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Personal Blog - Android Report 04/2012

Sun, 06 May 2012 15:47:40 +0200

Hi Folks and welcome to my fourth report on my Android Experiences.

The last month was by far not as good as the month before, which had 2 main reasons:

First of all, exactly on 1st of april the CPC dropped heavily - I think there were some good campaigns running out so there was a lack of high cost ads.

Over the last month the daily impressions were constantly decreasing and it looks like that it remained on around 120k daily impressions for Robo Miner (remember, there were over 300k the month before).

The reason is, that germany has peaked out in new installs and start falling down rapidly - I think everyone was playing Robo Miner over many weeks and at some point get bored about it. This will happen with nearly every game sooner or later I fear.
Currently I am trying to get new features ready which will hopefully keep the players playing longer.

Before I proceed, here are the numbers for april - these are for ALL my apps, remember, that almost all of it is made by Robo Miner

admob:

eCPM: 0.82
Impressions: ~6 million
CTR: 2.98%

The eCPM was very unsteady over the whole month, after dropping massively on the 1st of april (dropped to 50%) it jumps between 0.72 and 0.93. So I think there where many short campaigns around and not many long term campaigns.

The Impressions where falling from 300k/day to around 130k/day at the end of the month.

The CTR is very stable and gives no appropriate numbers, that is normal so far, and just relies on the quality of the ads - as you guess, the quality was not that good like the month before. This reflects in lower CPC and also lower CTR.

There were 3 clicks on madvertise and 6 clicks on leadbolt - both of them are not worth to mention at all :-)

Let's take a look on the download and install numbers.

slideme does not generate downloads any more - don't know why, but there is nothing to tell.

google play store statistics does not give me very good information which I can write down here.. but with some calculating, I end up with ~50.000 installations in april on google play store. The daily installs have settled at about 1000 installs - which seems to be stable since some weeks.

An interesting fact, I also mentioned above, is that the installs in germany and russia has dropped. The USA installs are increasing very slowly and now Germany and USA are the Top Countries.

At Amazon App Store, numbers are stable and ranging between 150-250 downloads per day - which is not quite bad!

While on Amazon there are much less reviews given by players, their reviews are more detailed about the game and gives me more insight of what people are thinking about my games - which is quite good for me, so I can improve things, people don't like. Thumbs up for that.

getjar is producing a little less downloads as amazon but still reaches around 60-170 per day.
And hey, I got 1 Like and 1 Comment on Robo Miner there ;-)

So, Robo Miner is also available on Samsung App Store - let's look how it is doing there. Remember, that on Samsug, you have to upload your app for many different devices, they offer - I still had no time to upload it for the other devices, so it is only available on the high end devices in Samsung App Store, while Robo Miner would currently be be also playable on the other devices they offer.

The downloads around 166 per WEEK but very steady. I am pretty sure, there would be more if I would maintain my uploads there a little bit better and get it ready for all the other devices... but I do not have so much time at the moment and it needs quite a bit of it - I would love, if I could just add multiple device-categories to ONE apk .. not sure, if i could, haven't tried very hard, but it does look like that I have to setup a complete new app (in their system) to maintain different classes of devices .. I have to investigate that in the future :-)

Well that's it with the numbers. There were not many updates in april for Robo Miner, so I am not sure, if that had any impact on the numbers. Thing is, in the next update there will be technically big changes, so I am aware of not devlivering a bugged or unbalanced version. I really hope, that people will like the next update with all the new blocks. I should be able to release it in march, so maybe in the next report I can write about it and if there was any impact in download numbers again.

I also joined some new services, which should give me more detailed and comparable data for the next report.

I hope you enjoyed reading this little post and you get some information out of it.

Cheers, Peter

Robo Miner - Preview on Next Version! New Blocks!

Tue, 01 May 2012 01:34:07 +0200

As I announced in my last post, I am currently working on new blocks for Robo Miner.

These new blocks will be Granite (very strong) and lava (very explosive).

In this video you can see, how an explosion will lead to chain reactions in a mine - they can be lethal so it is crucial to plan your detonations or get away very fast, very far :-)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sn7Zi8ZuSM0 />
For this new blocks it was needed to completely rework the logic behind the falling blocks (it was sometimes buggy anyway) and the way, the explosion fragments gets managed.

So, this video shows Robo Miner on a Level 40 Mine at the bottom. What you see is the current maximum amount of lava and granite blocks appearing in the game (could change in the release).
The device is an Asus Transformer TF101 and it works nearly on the same performance on my Samsung Galaxy Ace.

Even, when I tweak the game to have a 100% fillrate of lava (which leads to blowing nearly the complete mine) it is still running .. not so bad :-) Unfortunately, I have no vid of such a tweak ;-) But it may happen, that I remove the fill-cap to allow 100% lava again (so every mud block is lava).

Let me know what you think of it!

Robo Miner - Developer Greetings

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 00:03:49 +0200

Hi Volks!

I think, I should give some life sights because there was no recent update. That is because Robo Miner visited me over here and we had a nice time!

We've taken some pics. Robo Miner loves the sea and also beautiful cars, so I invited him. He was mining some moutains over here too, so we got some new valleys - quite nice, isn't it? :-)

No, to be honest - I am working currently on the new blocks I recently announced. These new blocks will be granite and lava! I want to tell you a little bit about them, so you have something to look forward.

I would also love to hear your opinions about it, because this change will make the deeper mines much harder to master and they will get much, much more dangerous.

So for granite. Granite is quite strong, so you can't dig it .. and even if you want to blow it up, you need 2 pieces of dynamite. The first one will only make it crack and the second one will then blow it up.

Lava is quite different.. Sure you cannot dig it, because your drill will melt. I am not sure about if the Robo will be able to walk on lava, but maybe he can. But lava is much more trickier... If there is a change in pressure - so a stone falls on it, or it falls down - it will explode (like a small dynamite). This will lead to some chain reactions when there is much lava around - not the savest place for a little robot!

The main reason, why this update needs a good amount of time is simply, that these chain reaction needs a little bit of computing power, so I have to change some fundamentals in the game logic to make it run smoothly on most of the devices.

Also, the falling logic can now be much more scattered and asyncronous .. so .. yea, I am working on it ;-)

I personally try the game on my Samsung Galaxy Ace and also on my Asus Transformer TF101. I cannot guaranty that the game will also run on much smaller or older devices. There is the hardware restriction of some devices, and many other things - if you are already in a very deep mine, you know, that the game can lag sometimes, when there is much to do.

Fortunately, I also improved the overall performance of some drawings, so in exchange to more gameplay you will maybe get also better performance .. you may .. ;-)

I hope you all have a good time playing Robo Miner and please! Don't stop sending me suggestions, I would also really appreciate if some of you give me some feedback about the new blocks, so they do not spoil the gameplay.

Robo Miner - Update v.1.4.5

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 23:16:24 +0200

After the new features in the last update this update is also a little bit of refinement of these recent updates.

First of all, players told me, that they don't like the diamond scanner, because it is so expensive and does only work 1 time for a short period of time.

So the Scanner is now cheaper than before. You can still use it only 1 time per item but it will show the direction a little bit longer. Feel free to purchase more of them your robot can carry as much of them as you like, but remember: Be careful, if the robot dies, your inventory is lost!

I heard of many player being in very deep mines. Some of them had also reached their phone limit. That means, Robo Miner will get deeper with every level, but sooner or later your phone will not have enough memory to hold that really big worlds.

On Player experienced such a behavier at level 36 (yes, that is really deep, my congratulations for that). I am not sure if anyone else reached this limit before, but only one was telling me about it, so congratulations for reaching the limit! ;-)

Oh wait, there is another change! There are now CRYSTALS! You will find them in the deeper mines right after you find diamonds you will no find now 7 all new crystals down in the mine - I wont tell you what they are, just find it out by yourself, I don't want to destroy the surprise..

Some minor changes in this release are that the parachute can now triggered more earlier - it was hard to trigger it, so now it will let you trigger it after you've fallen 1 field or more. Hopefully that will save your robot from getting smashed by gravity :-)

I am not sure if anyone will recognize it (or has recognized in the past) but the rock pieces which fly around after destroying a field were always mud .. that's lame, so know this little pieces are more correct :-)

Also the diamond is now even better hidden. It is now in the lower 20% of each mine .. on deep mines you'll have to search very well...

I found some bad ratings in the last time. Some of them are not very informativ but some of them are. There are currently some problems where I do not have a solution yet:

PLEASE if this is your first update, remove your sd card. Some android versions WILL delete your savegames when updating to the new version!! I cannot do anything about it. If this happened to you in the past already: It will happen again! It is not the fault of the game, it is a bug in your android version. sorry..

There are some devices out there which are still not able to render levels greater than level 6. I do not know that devices, but some older devices will stop working in level 6 - you will only see the blue sky and nothing more.
If this happens to you: I am sorry, your phone is not able to render the big world.

edit: Sorry, I've forgotten: I was able to extend the playable levels on such phones - even the older phones are now able to play up to level 12 (hopefully)

GOOD NEWS!
I got some mails about an ad-free version of Robo Miner. That's why I started to work on this and maybe will come up with an ad-free version in the very soon future.

WHAT'S NEXT?
I am currently working on more blocks! Yea, there are some ideas and I also got a couple of mails with very good suggestions, so stay tuned ;-)

AND PLEASE!
If you have any problem with the game, let me try to help you. If you do not send me a mail or write here into the forum, I cannot help you or fix any bugs (I need to get knowledge of them)

Personal Blog - Android Report 03/2012

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 13:27:37 +0200

Welcome to my Android Report of March 2012!

This month was again dominated by Robo Miner and I released another game: Sholik.

I did not do many marketing for Sholik which is a small little puzzle game and decided to see, what Sholik can do on its own - which was not very good, but that's what I've expected somehow :-)

As I said, Robo Miner was the real winner of March and throughout the whole month there was a raise in just everything. More installs, more, impressions, more players and more features :-)

I tried to stay with weekly updates, so players always get something new and fresh. Also I got so much mails from players which told me how much they like the game and I also got so much mails about suggestions of new features.

Here, I want to thank them all, because they really help me to make the game even better and - more important - they tell me any bugs, so I can react on them.

I've found some reviews of Robo Miner in the web and I really enjoyed reading them and made my own conclusion about it to eliminate any critics :-)

Also, Robo Miner was localized to german language - mainly because most of the current players are german so I had to contribute that.

Robo Miner has reached about 400.000 Installations (overall) since his release in March and the daily installs were raising every day. At the end of march, that trend stopped and is currently ranging.

There is still no big userbase in the USA and the installs are dominated by europe.

As I told you, my other games didn't change in their performance, I did some changes to Tablet Tower Defense because I got a nice contact to a player who pointed me out some errors. So here are the actuall install numbers for all of my bigger games:

Robo Miner: ~400.000
Tablet Tower Defense: ~3.000
Minesweeper: Unlimited! : ~1.500
Sholik: ~200

I will not mention any sales from my paid apps because the numbers are unsignificantly low :-)

The thing is different for advertising stats. Robo Miner is played very often and very long and also I got mails and messages from people who do not find the ads annoying, because they seem to be placed in a user friendly way.

Impressions: 8.5mio
Fillrate: ~99.73%
CTR: 2.99%
eCPM: 0.84

As you can see, Robo Miner has delivered nearly 10 million ads to his users. But there was some things, which are worth to mention for that month.

In the second week of march, there was a very huge drop in eCPM - something was wrong at admob I think and this state keeps on for around 7 days. After that it reverts to the "usual" for 1 week and get a huge boost at the end of march.

At the end of march there were really good ads out there, which resulted in a higher CTR - I really hope that there are more good ads in the future, because beside myself it is much more interesting for the players to get interesting ads.

Next place in this month was Tablet Tower Defense:

Impressions: ~20.000
Fillrate: ~99.85%
CTR: 1.59%
eCPM: 0.84

and Minesweeper: Unlimited!

Impressions: ~35.000
Fillrate: ~99.70%
CTR: 0.53%
eCPM: 0.28

Maybe you will find it interesting, that Minesweepers eCPM is very low. I believe, that is because the ads are hidden, when the game menu opens and are visible again, when the menu is closed. That will result in an ad rfreshment so the Impressions are to height and therefore resulting in a very low CTR and eCPM. I have to work on that to find a better solution.

My other games are not worth to mention, even when reactions to Sholik are very good - it is not very popular and reached only 5.000 Impressions in march. Maybe I find some time to do a little more promoting on it, because it seems, that people like it, it is fast and easy to play.

Another thing to mention is a comparison over the different stores - I currently use many of them and I will publish another article in the future with a more detailed insight in this subject.

What I can tell you over all is, that Robo Miner is only that sucessfull in the google play store - no other store is reaching that numbers. Not even nearly.
While daily installs was nearly at 10.000 in google play, every(!) other store hardly reaches 20-50 daily installs.

Robo Miner is now also available on the samsung store, but it is hard to keep it up to date there because it needs so much time. Same counts for amazon.
While slideme and getjar are very fast in updating the app, even there, the download numbers are not very high.

I am not sure if it is worth the massive extra work to maintain that much stores. Sure, samsung store is far more better, than I expected it to be and amazon has the true benefit of being able to delivier to Kindle devices.

Sadly, there are no detailled stats in amazon to find out how many users are actually using Kindle Devices and which are not, but whatever, I will consider this other stores in my future games :-)

That's it for that month, I am pretty sure, I haven't mentioned all things that happened throughout this month because there was so much work to do, but hopefully you get a little insight :-)

Robo Miner - Update v1.4.4

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 17:03:53 +0200

There it is - a new update was just released!

There are some changes here, let's start at the top:

Parachutes

Yes, you can now upgrade your robot with parachutes!! The upgrade is available at your UFO, with every Level of this Upgrade you can carry 1 more parachute - they will be refilled automatically everytime you come back to your UFO.
You can use the parachute when falling down a chasm - there will appear a new button on the right, which you have to touch. If you touch that button, the parachute will pop out and you can slowly land on the ground.

Right underneath your energy bar you will see a new Element. It shows you how many parachutes you can use. They refill when you visit your UFO (if you have purchased the upgrade)

Diamond and Scanner

The Diamond is now much more scattered around the bottom of each mine. The deeper as the mine is, the more scattered is the position of the diamond! So you have to seek more of the mine to find the diamond!

You can purchase a Diamond Scanner at the UFO - it will appear in your inventory. When you use it, it will point you in the direction of the diamond. Very useful, but expensive!

Watch the time...

I got a mail from a user who wished to have a clock, so he can see what time it is - well, now there is a clock in the lower left corner in the main menu, which shows the current time :-)

Stay a little longer..

When you have found the diamond, you can decide to stay in the current mine for a little longer!
So, when delivered the diamond to the UFO, the Robo asks if you want to proceed to the next mine.
If you decide to STAY, you will find a button on the left side, when you are on the top of the mine where you can manuelly proceed to the next mine.

So feel free, to stay longer and discover more of the mine :-)

conquering bad savegames

It was still happening, that users lost their savegames - that happens, when the game was interupted during saving.

From now on, if you use your SD Slot - the game will be saved to a temporary file first. Only if that was completed successfully, the savegame will be "overwritten". So even in the worst case, when saving was interupted you have still the "old" savegame available which is much better than starting from zero.

I really hope you enjoy the new feature, and I hope even more, that you will write me a message, if anything does not work as expected, as you all know, I'll fix it as soon as possible :-)

Robo Miner - Update v.1.4.3

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 11:45:51 +0100

Weekly Update for Robo Miner!

This time, we added german language support. Currently, most of the players are from germany, so it was needed, that also the game reflects that by featuring a german version.

But we do not force you to use the english version. If you start the update the game will read your device language and set the game language to german if applicable - else the game stays english.

You can switch the Language in the settings screen for sure.

You will also find a new button on the main game menu - where you can look up your current statistics now. This is also one step further to online highscores which will be introduced in one of the next updates :-)

The ore prices where "flattened" now - before, Uranium was worth more then the next gem - that was intentional because uranium is so rare - but it confused some players - so the ore prices are now "corrected" - they now get higher as deeper as you dig :-)

Hopefully you like the updates and stay tuned for the next updates!

Please don't forget: Report me any errors, issues, wishes or critics so I can fix them or consider to add them to the game :-)

Tablet Tower Defense - Update v1.2.9

Sun, 11 Mar 2012 19:26:40 +0100

Well, this Updates finally fixed the error with reseted ranges of the towers after loading the savegame (so, after a call comes in and such things)

Also there was a bug where you was able to completely freeze the creeps :-) It's fixed now.

The Full Version now has android licensing inside - this is the first time I use it, so hopefully everything works well and it will help against piracy - Tablet Tower Defense was heavily pirated sadly. If it will not work, I will dismiss the adfree version from android market.

Let me know if there are any troubles with the game, it should now also render better on smaller devices - I have removed the constrain that every device shall have the same playfield - the playfield is now slightly different - it is as big as it fits on your screen :-)

I have also removed the compatibility for small Screens - it is truly not playable on them, so I removed them from the compatibility list.

Sholik - How to play Sholik

Sat, 10 Mar 2012 14:16:28 +0100

There is no ingame description of the gameplay yet and also there is still no video (sorry for that) - so it will be best to give another brief overview of the concept of Sholik!

If you get it right, you will be familiar with the gameplay very fast, so here is how it works:

If you slide your finger from left to the right you will see a bar forming which links the elements together.

Now, if you release your finger, this linked elements will be rotated as ONE unit around their center by 180 degrees.

You have to rotate different sized "linked elements" so there are 3 or more elements in a row.

As soon as you have 3 or more in a row the Elements will explode and removed from the playfield.

You have to repeat this process until all (possible) elements are removed.

Each Stage has more Elements but each stage only gives you 40 seconds more to resolve it.

Also, if you match more than 3 elements you will get 1 second more for each element removed in this row.

When the time runs out the game is over and maybe your points goes up the highscore list.

If you don't want to drag and get more confident with the controls, you can also just tap at the latest element and so you will be able to play it very fast.

Sholik - Sholik - Fast Paced Puzzle Fun!

Sat, 10 Mar 2012 14:07:49 +0100

Our new game sholik is just released!

The first user reviews were quite good and if you like games like Milpa on iPhone you will be very happy that we now have released a game based on this great concept for android!

It is faster paced and you have to fight against the time only!

Please be patient to find Sholik on your favorite store because at most of them it is still in approval process but should get available in some days!

Let me know how you like Sholik I would love to hear from you.

Robo Miner - Update v1.4.2

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 21:59:15 +0100

This update is released before the weekend because there are some changes in it, which I found worth to deploy fast.

One reason for that is because the bigger fontsize made in the last update has made the tutorial hard to read. Amazon complained about that and rejected the update - so I changed the bubbles alltogether, they are now bigger and can grow to the full screen.
Also, when Robo is waiting for user input all the controls disappear to get your attention :-)

Another update is something some users complained about. When Robo runs out of Energy, Ladders or Pillars he was talking about it all the time ;-)
That's now changed! The Robo will tell you, when he used the last ladder or pillar and also before he runs out of energy. The Bubble will then disappear again.

There was a glitch found by an user! If you died down a mine and restarted the whole mine your inventory was not lost - yea, we fixed that, sorry :-)

Also the controls .. there are many thoughts abut the controls.. There is really a little bit of miss-taps when running up the ladder an suddenly falling down sideways.

I have slightly impreoved that recognition .. so it is more likeley that the robo will move up down than left/right .. everyone schould get it right after some minutes of play, it helps very much to not fall down sideways. The drawback is, you have to tap more far away the robo to go left/right. Personally I tap very near :-)

That's it for this update hopefully everything is alright on your phone too!

Cheers!

Upcoming in the next version: Robo Miner also in German!

Robo Miner - Where to download Robo Miner

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 13:55:26 +0100

I am not quite sure, why people are searching for that, maybe there are people coming to Robo Miner over different platforms where there is no direct download link.

So to get Robo Miner on your mobile phone, you can use different stores, where I have published Robo Miner so far.

You see a list of them just right of this post. Pick your favorite Market and visit it with your phone to get Robo Miner.

Please remember, that some stores needs approval for every update, so some stores maybe will not have the latest version available. This is true for Amazon and for Samsung App Store.

If you don't mind to get a approved update and always want the newest version, stick with Google Play (Android Market), slideme.org, getjar or AndroidPit - there is always the latest version available and you get the newest updates right on your phone.

Maybe there will be an version in the future where you can play Robo Miner in your browser! So stay tuned ;-)

Robo Miner - How deep is Robo Miner?

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 13:50:19 +0100

There are people asking how deep is Robo Miner or what is the maximum depth of mines or what is the maximum level?

To be honest - the only existing limit is the capability of your phone. Every mine is always deeper than the mine before, there is no real limit at the moment and no defined end of the game.

Except if you are unlucky and have one of the rare phones which does not support such big mines, like the HTC Wildfire (buzz) - currently I do not know the real reason, but on this phone you will not be able to play any mine after level 5. I've removed this phone from the compatibility list at the moment, and will remove every other device which is not capable to render such deep mines. Sorry guys, I do not have a solution currently for that.

I am pretty sure many players will complain about the "lack of ending" - but stop! There is more. Robo Miner will always get more features. There is the online highscore tables coming soon, where you can compare your stats.
There will be a Multiplayer Mode also where you can play challenges with your friends or some sort of Coop.
But, well, that's currently future music and I do not know a timeframe for that features at the moment.

In the first place I am very happy when players send me an email when they got any errors, so I can fix them for the best user experience possible.

And now, what is the highest level my Robo can reach with updates?

Same here: No Limit! Sure, each upgrade will sooner or later max out in the one or the other way because you will not mention any improvement any more - but also here, the game will find a way in the future to give you more reason for every level you reach ;-)

Hopefully that clear's up the one or the other question and I wish you fun with playing the game!

Let me know your levels, I would be curious how deep people has digged right now :-)

Update: I get some information about "Out of memory" in Level 36 .. I am not sure if that will happen on every phone or is dependend on how much memory your device have - just to let you know. The game will probably freeze at this level. I'll try to come up with a solution to this.

Personal Blog - How to find pirated copies of your apps

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 11:49:45 +0100

I was asked how you can find out if there are any pirated copies of your apps around the web.

To be honest - that is quite simply done manuelly by using our good old friend google.

Just search up the name of your apk file. For this to do it is best to give your paid app a well searchable package name to do so. You will maybe find some hosters hosting your files or other sources.

Most of the "known" forums out there were hiding the apk name from search engines, so you also need to search for your game name also.

This way you should be able to find it on the "known" forums.

You can do that once a day or once a week with the search results delivered for that period (you can tell that google, by using ght options on the left side of the google website)

If you are lazy (like me) you can also put up a small script which does this work for you and informs you about new found items, maybe filtered by the "all known" forums.

You can also let google send you a mail, as soon as new search results are found - I've tried that also but was not satisfied because I found that it does not notify always .. did no further investigation about it.

I am thinking about putting up a little service for other developers where they can track their apps .. maybe I'll make an app for that ..

How to react on found pirated copies

To be honest .. you cannot do much about it. Yes, you can register at the "known" boards and report the thread (they will remove it) and yes you can also report the files on the different hosting services, when you found some (they will remove it also).

But that would cause you so much work, that it is better to think about better protection inside your app. You will not be able to stop pirating your app but you will be able to lower it.

For me the most annoying thing was, that there IS a free version available and my games are no big sellers - it's like a backstab and I don't like to be backstabbed.

So, even if you will be able to find most of your pirated copies - stop trying, it does only cost you nerves and time. Better invest it into new updates for your apps. Users get the benefit of automatic updates and new features every time, instead of waiting for a pirated copy and update manually.

You see, most of the users will be lazy too and are much more willing to buy your app, if they get more benefit of it instead of pirating it.

update: a reader of my website just gave me another tip on how to find such copies (thanks to hendrik). If you have a video of your app, then look at the referers. Because the video is linked with the pirated copy you will find some sources in your video stats.

Personal Blog - Android Report 02/2012

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 21:56:14 +0100

Ok, here we are, with the report of February 2012.

This was truly the month of Robo Miner which performed awesome.

I liked the easy to play concept and even my girlfriend ist still playing it multiple times per day just because it is an addicting and funny concept where you can play for hours.

In February I was experiencing many things, that were completely new for me. One of them were the comments in android market for example. Not everyone wil llove your game and you have to accept that.

In February I decided not to try to get decent revenue from my other games, instead I decided to use them to advertise Robo Miner. That was a good idea because there were really some clicks on my House Ads which resulted in new players for Robo Miner.

In every free minute I was busy with enhancing the gameplay of Robo Miner, fixing bugs and implementing new features. Also tried out many stores, signed up in boards, looking up some behaviours.
In this month I learned very much about android, opengl and all of the stuff around it.
I tried many things, some of them were good, some failed, but overall people liked the game and were happy with the changes and the numbers were going upside steadily.

At the end of February I reached:

Impressions: 2.5mio
Fillrate: 100%
CTR: 2.16%
eCPM: 0.64

As you can see, there was an really huge increase of impressions. Robo Miner was downloaded nearly 150.000 times at this point. Most of the Impressions are still delivered by Robo Miner (nearly all of them).

You will also see a huge drop in the eCPM (compared with jan). That drop started right at the beginning of february and over the full month it was never over 0.77. I don't know the exact reason for that.

When I started using ads in my games I was going with the default values for refreshing the ads - maybe that was a bad decision because, this way I was getting many impressions but less clicks.

So I raised the refeshment on Robo Miner to the max (120 sec) and turned off ad refreshment on all my other games.

The eCPM get's more stabilized and I decided to stick with it.
At the end of the Month Robo Miner stabilized also the CTR which was at around 2.5% which is a quite legal value.

My other games are still not very popular and are not often downloaded.

Tablet Tower Defense was downloaded ~2000 times from the beginning on and Minesweeper: Unlimited! stays at around 1000.

I don't know if they will ever rise to an higher level .. also Tablet Tower Defense was pirated very heavily which doesn't help to make mainting very funny :-)

read more: www.reiti.net/personal-blog/blog/69/how-to-find-pirate-copies-of-your-apps

As long as I do not have any working DRM Mechanism I will not release any adfree/paid versions .. Minesweeper will be the test candidate to try out google licensing, so let's see how that will work.

Because I found, that Minesweeper: Unlimited! really is a good game I decided to put some House Ads in and see how the game will react on it .. As far as I can tell .. at the moment there was no great change in the download numbers.

Currently I am not displaying House Ads in Robo Miner.

Next month I will release another game - a simple one out of the puzzle genre.

Currently I do expect, that this new game will surely not be as sucessful as Robo Miner is .. but I don't want to stop developing and releasing new apps.

I have some more game prototypes ready for further development, but they will need much more effort to get them ready for releasing and currently I spend my low time on Robo Miner to satisfy the players :-)

Hope you enjoyed reading this report!

Personal Blog - Android Report 01/2012

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 21:37:49 +0100

Hi Folks!

I just was reminded about doing a litllte bit of reporting about my experiences with android development.

For me it was a big help to read some reports from other people out there to keep things going and keep trying so maybe I should give something backand write my own reports about this subject.

This report here from Jan 2012 is a little bit late, but I decided it is part of the whole thing and I should start here.
I started developing for Android Devices back in December 2011 and released my first games in this order:

Tablet Tower Defense - Strategic Defense Game
Shape Masher - Fruit Ninja Style Game / Tap'em'up
Shapr - Match-3 Style Game like Jewelz
Minesweeper: Unlimited! - hexagonal Minesweeper

These games where released during December in 2011 and because I don't had any userbase or marketing basement at all - they were doing badly :-)

It could also be, that this games are just not good enough to get any noticeable attention, but to be honestm out there are many, many games which does not deserve the attention they are getting, so I got bad luck, because noone knows them.

There was no great action in december, so I just skip it and begin right with 2012.

In January I was ready with developing Robo Miner - which is doing really great at the moment, and also in january there was the first reasonable revenue.

Before Robo Miner, I was releasing always pairs of "free demo" and "paid full" versions of my games - that was a terrible decision and after the first days of Robo Miner i decided to switch all my demo versions to free full versions with advertisements in it.

And because the few sales which are done all over many different store it is very complicated to collect all the numbers and that's the reason why I will just report advertisement experiences. It seems to be the way to go even, when I don't know how long such an revenue will last.

For my first 5 Games I implemented some other ad networks as well with admob as backup - as I know for now: It was useless and so I will stick to admob in the future it is very steady with the numbers and the fillrate is nearly 100 percent .. so for me it is not worth the extra work to implement other ad networks. I like it simple :-)

Let's head to some numbers because everyone of you is hot to read it - hehe

As mentioned Robo Miner was released at 27th January and it started like a rocket - so most of the numbers was made by Robo Miner. I will not go into deep detail about that numbers because .. truely, I don't have the time for it currently :-)

Impressions: 54.093
Fill Rate: 94.24%
CTR: 2.04
eCPM: 1.17

Maybe I should describe these numbers because I decided to not show any further details about it.

The Fillrate is a little bit lower as it should be - that's because I just missed to activate google ads in the first place .. it happened with nearly every game which I was newly publishing with ads .. so that's it, normaly the Fillrate is really near 99%

I was not doing any House Ads in January and most of the Impressions were done by Robo Miner in just a few days.

I don't need to mention that at the end of this month I was really curious about the next month and was refreshing my stats whole the day :-)

You see - without Robo Miner, the Impressions would be around some 1000 and I really was not expecting, that Robo Miner would have this type of sucess.

Personal Blog - Android Market becomes Google Play

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 20:40:12 +0100

Today I opened up the market to check how Robo Miner is doing and recognized, that something is different.

Woah! They renamed the Android Market to google play!

Ahm .. yes .. currently I do not know what that mean for the future .. and especially what it mean to links (and backlinks) to the original market ..

I don't like it, when big institutions start to rename well established websites / services. That's always chaotic.

But beside the official news about this change .. lat's think about the real reasons why google decided to change such a "big piece of the internet". I would be very interested in that and normally google is relatively honest in telling what they are doing .. it's something I like google for.

I am pretty sure, google wants to expand their business much further .. it seems that they are going for the movie and music industry as well. There are more and more media boxes out there which run on android.

It really looks like google will have a very big influence in the media market in the future and they are reacting to that with this new service "google play".

I really wish, I would know what I should do with all my links and if I should change them to the new domain or I should not and how google tracks backlinks now.

I find it a little bit chaotic - but let's see what the rest of the world is doing now, I am curious about it :-)

edit: After wondering about the now titles and names - some hours later a mail from google arrived, explaining the changes. So the links will still work .. ok, I guessed that already - but they didn't mention backlinks .. sure they didn't :-)
they are using a weird redirecting concept at the moment ..

Robo Miner - Update v1.4.1

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 18:50:57 +0100

wow - another week has nearly passed and so it is time for another update!

Please - as usual - if you experience any bugs or errors, send me an email and I will fix it asap!

In this update we improved the overall readability of texts! It is now ways better than before!

There is now a settings screen - you can find it on the main game menu (tap on energy bar or use menu-hardware button). There you can now disable sound and (new!) rumbling.

Yes, from now on, rocks are so heavy, that they will vibrate your mobile! But this feature is disabled per default, you have to turn it on first. I don't want to annoy anyone with it in case someone does not find the settings screen immediatly.

Dynamite is now also available at your UFO! Yes, you can buy it! It is not cheap, but if you can afford it, you are fine ;-)

Also - autosave is gone! - there were too much troubles with it because sometimes android decides to shut down the game without waiting until the game has finished saveing. If that happened the savegame was destroyed.
So, autosave is disabled. The game will still save itself if you reach the next level and..

..you can also use the all new Fast-Save-Button! It will appear everytime you arrive at the top (left side of screen) tap on it to instantly save your current game.

That way you can always save with one tap proceed with mining! ;-)

Maybe some of you will recognize, some wont: The background of some screens is now a little bit brighter - that's because that helps to read the text there ;-)

I really hope you like the new update and I more than that, I hope anyone will report any bugs as soon as possible, so I can fix it ;-)

btw, Robo Miner was downloaded 130.000 times now

Queued Changes for the next update:
Show Warning-Bubbles of ladders etc only short
Improving Movement-Controls

Robo Miner - over 100.000 downloads after 1 month!

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 20:40:01 +0100

It happened yesterday, that Robo Miner has counted over 100.000 downloads so far.

As usual: The numbers are not very exact because I don't know the exact numbers over all stores where you can get Robo Miner, but nevertheless, that's a great thing!

Personal Blog - Good old Android Piracy

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 22:45:56 +0100

The last days I've found more and more pirated versions of Tablet Tower Defense. It is some sort of "out of control" and I can't do anything about it.

That is sad - my current reaction was: I dropped the paid version of nearly every store out there except official market and amazon.

Amazon have their own DRM System, which I use there and for market I will upgrade all paid apps to their licensing sdk (with some sneaky changes to stop hacker kiddies).

I will not offer paid versions on other stores any more. Sorry guys

The amazon DRM and android licensing api are working quite well and un-intrusive (as far as I know) so they should be a small barrier.

If you are a purchaser on any store out there and have any problems because I removed (unpublished) the full version of any game - please let me know so I will solve the issue.

PS: If you downloaded a pirated copy, I am not bad with you (you are not the pirate) :-) But there is a full featured free version available too - use that ;-)