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GDC 2010: The secret to App Store success
For the last panel of GDC 2010 day two, David Whatley of Critical Thought took the stage to talk about the App Store success he found with his games geoDefense and geoDefense Swarm, and almost dared other iPhone developers to follow his "guaranteed plan" to go from "zero to Time Magazine." He's got quite a background in the trenches of coding and game development, having designed and run online mulitplayer games for over a decade with his "day job" at a company called Simutronics, but he decided to take to the iPhone in his spare time both to learn the platform and see what he could do with it. First things first, he said, to make an iPhone game, you've got to figure out your goals as a business. He talked about the potential on the iPhone in terms of millions of dollars, but of course, since "99.9% of businesses on the App Store make no money," it's much more likely that if something goes wrong during development or something doesn't click right, the money will drop down to just "a few bucks." It's a balance of costs (which he relabeled as "risks") vs. revenue -- it's very easy, he said, to make money on the App Store, but the issue most developers have is that they let costs get away from them by having too big a team or by investing too much development time, and that comes straight out of their bottom line.
iPhone It In: geoDefense
I'm not proud of the fact that if you saw me madly poking my iPhone during GDC, I probably wasn't communicating hawt scoops to the homebase. No, I was probably playing geoDefense, the bastard love child of Geometry Wars and tower defense that my productivity wishes had never seen the light of day.As in most TD games, you'll fend off an ever-increasing army of creeps by strategically placing different towers to defend your homebase. Your towers have a range of attacks from a standard shot to a missile with splash damage, and you'll have to pick the right one to deal with the range of enemies, which vary in strength and speed.%Gallery-48925%
