Commissioned by Reflexive (now a part of Amazon), and based on the original PC/Mac title developed by my good friend Juan Pablo Ferreyra from South Winds Games, Airport Mania: First Flight is our latest iPhone game available on the App Store. Coincidentally, it is the first iPhone project we started working on, back in 2008’s summer.

The game has about two thirds of the levels found on the original title and keeps all of its features, unlockable paper planes included. Everything, from positioning and size of dialogs to level balancing, has been revised and adapted for the touch screen, resulting on a top of the line port that has been received very positively so far. Special kudos go to Reflexive’s Russell Carroll, for his support and personal involvement on this project.

So, what are you waiting for? Go look for $1, get the game, and fasten your seatbelts :)

Posted in App Store, Lemon Team | 5 Comments »

After I published our iPhone analytics and monetization solutions matrix, Vishal Gurbuxani —one of Mobclix’s co-founders— got in touch with us as he felt we had left out some unique features out of our matrix. Vishal was kind enough to walk me through their offering, highlighting what he believes are the five core differentiating features of Mobclix:

1. Event Logs: log custom events with different log levels.
2. User Feedback: a comment form to get anonymous qualitative feedback on your app.
3. User Ratings: a rating form to get quantitative feedback the appearance, fun, overall, performance, recommendation, usability, and value of your app.
4. Interactive Ad Units: small JavaScript (SproutCore) based apps within a frame.
5. Application Ranking: I’m not sure how it works (based on sales, popularity?), but it seems to give a good idea of how apps are performing compared to others.

With the only exception of the first feature —which I have seen implemented on other solutions—, I think the other four are pretty unique (though I could be wrong). Among all the usage stats collected by Mobclix’s platform, I personally loved the breakdown of Wi-Fi vs 3G downloads. For iPhone developers wondering if keeping the download size of their apps under 10 MB (for OTA purchasing) pays off, having access to that data would give them an definite answer.

When I asked Vishal about his thoughts on Android, he said they are working on an Android version of the analytics tools that shares the same feature set as the iPhone one. He also added that the while iPhone users currently outnumber the G1 about 20 to 1, that is expected to change soon as more Android–based phones are introduced.

I would like to thank Vishal for his help and hope this post will help fellow iPhone developers on the look for an analytics/monetization solution decide between Mobclix and its competitors.

Posted in Game development, Marketing | 3 Comments »

Mahjong Epic is our latest commisioned iPhone game to appear on the App Store. Designed by Kristanix Games and based on its big brother for PC and Mac, Mahjong Epic’s unique selling points are the vast collection of boards –100- and the built in board editor. AppCraver.com reviewed it recently, giving it an 8/10 score.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Lemon Team | No Comments »

Keeping the size of your iPhone App to a minimum is interesting because of many reasons, but probably the most important of them is Apple’s 10 MB app size limit to App Store downloads over cellular networks (3G or EDGE). Mind you, this limit to OTA downloads applies to final compressed (zipped) size. Although compressing you app bundle with the “Compress” Finder action will give you an fairly accurate estimate of the final download size, be aware that the iTunes Connect metada might increase size in a couple hundred kilobytes.

Keep reading for two tips on reducing the size of your iPhone apps.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Game development | No Comments »

Today’s been a great day for us. We made it both into the front page of the local newspaper and the tv news:

Posted in Lemon Team, Press coverage | 6 Comments »

It has been only 6 months since the App Store was opened, but there are at least eight ‘analytics’ and monetization solution providers iPhone developers can choose from.

What can analytics/metrics software do for you? They track how your application is being used, and log things such as the number of unique users, how much time was spent on certain parts of the user interface, what features are they using the most, how many times the app crashed, etc. All these stats tell you which areas of your application you should improve.

Interestingly, most of the metrics tracking solutions out there do also offer ad placement services. This is an alternative business model to paid apps, although you will probably need tens of thousands of downloads to make some money out of it.

After a little research on each solution provider, I have put together the following matrix:

 
Unfortunately, I have not been able to test all solutions in depth. Therefore, I am not aware of which providers offers the best analytics module, or which SDK is more solid. Also lacking from the matrix are the minimum or average PPC or CPM revenue ratios.

If you find innaccurate or missing information, please leave a comment below and I will gladly update the matrix.

[Update 01/01/09] : Thanks to the commenters for pointing out Greystripe and Videoegg. I will update the matrix as soon as I can look into their iPhone services. Also according to people in the known, AppLoop has gone out of business, and their website is no longer accessible.

[Update 17/01/09] : Added Greystrip, Videoegg and Flurry to the matrix. Removed AppLoop (went out of business).

Posted in Game development, Marketing | 10 Comments »

On tuesday the people at the business incubator gathered to decorate together the common areas of our floor for christmas.

More pictures after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Lifestyle | 1 Comment »

Up until the release of the iPhone SDK for iPhone OS 2.2, Xcode 3.0 did not work with installations of Subversion 1.5+, but the latest build solves this. Alas, setting up Subversion to work with Xcode requires some extra work. To save you some precious time googling around, I have prepared a brief tutorial to guide you through the process:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Tutorials | 14 Comments »

Last week took place the first Congreso de Desarrolladores de Vidojuegos (videogame developers conference) in Valencia, Spain. Organized by DOID, the goal of the event was to bring together as many people from the spanish games industry as possible. With more than 200+ people attended, from students to professionals developers working abroad, the goal was more than accomplished.

For us, the possibility to chat with fellow developers and expand our contacts network was great. The talks were also excellent overall, with speakers from companies such as Crytek, Grin, Pyro, Abylight, Rockstar or Virtual Toys. We can’t thank enough the organizers for their job and we hope CDV 2009 will be bigger and better.

Alvaro Vazquez (Grin Barcelona) on The Game Concept Stage. (Pics shamelessly stolen from NoticiasJuegos.com)

Ricard Pillosu (Crytek) on Agent Coordination using Behavior Trees

Miguel Villar checking his e-mail (left) and Olmo Ríos from El Neutrino Raro (right)

Posted in Events | No Comments »

Welcome to our brand new blog!

We —Lemon Team— are an independent game developer based in Alicante, Spain, currently focused on Mac and iPhone game development and porting.

After years of freelancing or working for others, both Miguel and me decided to fund our own start-up to keep doing what we love best: developing games. Setting up the company has been a tiresome experience, not without problems. Our office is located at the local administration’s business incubator, which provides us with a host of services for a very low rent. You can check out some pictures of the office at the revamped About section.

Because we want you to trust us way before you need us, we will be blogging mainly about what we do and how we do it. We will regularly publish useful tidbits of information regarding game development —specially for the Mac or iPhone—, without getting too technical.

Thanks for reading, and see you on the next post!

Julio Gorgé, co-founder

Posted in Lemon Team | No Comments »