Okay, there’s not much pain left from the procedure on my spine but took my first walk today and my left leg feels like its made of lead which made the walk interesting. Looks like I will need those two weeks of physiotherapy the surgeon prescribed. The size of bruise on my arm where they had the saline drip inserted is enormous and very angry. Thankfully there’s not much bruising around the site where the needle went into the spine.

January 2009 started the mark of a bad year for me health wise. I had just attended a poker night with my colleagues at Introversion in Marks flat and on the way home I managed to tear my achilles tendon. This meant the next couple of months on my back with a leg I couldn’t move. It also marked the end of my role as producer on Darwinia+ and eventually my time at Introversion. What I didn’t know at the time was that even though I would recover from that injury it would eventually lead to another and that other was a slipped disc in my spine. So there wasn’t a single month in 2009 and so far in 2010 that I haven’t been in constant pain. I now have very much respect for those that have to go through this every day of their lives.

Today however marked what I hope is the beginning on a change. Today I went into hospital to have an injection in my spine and some manipulation to get that slipped disc back into place – or at least stop it pressing on the nerve that was causing all the pain. Now here’s the weird thing about me: I was far more frightened of the thought of having sedation than the actual procedure. So when I asked the surgeon if I could go without sedation he had a look of shock but went along with it.

So, I was wheeled into the theatre, the nurses were informed that they were doing this without sedation (cue more bemused looks) and I was then asked to sit up on the trolley and put my feet onto a stool. I was then immediately clamped down by one nurse on my right and another on my left. The poor nurse to the right was quite short so she had to reach up to try and keep hold of my shoulder. The one on the left was determined to help with the pain as much as she could and kept insisting I squeeze her hand. I’m sure half way through she regretted this as I have quite a strong grip – especially when somebody is poking around my spinal chord with a needle.

The actual needle going into the spinal chord wasn’t bad and the whole procedure was over in about 15 minutes. The only down side through the whole thing was that for some bizarre reason my left leg just started bouncing. The surgeon kept asking if I didn’t want to reconsider the sedation, I had absolutely no control over that bouncing but was otherwise completely relaxed. I seem to be able to keep relaxed in tense situations, for example I once fell asleep during a root-canal, the poor dentist had to wake me up and ask me not to fall asleep again.

At the moment it would seem that the operation was a success. I only have pain where the actual needle went in but they warned about that – all other pain has gone. I must admit I hope it stays this way. Here’s to looking forward to a better year ahead!

After speaking with a few people I decided to take a bold step and make the app free. As soon as I did this the downloads shot up and now look like this:

I have however just had update 1.01 approved for distribution on iTunes and that update adds AdMob ads into the application to fund it going free. I am already working on 1.1 which include google maps so that you can see where posts happened.

Zero sales today. What does that mean? It means TheWall fell off the new apps list on iTunes. When this happens to an app it makes it very difficult to find your apps. At was at this point that I decided that for one day I would make the app free.

At the same time an incredibly flattering ‘review’ of the app appeared on iphonegamerblog.com

This is an amazing step forward for Xiotex Studios – so thanks guys!

The sales are ramping up at a small rate and look like this so far:

Still working on the press release.

I had a friend once who was convinced that all you had to do was make a game and people would buy it or at least come play it (he was into the freemium model in a big way), I think this is called ‘the field of dreams’ method of marketing. I don’t particularly subscribe to this method of marketing since it seems a bit hit and miss to me. While I was the producer of Darwinia+ for Introversion I had exposure to some of the marketing side of game development so I am not as naive to think that I just need to sit back and allow people to organically find my apps on iTunes. The Wall has been out for a few days now and I have yet to do any serious marketing for it due to having caught the flu at the same time so in a sense it has been going through a sort of ‘field of dreams’ type marketing process and look at the results:

The numbers on top of the bars correspond to the number of apps sold that day. This particular graph only applies to TheWall and does not contain any data from the sales of Boxes which were happing at the same time.

So, if this is going to be anything of a success then I obviously need to market it a bit more aggressively. In order to do that I did the usual google search to get some tips. There are a few gems out there but nobody seems to chart the progress of an app from release to successful sales. So, I’m going to, so keep checking back here to see how I progress. I will detail everything that happens.

The most obvious thing to do is to provide some way to link to iTunes from this blog so if anybody comes here they can immediately jump to iTunes and buy my apps.

My first step is a press-release. I did approach some people in order to pay somebody to write a press-release for me since I have never done one and one of the people volunteered his heavily pregnant wife to write one for a modest fee and I was going to take them up on this when out of the blue a marketing guy I used to work with wrote one for me and just gave it to me for nothing. This is an incredible bonus so obviously I am going with it. I have a little bit of work to do on it but once it’s totally finished I will post it here. Once it is complete I will be sending it onto to all the various magazines that review iPhone apps.

The next step is to get promo codes to the app out to the various web sites that review apps….

When the iPhone was announced I knew that I had to use it’s GPS capabilities in some way and it had to be in connection with some kind of social networking capability. I finally made that app and it’s called ‘The Wall’ and you can find it on iTunes

The Wall is a messenger app with a difference. Every message is tagged with the GPS location the message was entered and those messages can only be read at those locations. You can walk down the road and find a whole new set of messages that just magically appear. This kind of app has so many different applications. What I want to use if for the most is to leave small reviews of restaurants that I have eaten in but it could be used for absolutely anything that location matters. I know some people who love running around cities playing a reality game where they have to pick up clues to find out where to go next – The Wall would be amazing for this. Ultimately whatever you use it for is up to you.

One of the priorities for me was that this app should be extremely easy to use and light-weight. So when you fire it up you are presented with a single screen that contains everything you need to know and do. You simply write your message in the text box and press send. When you do this you get presented by a choice of mood icon to apply to your message and that’s it – as can be seen in the following image:

Even while it was going through Apple’s submission process I had more ideas on how to extend it to add more features so keep watching this space!

I put on Pixar’s Up to watch and I glanced over to my MacBook Air and decided to check my mail. To my surprise I found:

‘Your application has been approved for sale on the App Store.’

Time to get cracking on the marketing!

I have another app going through the submission process. The first was a game called ‘Boxes’ and can be found on iTunes and is still selling. The first app was really an experiment to see how long it would take to develop a game on the iPhone and get it into iTunes. In total the first time took 4 weeks after being rejected the first time due to the large icon not being the same size as the small icon. I forgot how frustrating the submission process can be.

The current app has been in the process for 2 weeks so far. It went into review stage and got rejected almost immediately due to a HIG issue but that was simple to resolve. Now it’s been back in the review stage for a week so far. I keep checking my email to see if it has moved into the next stage – no luck so far .

The problem is one of not knowing exactly what is going on with your app once it enters the system. The most you get is an indicator of which stage it is in. I’ve worked with other publishers that have a submission process and they give you more information and that saves a lot of the frustration because it then becomes much more of a relationship rather than a black box. Still, this is the only way to get an app on Itunes at the moment so it’s something we developers have to go through and try to smile while we are.

One thing still worries me however, it’s not clear if when the app enters into review stage it gets checked for multiple failures or they just stop at the first one they find. If they stop at the first one then it is entirely possible that your app can take an age until all the faults are found.