iDef finally went on sale on the IOS store a couple of days ago which meant that, as a live project, we’ve finished actively working on it. Providing there’s no patching needed – which shouldn’t be needed due to all the testing we’ve done – then we’re concentrating now on getting it out there. The main hurdle with releasing any kind of Iphone or Ipad game now is actually getting it visible. There are so many products competing for attention on IOS that it’s really, really hard. We could have hundreds of people who would really like to buy and play the game but they’re never going to hear about it. In fact, in some ways, it’s even more work making people aware of the game than it was in the final stages of development, getting Apple to accept, and agree to sell it.

Dexterity Design is two people – Aaron and I. We’re just programmers who are adapting to the other areas of game development rather than getting other people involved, because it gives us complete creative control, which is what we need to work to our vision. We don’t have capital for marketing stuff such as magazine adverts, You Tube play-through’s, in-game adverts, web site promotions or stuff like that. The one thing we can influence is obviously social media so that’s where we have started. And for a company that’s completely unknown, iDef is our first game as a partnership, this is going to be a huge task.

Very soon we will be moving on to actual development of our next game (which is a far bigger job than iDef) and will need to concentrate on that, rather than visibility of what we have done up until now. Anything we learn from getting iDef out there is obviously vital. Of course we both knew that this is going to be a tough side of the business and we don’t expect instant success. We’re both realistic enough to know that iDef is too niche to just hit a global warm-spot with a huge market and get massive visibility from the start. Our games are games that we wanted to play and hope that other people will like, so this is more of a post to show what we’re doing now it’s finished, rather than a moan at all the problems we will now be facing getting it out there.

It’s way too early to start counting sales and pondering if it’s been a success or not, right now. I’ll likely do another blog post a couple of months down the line to look back on how well it’s done on the store. There’s no option here for direct sales when it comes to IOS due to Apple’s own restrictions. You can’t even put games you’ve been writing on other people’s phone’s or Ipads unless you compile direct to them using your own developer certificate, so we don’t have any way of selling our game on the Dexterity Design website. We do seem to have an option to give away keys which owners can redeem on their own account so we’ll be doing some of that soon, no doubt.

So we now both have the new game in mind and are looking at the design aspect at present, especially from the programming side. We’re presently looking at using Swift to write it in – but still have to decide on Cocos2d, because we’re going to need a lot of maps and we’re not convinced of the practicalities of doing that as yet.

As before we’re looking at a retro game but not from the arcade this time. We’re taking influence from a couple of classic games from the eighties that many people will remember who actively played games back then. We’ll hybrid them both into one game and, we hope, come back with something amazing. I can’t really say any more than this right now, or Aaron will chop off my fingers. Our website will naturally be updated during development to show our progress so the cat will probably be out of the bag at some point next year regardless. I will say it’s Sci-Fi themed, however. But so are a lot of games so that’s not really a massive spoiler 🙂

Categorised as: Development | Swift