Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

Back on the IPAD -> Gratuitous Pad Battles!

cliffski

Ok, so after hurriedly yanking a slightly buggy version of GSB from the apple app-store, the IPAD version of GSB is back on sale and you can all go rush out and throw money at it right now. Hurrah! Here it is:

http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/gratuitous-space-battles/id517457294?mt=8

(The expansion packs in the PC version will end up being added at some stage. The campaign add-on won’t make it to ipad, it’s just insanely big and complex and involved and not pad-friendly)


Here are a few lessons learned from the ipad experience thus far:

1) The ipad has hardly any memory. Developing on PC, then squeezing it onto ipad is seriously hard!

2) A game where you zoom in and out and drag stuff around is really cool to play on the ipad. It feels very l33t.

3) There seems to be basically no way to get any attention on the app store unless apple chooses you. Admit it, you all only found GSB by searching.  Even the category search function seems broken on my ipad 2. It’s a trainwreck, compared to other portals.

4) Everyone who insists that nobody buys ipad games > $0.99 is just wrong. They do.

If you are a high-powered famous and influential mac-blog-owner or reviewer with a bazillion readers, and you have NOT got a press-review copy of GSB on ipad, just email me, and I will see what I can do.

In other news…. very close to setting the GTB release date now. It will also be on GamersGate, Impulse and Steam. Yay!

7 thoughts on Back on the IPAD -> Gratuitous Pad Battles!

  1. I’m just gonna buy this because I like reading your blog :D Never actually played any of your games, I’m just following for your thoughts on indie-dev. Let’s see if I like the game too ;-)

  2. It’s not that noone buys games at > 0.99. As you said, they do. The higher you price it, the less volume you get, and that’s an unfortunate reality, especially without demos. The best way to get attention is to create it. People play the games with the charts, and get attention. Raising and lowering prices is one way, just by themselves, and in conjunction with published and spur of the moment specials. All of these conspire to bring you to the top.

  3. Now I want to buy an ipad for just this game. It looks so cool, got look for a video on YouTube showing it off.

  4. Even after the ‘update’ it still crashes all the time, has a mouse-centric UI, and you can’t zoom out far enough. It’s a real shame Red Marble clearly have no idea what they’re doing because it’s a neat game and suits the platform play wise, even if the UI is a festival of redundant ‘clicking’ tiny buttons.

    The whole ‘press a button to see your average armour number, the most important number, in a popup’ is improved on iPad by that button repeatedly crashing the game. I feel like the world needs some kind of Freelance GUI Superhero or something.

  5. Thanks for reporting that shp stats crash bug. I just reproduced it here, and we will get it fixed ASAP. It seemed to happen oly the second time you go back into that dialog, and somehow we missed that…sorry!

  6. If you’re not designing fresh ships, I doubt it comes up much. It’s just a shame the armour stat isn’t on the speed/cost/power/etc area, since it’s such a big part of the game and changes every time you add a module.

  7. Hi there,

    as I am on Android (and will stay there for sure), I made a suggestion in the GSB forums under “suggestions” ;-)

    http://positech.co.uk/forums/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=7316

    I am not suggesting to port GSB to Android, but only the part about setting up your fleet assets. In some way like a remote control for the PC game.

    I don’t want to judge on the iPad’s hardware, even if Android tablets (3.0 and above) come with quite some RAM, CPU (cores), GPUs and so on. I don’t think that porting A GAME to A TABLET is a good idea in every case, as any tablet OS and UI follow a certain “touch philosophy”.

    I think that the fleet setup process could really be made the suggested way.

    Nevertheless I think that this game on a tablet (like the iPad port) is worth quite some attention!

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