Facebook F8 Conference: What it can mean for your Mobile App

The Facebook F8 Conference  promises to unveil exciting new features to allow users to engage with content.  One thing that is already noticeable is the new look of users' Facebook NewsFeed.  Even though this new feature has its fair share of critics, I feel that Facebook is positioning itself to take an even larger role in people's lives.  So how does this effect developers of Mobile Apps?

Well one major thing that I can foresee is that Mobile Game Developers may want to strongly consider moving their games to the Facebook App Platform.  Even without taking full advantage of all of the social features that the Graph API has available, several games could be quite successful.  Some simple Googling can provide several short tutorials to get one started in creating their very own Facebook App.  That's just my two cents for today.

Mobile Game Marketing: The Power of Word-of-Mouth

When marketing your mobile game don't underestimate the power of Word-of-Mouth Marketing.  Well, what is Word-of-Mouth Marketing?  It has been described this way by the Word Of Mouth Marketing Association:

"The act of consumers providing information to other consumers...It is the art and science of building active, mutually beneficial consumer-to-consumer and consumer-to-marketer communications."

What can that mean for you and your business?  Well, basically you need to make a great product and provide tools to make it easier for your customers to share how wonderful your game/application is with others.  You may think that this form of marketing is free, but that is not necessarily the case.  You need to provide infrastructure that makes this type of consumer-to-consumer marketing successful and it does require lots of time to keep up with the different front-facing tools that you choose to implement.

In marketing our first game, Word Crank, we have used the following tools to facilitate the Word-of-Mouth process.

Tools

• Facebook Fan Page


• Twitter Account


• Blog with sharing abilities


• YouTube Channel


• Reddit Account


• OpenFeint integration in the game


• Email

Making use of these various tools takes time, as you have to constantly make posts and send updates.  But more importantly you allow your customers the opportunity to provide feedback and then easily share the information that they have received with others.  So far we are happy with this area of our Marketing endeavors.  However, it's challenging to say for sure quantitatively what the impact has been up to this point.

SOLUTION: Apple Mach-O Linker Error When Compiling iPhone App

Recently encountered the following error when compiling an iPhone Application, "Apple Mach-O Linker Error".  After some digging I realized that I had included the same file twice in the application.  After removing the duplicate file the error went away.  Hope this helps someone else that has a similar error.

Read more about iPhone Development

Download Word Crank on Android for FREE!

Our Game Marketing Post featured on Trove.com

Recently one of our posts was featured on Trove.com.  For those of you who don't know yet, Trove is an up and coming News Aggregator that incorporates Social Media throughout.  We were proud to have our article featured under the "Facebook Advertising" topic.

Word Crank now Available on iPhone!

Just got the thumbs up from Apple, so go and check it out all you iPhone users! Word Crank on iPhone

Advertising your Mobile Game's Fan Page with Facebook

So recently we have decided to advertise our Word Crank Fan Page using the Facebook Ads capability.  Taking advantage of social media to promote your Android or iOS application is becoming the standard among the majority of game developers today. Almost all of the top hundred apps have a Facebook presence, so we of course jumped on the bandwagon to help promote our game.

The Facebook Ads infrastructure allows you to target certain demographics for your ad campaign.  What's unique about advertising with Facebook is that you have the ability to target potential users via their interests and likes.  Not with that being said we initially targeted users who liked things such as, "music", "gaming", "reading", etc.  We believed that these users would be more likely to become fans of Word Crank.  However, we saw very low click-through-rates for those users.  The next stop was to just target anyone, regardless of their interests and the clicks started coming through.  Below are the results for the past few days with the new adjustment in targeting.



We were able to get 14 new "likes" out of the 34 people who actually clicked the ad.  Before this we only had 1 new "like" from the Facebook Ad Campaign.  We are happy with the results, and since this is a new game we will have to give it some time to see what impact the Facebook Fan Page is going to have on our marketing efforts.  One downside of the Facebook generated ad however,  is that you don't have a lot of flexibility in the layout and colors.  They use a standard template for all of the ads, so you have to be creative with the picture you choose and its accompanying wording.  I hope that soon Facebook will allow for more layout options.

Please feel free to ask questions/comment.  Thanks.

Working with Texture Packer

In my post about some simple iOS and Android programming tips I mentioned a software called Texture Packer that is very useful in creating Sprite Sheets.  Below are the steps that can be used to create a simple Sprite Sheet which are the steps that I used in creating Word Crank.

Instructions

1. Open Texture Packer.  You will be presented with a blank view where you can add your Sprites.


2. Click on the 'Add Sprites' button to select the Sprites that you want to include in your Sprite Sheet.


3. Once you have selected your Sprites, just click the 'Publish' button and you can will have two files, the .png file which is your Sprite Sheet and a .plist file which can be used to identify where each object is located in the Sprite Sheet.

Screen Shots