Introduction to Game Design on edX

Hi guys! I just wanted to let you know that I'll be taking part in the Introduction to Game Design course on edX. It's going to be my first course on this platform and I'm excited to find out if it's as good as Coursera. If you feel like keeping me company, go ahead and sign up as well. It starts in four days and it's free, unless you want an official certificate.

By the way, I got to know about the course via the Indie Game Developers group on Facebook. Besides a handful of promotional materials that people publish there, you can also find plenty of interesting news. For example this video on how Rayman Legends is made.

This week I'll try to reveal to you some of the details of the game I'm working on for a local app company, so stay tuned. It's a casual bubble game and it uses libGDX. I'm not writing it from scratch, but rather finishing up the details, but still I'm quite enjoying the process.

Making Money with Apps - e-book review

I've read the Making Money with Apps e-book recently (twice actually) and I would like to share my impressions with you. You might already know the author - Jörg Winterstein - from my previous interview that I did a year ago. Jörg, also known as Eiswuxe, is a very successful German indie game developer with almost a decade of professional experience, great blog called My-Indie-Story and an impressive portfolio of apps. I was extremely excited when he agreed to give me the book to review for free (usual price is $29.99). I hope I can help you decide if it can be a valuable read for you as well.

More about the author

Jörg used to work for a video game company and then decided to start his own business with a bunch of friends. Unfortunately, they went bankrupt when their financial backer stopped the cash-flow. After that, he carried on to create games by himself, to finally succeed and make a living from it (and even doubling his previous income). According to his reports he makes around $10k a month now.

What I liked about his story is that even if he failed first and kept working hard in order to reach his goals. Also, he didn't just get lucky with one app - he has a couple of them that are different from one another, but still make a lot of money.

What is the e-book (not) about

If you're looking for a programming tutorial - it's not a book for you. It doesn't tell you almost anything about the technical side of creating apps or games. Instead, it gives you useful tools and frameworks that Jörg uses/used to use, explains why he took certain decisions, giving you precise numbers and statistics, and basically leads you through the lifecycle of an app from choosing an idea to publishing and marketing it.

Here's a list of subjects that you may find in the book:

• tools for coding, graphics, sounds, music, and other content
• comparison and comments on several game engines and game programming languages
• thorough explanation of mobile ads - their formats, ad networks, statistics, house ads and expected revenue - all with real-life examples
• paid apps and in-app-purchases - how to set your price and perhaps even double your previous income, comparison to free apps with ads
• app marketing - choosing an idea, naming, icon design, review sites, keywords, facebook advertising, forums, etc.
• getting good ratings
• Google Play vs. Apple App Store vs. other stores
• testing - how to make sure your app does not contain bugs or design errors
• alternative places to publish your apps
• tracking the apps' usage and performance
• taxes
• tons of other tips - most of them from hands-on experience

Strong and weak points

The book contains a lot of invaluable information for indie developers on any level, no matter if they are just starting out or trying to improve their income. Some of the tips can save you a lot of time and money by helping you make a decision like whether to use facebook advertising or how to determine the price of an app. Making Money with Apps basically describes step-by-step how an app/game is made, distributed and marketed with real-life examples and numbers which give them credibility.

The thing I didn't like was that most of the statistics are becoming outdated - dating back to 2012. I know it's only two years, but a lot has changed since then. Jörg told me he is planning on doing a general update, so it should be fixed in the near future.

In some sections I also had a feeling that Eiswuxe tried to explain even the most basic notions (like what CPM is), not knowing exactly what his target audience was. It can be a good thing if you're a total beginner, but it might be boring for more advanced people (even though there are parts definitely more suitable for them as well).

Summary

I believe that Making Money with Apps e-book deserves a 4.5/5 score and perhaps even 5 when the statistics and general structure get updated (hopefully really soon). It gives you the insight of a game-programming veteran and definitely helps you be more successful with your apps. I was somewhat unsure about the price - $29.99, but after reading it I think it's definitely worth it. There's also a three-day-long money back guarantee, so if you don't like it, you can just get refunded. I strongly advise you to give it a try. I'll be glad to hear your opinion on it as well.

Buying and Selling apps on CodeCanyon

A couple of months ago I found out about Fiverr and I decided to try it out. I published a gig offering to help people add ads to their Android apps. It wasn't very successful - I basically just got one person buy it. However, our cooperation didn't end with just ads. He asked me later to reskin a soundboard app he had bought on CodeCanyon for $15. I took a closer look at the portal because I was amazed at how cheaply you could get good quality code to learn from and reuse. Recently, I decided to run a full-fledged research and find out if CodeCanyon could be profitable for sellers as well. Here's how I did it and what I discovered.

Research details

In order to gather the data about mobile apps, I wrote a simple web crawler in Python. It went through all four categories - Android, iOS, Native Web, and Titanium, extracting interesting pieces of information about each app. After the script's work was done, it saved the collected data in a csv file, which I subsequently imported into a Google Docs spreadsheet. From there I extracted the statistics that seemed the most useful to me - how expensive the apps are on average, how much developers earn, which categories and platforms are the most popular, etc.

Results summary

There is almost a thousand mobile apps - most of them for iOS, but a lot for Android as well. They range from $5 to around $50 and the average price is only $15. It's insane that you can buy a fully-functional game or application for such a low price.

There are almost 50k apps sold worth more than 800k dollars. Again iOS is leading in the ranking, but Android is not that far behind it. Web and Titanium apps are far less popular, but still not insignificant.

The most popular apps have sold a good couple hundred copies worth around $10k earned. The best of them sell more than a hundred times a month, bringing their authors up to $2k monthly revenue.

On average, however, apps sell in around ten copies and earn between $100 to $200 a month and $1k in total (most app are quite new though). This is still not bad, taking into account the potential revenue you could have with those apps.

Among the most popular Android apps there are:

The Restaurant App - 463 copies sold

Android Flat UI Template - 418 copies sold

Flappy Bot - An Obstacle Avoidance Game - 380 copies sold

Kids Memory Game With Admob - 366 copies sold

Recipies App - 335 copies sold

Jumper - An Arcade Jumping Game - 229 copies sold

See the full list of Android apps with the most sales here.

Judging by the ratings, the majority of apps seem to be of high quality. Each gets rated by around 10 people and the scores are mostly favorable.

There's also extensive feedback from buyers - some discussions exceeding 400 posts. On average, however, there are 30 comments on each app, which gives you a good idea about other people's doubts and the author's responsiveness.

Categories Summary

I wanted to see which app categories were the most popular and profitable. Here's the result of my research.

Android Categories

iOS Categories

Web Categories

Titanium Categories

Android

Full Applications

Templates

Games

Utilities

iOS

Full Applications

Games

Frameworks and Libraries

Web

Miscellaneous

Full Applications

Titanium

Full Applications

As expected, people want to buy full applications and games which are ready to reskin and reuse. Some templates and utilities are popular as well, but usually bring less profit. For more details, take a look at the tables above.

Conclusions

CodeCanyon seems to be a great place to both buy and sell apps. It's affordable for buyers, but still lets you make a significant amount of money if you want to publish your own code there. Note that the extended license (the one letting people sell the app) costs five times more than the regular one. I didn't take it into account in my research, because there was no information about the percentage of people purchasing it. It might influence your earnings significantly though.

In the future I might experiment with CodeCanyon some more. I have a nice idea for a simple but interesting app related to Facebook. Perhaps I will try to see if other people would want to use it as well...

P.S. Sorry for not posting anything for so long. I was moving between countries - from Italy to Poland. There has been some exciting stuff happening in the meantime and I'd like to tell you about it. In short - I got my first Elance project, I read a good book about indie Android adventures, I'm working on an arcade game for a local company, and I'm on the brink of being admitted to a premium freelancing portal. Stay tuned for more details! 

Android video courses

Some people were asking me about resources from which they could learn Android. There are numerous courses on the Internet as well as books. You could probably just google them. What I want to focus on in this post though are video courses/tutorials. I've taken some of them and I really liked this form of studying. I've also done research to find out about less known ones. So here they are, ordered by the amount of experience I have with them.

Coursera

It's a great site with free courses offered by the best universities in the world. I've taken almost ten of them now (not only related to programming) and they were all amazing. Only if you need a paper certificate of accomplishment, you have to pay a small amount of money. The only problem is that classes start at specific dates a few times a year, so that all students can work together and help each other. If there's no active session, you have to wait till the next one. Here are those related to Android:

Programming Mobile Applications for Android Handheld Systems
8 weeks, 5-10h/week

Creative, Serious and Playful Science of Android Apps
11 weeks, 5-10h/week

Pattern-Oriented Software Architectures: Programming Mobile Services for Android Handheld Systems
8 weeks, 8-12h/week

Programming Cloud Services for Android Handheld Systems
10 weeks (6 core), 4-6h/week

Udacity

Udacity offers probably the highest quality, most extensive and up to date Android courses taught by the best teachers (e.g. Reto Meier himeself) and endorsed by Google. It's enough to say that almost 100k people have signed up for them so far... and they've been available for around a month. The video materials are free. If you need access to projects' source code, help from a coach, or a verified completion certificate, you need to pay $150.

Developing Android Apps
8 weeks assuming 6h/week, $150 for the paid track

UX Design for Mobile Developers
4 weeks assuming 6h/week, $150 for the paid track

Udemy

It's one of the biggest e-learning sites with plenty of Android videos for beginners and advanced users. Prices range from free to about $150. Other courses (design, programming, monetization) are of high quality as well. There's plenty of social proof - good ratings and reviews. The most popular classes have up to 35k students.

Most popular Udemy Android courses

Learn Android Programming From Scratch - Beta

Game Development Crash Course with Corona SDK

Learn by Doing - Android for Beginners

Google I/O 2014

Google I/O is an annual software developer-focused conference held by Google in San Francisco, California. Its significant part is dedicated to Android. They will not teach you how to start making your apps, but rather tell you about new SDK capabilities, design guidelines, devices (wearables), Google Glass programming, material design, etc.

Google I/O 2014 Videos (you can filter Android related ones using the right panel)

Google I/O 2014 Android App to watch videos from your phone or tablet

Google I/O 2013 for last year's videos

YouTube

It's probably the biggest repository of videos ever existent. Why not use it to learn some Android? The channels I watch the most are:

Android Developers

and their

Android Design in Action series

If you want to learn from scratch, there are playlists with thousands or even millions of students like you. Take a look at the following ones. Just be careful - they're becoming more and more outdated, dating back to 2011.

Android Application Development Tutorials
200 videos, 2.7mln views

Android Tutorial for Beginners
106 videos, 290k views

Android Bootcamp Training
2011, 18 one-hour-long lessons, 58k views

Android Mobile Development Tutorial
12 videos, 25k views

CS 282: Systems Programming for Android
26 videos, 21h in total, 21k views

lynda.com

Online video tutorials to help you learn software, creative and business skills. It's a paid site with a monthly fee starting from $25. They don't offer a-z courses, but rather smaller 3h-5h ones targeted to teach you a specific skill like creating a note-taking app or a simple multi-platform game in Flash. The nice thing is that once you become a member, you gain access to all the courses they have.

Android related tutorials on lynda.com

lynda.com Android app

Android SDK Essential Training - 5h 10min

Building a Note-Taking App for Android - 3h 7min

Building and Monetizing Game Apps for Android - 2h 55min

Connecting Android Apps to RESTful Web Services - 3h 24min

Distributing Android Apps - 1h 38min



I hope you like my list. As always, I encourage you to leave comments with your experiences below. Help other readers find a course/tutorial for them or avoid the bad ones. Happy studying!

App review exchange with SmoothReviews

Many Android developers who release their first apps have problems getting an audience for them. It's really not easy to make people rate, review and share what you create. And without any social proof, obtaining new installs or getting featured by Google Play is very hard.

That's why people post their work on Facebook and Twitter, ask friends to install and rate it, create groups of mutual help or look for others with a similar problem to exchange reviews. All of the above usually with meager results. Your Facebook friends hardly care about your geeky side. Having a separate page or Twitter account for the apps might help, but you need to have some followers beforehand. Friends can always write a couple of nice words, but how many of them willing to do it every time you come up with a new app do you have? In self-help groups and review exchanges people mindlessly install what you tell them, rate very often without even running the app and then simply remove it from their device. If Google does not penalize those votes, they probably will at some point. After some time of practising this, your Google Play account will most probably look like a mess, recommending to you useless and uninteresting apps, just because you liked similar ones...

SmoothReviews might be the answer for this problem. It's basically a review exchange portal where you rate and review other people's apps and in exchange they do the same for you. The difference is that you pick the apps you want to rate and you don't have to give them five stars - just be honest. By requirement you have to keep the reviewed app for 48 hours. It's advised to write at least two or three sentences including some constructive criticism if necessary. Paid apps are supported as well, but they require you to return the favor. When you sign up, you get two app slots for free, but if you do it through my link, you get an extra one. The whole reviewing process usually takes a couple of minutes and includes taking a screenshot of what you wrote. Try it out if you think it might help you.

If you have any questions about SmoothReviews or want to share your experiences with it, please use the comments section. Perhaps you even get to review one of my apps :)

I'm looking for a (freelancing) job

After 1.5 years an Italian period of my life is about to end, since I'm moving from Milan to Cracow, Poland in September. After working from home as a web and Android developer and then doing the European Voluntary Service project for a local NGO I'm ready to finally move on to do something else. I'm not sure what that "something" will be, but I'm hoping to find a job related to game development, Android or both. I tried to look for online gigs that I could do from home, but it didn't really work that well. Here's what I experimented with along with the results.

Freelancer.com

It's one of the biggest freelancing portals with lots of projects and categories to choose from (from software and design to data entry, sales, marketing, engineering, accounting, and translations). It has changed a lot, mostly for the better, during the last year, but still there's a lot of space for improvement. Projects on Freelancer are usually poorly described, which makes it very hard to bid. Other than that, there's always tons of people from Asian countries (India, Pakistan, Indonesia, etc.) who are willing to work for $2/hour, which is probably not a salary suitable for Europeans or Americans. There exist premium accounts and specialized tests that you can take to increase your chance of being selected, but most of them are paid (usually $5) and I didn't feel like spending money on something that I wasn't sure would even work. My final balance is about 50 bids and never being selected... Perhaps you can be more lucky or find your niche. The most popular categories are very difficult to compete in.

Elance

Another freelancing portal from the big trio. Mostly IT centered. Project descriptions seemed to me more detailed than on Freelancer, but again the competition is quite fierce.

oDesk

The last from the best known freelancing portals. The least known by me. Perhaps I made a mistake by not trying it out more thoroughly, because it's the most restrictive (you can't place so many bids), which prevents people from spamming every project they can possibly find.

Rent a Coder

It's a small, software-oriented freelancing site. Being less known might be an advantage here though. There's much less projects than on Freelancer, but also much fewer people to compete with. I managed to get a response from some employers once or twice, but the negotiations never got very serious. I haven't used it for some time, because I thought it had been bought by a biger portal and not being updated any more. It turns out that I was wrong.

TopTal

I practically just got to know about it. It's an elitary portal with 4-step recruitment process - you can't just sign up and start looking for projects. I'm on the third step now. If they let me in, I'll make sure to tell you more about it. Almost for sure being part of it gives you the biggest probability of finding a job to do. They even insist that you work full time. They use Codility for their programming assessment, so you may want to give it a try beforehand. Oh, and they also have a blog where they published quite an interesting article with possible questions you can encounter on your Android job interview.

Fiverr

Have you ever been curious about what you can buy for five bucks? Well, now you know... Pretty much anything, from simple logos, illustrations, to apps, voiceovers and pranks. I was helping people to add ads to their Android apps and I managed to get to know a guy who was giving me more work afterwards (reskinning apps bought on CodeCanyon). After that I wasn't so lucky though, so I decided to take down the gig and replace it with new ones. Check them out here.

The point of the above rant is that freelancing is not an easy thing to do, even if you're a fairly good programmer. That's why I'll probably be looking for something more stable this time. As a side thing it can be interesting though and I'll definitely keep trying alternative ways of augmentig my income. By the way, if you have something to do for me, let me know :P

My new app: Blogger Stats

As I mentioned some time ago, I've been working on a simple app for displaying pageviews statistics for blogs on the Blogger platform. The idea interested me, because I wanted to check how many people viewed my blog, and there was no app like this on Google Play. Using a browser to go to the administration website was simply inconvenient. It was slow and you had to log in to see the information. That's why I decided to try to create an app for it.

You can get Blogger Stats for Google Play here:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=pl.bartoszwesolowski.bloggerstats

The screenshot on the right explains perfectly what the app does. It basically tells you how many people visited your blog in the last week, in the last month, and since you started it. Unfortunately, more detailed statistics are not available, because the Blogger API does not support it right now. This information is usually satisfying enough though.

What's great about the app is that you don't have to log in to your account, because it uses the built-in Android authentication mechanisms. This way it's also safer, because your username and password are not stored anywhere. What is more, you can use it offline, because it stores historical data on the device. Finally, if you have more than one blog, you can easily switch between them using the dropdown menu in the action bar.

What I'm particularly proud of is that Blogger Stats handles orientation changes elegantly by using retained fragments. This way the user does not even realize that the app is being restarted. To read more about this technique, go to the Handling Runtime Changes section on the Android Developers site.

If you're interested in implementing something similar or in using other Google API's, I recommend the following resources:
Blogger API reference
Google APIs authentication guide
Sample Android App for Google Tasks (todo list)
Google Plugin for Eclipse

As to additional libraries that I used, there was Crashlytics for crash monitoring and discreet-app-rate for displaying an elegant notification encouraging users to rate the app. Both helped me a lot with my other apps and are very easy to implement.

Once again, you can find Blogger Stats on Google Play. If you have a Blogger blog, I'm sure it'll be useful for you. And don't forget to leave me a nice review :)