What are we doing next?

This is a question that we've been struggling with quite a bit.  Should we keep adding more features to Zengaku?  Would a new platform such as the iPad, or Android make sense?  What about some of the smaller platforms where we wouldn't get lost in the noise?  The WebOS looks interesting and RIM holds a special place in our hearts since it's just down the road and a number of our ex-coworkers are there now.  Even one of the original Redshirt's works at RIM.  But the platform seems to be a bit dense to penetrate and we're not hearing great things about the opportunities for small independent developers.  But that's probably a whole other blog post.

Some of us are very excited by the idea of doing independent mobile games, others feel like productivity applications would be more rewarding.  Coming to a decision is pretty difficult.  There are benefits to both approaches.  Games don't require a lot of support and maintenance and if you make a popular game you can build on that popularity and revenue with a new version 2 or 3 of the game and customers generally are good with that as long as there is enough of a new experience.  However productivity or utility applications seem to have different expectation.  Our friend, Barry, the maker of LiveCams had told us in the past that support and maintenance were a major part of his overhead of selling his application.

However games are very hot and cold and require a real creative spark to be done well.  We're all pretty much dedicated software developers, but we're not known for our artistic abilities, or our familiarity with Photoshop.  None of us have built a real game before. Zengaku is a pretty simple game really.  Any new game we might create will likely be a significant departure from this genre.

With a productivity or utility application you can have more opportunities to build the business beyond just the mobile market and sales are generally steadier.  A productivity product usually will have a longer shelf life as well.  Plus you get the satisfaction associated with knowing that the work you've done is going to help someone get something accomplished easier, or more quickly than they could previously.  It's a hard choice, but we seem to be settling in on a direction for now.

Games FTW!  Regardless of our personal deficits we all really enjoy games and are pretty charged up by the challenges in developing game software.  Also gaming provides a relatively simple business model with  a potentially better chance of success since a lot of small games have done quite well in the mobile marketplace by providing a fun, engaging and unique twist on a familiar gaming paradigm.  Also given Zengaku's recent growth in popularity we'll be providing more frequent update to that game to see if we can get it up to where we believe it's true sales potential should be.

Complexity and Version 1.3

Our latest update to Zengaku is out the door and actually moving pretty well by our usual standards.  No one is breaking the bank just yet, but sales have been steady for the past week, which is nice.

We thought we'd share a bit about the things we found while working on this latest release.  

Backwards Compatibility:

We've been trying very hard to ensure that older devices will continue to be able to allow our 10's of faithful users to play on their ancient iOS devices.  In particular one of our developers/founders still has a 1st generation iPod Touch device running iOS 3.1.3 .  It's been great for backwards compatibility testing. One issue we had was with our new back and settings buttons.  The new buttons are simple images without any text.  In our testing we found that the images were rather small so there were a lot of missed touches.  I got frustrated more than once while trying to get into the settings screen.  

The fix was pretty simple.  We just had to adjust the size of the bounding rectangle around the button.  This  stretches the image out to fill the rectangle so we used IB to inset the image in smaller bounds inside the touchable area.  However good old iOS 3.1.3 devices don't seem to adhere to such settings from IB. So even though newer devices worked like a charm and looked great we had one device where the gear used for our settings button was a tad oversized.

The solution to this new problem was again simple enough, just a bit of a pain really.  What we've done now is created the image and the button as separate objects on the view.  The button is completely transparent and our image is sized and placed under the button.  This gets us better touch sensitivity and backwards compatibility.  

Small Features Mean Big Increases in Complexity:

We added a number of small features in the 1.3 release including a game timer, a settings screen, social bragging, landscape orientation, sorted notes and automatic option removal.  

None of these features on their own were particularly complex, but one in particular ended up causing a number of bugs and taking a lot more effort than we'd originally thought.  Can you guess what feature that was?  It was the game timer.  You'd think that would have been simple right?  It's a timer that counts how long you took to finish a game.  How tough could that be? 

Well it turns out that it's a fair bit tougher than you'd think.  You have to think about the logic for calculating the time it took.  We had to ensure that the timer was still counting time even though you might not have turned it on.  So you couldn't just turn on the timer at the end and make it look like you finished the game in almost no time.  We also had to make sure that if you left the game screen to view the options menu, read the help docs or just exited out to use another application the timer wouldn't keep counting.  Seem simple enough except that there's a few different way to determine each of these transitions in iOS.  The modal dialog we use for our settings is different than hitting the back button which is different than hitting the home button or the lock button.  We had the added problem of the file format used to save games wasn't previously saving the game time properly.  We'd had the idea of timing games from day one, but we'd never written anything that actually worked properly until now.  So games you'd started previously might have quite odd times now.  We corrected for that by updating the version on our file format so that if we detect a game that was saved with the older file format we'll assume the time is 0 and upgrade the file format.  

The timer caused other issues in that once you won the game we had to make sure that the time you could brag about via Twitter or Facebook would be correct as well.  Because our implementation of the time storage wasn't and probably still isn't particularly sound we had been re-calculating the time when you were on the win screen.  This meant that any time that passed between you completing the puzzle and hitting the brag stone would show an increase in time.   This too was addressed in our last update out just this week after being approved by Apple.  One other little timer related tweak in our last update was to include the time on the win screen.  It was obvious pretty quickly that including that on the win screen was an oversite that needed to be corrected.  You did all that hard work to finish the puzzle quickly and then you don't get to see the time being recorded.  Silly us. 

Interface Builder is loads of Fun:

The interface builder is a nice tool and does help with the initial layout and prototyping a UI very quickly.  However it seems that the more that we had to tune our UI to suite the needs of our desired gameplay we found the tool to be lacking.  Anytime you need to actually need to deviate slightly from the default behaviour you have to jump back into good old objective C.

Not that coding is a particularly painful or foreign activity for us, but it seems like the tool's promise is greater than its delivery.  It would be nice to be able to tweak the touch responses of UIButtonView's without having to create our own custom buttons views in code.  But there was no option for us to easily modify the existing buttons to allow us to respond differently to a press and hold and a press using the standard controls.  Also with the increased importance of handing multiple orientations in an application. It seems like something that the IB should support is the ability to prototype the landscape and portrait orientations for a single view controller and provide some simple animations for the components to transition between the 4 possible orientations.  In stead we had to mock up the landscape view and then collect the co-ordinates of all the different elements and provide the code to translate them at runtime.

Conclusions:
Zengaku 1.3.x has so far been a very, very successful release for us.  For some reason we've seen improved traffic for both the paid and free versions over the last 3 weeks.  We're not sure if it's the new, price, the fact that its a sale, or if the added puzzles and retina images had anything to do with it.  So far the timer seems to be getting better and we've only heard of a couple of issues from our users.  The Twitter and Facebook integration was at least simple to add, but hasn't been used extensively so far based on searches we've done.  It's too bad that more people aren't making use of those features and following Redshirt Labs on Twitter, or Zengaku on Facebook.  We'd love to have more interacting with our user base so we could better understand where the game could and should be going.  However with the improved overall reception we're pretty encouraged and a bit reinvigorated.  We should be providing more incremental UI improvements over the coming weeks and I'm thinking that an iPad version is starting to make a lot more sense.  Maybe in time for the actual launch of the new iPad 2.

But one thing we've learned is that small features or changes have a effect on complexity that is orders of magnitude above the complexity of the feature itself.   The other thing we're learning is that advertising is a complete waste of time.  We've not spent one dime on advertising in the past 3 weeks, but have seen a sustained improvement in our downloads that we've yet to really explain.  However we're extremely happy to see the improvement.   Keep playing!

Reducing the Scope

We really wanted to put a lot into this next release of Zengaku.  We'd had a number of ideas for features to do and we were really excited by the idea of native iPad support since the larger screen would make game play better for the full size puzzles in particular.  However a lot of things have happened since our last release.  Not least of all was the fact that we all lost our jobs.  Then some of us left town in search of work, others have taken up at a real startup rather than our little side project.  Finally some have just lost interest and would rather spend their free time on other things.  So our resources have dwindled and our attention has been divided.  Recently I had my first child which also reduced my energy and free time.  The core red shirts is now numbering 2.  Maybe 2.125...maybe.  So something had to give.

A quick analysis of our installed user base shows us that only about 4% of those who've downloaded Zengaku are playing it on an iPad.  That's a pretty small base to be targeting a good chunk of our effort.  In fact when you do the numbers our iPhone version is actually also probably not worth the effort.  The Zengaku.com site is probably used more regularly by more Zengaku lovers than all our iOS sales combined.

However that type of calculated analysis isn't exactly what Zengaku is about and we will produce an iPad version soon.  But hopefully the new features will be enough to drive a few more sales and make that effort  make a bit more sense financially.  We also would really like to create some other applications on the tablet, smart phone, desktop and web front that we've been rattling around for a while but have not had the time to prototype while trying to get this update complete.

But on the brighter side we've added a number of great features in this upcoming release we think you'll enjoy.

1. Support for multiple orientations and locking an orientation if you so desire.
2. A clock to time your gameplay.
3. A chance to brag about your time via Twitter or Facebook.
4. A mechanism to easily share your love of our little application with your friends and followers on either Twitter or Facebook.
5. A lot more puzzles to chose from including a set of Jumbled Mini Puzzles.
6. Jumbled Mini Puzzles where there are 6 digits still, but each puzzle could use a different 6 digits from 1-9.

We learned a lot in this release.  We spent a lot of time dealing with the limitations of the Interface Builder and the dangers of integrating 3rd party libraries.  We also learned about some of the difficulties in supporting devices that are still running older iOS versions.  Luckily some of us have such devices so we discovered these issues in our own testing.  Hopefully you'll appreciate the work we've done here and support our application with rave reviews and sharing the Zen with your friends and family.  We'll keep working to make the application better as long as there are Zengaku lovers out there. 

The BIG new features in version 1.2 is: MINI PUZZLES!

Shortly after we released Zengaku, we realized that the puzzle game could be a bit much for a lot of people when they first looked at it.  We thought hat if we provided some good help information and some hints that would be enough to get them over the initial shock of looking at that blank puzzle screen.  However we soon found that these things just weren't enough.

Our review from App Safari was the last straw.  It was a very positive review.  And we've been very appreciative of that.  The one bit of criticism they had was that the puzzles were a bit too much for the reviewer.  Who even stated that they were no number puzzler and never actually finished a game.   This made us sad.  ;-(

So we decided at that point that our new number one feature was going to be a smaller version of the original game that would allow new players a chance to sharpen their skills a bit before taking on the challenge of larger puzzles.  Our puzzle generation specialist set about tweaking things to see what we could do.  So we created a number of puzzle boards that used the numbers 1-6 rather than 1-9 like the larger version do.

I'm actually not a big number puzzle fan myself.  My wife is the one who usually tests out our new puzzles for me since it just isn't really my thing.  But the with the mini-puzzles that changed.  They didn't take me as long to work through in general.  But we've got a couple of permutations that are still crazy hard.  But that's good too.

I just realized we never published this post and we should have.  I'm righting that wrong now.

To Redshirt or not to Redshirt?

So I've been thinking about our company name the last couple days.  There has been an upsurge in violence in Thailand where some protestors called the Redshirts have been causing a bit of a ruckas.  The reason for the blog post is just to clear up the lineage of our name.  I doubt anyone that knows us personally or who'd read this blog (since they are probably a fully overlapping ven diagram) would suspect that we knew about the other usages of Redshirt before we were formed.  Although some people have politely (playfully) pointed out the overlapping name recently.

The connotation for us is directly linked to our general nerdiness.  As nerds who play too much WoW and get way too excited about the next Apple product or will argue for hours about the merits of Java vs C++ or how much the use of square brackets sucks in Objective C; we obviously associated the Redshirt in our name to a small television program that started back in the 60s and attempted to take us on journey "where no man has gone before."

With that in mind we've been a bit distressed as we found out that our name, which we thought was somewhat fun and playful, is actually associated with violence, protest, even a white paramilitary group from the southern US.

So lets recap a bit shall we?  Please, please, please think of us and our name with the following video in mind:



But do not think that we have anything to do with the much more serious stuff going on in this video.  This is NOT at all something we are trying to associate with.  (Regardless of the validity or not of the protestors problems with their government of Thailand.  We just simply don't know anything about the issues at hand and what to stay out of it.)



So remember we're fun. Not serious.  Just like our game we made for the iPhone and iPod Touch:  Zengaku is fun and nerdy.   Not serious and deadly.  Ok.  I feel better now that I got that off my chest.

Zengaku Lite - Marketing success?

Well... it has been a few days now that we've had Zengaku Lite out there. It already has many more downloads then Zengaku, and we've had a couple of days with multiple sales of the full version.

We initially started out with the $0.99 price because we figured we would target impulse buyers and we were more concerned with numbers rather than profit. As the sales began to trail off, it became apparent that we needed to figure out marketing... and maybe people really do want to try before they buy.

With the release of Zengaku Lite - we raised the price (to $1.99) which I feel is still a steal for the quality of the game. So now users can try before they buy, and if they like it, I don't think the extra buck will be a factor.

Now if only we could find a way to get everyone with an iPhone to try Zengaku Lite. I mean... it's free! We're trying Facebook ads, and the review on AppSafari (4.5/5) has likely helped a bit too.

Zengaku 1.1 and Zengaku Lite!

Before Zengaku was even released, we were already working on the next version. Here's a quick overview of what changed.

Most of the changes in the 1.1 release are internal details. We fixed a whole bunch of memory leaks, and a few minor bugs. These won't be visible to most of you, but it gives us a cleaner code base to help us with some upcoming features.

A few user visible changes you may notice are:

• We now show statistics for your puzzles. From the puzzle book selection screen, you can see how many puzzles you completed, and how many are in progress.
• The "Contact Us" button now presents an email form, rather than taking you to the Mail app.
• There's now a link back to the Redshirt Labs website.
  

And the biggest feature of all, there's now a Lite version!

Zengaku Lite has the same gameplay as the original, and is Free! You get fewer puzzles, but it gives you the chance to try the game before you decide that you really really need to buy it. And you will... just try it!

Get Zengaku Lite at http://www.redshirtlabs.com/zengaku/lite or Zengaku 1.1 at http://www.redshirtlabs.com/zengaku/.