Last week my latest iPhone App, Better Christmas List, was picked to be one of the featured staff favorites on the App Store. Huzzah!
The kudos of being selected gets your app a place in the “Staff Favorites” on iTunes, and the “What’s Hot” section of the iPhone App Store. This is prime billing, and almost as good as being in the top 10 list.
But what effect does this have on sales? Well so far it seems like a 2x effect 
My second iPhone app went live on the App Store last night. Interestingly it was approved in under 48 hours, but took two days to appear in the store. I assume this is because Apple only add so many applications a day and there’s now a waiting list – Pinch Media have an RSS feed of new applications and the number each day is staggering.
I’m pretty pleased with this application. My first app (Photo Speed Dial) was really an exercise in learning Cocoa/Objective-C and the iPhone SDK and tools. Everything took time and there were several things that I basically did wrong, things that made certain aspects harder than they needed to be or fought against Cocoa’s MVC pattern.
Lessons learned. This time around I was able to focus entirely on the design of the application and it really showed both in development time and the end product. Inspired by the FriendFeed 24 hour app challenge my aim was to try and put together an attractive and useful app over the weekend. I didn’t quite manage that but came in at around 72 hours total.
During the development process I kept a log and screenshots. When I get time I plan to write them up as a post, mostly for my own edification and a self-reminder how useful design and planning can be even for personal projects.
Until then… Buy my app!
While i havent played it yet, I have noticed on Metacritic that Silent Hill Origins is getting some pretty good reviews from the press.
What’s never mentioned is that the team at Climax UK did the whole game in around 12 months, after inheriting it from the previous team who’d wasted a year of development. I saw that teams effort and it wasn’t pretty. There was really nothing in the way of code, art, or even design that was worth salvaging.
That the team in the UK not only managed to turn out a worthy entry in the Silent Hill series, but did so in a year is truly impressive.
Kudos guys, kudos.
(This post is for all the family and friends who were puzzled by my near-disappearance during August and September. I wasn’t kidding when I said I’d be busy at work for a few weeks!).
For the majority of video game developers, end of project overtime (a.k.a crunch-time) is the near-inevitable tradeoff we accept for an interesting and generally fun job. And like the Curb Your Enthusiasm sketch about Hodgkin’s disease, there are both ’good’ and ‘bad’ varieties of crunch-time.
Good crunch comes close to the end of the project. There are X number of bugs preventing you shipping and the end is in sight. Another form of good crunch would be working overtime to make that last-minute-yet-terrific tweak, or polishing up the latest E3/Press/Cover-Disc demo that will be seen by thousands.
Bad crunch is very different.
