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

Notes:

• Stats supplied by the most excellent Pinch Media service
• Retail price has remained $2.99 since launch
• The last orange entry is a partial day and incomplete
• Better Christmas List is #1 on the staff favorite and What’s Hot list
• After being featured Better Christmas List is now #61 in the top paid apps list

I’ve omitted actual sales figures from the above because I don’t feel it’s relevant, but suffice to say that before being featured daily sales were several hundred.

Since being released in early November I saw a steady day over day increase in daily sales (before being featured). This is in contrast to most apps that experience a boom and then a decline, but is likely to be a result of being a festive app and Christmas approaching. I expect sales to fall off a cliff in the next week or so

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!

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.

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. 

Bad crunch can be summed up as the “oh fuck” phase of a project or milestone, the time where it’s discovered the amount of outstanding work exceeds the time remaining. In addition, while working on features that have not yet been completed (or started!), special care must be taken as the amount of QA time they will receive before release can vary from weeks to hours. 

The causes of bad crunch and how they can be avoided deserve an entire post to themselves. However, since I’ve only recently finished my latest bout of crunch I’ll save that post till I’m feeling a little more objective  Instead, here are 10 of the things I most dislike about crunch-time in the games industry..

1. The final deadline is never really the final deadline, at least not at first. Attempting to guess the real deadline becomes a game of cat and mouse between the developer and the publisher.
2. Your daily diet consists of cheap takeaway food, constrained to a few repeating varieties. To this day, certain Indian dishes bring back haunting memories of summer 2004.
3. Life begins to resemble Groundhog Day, sans humour and Andi McDowell. While Bill Murray learnt to play the piano, your only gain will be carpal tunnel syndrome.
4. Because the majority of games target the holiday season crunch-time, annoyingly, coincides with the last few months of summer. (We work on video games people, we don’t get enough sun as it is!)
5. You wake up one morning and realize you’re out of fresh laundry
6. You wake up the next morning and realize you’re still out of fresh laundry.
7. Consumption of Coffee/Coke/Red-Bull increase to dangerous levels. Unofficial competitions begin to see who can brew the strongest, yet still drinkable, coffee. 
8. Some team members begin to develop an irrational dislike for the publisher in general, and the publishers QA team in particular.
9. During the final month (or months), various team members will be sporadically struck by day-long bouts of unfounded optimism and utter phrases such as “we’re nearly there”, or “one last push!”. The rest of the team will take time out of bug-fixing to plot their painful deaths.
10. After crunch is over, you still have submission to contend with.