In an earlier post, I talked about how I’ve been getting a large number of downloads for version 2.0.1 of Bus Jumper, and I had no idea where they were coming from. Well, I think I figured it out.
Dec 282012
Dec 262012
I think I’ve mentioned this in the past – I’ve always got more Bus Jumper users showing up on Flurry than I can account for. I recently switched Neil Rajah to AdMob, and a couple of days later I did the same for Bus Jumper. The new version is on the Google Play Store, as well as most of the 3rd party stores I use – SlideME, GetJar, etc. I haven’t yet submitted the update to Amazon or B&N, but those stores had different app version numbers, so I can track how many users I’m getting from them (answer: not many). However, I’m still getting lots of new users every day for a very old version of Bus Jumper, and I don’t know where they’re coming from.
May 172012
I just released an update to Neil Rajah. This has a bunch of bug fixes, and one new feature – the ability to unlock levels. I noticed from my Flurry analytics that the number of ‘level died’ events greatly exceeded the number of ‘level completed’ events. Also, there were some sessions where people tried the same level many times in a row, with each attempt ending in death. I saw at least one session where someone tried the same level over 60 times. I’m glad people are finding the game challenging and not frustrating. That’s more patience than I would have 
But it also felt like a potential opportunity. So now I have unlockers that you can buy from the Swarm store. These aren’t in the in-game ‘diamond store’, so you’ll have to get Swarm coins to buy these. Hopefully this won’t feel like a blatant money grab attempt. We’ll see. I’m hoping that someone will be enticed to spend some Swarm coins in the game to get past a level that he or she is stuck on.
I also started work on new levels, but that needs some more time and tuning. Since the unlocker code was ready to go, and I had several bug fixes that I also wanted to get out, I decided to release this.
The new version is on the Google Play store now, I’ll be updating the other stores later today.
Apr 292012
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 |
Mar 072012
I recently flashed an ICS-based ROM on my phone. Since I’ve been working on the transition screens for showing and hiding ads in Neil Rajah, I discovered pretty quickly that my game wasn’t fetching any ads on this phone. If I hadn’t been working on that, I doubt I would have noticed. It’s not like you really miss the ads, they’re almost always fairly annoying.
At first, I thought I had broken something in my code. Then I tried Bus Jumper and that didn’t have any ads either, so I suspected Mobclix. But I eventually realized that none of the ad-supported apps on my phone were fetching ads. After some Google research and some poking around on my phone, I discovered that the ROM I’m using has a pretty interesting feature – it blocks access to over 30,000 websites that are ad servers, pornography sites, and so on. Mobclix and AdMob are blocked, so is Flurry. I didn’t go through the whole list, but it looks pretty comprehensive. And this is done in a very elegant way, nothing brute force like revoking internet access permissions from the app. An attempt to access these sites will simply fail, and the app won’t know why. (For those who are curious about the details – the /etc/hosts file has an entry for each of these domain names, all of which point to 127.0.0.1. This means that any attempt to access these websites will be redirected back to the phone, where it will fail).
As a user, I think this is a great idea, and I’m quite enjoying running my apps with no ads on the screen. But as a developer of ad-supported games, this makes me unhappy. It’s not like I make a lot of money through ads, but that is pretty much my only revenue stream from my games, and losing that won’t be a good thing.
Feb 252012
I’m tired and I’m procrastinating. Instead of trying to figure out how to tune a procedural level generator for 100 levels of increasing difficulty, I decided to start looking into analytics for Neil Rajah. That led me to the Flurry website, where I happened to look at the Bus Jumper dashboard for the first time in a long time. Here are some of the numbers:
- 164,000 – Total users
- 588,000 – Total games played
- 5.5 years – Total time spent playing the game
I thought those looked impressive enough to brag about