I’ve just had a four day weekend during which I’ve actually managed to get quite a lot of stuff done, both when it comes to iPhone development as well as when it comes to thinking of various future projects that I have in mind. I’ve just got a new app submitted to the App Store an hour ago, I’m trying to re-brand the Mercury Mind game, I’ve just submitted a new version of it which I’ve called iAssociate. Hopefully Apple would approve it, even though it content wise isn’t that different. Game wise it’s a much better version though, it looks much more like a game and it also offers you online high scores, so that you can compete against others as well as keep track of how well you are doing in the game compared to others.

After having been developing and designing this project now almost non-stop over the weekend I can’t say anything except that developing for the iPhone just kicks ass! First of all, game development is a lot of fun, just having an idea an being able to turn it into a game is just awesome. And secondly, developing for the iPhone is so nice and easy, the whole API is really nice and easy to use all most small things, such as adding animations, internet connectivity, etc, can be done just like that without the developer having to worry too much about the technical details.

A few screenshots from iAssociate 1.0

iAssociate 1.0 Level Select

Out of the blue on iAssociate 1.0

This week I’ve tried to post my game to a few review sites, I sent out promo codes to I think almost ten sites and so far the only site which has shown any interest toward my game is The Free App Store Review. I emailed back and forth a few times with Eric March, who’s the co-founder of the site, and he seemed to like the game pretty well, in fact, you can check out his review here: Mercury Mind Review.

He had some good points about the game, that usability wise there is still lots of room for improvement. Some of the things he mentioned were that:

- If you click on multiple words in a row, while the keyboard is visible, the “de-selected” ones will be drawn as blank. – Fixed in 1.1.1
- If you click on a word, which is down on the screen, the keyboard will come up and cover it. – Fixed in 1.1.1
- Problems to figure out that you can click on already visible words if you want to match your answer against every word that is associated from that. This is mentioned in the help, but from what I’ve seen with some friends who’ve playtested this as well, it’s clear that I’ll need a tutorial mode in the game, just something that quickly shows this feature. I’m gonna implement this now in a future release, I didn’t have time to put it into 1.1.1 as I just wanted to get those small fixes out there asap.

Besides the reviews I’ve also tried to post some info about my game to various game & iPhone forums, but so far I must say that getting any kind of publicity for this game seems to be really hard. The competition for attention in the App Store seems to be really high right now(no wonder, with 35 000 apps and counting…), and I have a feeling that if you’re an independent developer, then just having a good application won’t be enough, beside that you’ll still either require some good marketing efforts, or some luck in getting your game posted on the right review sites, so that it would generate a lot of views.

A screenshot of the look of the game in v1.1.1

Surfing the Web, v1.1.1

Mercury Mind Lite was yesterday approved by Apple, late on friday evening I got the mail from Apple saying that it has been approved and is ready for sale =) Overall I’m really happy to have the Lite version out there, and I’m hoping that it will generate at least some additional sales for the full version, as I’m counting on the fact that the idea for the game is good, it’s only a matter of getting people hooked to it =) The only downside to this is that v1.1 of the full version hasn’t been approved so far, so my apologies to any of you out there who get the Lite version and then buy the full version (v1.0), first of all you’ll get a version that has a few bugs, but secondly it will also soon be updated and you will then lose all the words you’ve entered into the mind map so far (because I’ve updated the levels). In future updates I will try not to touch the original levels at all, so that they’ll remain the same then and no save games will be lost. I will however try to add more and more levels in each update, so that there’ll always be a good reason to get the update.

If anyone out there is interested, some stats on my path to riches and glory

Mercury Mind – 64 sales (12 days in the App Store)
Mercury Mind Lite – 34 “sales” (1 day in the App Store)

Get Mercury Mind: Mercury Mind in iTunes
Get Mercury Mind Lite: Mercury Mind Lite in iTunes 

Television Series Level

Last night I finally got the update to Mercury Mind submitted, version 1.1 is now under review and will hopefully be released within a week if the review process is as fast as it was for the first version.

v1.1 most important fix is that it should fix the memory problem that there was in 1.0, which caused the application to crash after a certain amount of time. (The crash comes after the app gets the second didReceiveMemoryWarning). What I at least learned thanks to this crash is that the Simulator does in fact allow you to test the memory warning behaviour by having a ready method for that in the Hardware menu, Simulate Memory Warning.

Other changes in v1.1:
- The levels have been tweaked, much new words have been added and the links have been tweaked.
- Notifications for level completion and level unlocks added, you will now be notified when you unlock a new level
- You can now see the lengths of the individual words in a long phrase, no longer just the total length of it. For instance, if there would be a phrase “Mercury Mind Lite” in the game it would show up (before being revealed ) as “——- —- —- (7+4+4)”
- Some graphical glitches with the UITextFields were fixed, they sometimes displayed a one pixel wide transparent line before the rounded parts, this was caused when I had both odd and even width UITextFields and then tried to centre the words at a certain coordinate. This has been fixed by making sure that the textfields are always of an even length.

After getting v1.1 done and submitted I then started work on the Lite version, which actually wasn’t that big of a project as I had already earlier thought it pretty much through, what would be included and what wouldn’t. So it was just a matter of making those needed changes and getting a new certificate from apple (since for the first app I hadn’t been smart enough of getting the com.doman.* certificate but instead a specific one). 

App Store Situation as of May 3rd

Hopefully after I’ve gotten these two new version out I’ll be able to try to somehow advertise my game a bit and submit it for reviews, as so far it hasn’t gotten that much attention (which I guess is a good thing considering it did contain a few bugs =)). Anyway, thanks to all, around 50 of you, who’ve already bought v1.0!