CastleMine in action
The last patch I plan to release has just pass certification so now is a good time to take a step back and reflect on what what’s happened over the last month and what I’ve learnt.
These are just a few of its recent achievements:
- Over 10,000 downloads in the first month
- Over 400 positive marketplace reviews averaging 4.6 out of 5 stars
- Its highest marketplace ranking among all free games has been in France which was a big surprise at 64th position. It was mentioned on www.monwindowsphone.com and it’s amazing to see what an impact that had on downloads.
- Received a marketplace review “This game is tight like a tiger. Its just that sweet”. When you get comments like this you know you’ve made it big time! It made me laugh anyway.
All this has definitely renewed my enthusiasm for the Windows Phone platform and I’m now back enjoying adding new features into the ultimate final release.
It did have a low point where after my very first update (version 1.1) I broke the game for anyone who had upgraded from version 1.0… whoops! That was a harsh lesson in testing! The bug stopped players from gaining skill points, which is a fundamental element of the game. Thankfully I don’t think I put too many people off and was able to rush a patch through certification in less than a week. It was interesting to hear feedback from players who had managed to beat the game with no skill points, so when they finally got them back the game felt too easy! Level difficulty is definitely something I’ll be focused on next release.
It's difficult without skill points...
Other great bugs included a feedback form that only recorded a tiny portion of the message and a tutorial that was invisible to anyone using the Windows Phone white theme. Again, this is all great learning experience and should make for a much more stable final release!
As far as ad revenue goes, it’s up around the $500 mark so far. This is purely using Microsoft’s PubCenter. The eCPM is much lower on this game compared to Apple Squash, but it makes up for it by volume of impressions since the average play session is over 20 minutes! The only disappointing thing is that there are still a number of countries that have an eCPM of practically 0. For example over the last week I’ve had 86,000 impressions in China but only made 30 cents. The same number of impressions in the United States would be $90.
Before releasing the game I made a last minute decision to delay the submission and add in Google Analytics. It turns out this was a great investment of time because the data I’ve been able to capture has been invaluable. It helped me identify a couple of bugs and tweak an few aspects of the game. To implement analytics I followed this link:
Amazingly, it really was that easy. An interesting fact from the data I collected is that Nokia seems to be dominating the Windows Phone markets. A vast majority of players are using Nokia 800s and 710s. This was a little surprising to me. I know Nokia’s are selling well but they were also later to the market. It’s good to see they caught up so quickly!
You can download the CastleMine Beta here:
