Pebble In The Ocean

The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones. - Confucius

In the first post, 'Failure To Launch', we talked a little about my 'gaming vintage' as a gauge of those experiences that led me to be here writing to you fine folks today. I alluded to discussions of things such as bootstrapping a company using open-source tools, and postmortems after a successful product's launch. The road we'll go down today is that of the most recent product road we've explored as a company, that of 'Through To Iota'.

'Through To Iota' was completed and uploaded for approval in the very early hours of Saturday, September 12th, to much excitement within the team. A short while later in the waning hours of Monday, September 21st Newfoundland Standard Time or NST, the product and it's Lite version were released! With more than a little local fanfare, our first completed product made it's preliminary steps out into the world. It was quickly picked up by the aggregation sites whose automated feeds keep their users in the know the minute a product is released or updated. The word was out! Binary Dawn's first product, 'Through To Iota', was now available!

Our initial excitement was quickly tempered, however, by an unyielding reality; we were now one of 80,000+ apps available on the Apple App Store and counting according to apptism.com. While within the team our vision of creating and releasing 'Through To Iota' was one of rolling a grain of sand uphill until it became a polished boulder which we then pushed off the cliff at the top and out into the local pond for a huge splash; from the outside looking in we were but three small ants who worked a microscopic dust particle into a tiny pebble which we pushed off a cliff into the raging north atlantic ocean with barely so much as a ripple.

Don't get me wrong, we all still feel a great sense of satisfaction and fulfillment having successfully launched our first product into the Apple App Store. Receiving feedback from players has been a very rewarding experience, however, total downloads remain at a level below expectations. With these thoughts in mind, lets take a look at what went right and what went wrong with the initial launch of 'Through To Iota'.

What went right:

The team
Having partners who work well together and have complementary skill sets is key.

Background tech
'Through To Iota' leveraged our own internal library that had been built over the previous year and beyond, as well as several others such as libpng and Box2D.

Rapid development
At about eight weeks development time, 'Through To Iota' came together fairly rapidly thanks to the teams synergy and the tools that were already in use prior to the start of development.

Open source tools
As mentioned above several available pieces of technology made the rapid development of 'Through To Iota' possible. As well as several zlib licensed libraries in use, the Inkscape and Gimp tools were used quite heavily throughout development. While not without issues, many thanks still go to the authors of these libraries and tools.

What went wrong

Pre-Release Lack of promotion
As the focus was simply on completing the first product and getting it approved, not much time was devoted to how the public would be made aware of its existence prior to its release. Certainly a case of, 'if a product is released in the big forest, does anybody hear?'.

Lengthy development
Yes, 'rapid development' was cited as what went right. However, the team initially estimated the time to be much less! Lesson learned here; polished gameplay alone does not a product make.

Overall, completing and releasing 'Through To Iota' has been a very satisfying and rewarding experience for all involved. While from the outside it is just one tiny pebble dropped into the ocean of App's currently available, I believe moving the small stones is a good first step on the road to moving mountains.

So, on this Canadian Thanksgiving, I for one am thankful to all the people out there who helped to make this possible, both known and unknown, and to those players out there who have decided to see if a small product from an unknown developer, Binary Dawn, could entertain them for a little while.