Cogitu

As I mentioned in my previous post, I'm going to be blogging weekly about my indie journey. Today is the first "work" day of that journey, so I think we should probably look at the state of Cogitu today and then set some goals for this week.

A Year in Review

Cogitu LLC was formed back in February 2009. I originally published Budgee prior to that, but for the purposes of my indie journey, I'm going to stick with February 1st 2009 as my official starting point. So, what has the last year looked like sales wise? It went something like this:

All told, I made right around $1800 in gross profit from app sales (Budgee & Pinball Mini combined) over the last year. In case you're wondering, there were a total of 1526 downloads over the period (excluding updates) - so that works out to about 4 downloads per day on average. You can see the sales started off relatively strong for the first couple of months, but then they fell off significantly. I made several updates to Budgee those first few months and that helped keep it in the new releases list (of course, Apple changed the way this worked earlier this year). The sales never really picked up for Budgee after the drop. I attribute most of that to the lack of updates and evolution of Budgee over this period. I had a backlog of items to add to Budgee, but after revisiting the new features, it became apparent that I needed to give the app a total overhaul to make it into the app I envisioned. I've been working on the 2.0 version, but due to various issues, I've had to wait until now to start making substantial progress. That covers Budgee, but there is another app we need to talk about...

Enter Pinball Mini

Chris, the awesome graphic/UI designer, and I had been talking about different games we wanted to build for quite a while. We had initially started working on a puzzle game called ROLLAB, but we started running into some technical difficulties as well as some logistics issues (designing the actual puzzles was going to take quite a while). Due to these issues, we decided to put it on hold for a while. Our second attempt at a game was a tower defense style game. I never posted screen shots of it, but we did actually have an alpha build that went out to a handful of testers. We both enjoyed it, but we couldn't settle on an art style. While working on this game, we also came up with some really cool takes on tower defense (as far as new gameplay mechanics). Unfortunately, both of our day jobs started requiring more of our focus, so this game had to go on hold as well. A couple of months later, we decided we wanted to pick a simple game that was fun to play and just power through it - so we did. Pinball Mini is that game. With Pinball Mini, we finally found an idea that was simple enough it could be built easily over a few weeks and the art style was perfect for Chris' talents. We launched Pinball Mini in early September. This is how it did (the first is revenue followed by units):

Yeah, that's right. A whopping total of 335 downloads which is $228 in sales or $1/day in revenue. Thrilling isn't it? The good news is that Pinball Mini was simply a fun project for us to do. It didn't take a ton of time and we didn't have any set expectations for it. We've had some positive feedback from the few people that did purchase it so Chris and I have both been happy that at least a few people have been able to enjoy it. Now back to the reason I'm even posting this...I just quit my day job to write iPhone apps so how am I going to make this work?

The Plan (Part I)

The first stage of the plan is to get Pinball Mini up to snuff so that it's on par with other simple casual games. To accomplish this, we're adding in some new ways of scoring - you'll be able to get multiplier bonuses based upon the number of balls that land in each cup. We're also going to be adding more interactivity to the levels with some special physics objects. In addition, we're also going to include OpenFeint achievement and leader board support in version 2. We're going to look into supporting OpenFeint player challenges as well, but I have to do a bit of testing on that one to see how we'll pull that off.

In addition to the changes in the software, I'm also going to spend a bit of money on advertising. I didn't really try to do much promotion at all other than a quick tweet or two and I have no doubt that was a mistake. I haven't nailed down any concrete plans on the marketing aspect just yet, but I'll post more about whatever I decide in the coming weeks.

This Week

So, that's great and all, but what am I going to do this week to get things moving? Well, I've been prototyping a few of these changes this past week (specifically the OpenFeint support) and that work revealed that I need to structure the whole code base a little better. This project started out quick and dirty and that's how it ended up, but unfortunately, that won't do going forward. I expect I'll spend most of this week re-writing the majority of the app as well as upgrading the engine to the latest release of Cocos2d. I also have some administrative issues I need to handle with the LLC itself (finishing up some taxes etc.) so I expect that to eat up a bit of time as well. By the end of the week, I'm hoping I can have a second alpha version (with the re-written code base) up and running. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got a heck of a lot of code to write...