New Site Design

In September, the site was given a much needed face-lift.  Everything should be much easier to find and it is certainly easier to manage (everything was moved into a central WordPress installation).

New Product Launch - Pinball Mini

A few weeks ago, we launched our second app (and first game) - Pinball Mini.  Its been a fun app to work on and we've had positive feedback from pretty much everyone that has played it.  It isn't a world changing app or anything - just a fun little diversion for a few minutes here and there.  Going forward, we'll be adding more boards just to keep things interesting, but we're in a bit of a holding pattern as far as new features go.  Part of the problem is that we didn't really do any marketing for the app and our sales reflect that...so before we invest any large blocks of time into new features, we're going to try some different marketing possibilities.

In the not too distant future, I'm hoping to have some posts about how we built Pinball Mini.  It was quite surprising just how different game programming was from "regular" app development.  Pinball Mini also had a real graphic designer (my good friend Chris Echols from oneredtwo.com) and that presented some interesting challenges too as far as the development work flow.

If you're interested in checking Pinball Mini out, here's the link:

http://www.cogitu.com/products/pinballmini/

Budgee 2.0 Progress

You may have noticed a lack of Budgee updates recently.  Rest assured, it hasn't been abandoned.  The whole app went back to the drawing board (architecture wise) and it's taking a lot of time to build things the way we want them built.  The feature set is largely the same as the current version of Budgee with the addition of quite a few more useful features.  The good news is that Budgee 2 will still be a free update for all current Budgee users.  A couple of features are require significant backend server support - for those features, we may have to make them an optional in-app purchase.  We're trying to avoid doing that though because we really want all features to be available to everyone right from the start - we just have to figure out a way to make the numbers work.

That's about it for this update.  More to come soon.

For reference, Budgee was introduced in mid-October 2008 at price tier 2 (that's $1.99 US). It stayed at $1.99 except the last two weeks of December 2008 when the price was lowered to $0.99 for a holiday sale. During these few months, there were not a ton of updates - a few right at the beginning and then a couple scattered around after that. The dip the week of December 21st was caused by Budgee being removed from the app store for a couple of days prior to the holiday sale. (In short, I wanted the price to start at Christmas, but Apple was cutting off iTunes Connect access a few days ahead of that...so I had to change the release date to Christmas and then change the price...the result of that was that the app was removed until Christmas and I couldn't change it back.)

You can see that Budgee doesn't bring in enough revenue for one to live on - it averages ~$250/mo - but it is certainly a nice side job. Keep in mind, these sales were all made without any form of advertising. My goal for 2008 was just to break even with the cost of the iPhone SDK - so I've more than met that goal. Budgee is also one of the programs *I* really wanted on my iPhone for the longest time - so my intent was to make the app that I wanted and then if people enjoyed it and I made money with it, then all the better. For 2009, I'm trying some different tactics with Budgee - online marketing, more frequent updates, a major upgrade - so we'll see how all of that ends up changing things.

I have also included data on updates so you can see how the number of total users compares to the number of users running the latest updates. If you have any questions about this data, feel free to leave a comment and I'll do my best to answer. I'd like to be pretty open about Budgee since I've learned a lot from the iPhone dev community sharing information like this, so I'd like to try to give back when I can.

Budgee Updates

If you've been following this blog, you've seen a couple of updates for the current version of Budgee were released over the last two months.  The problem has been that Apple's iPhone/iPod Touch OS updates are causing some internal functions to work differently after the update.  Specifically, the code that encodes text so that it can be used in a URL seems to be very finicky.  Recently, this caused Budgee's CSV export to not work since the URL wasn't being generated properly.  The issue should be fixed for everyone now with the most recent updates, but it sure would be awesome if Apple would release the new OS update to developers a couple of days earlier than the general public AND provide accurate release notes as to what changed...but until then, I'll do my best to get patches out as soon as I find them or hear them from you guys.

Budgee Version 1.5/2.0

Speaking of Budgee, about half my time is currently being spent on the revamp for version 1.5/2.0.  I'll be posting more about the specifics as it gets closer to release, but at this point, the non-UI code is the main focus.  The first release of Budgee ran ok, but things were/are far from optimal under the hood.  With this new release, all of that is changed.  It'll run much faster, but the real reason for the change is that it allows for features to be added much more quickly in the future.  I'm also looking at the ability to automatically report errors after they happen and potentially allow bugs/feature requests to be submitted right from Budgee.  This new release is going to be quite awesome - it'll still be simple to use, but there will be more advanced features that can be enabled if you'd like.  I'm still undecided whether the new release will be version 1.5 or whether it will be 2.0.  I know what I'd like 2.0 to do, but I may go ahead and release 1.5 with the new backend and a couple of features...then build up to version 2.0 with incremental updates.  The problem is, I really, really want to get 2.0 out there - it is really the product I envisioned when I first started writing Budgee.

Paper Defense

The other half of my time is now being spent on a new project.  Originally, I started working on a game called ROLLAB - we got about 80% complete with it and then hit a couple of snags.  Some were technical issues (e.g. frame rate was way too low to be acceptable) and some were design issues (e.g. the game just didn't feel quite as fun as either of us would have liked).  While thinking about how to fix ROLLAB, we accidentally stumbled upon a new game idea that we both liked much better.  If you were looking forward to ROLLAB, don't worry, it will still happen eventually. We just need to revise the game concept before we go much further and this new project will give us the proper game engine that we can then use to power ROLLAB.  So what is this new project?  Well, I'm not ready to reveal all just yet - but it's still a 2D game, it's up and running right now with some alpha testers, and it's already quite fun to play.  It's called "Paper Defense" so you can probably guess the general idea of the game from that alone.  More details soon.

Forming an LLC

I've decided to turn Cogitu into Cogitu LLC.  The paperwork has been started, but it'll probably be a month or so before all of the changes are finalized (apparently it takes a while to change things in the App Store).  I started Cogitu as a hobby six months ago.  I wasn't sure how well things would go, so I didn't want to get too much into setting up a formal business structure (since that means a ton of paperwork and a lot of extra costs).  I don't make a ton from Cogitu right now (I'll post Budgee's 2008 sales data this week) - usually around $250 a month - but my goal is to get that to at least $2500 a month within the next six months.  Even if I don't though, as long as the $250/mo+ holds constant, I'll be at the point that I should be filing additional business taxes, so if I'm going to be doing that, I might as well have the legal protection of a business as well.  Honestly, I think the LLC will be overkill - but it's one of those times when I'd rather spend $500 now and never use the legal protection as opposed to needing the legal protection in the future and not having it.  I don't know what the future holds, but my goal is to at least get Cogitu to the point that I could live on the income if I wanted to.

New Blog Posts

I've also been working on a couple of new blog posts that will be coming out this week.  I'm going to start sharing more of my "lessons learned" - mainly from a technical/developer perspective.  I will be posting some about the business aspect as well - including Budgee sales data - just to provide information to anyone thinking of doing the same type of thing I am.  My goal is to have this blog be more about these types of posts instead of just product annoucements - I've just been so busy with everything else that it's hard to sit down and write out a post that I'm satisfied with.  Starting this week, I'm going to set aside an hour or so a day to work on these types of posts and see if that helps.