Archive for the ‘All’ Category

New Features, Massive Update coming for B.I.T.S Soon

Sunday, February 14th, 2010

My brother and I have recently done a bunch of work on B.I.T.S. He totally re-purposed all the art assets to look way crisper and in higher resolution. We’re also adding a new feature to the table. Lastly, I’ve done a lot of work to gain some huge performance improvements even with higher res graphics, better PVR texture compression. I’m seeing an almost constant 60 frames per second on my iPhone 3G (not 3GS) with OS 3.1.3. On a first gen device with OS 2.2.1 Im seeing around 40fps.

Most of the performance gains were achieved by eliminating redundant OpenGL ES state changes. An example of this is when binding textures. Instead of constantly switch textures (everything is stored in texture atlases) I store which texture is currently bound and don’t bind if I don’t need to. I also make sure that I put the textures in the atlases in the order in which they are drawn to further minimize texture switching.  This only works on OS 3.0+. On OS 2.2.1 I’m using a different strategy that was also a big win. I gained at least 8-12 fps by making the rendering thread based instead of being driven by an NSTimer.

Here is a screenshot comparison. The old version runs at half the speed (inconsistently) and doesn’t look nearly as good. Please note that this is all still in development.

Before:
Old B.I.T.S Pinball Graphics

After:
New B.I.T.S Pinball Graphics

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This is what your sales might look like after being featured by Apple.

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009

Shortly after “B.I.T.S” Pinball’s initial release we ended up on “New and Noteworthy” in the iTunes store and on “Hot New Games” in the iPhone App Store. Of course we have no real way of figuring out where our sales came from but we can only assume our boost in sales had to do with this. Don’t get me wrong, being featured by Apple is definitely great for business! We are extremely excited and thankful for being featured and hope to pull it off again in the future.

B.I.T.S Initial Sales Full

Based on these statistics the only observation I can make is that getting Apple’s attention is only part of the equation. I can see traditional marketing making a larger impact on sales over time and the fly by night successes disappearing. Of course this may only apply to us and I’m sure there are stories out there that prove the opposite. I think sharing this info can only help others make more educated guesses on how to play the game :)

As a side note, the “only” marketing we did was announcing our game on the touchArcade forums (one of the best places to announce your game by far) and requesting reviews from as many iPhone gaming websites as possible. It’s been almost a month since release and not a single review site has reviewed our game (perhaps our game is just that bad?… I don’t thinks so). Those that responded to our review requests where only trying to sell us adverting or wanting us to pay $$$ for an “expedited” review, (except for the iPhoneSlutz: http://iphoneslutz.com/, those ladies are awesome!). It takes a lot to make me nauseous but email responses asking for money to review our game only make me reach for the Pepto.

iTunes link: B.I.T.S Pinball

B.I.T.S Pinball home page: http://www.ballinthesystem.com

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I’m heading to Seattle iPhone Tech Talk

Saturday, October 31st, 2009

I’m really looking forward to attending the iPhone Tech Talk here in Seattle on Monday (Nov 2nd 2009). The scheduled talks look to be really relevant, (http://devworld.apple.com/events/iphone/techtalks/). I might even get a chance to meet up with some Seattle XCoders and maybe even make some new iPhone developer friends. Anyone else going to be there?

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