I will also try to answer some questions that arose regarding my last report. The feedback was enormous and many people took the opportunity to ask me questions via the comments-section. Even though I answered all of them, some of you might have missed the information in there. So here are some of the frequently asked questions from the comments:

What type of grant did you receive?
I received what we here in germany call “Gründerzuschuss”. It can be considered a start-up grant. Normally, this is meant for unemployed people to help them end their unemployment by getting self-employed. So it applies to one person only. It is as high as the unemployment-fee that one would receive plus some 300 bucks for insurances. It lasts 9 months. My grant will end this month, but as you can see I already earn enough money to keep on going without the grant. So for me, it perfectly worked out.

Are people pissed off by kids-apps that display ad-banners?
I was very curious about that, too, when I started. What I can say now from my personal experience: 99% of the people are NOT. From all the 2.500 ratings that my animal puzzle has on Android, only FIVE even mentioned the ads:

• Two people complained about adult ads being displayed, which of course is totally inappropriate for apps aiming at children and so their complaint is absolutely understandable.
• Two other people were bothered about the ads in general and uninstalled the app
• One person was THANKFUL that the ads were not placed inside the real game but only in the menus.

This refers to ads on Android. On iOS, noone mentioned the ads. They get removed once you unlock the full version, so I think many people did not even witness them. They either like the game and buy it or delete it again. So as you can see, people seem to be really used to ads.

How do you handle all the tax-stuff?
First of all, NEVER trust any information you find on a forum or in the internet in general. With this said, you might skip this answer :D

I only can advise you to contact a tax-consultant. They should know their stuff. Of course it costs money, but in my case, my consultant agreed to offer me some startup-help and charge me some special-fee until I start earning real money. It is also an investment for them if this happens to become a long-term relationship.

What I can say nonetheless is that here in germany (and I bet in most other counties, too :)), you always have to pay income-tax at the end of the year. Then there is the sales-tax that you normally add to an article when selling it to a customer. In germany, its 19% of the price and goes directly to the tax-office every month or every year, according to what type of company you are running.
Now as far as I know, the appstore handles all that sales-tax stuff for you and they pay the sales taxes themselves. So what you get from them is your income, so you only need to pay income tax for that. Google is not that kind. You need to handle all sales-tax stuff for yourself. According to in which countries you sell your apps, this can get quite tricky. It’s the main reason why all of my android apps are free. Money from advertising is yet another story. So as I said: better to ask a tax-consultant :)

Income

So here are now my revenues for January 2012

Ads income

iOS: $184 (+ $112)

Android: $989 (+ $387)

Appstore Sales

iOS: $6.937 (+ $3.171)

Apps separately

Apps combined

As you can see, there are days where I make $300 a day! Now that’s insane.

Total: $8.110 (+ $3.671)

That is surely some crazy ammount of money. Even if I deduct 25% of it to save for income tax at the end of the year and pay all my bills for this month, I still got some money to spare. Seems like quitting my job was one of the best decisions I ever made.

How come I more than doubled my income? There are mainly two reasons:

• After comparing my puzzle-games to their competitors I realized that other people charge WAY more for kids apps. So I chose price Tier 2 for ALL of my inapp-purchases. People don’t seem to bother since downloads were not affected at all. And I’m still cheaper than many of my competitors.
• Android Apps really took off. After the clue with the “rate to unlock” feature, my ratings and with them my downloads really increased, which led to a remarkable revenue-increase coming from the ads.

I also assume that regular updates (mostly bugfixes, seldom new features) keep your apps visible. The peaks you see in the sales-curve are weekends on the one side and days after updates on the other.

Plus, I try to answer every support-question within 24h. I think that prevents people from blaming me for a disfunctional app in their ratings-texts. Few still blame me, but the vast majority of users seem to really love my apps. What else can I ask?

There is however one downside to that “adult ads” story. I immediately communicated with the ad-network after users complained about the adult ads. I already ensured in the past that filters are setup so that no adult ad can slip into my apps. But somehow the filters were not configured correctly by my ad-provider. So I restricted everything that was not suitable for children by myself: ads for alcohol, tabaco, dating apps, eCommerce, business and so on. After that, my ad fillrate dropped to < 1%, and so did my ad revenue at the end of january. Seemed like nearly all ads are targeted at adults. I changed to another ad-network to see if they provide better fillrate and revenue for child-friendly apps. You will read about my experience with them in the next post!

Now one can say that two out of 2.500 users complaining is not a reason to pass $1.000 a month from ad revenue. But for me, it’s a question of principle. I would not sleep well if I knew my apps that are designed for children display inappropriate ads. Full Stop.
If revenue from the new provider is still as bad, I will find new ways of monetizing :)

So, thanks for reading. I hope I could inspire and motivate you once again. As always, feel free to ask your questions in the comments section of this post!

Back in 2007, I released a freeware game that me and a friend of mine had created in our sparetime. The game was a Turrican-inspired platformer called Hurrican and it got very positive reviews from all across the net. The game was written in C++ using DirectX, and unfortunately we never managed to port it to platforms other than windows.

So today I would like to release the whole set of sourcecodes and assets that make up the game. You are free to use everything contained in the download for your own pleasure :)

It would be cool if you could drop me a note when you are using anything from the package, even though its not necessary to do so, as long as its a free release. For any commercial use, you must contact me first.

I have not touched those files for years, so don’t expect everything to work out of the box. Of course you can ask any kinds of stuff in the comments section of this post or contact me via email.

So, go and download the Hurrican sources and assets HERE!

Please check out the README.txt for further information.

So Animal Puzzle and Dino World should work fine on the iPad now.

And btw, Animal Puzzle for Android got 60k downloads now. So that’s 10k downloads in four days! Thanks everyone! Aminig for the 100k now ;)

Below you can see some screenshots of my upcoming app: An interactive Knight’s Castle that consists of several minigames. Click a picture for full size. Can you name the games that inspired me? ;)

Archery

Market

Dress the knight

Joust

It has something to do with that “swipe with all your fingers to switch applications” gesture. (I’m sure there is a fancy name for it, but I don’t know it yet).

So finally I can start fixing that bug. Updates should be available in about 1-2 weeks, dependant on the time that it takes apple to review them.

Some of you might remember how I started my indie-career earlier this year.

With the new year ahead I guess its time for a little retrospect / post mortem / whatever. At the end of this post I will inform you about the money I made so far. I will try to do this on a monthly schedule, pretty much like KreCi does on his website.

But first I’ll have to go into greater detail and tell you a bit about how I planned and funded this whole “operation”. The planning part is rather short. I was fed up with working in the video-games industry without being able to carry out my own ideas. My latest try, a browser-games company that I founded together with some former colleagues, went out of business as our financial backer lost confidence in our ideas and skills. I started working for another company but soon realized that I wanted to try it all on my own. So I:

• quit my day job (which was one of the best jobs I ever had until then)
• started coding

I then managed to get a grant for a business start-up which consisted of the unemployment pay I would receive plus some bucks for health-insurance and stuff. It would last for 9 months (from mid may 2011 to mid february 2012). After that time I had to earn enough money to keep going. Shortly after, my wife and I got the news that we’ll be having a baby in december. Even though that was the best news I ever heared, I had to consider if it is possible to get my business up and running until the end of the year and make enough money for my little family. I still decided to give it a go. I knew I could switch back to a paid job if I wanted to. So I grabbed the Corona SDK which I already evaluated some weeks before and started coding. I only owned a Samsung Galaxy S and no Apple-Hardware at all, that is why all of my early releases were available for Android first.

 
 I released Old Fart as my first product. It was available for Android in an ad-supported, free version and a paid version. The paid version had about 40 downloads after two months. Nothing to get excited. The game was later then rejected by apple due to its theme. As you might know, they don’t accept any more fart apps. First I wanted to argue that it was a real “game” and not just a “press this button to fart” app, but one thing why I started my own business was because I did not want to mess around arguing. I wanted to code.
Considering this the typical initial difficulties, I started working on my second game Bloo Kid.

Bloo Kid

Being a retro-style-games lover myself, I thought there are enough people out there who would appreciate an 8-bit style, chiptune-fueled platformer. I read a lot about making money with apps and decided to make Bloo Kid available for free from the beginning on and place ads in the game, since I did not have a mac yet and could build for Android only. I first chose AdMob since it was the one that most people talked about. One of the main reasons why this did NOT work out very well was the placing of the ads. The game had quite a lot of downloads (currently 46k total, 13k active installs). But since you get paid for ads being clicked, you need to display the ads long enough for people to be able to click them. I however placed the ads only in the start menu (and level selection) as you can see below, so that nobody gets bothered by ads during the game. But starting the game and getting to really play a level takes players only some seconds. Not even enough to properly load an ad, let alone click on one.

The Bloo Kid title-screen displaying an ad for … Bloo Kid :)
Placing the ads only in the startmenu gave me really low fillrates and click-through-rates

Another downside was that for some reason Bloo Kid never really managed to get the CPC I saw other developers had. I switched from AdMob to InMobi as soon as Corona supported inmobi ads. It turned out to be a good decision since in relation I got a lot more money from the ad impressions I created. (infos on my monthly income can be seen below.)

I bought my mac mini from an online store that, as I later found out, sent the hardware from Thailand. It had something to do with duty-fees. The mac was a bit cheaper than the one I could buy directly from Apple, but it took aaaages until I got it. At some point I thought I got cheated, since I had to do a money transfer to a thai bank account. I even could not do it online but had to go to my bank and fill out a form. The lady at the counter must have thought I bought a woman in Thailand or something like that. On the left you can see the transfer protocol from FedEx that shows the odyssee my mac had to go through until I held it in my hands. It went from Cologne to Paris and back to Cologne for no comprehensible reason.

I then created an iOS version of Bloo Kid and started making some noise. But even though the game got featured on some websites and was even reviewed in magazines, downloads were not close to what I hoped (and needed to pick up steam). The game sold 50-60 units a day for about one week after the release but then dropped to 10 sales a day. Priced at $0.99 you can imagine that I was not satisfied at all. One good thing is that the downloads are STILL 10 a day even though I did not do any marketing at all for the last months.
Being a bit frustrated I started coding several prototypes, some of which can be viewed on my YouTube channel. But I considered none of them to have the potential to turn the tables for me.

Now starts the good part where you all should listen up…

It was a mere coincidene that I created a kids application on the weekend. I already knew there are tons of apps available where you have some pictures of animals that make a sound when you tap them. My niece and nephew (3 and 5) were always thrilled by those apps. But somehow it needed yet another impulse for me to do something similar. A friend of mine saw his little daughter (one year old) with one of those mentioned apps and the joy it gave her just to hear those animals, and he said: Why not give it a try and create something like this? So I gave it a try and created something like this :)

Farm For Toddlers

I decided to make it a bit more fancy, since I considered pictures with animals on it too sleazy. So I came up with a farm that has certain animals on it. Tapping an amimal would make it wiggle its head and make a noise. I also added some funny stuff like a moveable barn door, a hidden frog, a pond with a fish and a chimney that could spit smoke if you touched it.
I released that app for free on iOS and got 20k downloads on a single weekend. All I did was release the app and use the IDRTG to spread the word.

I immediately enhanced the app to feature two more locations that could be unlocked via in-app purchase for $0.99 and released an update. Sales on this app were like Bloo Kid in its first week, except the fact that they STAYED at 50-60 a day and did not drop after a week. Given the fact that it took me about 1,5 weeks to create the app with all its three locations, this was a blast.

Animal Puzzle For Toddlers

I then started making another kids app, Animal Puzzle For Toddlers. It features some basic puzzles with increasing difficulty sporting cute animals and rising balloons that you can pop with your finger once you completed a puzzle. That app has some crazy 80 – 120 sales every day since its release, priced at Tier 2 which is $1.99 for the user and a whopping $1.40 for me.

Dino World

Needless to say I created ANOTHER app in the vain of the other two, this time featuring dinosaur puzzles and some very basic trivia about prehistoric animals: Dino World was born. It is not yet as succesfull as the Animal Puzzle, but also has some 30 – 50 in-app purchases a day.

The Android Market

All my apps are available for free on the android market featuring ads. The market is now changing so that you can also earn some money with paid apps, but for now the “free and ad-supported” strategy seems better for my apps. I might change this as soon as Corona supports in-app billing for Android apps.

Since I got some nice download-numbers by now, the ad income from InMobi every month is not bad at all. You can see this below, too.

I recently came up with an idea that sky-rocketed the ratings for my android apps. Where you have to pay on the iDevices to unlock all the content, you are asked to rate the game instead on android. It simply opens the market page and unlocks the game in the background. Most people really rate the game, and many of them even write a small review, mostly positive.

Current Income

As I promised I will tell you about my current income or rather the one for december. I will keep you updated how my income evolves in the coming months.

Ads income December 2011

iOS: $72.46

Android: $601.5

Appstore Sales December 2011

iOS: $3.766

 
Total: $4439.96

In EURos, that’s roughly my old salary! And January is looking even better than December did.
I am currently working on another Kids App. If it has only half the success of the previous ones, and sales keep as constant as they are, I will start working on a “real” game again. Maybe I’ll pick up one of my prototypes or start something new. I’m not quite sure at the moment. But that’s exactly the point where I wanted to be: have enough income to work on whatever I think is best. Without too many people around me who tell me what to do :)

Phew, this is a hell of a blogpost. I hope it can motivate you a bit. I am sure there are a million question right now and a lot of things I missed in this post, so please write anything you want to know down in the comments section. Good luck to you all!

there are updates available for
Farm For Toddlers,
Animal Puzzle For Toddlers and
Dino World

The updates contain bugfixes like a crash when placing a puzzle piece as well as some improvements like a back-slider button instead of a back button. I’ve also removed many of the popups and social buttons to make the usage more toddler-friendly :)

Updates are available for iOS and Android.

As always, the app is available for free but offers limited content only. You can unlock the full version nice and easily via in-app purchase!