Tag Archives: thoughts

Talking about the indie life with “Beginning iOS Development”

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Today I would like to redirect you to Beginning iOS Development. Some days ago I was asked by them to answer some questions about iOS development and the indie life in general. We talked about a bunch of topics such as the troubles an indie developer may encounter while trying to make a living of app development, the first app I created (paintingWalls), how to succeed as an indie dev, how to market your apps with no budget, etc.

To be honest, I think that the questions were extremely appropriate and the overall interview was very well crafted. It made me think deeply about the whole indie stuff. There were some things that I was not taking into account, specially from the strategic point of view. And I was not even aware of that. Trying to answer sincerely the questions of the interview made me realize about it.

I really think that was me who gained more from that conversation 🙂 Here you have the complete interview. Not too long 😉

The Interview

The pressure of money

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In today’s post I would like to share with you some thoughts about surviving as an indie iOS developer. I started my iOS journey in August 2009 with the development of paintingWalls. However, I went full-time indie one year later, on August 2010. So currently, I’m living from the incomings produced by the apps you can see in the Projects page of this blog.

money

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Game Theory Applied: Endogenous Value

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Today’s article is the third one in the series “Game Theory Applied”. You have the previous two here:

In the previous two articles I talked about game design aspects that I think that were well addressed in New Sokoban. However, today I’m going to talk about a very difficult and tricky topic that should be better applied to New Sokoban: endogenous value in games.

Endogenous Value

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Game Theory Applied: The Flow Channel

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In today’s post I would like to start a series of articles about Theory of Game Design and how I applied (or tried to apply…) it to my projects. Usually games are made by inspiration and intuition. And this is not a bad approach because, at the end of the day, game creation is a deeply creative activity.

However, there are some game design aspects that have been theorized by experienced game designers that, despite sounding quite obvious, it is worth to keep them in mind while working on our games. I would like to start by one of the most interesting and effective concepts of game design: The Flow Channel. Applying this concept to New Sokoban had a very positive impact on the games experience. Despite it being an intuitive aspect of games that you could have learned while playing a lot of games during your live, the first time I red about it was in Jesse Schell’s book The Art of Game Design. By the way, this book is highly recommended for game designers out there and wanna be game designers like me 😉

Flow

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From lone wolf to pack member

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In today’s post I’m going to explain a little bit how my routine as an indie dev has changed in the last few weeks. I have experienced a really big change since New Sokoban was presented and released. I have gone from the lone wolf indie dev style to an intensive collaborative working style. And only in 2 months!

The Lone Wolf

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18 months on the App Store

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This is my first article that is going to be included into the iDevBlogADay series. So, I would like to encourage you to read the About page and the Welcome post if you want to know a little bit about me. You can also find all my own iOS projects on the Projects page.

I started my own App Store journey as an indie about 18 months ago. It has been an incredible experience, with lots of satisfying moments and also some frustrating ones. With successful stories and also with non so successful ones. However, the most important thing is that I have learned a lot about living in the jungle of the App Store. In today’s post I would like to share some experiences with you.

App Store icon

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Gamelab 2011. Trying to avoid the unavoidable

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From June 29 to July 1 has been celebrated in Barcelona (Spain) Gamelab 2011: the international videogames conference. I have been there the whole three days attending almost all the conferences and walking around the playing area. So, I have seen and lived probably the 95% of this Gamelab 2011. In today’s post I’m going to talk about my vision of the conference and the benefits I got from it.

Gamelab

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New Sokoban postmortem

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Today’s post will be a classical one: postmortem of New Sokoban. New Sokoban was officially launched around a month ago and I think that it is enough time to write this post. Basically because I think that things are not going to change a lot in the future concerning New Sokoban. So, here you have what went right and what went wrong.

New Sokoban icon

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Target audience considerations (part 1)

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In today’s post I’m going to talk about a quite tricky topic: target audience and its implications on the development and commercialization of your app or game on the AppStore. First of all I would like to clarify that I’m not by no means an expert about this topic. Everything I’m going to say is based on my experience with paintingWalls and New Sokoban. So, comments on this post will be specially appreciated 🙂

Probably when you start your first project that is intended to be published you don’t think about your target audience seriously. You probably focus on creating a great app or game and assume that this will be enough to reach mass market. Usually this is not true. Usually you need to create a great app for your target audience. And that implies that you need to fix or select your target audience first.

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