Sep 07
In-Depth: Saltsman, One Year On From Canabalt
Canabalt, Interview, Interviews, adam saltsman, iPad, iPhone Comments Off
Aug 18
Freeplay 2010: Why Adam Saltsman Makes Video Games
Canabalt, Games, Industry News, Reviews, adam saltsman, gravity hook hd Comments Off
Aug 13
Five For Friday: August 13, 2010
Blog, Canabalt, Games, Ninjump, Slate Magazine, capcom, friday five, ghosts'n goblins, rss, the incident, times for ipad Comments Off
Five For Friday: August 13, 2010 is a post from: Best Iphone Apps Review Website
Happy Friday the 13th, everyone! Make sure you keep your teenagers locked in tonight, and don’t let them talk to anyone named Jason. With that warning out of the way, here’s your weekly dose of what’s new and interesting in the App Store.
The Incident – A severely polished and classy take on the sky is falling genre. Dodge wave after crazy wave of falling cars and major appliances, only to use those same items to climb ever upward to your destination, the stars.
+ Universal App – Designed for iPhone and iPad
Released: 2010-08-10 :: Category: Games / Action
Ninjump – Jump like a ninja (because that’s what you are) up through the levels, between buildings and over laundry. Attack various creatures in match three stealthiness for stupidly awesome score and height boosts. Brag to all your friends.
iPhone App – Designed for the iPhone, compatible with the iPad
Released: 2010-08-12 :: Category: Games / Action
Ghosts N Goblins Gold Knights II – Capcom brings the sequel to its hardest game ever from the 1980s direct to your iPhone. You think you have what it takes? Well, do ya?
iPhone App – Designed for the iPhone, compatible with the iPad
Released: 2010-08-12 :: Category: Games / Action
Times for iPad – Takes your RSS feeds and turns them into a lovely newspaper-style layout. If you long for the simpler days of flimsy newsprint paper and fingers stained with ink, this may be the app for you.
Slate Magazine – In a world of iPad apps that continually ask you to pay more for their content (I’m looking at YOU, Wired), Slate asks you to read their magazine, for free, on your iPad. What more can you ask for from their asking of you? Wait, what?
[ Five For Friday: August 13, 2010 is a post from 148Apps ]
Jul 29
Gravity Hook HD Now Available for iPhone and iPad
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Gravity Hook HD Now Available for iPhone and iPad is a post from: Best Iphone Apps Review Website
Canabalt creator Adam Saltsman has released Gravity Hook HD ($2.99), an endless, high score-based action title featuring many of the addictive qualities of Saltsman’s previous work.
Equipped with a grappling hook, players ascend an endless vertical shaft by attaching their craft to nearby floating objects. Releasing the hook with precise timing will fling the craft upward.
Many objects are fatal to touch while the grappling hook is attached, however, ensuring a challenging experience as gameplay progresses and grappling opportunities become more precarious.
Gravity Hook HD is available as a universal application for the iPhone and iPad, and also includes the original Gravity Hook title as an unlockable bonus for reaching a 500 meter ascent.
As with Canabalt, the full version of Gravity Hook HD is playable online. As an additional bonus, for this weekend only, Gravity Hook HD’s soundtrack is available as a free download from composer Danny Baranowsky’s Bandcamp site.
Jun 03
Robot Unicorn Attack Will Make Your Dreams Come True
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May 26
New Pocket God Update Includes Canabalt Homage Minigame
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New Pocket God Update Includes Canabalt Homage Minigame is a post from: Best Iphone Apps Review Website
Episode 32 of Bolt Creative’s simulation title Pocket God ($0.99) introduces an endless minigame in the vein of Adam Saltsman’s popular autoscrolling platformer Canabalt.
Using a new power to split the earth, players can now send an unsuspecting Pygmy on a danger-laden trip through Hell itself. Once there, Episode 32’s “The Runs” minigame will begin. Players must jump deadly pits and dodge bat guano in an attempt to outrun a pursuing wall of lava.
Episode 32 of Pocket God also offers a new 99-cent skin pack that will give players the ability to transform the ice monster into a Japanese robot, a retro antennae robot, a poop-flinging yeti monster, and a pink bunny, among other creatures.
Feb 04
Rocketcat Games Details Upcoming Hook Champ Follow-Up
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Rocketcat Games Details Upcoming Hook Champ Follow-Up is a post from: Best Iphone Apps Review Website
Rocketcat Games is developing a follow-up to its addictive grappling hook platformer (and IGF Mobile finalist) Hook Champ. Developer Kepa Auwae revealed new details regarding the upcoming title in an interview at MTV’s Multiplayer blog.
Hook Champ’s sequel, tentatively titled “Avalanche Game,” will feature endless, randomly generated gameplay in the vein of Semi Secret Software’s Canabalt.
“Canabalt is a little limited ’cause it’s just rooftops, but we’re going to do a cross-country jaunt,” said Auwae. “In the main mode, where you’re running away from the avalanche, you’re going to start on a meadow, and then it’ll be totally random where you can go across grassy fields with ruins on them or caverns made out of ice.”
MTV notes that a similar design was initially slated for Hook Champ, but was eventually discarded in favor of pre-defined levels.
“Avalanche Game” will retain the grappling hook-based gameplay from Hook Champ, and will feature a variety of new gameplay elements available via in-game power-ups. Players will have access to boosted jumps, special attacks, and a ceiling-walking ability, among other features.
The upcoming title will also get one hardware generation’s worth of graphical updates, bringing Hook Champ’s hero into the 16-bit era. Rocketcat Games expects “Avalanche Game” to make its App Store debut in the next few months.
Jan 12
Capybara’s Vella: iPhone’s 99-Cent Push Is ‘Frustrating And Terrible’
Canabalt, Games, Industry News, capybara games, critter crunch, iPhone Comments Off
Capybara’s Vella: iPhone’s 99-Cent Push Is ‘Frustrating And Terrible’ is a post from: Best Iphone Apps Review Website
With an overabundance of games, it’s well-known that the iPhone game market quickly became dominated by pressure for developers to adopt 99-cent price points in response to increasingly solidified consumer expectation.
Capybara Games founder Nathan Vella calls that trend “the single most frustrating and terrible thing about App Store pricing.”
Speaking in a new Gamasutra feature (part of Think Services, as is Fingergaming) about the dilemma of pricing independent games, Vella says the the phenomenon has reduced developers’ options and made it harder for them to turn a profit.
“Since it became ‘expected’ by consumers, it forces a lot of developers, specifically indies, to devalue their game and significantly increase the number of sales needed for developers to get back their investment,” he goes on.
But developers also have the power to buck the trend. If enough of them resist the urge to plunge to 99 cents as quickly as possible, consumers might reevaluate how they value iPhone games.
Capybara is currently selling its well-received puzzler Critter Crunch for $1.99, more than half a year after it was released — and the freedom to do so is a big part of what’s attractive and potentially lucrative about the App Store, so developers must be careful not to relinquish that freedom.
Adam Saltsman’s celebrated sidescroller Canabalt is another game resisting the 99-cent siren song.
“That game is 100 percent worth $2.99,” says Vella. “Adam Saltsman bucked the trend and priced his game at a level he thought was fair. We’re on board with what Adam is doing — not letting the 99 cent pressure define how you price your game. Rather, just price it fairly. Having control of your pricing is great — being able to define, at a fine level, what your game is worth is something you often don’t get control over.”
[This article was originally written by Chris Remo and appeared at Fingergaming sister site Gamasutra.]
Dec 14
Canabalt Updates with Global Leaderboards, New Obstacles
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Canabalt Updates with Global Leaderboards, New Obstacles is a post from: Best Iphone Apps Review Website
Think you’ve finally beaten your Canabalt addiction? Think again. Semi Secret Software has rolled out a Canabalt update that includes new gameplay elements, a new music track, and global leaderboards.
Finally, your best Canabalt scores will be recognized as the incredible achievements that they are. In addition to tracking your best personal scores by day, week, or month, Canabalt’s new leaderboards allow users to compare their scores with top players worldwide.
Canabalt has also gotten a lot more challenging, thanks to the addition of new obstacles. The billboards might not give you much trouble, but the other major addition — “some enormous obstacle,” as the game describes it — is bound to take you by surprise. You’ll know it when you see it.
As always, you can play Canabalt for free online, though the new features in the latest update are exclusive to the iPhone version.
Dec 09
Canabalt Developer Adam Saltsman Explores “The 0.99 Problem”
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Canabalt Developer Adam Saltsman Explores “The 0.99 Problem” is a post from: Best Iphone Apps Review Website
In a blog post at Gamasutra (part of Think Services, as is FingerGaming), Semi Secret Software’s Adam Saltsman offered his views on “The 0.99 Problem” — a major issue facing App Store developers in recent months.
Saltsman notes that lower prices in the App Store result in increased sales. Often, developers opt to sell their games at the lowest possible price point — 99 cents — in the hopes of earning a spot in Apple’s daily sales charts, attracting an additional sales boost.
“App store ranking and sales tends to be a little logarithmic; moving up a few slots can mean a huge increase in sales,” Saltsman explains. “Dropping your price from $1.99 to $0.99, chopping it in half, can mean increasing your actual units sold by a factor of 10, or 20, or 100. The benefits are pretty obvious!”
According to Saltsman, developers would actually be taking less of a risk in the long run by pricing their apps higher than 99 cents.
In a hypothetical example, Saltsman describes an eight-week project undertaken by a three-man team. By Saltsman’s math, the team needs to earn about $30,000 in revenue to cover its costs of development.
With an estimated 50,000 units sold in an unlikely best-case scenario, Saltsman lays out potential earnings at three pricing tiers:
50,000 copies x $0.99 = $49,999 – 30% = $35,000
50,000 copies x $1.99 = $99,500 – 30% = $70,000
50,000 copies x $2.99 = $149,500 – 30% = $105,000
“Selling your game for $0.99 means you have to get in the top 10 to make it worth your while,” Saltsman concludes. “Selling your game for $1.99 or more means you can get by and maybe even fund your next project even if you’re only in the top 100.”
Saltsman also explains the reasoning behind pricing his company’s recent hit Canabalt at $2.99: “We felt (and still feel) that the game is worth $2.99.” Saltsman feels that the company’s pricing intuition paid off, citing unanimous critical praise and sales figures that he describes as “very satisfactory.”