Partly out of boredom and partly out of curiosity, I decided to compare some performance metrics between Neil Rajah and Bus Jumper. These numbers are from April 21st through the 28th.
Bus Jumper | Neil Rajah | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| New Users | 2691 | 3173 | ||
| Active Users | 8164 | 6204 | ||
| Sessions | 11770 | 12178 | ||
| Total Time (hours) | 1042 | 437 |
Neil Rajah is the first project where I tried to use ProGuard. The initial setup took some trial and error, but some Google searches mostly sorted that out. I had entries in the config file for libGDX, Mobclix, Flurry, most of the important libraries that I use. The game’s been out for a month, and no one’s really reported major problems.
I’ve always had a nagging feeling at the back of my mind that maybe my game is crashing all over the place, and I’m just not getting to know about it. But ACRA was working, I got crash reports when I was debugging the game, so I put that down as paranoia. I never got any ACRA crash reports from the field, and didn’t really give that much thought. You can probably see where this is going…
Yesterday, on a whim, I thought about checking crash reports on Flurry. And that confirmed my fears – my game has been crashing, and ProGuard had optimized out ACRA, so I wasn’t getting any crash reports from my release build. Awesome. I was working on an update anyway, so I thought, what the heck, I’ll just disable ProGuard, I’m not sure it’s really buying me that much anyway. Big mistake. Big big mistake.
This is a fairly new thing that started a couple of months ago. Every Friday, a couple of Googlers get together, drink some beer, and review some apps and games. They do this as a Google+ Hangout, and sometimes the developers join and chat about their games and apps. You can watch it live on YouTube, and the whole video is available a few minutes after the Hangout is finished. It’s a pretty cool idea.
A friend mentioned this to me a few days ago, so I submitted Neil Rajah for review, and asked some of my friends to vote on it 
I’m not sure how much of a difference that made, but it got selected for review. I couldn’t actually join the Hangout, but I was able to watch the video. They did a pretty good job with the review, and provided some good feedback and tips on areas to improve. They also had some fun with the Indian theme
What’s most interesting is that they pointed out the problems with the background music pause / resume, which is exactly what Amazon dinged me on as well. I’m working on a fix for that, should hopefully be done in a few days.
Here’s the link. I can’t get it to work right with the ‘start from’ code, so scroll through to about 33 minutes if you want to skip the other reviews.
When I got their approval email a week or so ago, I’d assumed that it was approved for all devices. Well, I was wrong. They were still testing it on the Kindle Fire, and they let me know today that it had been rejected. The exact text of their email that explains why:
Neil Rajah (Free) was found to be incompatible due to issues with the app’s interaction with Kindle Fire’s Settings bar. Neil Rajah (Free) stops playing background music when users access the Quick Settings (e.g., adjust the volume).
Neil Rajah (Free) was found to be incompatible due to issues with the app’s interaction with Kindle Fire’s hibernation feature. Neil Rajah (Free) stops playing background music after the device hibernates and then is woken up.
I started typing out an email telling them it was ‘by design’, but I should be honest here, I cut some corners, and their test team caught it. Have to give them credit for that I think someone in my beta testers had pointed that out as well, but I forgot to add it to my to-do list, and then it fell through the cracks.
What kind of user spontaneously leaves a rating on a game? In my experience, there are primarily two kinds:
In my experience, the second kind of user is much more likely to leave a rating than the first. And this isn’t just related to app and game reviews, you’ll see it all over the internet. Look at user reviews on anything – electronics, hotels, lawn mowers, it doesn’t matter. Most of the people who’ve put in the effort to rate something, have done it because they have a complaint. This doesn’t mean the product is generally bad, it just means that people who are satisfied with it don’t leave reviews.
You can create an app or a game that will amaze everyone, and then you’ll get lots of spontaneous feedback. But in the real world, that doesn’t work so well. I’m sure you’ve been in this situation. You have a fairly decent game, your analytics are showing that people are playing it and enjoying it, but the only people leaving ratings are the ones who hate your game.
So what can you do about it?
A few days after it was released, Neil Rajah showed up on the ‘Top New Free’ list for ‘Arcade and Action’ games. It was ranked 363 the first day I noticed it. I’ve been keeping an eye on that to see how it changes. It climbed through the ranks to about 250 fairly quickly. After that, it’s been a lot slower. Today, it finally broke into the top 200 range. It’s at 199 It was at 200 yesterday, so I’m guessing it’s going to be a lot harder to go up in rank from here
