Five-O Deluxe for the Mac is live!
Get Five-O Deluxe for Mac OS X
The Mac version of Five-O is now available on the Mac App Store! If you’ve played the iPad version, the Mac version will look very familiar. It has all the same features, including Game Center support for online multiplayer. Game Center is cross-compatible between iOS and the Mac, so you can play against anyone, and, if you have both versions, your own online matches will be synced across all your devices!
Five-O Deluxe will run on just about any Mac running Lion (10.7) or later. Online matches require Mountain Lion (10.8) or later.
A look back and a look forward
Last week marked the third anniversary of the release of Five-O on the App Store! The game has come a long way in three years. It started out as an iPad-only app, with no online multiplayer, and only one (way too difficult) computer opponent. With support and feedback from all the fans of Five-O, I’ve been able to develop the game into a what it is today, and I’m thrilled to see that the latest update has a solid 5 star rating with over 100 reviews.
Here are some more of my favorite metrics:
- Five-O has been downloaded over 110,000 times since its release
- Over 200,000 online matches have been completed
- Over 3.4 MILLION matches versus the computer have been completed
So… what’s next?
My next project is bringing Five-O to the Mac App Store. Since Game Center now supports cross-platform online matches between Mac OS X and iOS, I can finally bring all the features from the iOS version to the Mac with relative ease. What’s the advantage of playing on a Mac instead of your smartphone or tablet? None really, but I’m hoping to reach another audience, and maybe find some popularity in an App Store that has far less competition. I’ve already made a lot of progress on the Mac version of Five-O, and I hope to have it in the Mac App Store by Christmas.
While I’m happy to keep developing and supporting Five-O, three years is a long time to go without designing something entirely new. Realizing that, I decided to challenge myself to develop a new game too! My constraints were that it had to be a two-player, competitive, turn-based game. Staying within these constraints would allow me to leverage a lot of the code I’ve written for Five-O, using it as a solid foundation for things like online multiplayer. So far, I’m still in the early design stage, but I have one prototype that looks very promising. It’s an abstract strategy game that is similar to Pentago. I don’t have a release date for this one yet, but I will keep you posted!
The power of FREE in the App Store
Today, the App Store is saturated with games from large publishers with large budgets for what they call “user acquisition.” It’s getting harder and harder for indie developers to compete in this kind of market. So how does a humble hobbyist get their beloved app noticed? The answer, apparently, is to give it away for free for a couple of days.
Last weekend, I dropped the price of my iOS board game, Five-O, from $1.99 to free. I planned to run the sale for one day only, to promote the latest update, which added universal app support. As you’ll see, the sale was a big success, and the decision to let it run for a second day was a no-brainer.
Just flipping the switch to make your app free gets you instant press from websites and apps that automatically track price drops. AppShopper is my personal favorite. Posting on Reddit might seem like shameless self-promotion, but they love to hear about paid apps that have gone free, especially apps from indie developers, so long as you keep it in the proper subreddits. Touch Arcade also has a forum to post announcements of this kind. There are probably more places you could publicize a sale, but I stopped there, and spent the rest of my day playing Five-O online and periodically checking its rank in the App Store.
By the end of the day, Five-O was still climbing the charts. It was close to ranking in the top 10 iPad board games in the US. That was pretty cool, but I wanted to see how high it could go. The risk of leaving it free for another day was small. Losing a day of sales is no big deal. Obscurity, I have learned, is the real enemy in the App Store.
The next day, things really got interesting. I got an email notifying me that Five-O was on the “Apps Gone Free” list, a popular column featuring hand picked apps which have dropped from paid to free. Another email let me know that a German blogger had written about Five-O, which helped boost its rank in Germany. It was also doing surprisingly well in France, China, and Canada. Here are the rankings I am most proud of.
#1 iPhone Board Game in France
#2 iPhone Board Game in China
#1 iPad Board Game in Canada
#1 iPad Board Game in Germany
#1 iPad Family Game in Germany
#5 iPad Game in Germany
#7 iPad App in Germany
And in the US
#2 iPad Board Game
#7 iPhone Board Game
#9 iPad Family Game
#10 iPhone Family Game
#35 iPad Game
#94 iPhone Game
#100 iPad App
In 48 hours, Five-O was downloaded over 43,000 times! Almost 50,000 games were completed during those two days. It went from 250 DAU (daily active users) before the sale, to 3,800 on May 5th, and 22,000 on May 6th. Now came the time to see if I could turn this success into revenue. At midnight on May 6th, Five-O went back to it’s pre-sale price of $1.99.
Switching a free app back to paid in the App Store immediately obliterates its ranking. So it was with Five-O. But, much to my delight, it started to climb back up again. Five-O was soon hovering around #50 in the paid board games category on both iPhone and iPad. On May 10, another popular German website featured Five-O in an article, leading to a #124 top grossing game rank in Germany and my highest daily revenue to date. Worldwide, revenue for the week was up 1600% from the week prior.
Dropping Five-O from paid to free was an excellent decision. It cost me nothing and increased my game’s exposure immensely, leading to Five-O being featured on several websites that would have otherwise not known about it. And, the thousands of new fans will hopefully spread the game through word of mouth. To any of my fellow developers out there, if you’re a in a similar situation, with an app that’s getting good reviews but not a lot of exposure, I’d definitely recommend trying this strategy.
Five-O is now Universal!
I recently released an update to Five-O which adds support for playing on the iPhone and iPod Touch. The new pocket sized version has a redesigned interface that lets you use pinch gestures to zoom in and out on the game board. All the same game types are supported, including online multiplayer. So, if you know any board game lovers who have iPhones, now’s your chance to challenge them to an online match of Five-O!
Five-O now has Online Multiplayer!
The most requested feature for Five-O over the last year, and the one I was most excited about adding, was the ability to play online. I wanted to make sure it was done right, and that there would be enough people playing to make it easy to find an opponent. Well, I’m happy to announce that, as of last Wednesday, online multiplayer for Five-O is here! It uses the brand new turn-based multiplayer capabilities in Game Center. This is one of the new features of iOS 5 that didn’t get a lot of publicity. Turn-based gaming has already been extremely popular in mobile games like Words with Friends and Carcassonne, because it’s such a convenient way to play board games and other games with asynchronous competitive gameplay. By adding support for it to Game Center, Apple made it easier than ever for developers to add this feature to their games. It’s easy for the players too, since all it requires is an internet connection and a Game Center account which most people already have.
The nice thing about turn-based multiplayer is that not all players need to be present in a game at the same time. That makes it ideal for multi-taskers. After finishing your turn, you can leave the game to do something else, and the match will go on without you. When it’s your turn again, you will receive a notification to come back and play your turn. This also allows you to play in lots of different matches at the same time.
To try out online multiplayer in Five-O, you’ll need to be running iOS 5 on your iPad. As some people have recently discovered, if you’re not running iOS 5, and you try to download this version of Five-O, you’ll get an error saying the app is incompatible with your device. If you see that, don’t worry. It just means you need to update your iPad through iTunes on your computer.
I am looking forward to many challenging matches against you guys. Watch for my username, “CodeVandal”. So far only two people have managed to beat me. 🙂
Five-O Development Story
I’ve always thought that there were some big advantages to playing board games on a computer. There’s the automatic scoring, automatic shuffling, automatic set up and clean up with no small pieces to get lost, and, if you can’t find anyone to play against, there’s the option of playing against the computer. Back when I was in college, I took a course in artificial intelligence where we designed an AI for playing Connect 4. I enjoyed the project so much that, after it was done, I wanted to write another board game AI. But, this time, I wanted to design the board game too.
The first step was coming up with an idea for a board game. It was around this time that Sudoku was becoming really popular. I remember thinking about how Sudoku puzzles were a lot like crossword puzzles but instead of words and clues, they used numbers and logic. I wondered if other word games might work with numbers instead of words, and came up with the idea of creating a number game that would be played like Scrabble.
I’m certainly not the first person to come up with the idea of a crossword-style number game. In fact, I remembered playing a board game like this growing up. But, when I searched the Internet, I found that there weren’t any available for the computer yet. So, I decided to make one. I started by crafting the rules, mocking up a game board, and coming up with a catchy name, Five-O.
It didn’t take long to make the first playable prototype of my new game. It didn’t score your plays, it didn’t even check that they were legal plays, but it was good enough to see that Five-O had potential to be a really fun game. So, piece by piece, I wrote the rest of the code for setting up games, handling turns, and validating and scoring plays. And, once all that was in place, I wrote the AI code for the computer opponent. It was really cool to see it all come together.
A screenshot from the original Mac version of Five-O
After putting the finishing touches on Five-O, I spent some time looking for a publisher. Having no luck, I considered self-publishing through a new online store called MacGamesArcade. But, graduating from college, moving to a new city, and starting a new job soon consumed my time and Five-O sat on the shelf, unpublished.
Then, during the summer of ’08, I started developing iPhone games. The App Store was just what I needed to finally get my games out into the world. It meant learning Objective-C, Cocoa, and a whole new style of user interface design, but something about writing apps for mobile devices was just so much cooler than writing plain old computer games, so I dove in head first.
My first iPhone app was nothing to write home about. It was a Pac-Man style arcade game with simple graphics and gameplay. I considered developing a version of Five-O for the iPhone, but I just couldn’t imagine it being much fun on such a small screen, so I worked on other projects in the meantime.
When Apple introduced the iPad, my first thought was “I’ve got to get Five-O on that.” The large touch screen was going to be great for playing board games. And, with my experience developing iPhone games, I knew I could get the job done.
It took a lot of evenings and weekends, but I got Five-O working on the iPad. Through all the rewriting, refactoring, and tweaking, it matured into a nice little game, with decent graphics and a slick user interface. I want to thank the Ludum Dare community for helping me power through the final stretch of development. They ran an “October Challenge” for indie developers where the challenge was to finish a game and sell one copy before November 1st. I worked hard to meet that deadline, and I’m proud to say Five-O got its first sales on October 30th, 2010.
Since then, Five-O has been featured by Apple in the New & Noteworthy and What’s Hot sections on the App Store, and it has been lauded in reviews on several different websites. The success has been really encouraging, and I’ll just wrap up by saying thanks to everyone who has purchased Five-O or supported me in other ways. I plan to continue development on this game, and I’m excited to see how far I can take it.