cleared up in a day or two. Well, not in this case. I thought, given the technology of today, waiting a whole day for an update was poor. Having to wait twelve whole days was just plain cruel.

At least my apps already had some statistics - some of my colleagues had posted new applications during this period and have had nothing, zip, nada to play with. They have no idea if their apps even are working in the real world!

That aside I was pleased to see early on this very morning that that these figures have now changed. Finally!

Zombie Pop, my (now) free live wallpaper, was (based on previous figures) on line to be breaking into the 10,000s just around now; a milestone I was looking forward to witness. What the developer page was now showing me was 12,284 downloads! Twelve thousand downloads in three months! 4 stars over 147 reviews!

Fantastic!

And the trend seems to be getting stronger! As others have reported on their apps - there were noticeable upsurges on new version releases and national holidays.

It does now mean that I have to thank twelve thousand people personally for trying my live wallpaper/game! Thanks! :D

It's great that people are enjoying something that I enjoyed (and am still enjoying) developing!



Paul

Latest Release : Zombie Pop Live Wallpaper v1.2

Just a quick announcement: the release of the latest version of my Zombie Pop live wallpaper.  This is getting to be quite a fun project, seeing as it started life as an offshoot from my tower defence game.  Its latest incarnation includes the following:

::1.2
+ Customizable zombie head (Supports transparent backgrounds for better effects).
+ Popping sounds.
+ Zombie sounds.
+ User defined 'horizon'.
+ Exploding body parts.
+ Varying zombie speeds.

Yes, you can turn your brother, your best friend, your cat or anyone in your photo gallery into a flesh eating minion of the undead - there to blow to smithereens at the touch of your finger.  As you can see, I'm struggling to get a decent screen capture without the tearing.  Still working on that.

All good cartoon-y fun.  Do you think I should do a gory version...?

Find it on the Android Market here

Released Into The Wild

Image via Wikipedia

So where am I up to, I hear you ask with feverish interest. Well, let's see...

Project #1 - Livestock Vs The Undead

In May 2011, I started work on what is currently titled 'Livestock Vs The Undead' (a working title whilst I coerce it into a semi-acceptable state). I unleashed v1.0 onto the Android Market in June 2011, which is where I embarrassingly stumbled over my first faux pas: I was asking for a payment for it.

On other more lucrative fruit-based mobile platforms, I would've been laughed at for not charging. The Android community, it turns out, is a different culture altogether. Reputation and respect has much more weight here, and this has to be earnt. So I picked myself up, dusted myself down and rethought my strategy from scratch.

I withdrew the paid-for version of the game, tweaked how far you could take the game and released it as a free download. With the intention of letting the dust settle and await some feedback from the community, my mind was ablaze with possibilities and I thought 'Some of this code would make a great live wallpaper' so I moved immediately onto:

Project #2 - Zombie Pop Live Wallpaper

As a kid I loved it when my Dad had porcelain statues delivered (he sold them for a living). It wasn't the statues themselves that interested me. It was the plastic bubble wrapping they came in. I know it's sad but I did enjoy tirelessly popping each unsuspecting bubble.

So, I had this warm fuzzy memory floating around in my neurons, and I had these zombies marching down my screen. The rest as they say is history: ZZPop LW (as it was called) was born. This was released onto Android Market in June 2011, along with:

Project #2b - Zombie Pop Lite Live Wallpaper

Wanting to test the water on whether people would cough up some money for an improved version of something they liked, I branched the development into a feature lite version. It is still a full playable version, just with some cosmetic restrictions. Again this was released in June 2011.

Project #3 - Pixelnote Live Wallpaper

As my mind was still fresh with Live Wallpaper development, I thought, 'wouldn't it be neat if you could draw straight onto your wallpaper without having to open up another app?'. Taking what I had learned on the last two and a half projects, I brought Pixelnote into existence. I realised that due to limitations of the medium and touchscreens I could only take the idea so far, but what the hey.

Pixelnote was released in July 2011 onto the Android Market.

Around this time, I started looking at the Amazon Android App Market. Even though, being outside the US, I can't actually download anything at this time, it didn't stop me from publishing the game and three wallpapers.

Since then I've released updates for both Livestock Vs The Undead and Zombie Pop and am currently pushing Livestock forward by quite a way (v1.3 is in beta and is looking better).

And that's pretty much it in terms of development. I'll do a post on each of the projects in turn next with a bit of background and the thought processes I went through.

Cheers,


Paul