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.
Dec 222012
At this point, I don’t think I have anything to lose. Bus Jumper had some $25 days in December, and might cross $300 in ad revenue. Neil Rajah is making $1-2 per day, and won’t cross $50. Also, Mobclix has been saying “We’re going to catch up with our payments” for a while now, but their actual results have been pretty spotty. According to their posted payment schedule, they owe me a few hundred bucks right now. So I figured, might as well try something different. I tried to get Mobclix’s ‘open allocation’ to work, but either it takes a while for web changes to take effect, or the percentage settings don’t work right. I gave up on that after a while, and just switched my code to AdMob. Google doesn’t give everyone access to interstitial ads, so the inter-level ads are still Mobclix.
We’ll see how this goes. Flurry picked a good day to glitch, it’s showing 0 users for today, so I can’t tell if the update has gone live yet, or how many downloads it’s seen. It’ll be interesting to compare AdMob and Mobclix performance. I don’t really know if AdMob will have better ads to serve to India (which is where most of my impressions come from for Neil Rajah). If it’s significantly worse, I can always switch back, I have all the old code.
Dec 022012
I just published an update to Neil Rajah. Been a while, since the last one was in May. I’ve added 40 new levels, thus doubling the number of levels. I didn’t really add any new gameplay, so this is the same level generator, with the parameters tweaked to make the new levels harder. The main reason for the update is to work around a rendering issue with Jelly Bean. I’m not sure what the problem is, but if I leave hardware rendering enabled (which is the default), sometimes the game view goes black when the Mobclix ad view is shown. The game is still running, the buttons respond with sounds if I touch the screen where I know the buttons should be, but nothing gets drawn. I tried various combinations, and the only thing that worked is to turn off hardware rendering for the game view. So I turned it off for the whole application.
Jun 122012
In my last income report, I had mentioned a discrepancy in the NOOK store numbers. The reports showed about 500 sales of Bus Jumper, my Flurry data confirmed a similar number of new users, but the revenue numbers didn’t match up. Well, apparently, when B&N were processing the last update I made, they accidentally made the game free for a few hours. The roughly 500 downloads happened during the time that the game was free. Since this was their error, they are going to pay me what I would have earned if those had been legitimate sales. I should receive this payment at the end of June. There were a total of 564 copies downloaded for free, which works out to $390.78 that they are going to pay me.
This kinda sucks for B&N. I’m not going to complain about the money, but it’s a somewhat ironic way to generate revenue from your games 
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.