Until then, take a look at these.

Storyboard

Tou working on the trailer
 

Roland making beats
 

Character concepting
 

Character concepting
 

Character design & color schemes
 

Working out game mechanics
 

World/level concepting
 

World/level design
 

Icon

Splashscreen (sort of)
 

Puncho’s workspace

Hard to believe that it’s been over a month since DEO went live, and yet we’re still trying to wrap our minds around the thought of being up on the App Store amongst other great developers!

As I promised a few weeks back, I’ll be sharing with you some of our numbers (ain’t that why you’re all here?). I swear to be as transparent and open as possible.

Before I get into anything else, let me just say this; DEO (being our first paid game), nevertheless is a tremendous success in our opinion! We’ve learned a butt-load of crap; stuff you can’t get out of books!

Currently, we’re prepping a major update to address bugs (little that we had actually) and introduce a bunch of other craziness. 3 new worlds, lots of achievements, brand new mechanics, revised main menus, revised levels, etc! More on that topic later…

Let’s get down to business!

- Dev. cost from start – live on the App Store: $30,000 (including resources and labor)
- Dev. period: 3.5 months
- Initial release: Aug 18th, 2011
- Marketing budget: $0 (LOL)

- Total units sold on day 1: 660
- Total units sold during its first week: 2,080
- Total units sold to date: 4,000

- Day 1 ranking charts: strategy – #12; adventure – #19; all games: #93
- End of week 1 ranking charts: strategy – #26; adventure – #35; all games: #210

- Free for 24 hours on Sep 14th – total free units downloaded: 50,000

- Most popular countries: 1. United States 2. China 3. France 4. Taiwan 5. Israel 6. Canada 7. Russia 8. Italy 9. United Kingdom 10. Germany

Of course being in the top 25 and top 100 overall didn’t last very long but for what it’s worth, it felt good hanging around titles like Plants vs. Zombies hehe.

DEO had great momentum from the start but it wasn’t able to sustain its position. We have some ideas on how to change that! Hopefully after some revision and a bit more thought, we can have a second re-launch with hopes for better sustainability.

Most valuable lesson learned: Building momentum on day 1 is important; sustaining your position is even more important! Achieving both is a product of 2 things which cannot be separated – appealing art style and engaging gameplay mechanics.

This past week we have gotten DEO’s first Beta test results back from our beta testers, and amongst all of the different issues/suggestions one has stood out to me amongst the others; “Is DEO too difficult?”

I found myself asking this question too. I mean, where is the balance between when a game is ‘too hard’ or ‘too easy’? It’s a hard question to answer because I think it depends on the people who are playing it. Some people enjoy games that are extremely difficult; other people want games that are very easy. Different gamers have different ways of gaming (easier/harder) that satisfy them. This can be based on how much free time the person has, or what style of game they like (ex: someone who enjoys RPG’s shouldn’t be expecting to finish the game extremely quickly). On a personal note, I don’t believe that DEO is too difficult; the concept is simple to understand. Just jump! However, some of the levels might be a bit challenging. Of course this goes into the process of making a game work well.

So today we asked our intern to draw out some more sketches of some simpler level ideas to start off DEO so that the players can get a hang of controlling Deo and advance to more challenging levels. He had a good time brainstorming some new patterns and levels that can make learning the game a lot simpler. If we decide to go that way the challenge will then be to keep the first batch of levels simple and easy, but at the same time interesting and catchy. We’ll see how it works!

This isn’t to say that any levels are going to change, but this is just some [behind the scenes] insight on some ideas that we are having.

Alright, I have to take a moment and say this, as it has been the biggest push forward and drawback during DEO’s development…it’s been a bit frustrating actually. You want to get things done faster? Communicate! As a team, you’ve got to believe in communication as the heart of being more effective. Communication has been a huge part of our current game project.

Whenever anyone adds something, or changes the way something within the game looks/works it will be run by and checked before approved. This helps everyone to stay focused. I can’t tell you how many times we have lost our momentum due to lack of communication (we’re still learning).

This kind of ‘back and forth’ criticism is how we come to decisions quicker. A lot of times if there is something within a change that a couple of people disagree with, meet and talk about the pros and cons, and make a decision from there.

Here at Strapped to a Meteor we believe that communication is one of the most important things in developing ANYTHING!

Other things that should be mentioned in this post are:

1. Apparently Rob thinks he’s “A Pro” (see random letters attached above his desk)

2. Dan is an Apple/Mac fan-boy – diversity is good!!