Rebuild for iPad reached the US top ten in Simulation & Strategy.After all sorts of whining about Flash’s poor performance on the iPad 1, I manned up and made it happen.
The iPad 1 version of Rebuild has less snantzy animations, the map doesn’t scroll quite as smoothly, and admittedly it does run out of ram sometimes and crash. But these issues don’t seem to have lowered the game’s ranking or sales. I’ve gotten more complaints about Air incorrectly listing 15 languages than about performance.
I’ve been tracking the figures on AppFigures.com and was excited to see Rebuild’s #1 app ranking in Anguilla. Well… just kidding, but it was in the top 100 games in the US and UK for awhile. Considering it was never featured by Apple, Rebuild did pretty well, and made $15k in the first month.
Rebuild for iPad now has Game Center Achievements & Highscores.It’s evident that Rebuild’s success on the iPad came from it’s previous success as a Flash game. The sales peaks came on days when Rebuild was reviewed on sites like TouchArcade, as well as AppTudes, AppSmile, iPaddisti, 148Apps.
Releasing iPad 2 then iPad 1 separately may have been better too, because the update triggered a second round of press.
Rebuild sales peaked during reviews and updates.Likely it will earn another $15k from now on, possibly more if I put out an iPhone version or a content update and do some creative sales to get more press. But of course I’d rather be working on new things.
Like the Katakana crossword game Colin and I wrote for his mum for Xmas. Or the movie keywords parlor game I’ve been meaning to write for years. Or Word Up Dog (perhaps soon to be rewritten in Stage 3D).
This bizness be fresh. Take you from some disconnected punk to BAM! – competin' with all yo homeboys, earnin' achievements and shit.In my last post I lamented not having access native iOS features such Game Center and single sign-on Twitter. Well, Milkman Games has come to the rescue with their Game Center Native Extension for Adobe AIR. Took me less than an hour to pop it in to my FlashDevelop project, connect all the events and go. All in AS3, no Mac or Xcode required. Post scores, view achievements, all that good stuff with minimal effort. They also have an Android AdMob extension and more on the way – valuable tools for running AIR on mobile devices.
I’ve got Word Up Dog now running with Game Center on iPads and iPhone 4+, but I need to test it on the iPhone 3GS and iPod Touch 3+. So this is a call for testers – please sign up to join my Test Flight team if you’ve got any iOS device, and I may recruit you to help me test Word Up Dog, Rebuild, or some future game.
Sandworms, vines, thievin rabbits. Dawg this hood gonna get isself a makeover.For anyone who played the old flash version of Word Up Dog, there’s going to be some changes. I’m spicing up the levels with some new terrain and new powerups. I know, it’s no Rebuild, but after writing about zombies for four months I need some cute animals talking in urban slang stereotypes.
Word Up Dog was always meant to be an iOS game, so here we go!
I wrote most of Rebuild for iPad in the PhilippinesI wrote about AIR for iOS earlier in the year, but got caught up with Rebuild 2 before I could actually release any iOS game. By the time I got back to it, Adobe had just released AIR 3.0, and FlashDevelop 4.0 now comes with an AIR Mobile AS3 project that makes building Flash games to run on iPhone/iPad and Android a snap.
AIR 3.0 is definitely faster than 2.6, but I still ran into some major performance issues when adapting Rebuild 2 for iPad. It came down to dragging the big map around. In its original vector form, the map moved slowly and chunkily as all the buildings were rendered at every frame. As one gigantic bitmap it was quick as can be, but a 2000×2000 bitmap takes up far too much ram. I found an optimum middle ground but including the bulky AIR interpreter I regularly need up to 100mb, and the iPad 1 only has 256mb ram in total. So, what I’m saying is… Rebuild 2 is coming to iPad 2 and only 2. Sorry early adopters, you should have waited a year for the iPad with twice the ram and faster cpu & gpu. And a camera.
I also had to work around a shocking number of bugs in AIR 3.0 Mobile. Mostly display issues that could be solved by converting things into bitmaps before displaying them, each time increasing the amount of ram the game needs. Then, I was pretty sad I couldn’t add Game Center support without fiddling with Native Extensions in Xcode. I’m looking to pay someone to do this, because of course I’m The Girl Who Wrote An IPad Game Without A Mac.
Almost. Apple removed their web-based system for uploading binaries around the same time 3rd party compilers made it possible to build from Windows or Linux. Now, you can only upload using Apple software running in Mac OS. Sigh.
What are those new buildings there?But enough with the technical. Although the iPad version is a port of Rebuild 2 Flash, I added some new content to the game as a thank you for fans of Rebuild 2 who buy it. There are two new buildings, and one is linked to a new branch of tech. Some fresh events spattered about, and an entirely new story arc and ending written by my husband Colin. You can discover it for yourself (assuming you have an iPad 2) later this month.
Fun Rebuild fact: in the programming code, survivors are called “Colins”.
I was so busy enduring (or more like enjoying) typhoons in Japan and the Philippines, I nearly forgot to report on Rebuild 2 being live and in the wild! It’s now playing at at portals near you including Armor Games, Newgrounds (where it’s featured!), and Kongregate!
Feedback has been mostly positive, though some fans are disappointed that it wasn’t more different than the original game. I’m with you – I should have focused on adding more crazy new stuff rather than trying to improve what was already there. I suppose I saw all the flaws in Rebuild 1 very clearly and wanted to fix them all and make Rebuild 2 better in all ways. Turns out that’s incredibly time consuming, and believe it or not, Rebuild 2 took me (not to mention EvilKris who did much of the new art) longer to write than the original game. I get the anti-franchise sentiment and I totally agree that originality is one of the most important aspects of good Flash games. On the other hand, I feel all good inside knowing that Rebuild 2 is the lean, mean, post-apocalyptic city building game it was always meant to be.
EvilKris put together a video of his ending animations in their glorious full form, for those who want to revel in their un-cut awesomeness. Spoiler alert – here it is. The game’s already been mentioned around the web, including a review on JayIsGames and a game pick on the Indie Games Blog. Let me know if you see or write a review, I’ll collect them all in one place.
Finally, Rebuild 2 is going to be played in HorribleNight’s 24 hour gaming marathon benefiting Child’s Play. The guys need your donations to keep them playing games like Rebuild 2 ALL NIGHT LONG (and the next day) this Friday the 14th.
Rebuild 2 + Dead Frontier: SynergyRebuild has been sponsored – hurrah!
That means it’s coming out very soon, and what better time than October, when everybody has ghouls and zombies on the brain. And things just got zombier, because my primary sponsor is another zombie-themed game: Dead Frontier, a free to play mmo where you battle the hordes in an extensive ruined city. It’s quite pretty (I think so anyway though I know some of you don’t share my appreciation for gore), and it’s a good example of the cool shit you can do with Unity.
The sponsorship bidding process was long and stressful just like with Rebuild 1, and as before I’ve been screwing things up left and right. I was wallowing in One Cup sake earlier and wishing I could hire someone to handle this business stuff. But alas, history has shown that partering with producers is more trouble than it’s worth, especially for a small game like Rebuild.
Plus, if I didn’t do it myself, I might miss out on fun marketing stuff like doinginterviews and this blog, plus I like being credited as “Sarah Northway” rather than some faceless studio. Likewise it’s nice to deal directly with people, like Neil Yates of Dead Frontier and Daniel McNeely from Armor Games, who I’m happy to also be working with again.
So look for Rebuild 2 soon on ArmorGames and other fine gaming establishments!
